How one company used Canva to increase their social media engagement by 1100%

Conversational is a virtual receptionist provider for small businesses and startups. Their receptionist team remotely answer calls, manage appointments, and take messages for business owners.

Conversational uses Canva to support their marketing and content strategies. It’s working – since posting with Canva images that grab their audience’s attention, the company has seen a 1100% increase in engagement on social media and more website traffic than ever.

Conversational’s Marketing Director, Debra Carpenter, tells us about the ways Canva is helping them gather more meaningful results from their marketing campaigns and build a better, more engaging relationship with their audience.

We’ve been using Canva as our go-to tool for graphic design for the last year or so. I used the tool for graphic design work as a freelancer before coming on to work at Conversational.

Over time we’ve found more and more ways to use the images we create and turn some of them into important parts of our evergreen content. Hiring someone to do that amount of work for us on a freelance or full-time basis would’ve been really costly. We use Canva because it’s free aside from the premium elements and full of design options and ready-to-use templates. Check out this example below:

We use these three design templates about 80% of the time: The blog title template, Facebook post template, and Twitter post template. Every blog post looks more professional and well-done with a custom, branded title image at the top, and the drag and drop function makes it easy to throw a blog post title image together quickly. The Facebook and Twitter post templates get the proportions just right so the images aren’t cropped in weird places when they post.

The infographic template is another good one, and all the ready-made designs give us inspiration for our own ideas if we don’t use them as-is. We pick a template we like, change the colors, adjust the font, and make it “look” like the Conversational brand.

Our social media presence has probably received the most benefit from using Canva. The engagement we’ve been seeing there since posting our own images is really cool to witness. We get more likes, comments, and shares than ever before. We’re getting shared on big pages where we never expected to be.

We really think the professional look of our Canva-created marketing materials has been a big factor in that boost – we’re posting images and graphics that people enjoy seeing and want to share. That’s amazing!

Another way we’re using Canva to support our brand is by creating shareable infographics, custom blog images, and even images that promote special discounts or customer surveys. Being able to add our logo and control the fonts and colors on every image we create is another factor that’s been helpful in building and strengthening our brand as a whole.

Facebook has been the perfect fit for our Canva creations. While we also receive a lot of engagement on our other networks with our Canva images, we tend to see most of it concentrated on our Facebook page.

We utilize the power of the Facebook boost feature reach as many people as possible with our designs. We’ve seen incredible results with our Canva images on Facebook.

Our posts that feature Canva-created images have an average engagement count of 1154 total reactions (likes, comments, and shares) per post. Our posts without Canva images have an average engagement count of 95 total reactions per post – that’s a difference of 1114.73%.

One of our posts with the quote, “To get what you love, you must first be patient with what you hate” by Al Ghazali reached more than 16,100 people and had nearly 2,000 (1,992) engagements in the form of likes, comments, and shares. Posts with Canva images consistently bring in the most engagement.

And it’s not just engagement on our posts. We’re seeing a big increase in our total fans and clicks to our website as well, even though we’re posting less often than we used to (usually just once per day now).

Above is a screenshot from our Facebook engagement report last month, showing that we had 5.4K engagements, 211 new fans, and 250 clicks to our website all while sharing 37 fewer posts than the same time last year. That’s a sign that what we’re posting now – images made with Canva – is a lot more engaging to our audience.

My favorite feature on Canva is probably the ability to add team members and collaborate with others within your organization. I work remotely while most of the Conversational team is concentrated in our office, so being able to collaborate with coworkers online is great. We’re considering leveling up and upgrading to Canva Pro so we can add more team members and save our brand colors, templates, fonts, etc.

It doesn’t require any graphic design experience to use, most features are free, it helps us meet our engagement goals, and makes it easy to add our logo and brand colors to every design we create. It’s an essential tool for business owners that create their own marketing materials.