Simplifying Social Media for Landscapers: Canva and its Brand Kit
When it comes to marketing today, reaching potential customers for your landscaping business means 2 things: search and social. A strong social media game is essential for any landscaping businesses hoping to grow. Most contractors understand this, but most struggle with how to actually do it. Do you as the owner need to do it? Does the office manager handle it? Does the sales/account manger do it? What are tools that can make it quicker and easier? After working with 100’s of companies, we’ve create a framework that actually works. Canva is a part of that framework.
What is Canva and Why Should Landscapers Care?
Canva is an app and website—it’s a versatile digital toolbox for design that helps you create professional-looking graphics and visuals without needing fancy design skills. It's a handy tool that empowers you to make eye-catching marketing materials, and social media posts, ads, flyers, etc that will impress your clients and make you stand out from the competition.
💡 Canva is game-changer. Here’s why:
☑️ Time and Cost Savings: Canva provides a wide range of pre-designed templates and user-friendly tools that allow you to create professional graphics in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional design software. This means you can quickly design eye-catching social media posts even though you may not have the budget (or desire) to hire a professional designer or agency. Showcase your design/build projects, services, maintenance accounts, and crew in action in a fraction of the time.
☑️ Professional Appearance: Canva improves the consistency of your company image (yes, your local brand) and improves the look and feel so you appear more professional to your customers and prospects.
What the H#ll is a Canva Brand Kit?!
Canva's Brand Kit simplifies this process of keeping brand consistency by centralizing all your stuff in one place. You can easily upload your logo, select your exact brand colors, and choose preferred fonts. This ensures that your social media content aligns with your company image and creates a consistent look and feel across all platforms. Do it once at the start and anyone anywhere will have the same guidelines set-up and ready to go.
💡 Why it’s amazing:
☑️ Streamlined process
Social media provides an excellent platform to highlight your services and projects. Utilize Canva to create professional graphics that showcase the range of services your business offers, such as lawn maintenance, landscape design, or hardscape installations. Buy doing this is hard to manage and there’s all kinds of graphics all over the place. Canva helps you create appealing promotional posts for seasonal offers, discounts, or referral programs and stores them all in one easy place - you know where to get them each and every time, and you can build on your library over time.
☑️ Set it up in advance
You need systems and processes to scale your business. No different than with operations, bookkeeping, recruiting, service delivery, etc, processes and systems are important for marketing success. The Brand Kit allows you to choose and save templates for your social posts, in advance. Meaning, when you or the social posting point person in your company has some extra time, they can bang out a few templates. You’ll go through and create templates for each post type—customer review, design/build project photo, team members/crew shots, educational topic, etc. Then, when it gets crazy busy, you will be able to create quality posts, quickly.
Take control of your social posting with Canva.
⚙️ Here’s how to set it up:
Sign up for a free Canva account. Visit this link to do it an click on ‘Sign up for Free.’ You can always upgrade to a paid account later.
Set up your brand kit. Check out this video for a step-by-step walkthrough. You want to set-up your brand colors, upload your logos, and choose your fonts.
Begin creating by browsing through Canva's library of templates. Create your first social post by clicking the ‘create a design’ button. Search for Instagram post or story.
Browse the templates that come up and choose one that represents you company well. Customize the chosen template with your Brand Kit elements you already selected.
Save your designs and name and organize them for easy access.
Download your designs (or simply take a screenshot on your computer or iPad) and post them to your social accounts.
