Birthday greetings, yoga routines,
make up tutorials, unboxing videos--
from party invites and t-shirts to business documents
and social media assets, Canva has democratized graphic design
worldwide with free, easy to use,
online tools and templates that let
anyone generate great designs.
And in the process, the Australian startup
has grown into a $6 billion company.
What's up?
It's Jamal from HubSpot.
I'm going to show you how Canva mastered
every aspect of online marketing in its mission to disrupt
the digital design industry.
And if you like the story, hit the like button
and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel.
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Modern day marketing requires more captivating visuals
than ever before.
Text, photos, graphics, and videos
all compete for our attention in an endless stream of content.
Brands need to create literally hundreds of assets
to keep pace with the demand of online marketing.
That's why millions of marketers rely on Canva
to let them design without having to learn
traditional graphic software.
But Canva isn't just a helpful tool for marketers.
It's also a fantastic case study in online marketing.
So what can we learn?
Let's take a look at the four ways
that Canva successfully sells itself, starting with search.
Canva dominates the search engine results page,
or SERP, by focusing on transactional queries.
That means that the user is conducting a search
with the intent of completing a transaction
or getting something.
For users seeking design help, transactional queries
like design ads online and free online proposal template show
Canvas the first result on Google.
In other words, users may never have heard of Canva.
They just ask Google what they're looking for,
and Google determines that Canva is the best answer.
Thanks, Google.
But how does Google decide that Canva is the best?
Canva beat out the competition by creating
programmatic landing pages based on the most common queries
for their product.
One search term they identified is create.
So they made a landing page with the URL canva.com/create.
In the headline, what do you want to design?
It's so inviting.
Thank you.
No one has ever asked me that, and I'm glad you did.
Through its simple layout and extensive list of things
you can design, the page serves up
a large trove of easy to parse info that Google reads.
And Google loves reading.
Bunch of nerds over there, honestly, just, oh, let me
parse this.
Let me parse that.
Whether you search how to create business cards,
how to create brochures, or how to create bingo cards,
this one page on Canva comes back at the top of the results.
Pretty crazy.
The second query term they identified is templates.
For that use case, they not only put up
a landing page titled Discover Templates,
but they also built an entire hierarchy
of sub pages, more than 50 different template categories,
to help Google see all of the templates that are available.
And each of those parent pages have up to 75 child pages
with subcategories or templates.
It's like the Genghis Khan of parent pages.
You know what I mean?
That's good stuff.
That's a lot of well organized longtail search
terms with URL pass like presentation/templates/keynote
or poster/templates/lostdog.
You can practically guess the URL for birthday cards.
It's not what you think.
So imagine how easy it is for search engines
to index the pages.
Canva also knows that site authority
is critical for rising in the search ranking.
That's why it has invested heavily
in cultivating backlinks-- over 10 million of them.
A lot of those are organic, but Canva also invested in one
on one outreach to get thousands of blogs
to write about and link to pages on the site.
They also wrote thousands of their own blog posts
for other sites to link back to, which
brings us to Canva's next marketing method--
educational content.
When it comes to content marketing,
Canva is a powerhouse.
Its design school launches a blog in 2014
and has grown into a complete educational portal
with online courses and tutorials,
and events that can help users level up their design skills.
The Canva blog also lives on as a superb resource for design
information and inspiration--
"info-spation," "info-spiration."
The blog is divided into five sections-- design, marketing,
branding, nonprofit, teachers and students.
The first three-- design, marketing,
and branding-- serve dual purposes of acquiring
new users via traditional inbound marketing,
and, maybe more importantly, retaining those users.
Retention is critical for freemium businesses like Canva
that let users see the service for free,
then make money by selling premium content, as well
as subscriptions to pro and enterprise tier services.
Free users are more likely to convert to paid users
as they come to rely on the service.
Providing content that helps users improve their abilities
as designers and marketers, Canva
keeps them coming back, which is a huge driver of revenue.
The final two blog categories, nonprofit and teachers
and students, target two additional groups
that make up large parts of Canvas user base.
The companies Canva for Nonprofits and Canva
for Education programs offer free Canva pro accounts
to certified teachers and organizations.
They also generate plenty of press and backlinks,
as well as positive word of mouth
from some very appreciative users.
And seeing as 76% of Canva's traffic is direct,
it's safe to say that word of mouth
has played an important role.
And if you're thinking to yourself,
there's no way I can be like Canva
and get that much attraction, shh.
You can.
I believe in you.
And HubSpot Academy does, too.
That's why we've got a content marketing
certification to help you get to Canva levels of cloud.
That's big cloud.
Read more about that in the description below.
The third pillar in Canva's marketing strategy
is partnerships.
In a press release titled "Strategic Partnership
Supercharge Canva's Global Growth in 2020,"
Canva pointed to 42 partnerships in 18 countries.
These include a design to print marketplace with FedEx office,
a global preinstalled agreement with Samsung,
and an integration with HubSpot that let's
you design ads, emails, social posts,
and website content using Canva from inside your CRM.
It's neat stuff.
That's how I made Jamva, a direct competitor to Canva.
I'm going to run them out of business.
Just you wait.
Finally, Canva is not shy when it comes
to paid online advertising.
According to third party analysis,
Canva targeted an estimated 3,000 keywords and phrases
for Google ads in the US last year,
for which it received about 500,000 clicks
at a cost of $1.5 million.
That works out to be just about $3 per click,
well below the $6.40 industry average for customer services.
They're equally active on social media,
with Facebook and YouTube ads generating the most
incoming traffic.
However, all that advertising still only makes up about 5%
of total traffic.
Organic search, much of it the result
of Canva's SEO and content marketing strategies,
generates 16% of net traffic on the site,
proof that SEO and content marketing
really are crucial drivers for any online business.
Check out the HubSpot Academy courses we offer on SEO
and content marketing in description links below.
And when you need design work done,
we've got you covered with the help of Canva.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a make up tutorial
to watch.
I'm trying to be cute.
I'll see you next time.
Canva pointed out to 42 partnerships in 80--
badoop.
I'm just going to come out and say it, badoop.
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