The Benefits of Using Canva for Your Small Business (And How I Use It Almost Every Day)
If there’s one tool I use nearly every day in my business, it’s Canva. From designing blog covers (like the one for this post!) to building digital products and prepping my workshop presentation slides, Canva has become my all-in-one creative studio.
The beauty of Canva is that it gives small business owners access to professional design without the steep learning curve of complex software. Whether you’re creating social media posts, client resources, or a polished proposal, Canva has a template to get you started—and the flexibility to make it your own.
Why Canva Works for Small Businesses
Small business owners juggle a lot. Canva helps cut down the overwhelm by:
Providing easy-to-use templates for almost every design project.
Keeping your brand fonts, colors, and logos in one place for consistency.
Offering collaboration tools if you work with a team.
Integrating with tools you may already use (like scheduling content straight to social media).
Projects You Can Create in Canva
The list of what you can design in Canva is nearly endless. Here are some of the ways I use it in my business and how you might, too:
Marketing Collateral
Printed flyers, business cards, brochures.
Digital graphics for social media, blog covers, and ads.
Pinterest pins (every pin for my site is designed in Canva).
Brand Assets & Visuals
Logo design or refresh.
Brand guidelines with your colors, fonts, and imagery.
Product mock-ups and swag (totes, stickers, mugs).
Client-Facing Materials
Proposals, welcome packets, and guides.
Client prep resources and freebies (like my Brand Photo Shot List & Prep Checklist
Custom presentation decks (like I used for my Life-First Marketing workshop).
Digital Products & Content
Checklists, planners, and printable PDFs.
Course workbooks and slide decks.
Blog cover photos and social share graphics.
Audio soundbytes, short-form videos, and even Reels.
Business Admin & Personal Life
Admin printables like calendars, invoices, goal trackers or on-boarding forms.
Personal planning tools, chore charts, homeschool worksheets or meal plans (because let’s be honest, business and life often overlap).
Canva’s Extra Features Worth Noting
Scheduler – Canva lets you schedule posts directly to your social channels. While I use Metricool for most of my batch scheduling, Canva’s built-in scheduler is great for quickly pushing out a design you just finished.
Photo & Video Tools – Stock photos, background removers, filters, and light editing built in. Many of my blog cover images are styled or tweaked in Canva before publishing.
Audio & Video Editing – Create sound bites or edit short-form video directly inside Canva.
Collaboration – Share projects with team members or clients to review in real time.
Bulk Create – My favorite hack! Are you someone who regularly posts in a specific format and design? Like a tip of the week, quote posts, etc? Check into the bulk create feature! It’s game-changing for allowing you to dump your text/copy into a spreadsheet, link certain elements in your graphic/design/template, and mass produce as many as you’d like, all at one time! Here’s a helpful video to explain how it works.
Free vs Paid: Which Canva Plan Do You Need?
Canva Free
Great for getting started.
Access to thousands of templates.
Ability to create and download unlimited designs.
Canva Pro (Paid)
Unlocks premium templates, fonts, and stock assets.
Lets you upload your brand fonts, colors, and logos to keep everything consistent.
Background remover for photos.
Magic resizing (turn one design into multiple formats instantly).
Content planner and scheduler.
For most small businesses, Canva Pro is worth the small monthly cost. The time saved by resizing graphics, keeping everything on-brand, and accessing premium images more than pays for itself.
Canva as Part of Your Marketing System
This is where Canva shines most: it doesn’t just create pretty graphics. It helps build a marketing system that works across your entire content ecosystem.
Here’s how I use it strategically:
Brand kits set up for my own brand, as well as the other brands that I create content for, making design work more efficient.
Blog covers & Pinterest pins for every blog post (evergreen traffic drivers).
Email graphics for my weekly newsletter, The Friday Mix.
Presentation slides for workshops and client trainings.
Freebies & opt-ins like the 20+ Ways to Boost Bookings in a Slow Season checklist.
Social posts that tie directly back to my blog or offers.
Digital product layouts for my upcoming mini course, How to Plan 12 Months of Valuable Content in Less Than 2 Hours.
Every one of those pieces starts in Canva, then gets connected back into my bigger framework: my website (digital home base), my blog (evergreen resource library), my email list (direct communication), and my community connections.
The Takeaway
Canva is more than a design app. It’s a small business owner’s secret weapon. It makes your brand look consistent, helps you repurpose content across platforms, and saves you from hours of fiddling with complicated design software.
If you’re not already using Canva daily, this might be the year to gift yourself the Pro plan and start building a library of on-brand designs that work across every corner of your business.
And if you’d like weekly encouragement and practical marketing strategies, join me for The Friday Mix.