‘We’re just starting this journey’: how Canva is laying roots in B2B marketing

This can be really difficult. We’ve acquired quite a few businesses over the years – most recently the analytics and workflow platform MagicBrief this June. When it comes to integration there’s a time horizon you need to keep in mind. It may not be a month, it may not be six months – it may be more than a year. So it’s important to set the right expectations, that this will take some time, not everything can be fitted together immediately.

Then there’s choosing the right company to acquire in the first place. Even though Canva has more than 5,000 people, we’re always looking for agility and elasticity and the ability to pivot where the market leads. When you’re looking for acquisitions, you want to find that entrepreneurial spirit that you can continue to refresh – that creative energy.

When the Cannes Lions festival is on, it feels like Cannes is the hub for creativity. For us, it was a chance to soak up that creativity, to be there with our customers and the whole community, to experience the thought leadership and the awards and the celebration of all of this beautiful creativity. To be at the epicentre.

We’ve been at the festival before but in smaller spaces. We opted for a beach this year because it gives us more opportunity to show our product and to put on a program of content at scale. It helped us to connect the traditional thought leadership with real hands-on applications, so people don’t just hear about our vision, they see the practical reality, too.

First was the rise of the influencer community, and the influx of video content in particular, which has been a bit overwhelming. When they’re looking at buying software, 76% of millennial and generation Z customers want to start their journey in video format – and they want to self-serve as much as possible. People don’t want to see sales reps anymore and AI is leading a lot of that.

Then there are some landscape issues. A lot of marketing teams aren’t hiring right now, they may be making redundancies instead. Some of that is driven by AI, but CMOs are also dealing with budget cuts, which have affected a lot of business functions.

Against this backdrop there’s this incredible urgency around personalisation. You still have to create a lot of content, which AI can help with, but you can’t allow your output to be just more of the same. It has to be good personalised content; it can’t be completely driven by AI. You have to create more volume, but you also have to maintain a creative spark, communicate your brand values and ensure your message is differentiated so it can cut through a crowded field.

Marketing teams are grappling with that – balancing volume and quality – and then trying to distribute their content across all the various channels we have. We’re launching thousands of assets per week and I know that many other companies are doing the same.

There’s a lot of chatter about out-of-home, traditional advertising and, at the same time, the scale that can be achieved with digital campaigns. Many teams seek to balance investment in out-of-home activations and investment in big brand campaigns. The challenge then is to find a distribution path across channels that is consistent and create a holistic journey for the user.

But it’s very difficult to create personalised experiences without significant activity on digital channels. Producing a variety of activations is important, but creating a consistent message that will sink in and that users will internalise is the key to success. And that’s the same in both B2B and B2C campaigns.

I mean, look, we need to speak about AI, right? It’s not so much about using it or not – because everybody is using it. It’s more about using it to have a real, tangible impact on the business. Everyone is trying AI tools, but we’re seeing an evolution of the technology in marketing beyond driving efficiency, productivity or cost-savings. 

But still with AI we’re not measuring a lot of other things, such as business value. How do you use AI to get a new product out to market? How do you use it to better serve your customers? Teams have internal AI solutions right now, but they want to scale it out a bit. And, importantly, they want to consolidate their platforms. They want all-in-one tools rather than the disparate nonsense they face now. That’s what will help AI-buying teams better analyse business improvements and cost-savings.

I’m in B2B so, for us, it’s about shifting the perception of the brand for our customers. We grew up as a consumer company and for about 11 years we’ve been empowering the world to design. So it’s about fundamentally changing how B2B buyers see us.

It is validating to hear digital marketers using or showing interest in our products. But still, many people only know us as the platform their child uses for school, for instance. And it’s true that we do have more than 100 million students using the platform, but it’s also useful for your large organisation, even Fortune 500 companies, which may not be very agile or may need to increase their creative output. 

For us, it’s about staying unapologetically Canva, this great brand that we’ve built, but then showing up for people in a business environment. It’s moving this company with B2C roots into a B2B marketplace.

Many of these large companies are desperate to increase their content creation. I recently spoke with a Fortune-500 company where everyone internally is a content creator if they want to be. But the leadership doesn’t want their employees creating a bunch of off-brand content with the wrong tone of voice. 

The CMO wants to use these content ideas from across the organisation but do it in a way that feels safe, with clear guidelines. Canva has a number of brand kits, which are great for large organisations that maybe have 50 brands sitting within them. It enables leaders at the top to set effective guardrails for any content that is produced in the organisation. But this is a challenge for us. We’re just starting on this journey and it will be a while before we get where we want to be with it.

Embrace AI with open arms. I know everybody says that. But marketing is truly changing. No longer can you just check boxes on skills such as digital marketing or field marketing events. In the near term, it’s not necessarily the case that every sub-function of marketing will be completely transformed, but they will be disrupted.

There is so much efficiency to be gained through automation and AI solutions. So find that little micro-process or the opportunity for precision in the funnel, anywhere that you can add some automation. For us, one obvious spot was lead handoffs to sales. No one wants to do that. But we were able to automate it and then find better, more enjoyable projects for our people to do instead.

I know that feels like a contrived answer but it’s very true. You have to be hands-on with AI. At Canva, we’ve done a lot of workshops, hackathons and so on. We’re looking out for people who have figured out how to use AI for particular purposes and then trying to spread those uses across the company. But this stuff all starts at the top. It requires executive buy-in, which then trickles through the wider organisation.