Summary

• Prior to implementing Canva, Salesforce struggled with brand consistency across the social media team and lacked a clear approval process.
• The team leverages Canva’s Brand Kit and Resize & Magic Switch to ensure brand consistency, clarity, and efficiency across their assets.
• Using Canva Enterprise, Salesforce has seen a 66% reduction in cost per design and a 63% increase in design production.

Background

Salesforce⁠(opens in a new tab or window) has become one of the world’s biggest and most trusted software firms by helping businesses connect with their customers. Canva Enterprise⁠(opens in a new tab or window) helps Salesforce’s social media creatives protect the brand while scaling their own message to reach their global customer base.

The challenge

Communication and engagement are essential for any business, and few companies in the world understand that better than Salesforce.

Since 1999 the company’s cloud-based solutions have helped businesses across the globe create and manage deep and rewarding relationships with their customers. Salesforce’s apps are all about building a better, more personalized picture of a customer’s needs, and how best to speak to them.

But Salesforce’s extraordinary success means speaking to its own customer base can be a big and complicated task. Its social media presence alone spans over a hundred accounts, reaching existing and prospective customers across Germany, France, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Ireland, India, and the United States.

Kyle Legg is head of Brand Social Media & Creative at Salesforce, and coordinates a social team that collaborates with in-house staff and external agencies around the world.

“Salesforce on social has a lot of moving parts,” Kyle says. “We operate 140+ global social media accounts, in 22 regions, in 18 languages with 46 regional handles. So we manage a Social Media Center of Excellence to help scale our best practices and documentation to all staff and global agencies.”

Kyle and the Center of Excellence operate as a ‘hub and spoke’ model for the wider company. Their job is to create engaging content for Salesforce’s social media channels that is localized to each region, while also making sure Salesforce’s brand and messaging remain clear and consistent.

Kyle’s team is fluent in social media, but not everyone has a design background. In a company as big and diverse as Salesforce, that message could get lost in translation, leading to brand attrition and creation of “totally off-brand assets” or other branding headaches.

“People were using the wrong versions of fonts — using the boldest, heaviest weight which we don’t actually use, or using outdated brand fonts that we’ve moved on from. There were lots of accessibility issues with color. You may be able to read it, but it wouldn’t actually pass web accessibility.

“And then there was no approval process, streamlined approvals.”

The solution

Bringing Canva into the Center for Excellence’s toolkit has helped bring consistency and clarity across their work and the Salesforce organization. Canva’s Brand Kit and Brand Templates make small but essential tasks easier and quicker, so Kyle and his team can focus on finding new ways to reach customers.

“By empowering them to build their own assets with brand-approved templates they can edit with just a few clicks. We reduce their time spent in feedback loops and waiting on file delivery and free up our creative teams to focus on higher-impact assets for social media.”

A unified voice

“The biggest thing we’ve solved is consistency, for sure,” Kyle says. “Part of our vision for getting on board with Canva was building out a full brand-design system for social,” Kyle says of Canva’s Brand Kit. “With the goal of getting everything into Canva, so everything was consistent.”

One of the key design assets for Salesforce’s social practitioners are ‘quote cards’ to support customer success content, live events, product launches, and company news. But marketers aren’t necessarily graphic designers, and before Canva that meant Kyle and his team often had to make these materials from scratch.

“We have one designer who would have to build each card with complicated design software, and then the other teams that weren’t on the brand team were kind of making their own graphics, that didn’t really align with the event.”

With Canva, Kyle and his team are able to create a set of templates that tick all the boxes, while Canva’s Brand Kit makes sure only the right fonts and brand assets are in play. Now the wider team can populate and customize cards with ease using Canva’s simple drag-and-drop tool.

“We have consistency there now,” he says. “It saves so much time across the company, because we’re able to free up our creative teams. I would say I save at least ten hours a month just by not needing to go in and create or edit files, render animations, go through reviews, find and share source templates, etc.”

Localizing the message

Before Canva, rolling out a new campaign to all of Salesforce’s regions was a huge effort, requiring efficient coordination across different time zones, languages, and platforms.

But when Kyle and team launched a recent campaign on social media, global teams could find everything on Canva from the start. With Resize & Magic Switch, the team could create designs that can easily be scaled to suit the dimensions of any social media platform or post format.

“Our creative team built out all of the social assets for the campaign in Canva. We just handed the files to global teams to swap out headlines and get the message to market fast.”

Efficiency unlocks creativity

With all the templates and designs in one central platform, Kyle’s hope for a streamlined approval process has been realized. Canva features like preset design approvals, plus smooth integration with popular tools like Slack, also encourage real-time collaboration without the fuss of emails and attachments.

Fostering collaboration across a larger team has led to a remarkable 63% surge in design production. As collaboration levels have increased, so have the number of designs published, thanks to the effective utilization of Canva as a collaborative tool. This increase in productivity has also led to a notable 66% reduction in the cost per design within a year.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Kyle says. “All the approvals come through to me, and I can just click 'approve.' With the Slack app connected, it's fast and easy for everyone.”

All that time saved can now be used to develop new ideas, as Kyle and his team use Canva to explore other possibilities from video and animation to more time-intensive formats.

"Our time and resource-strapped social teams finally have time to create and deliver new content formats. We’re thrilled to get even more out of Canva with easy video editing, allowing us to create for social media with on-brand animated graphic elements."

For Marissa Kraines, VP, Global Head of Social Media at Salesforce, the impact has been felt across the company.

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