My favorite tool for small businesses to easily market themselves on almost no budget is Canva. Canva is a design tool that makes it simple to create EVERY kind of social media post or design ANY size of print. They also have options to build websites and edit videos. This post will highlight what I think is the easiest way to get started creating social media posts on Canva using 3 key tips.

Before you begin, be sure to create a free Canva account via their website, desktop app, or mobile app. A free account gives you access to some features and elements, but I find the pro account option well worth the $12 per month. You can check out their pricing options here. You’ll also need an internet connection while working on your designs.

Now on to the good stuff!

Tip #1: Find a Template

When you open Canva you’ll see a search bar front and center. Simply type in a description of what you need to design today. For this blog post I’ve imagined a fun, modern fashion boutique brand who needs an Instagram Story post to advertise their annual sale.

You’ll see two kinds of template results. The first is “Magic Design”, which are AI-generated to match your prompt. The second kind is templates that have been contributed by people and companies, in this case there are 1,300,000 results. Wow. Luckily Canva does a good job sorting the most relevant templates to the top. Choose whichever you like best! You can then customize it to include your own photos, colors, and text. Tips #2 & #3 will help us do that!

Tip #2: customize visual elements

You can update every aspect of the template to reflect your business’s branding. One of my favorite tools on Canva is their AI photo editing options. Drag and drop your photo (or push the + button on mobile) to upload your own photo. Then click the “edit photo” button. All of the options under “Magic Studio” are really cool AI tools to check out, but this time I used the background remover to make this brand’s photo similar to the one in the template. I also used the selection frame corners to resize the image after the background was removed.

Bonus tip: be sure to have your specific brand colors ready. You can select backgrounds, shapes, and text to edit their color.

Tip #3: Magic write

To replace the text in the template I recommend trying out Magic Write. Yep, another AI tool. I wrote a very poor paragraph about our example brand’s sale. My goal was just to get the basic info there, then I can select the text box and click “Magic Write”. There are a few options to choose from, I used rewrite and then did it again and chose more fun. The resulting text is MUCH more engaging and fun than mine.

Now your Instagram story is ready to be saved! Click “share” in the top right corner, then “download”. Canva will give you lots of output options but generally has the best one for the template you chose selected already. Hit “download” again.

Click the video below to see the text animation that was built into the template in action!

My goal with this post was to help small business owners (who aren’t the most tech-savvy) better understand some of the incredible tools out there. Learning more about these resources can help you boost your marketing more than you can ima