The Growth Machine Behind Canva's $6 Billion Business

Birthday greetings, yoga routines, makeup tutorials, unboxing videos. From party invites and T shirts to business documents and social media assets, Canva has democratized graphic design worldwide with free, easy to use online tools and templates that let anyone generate great designs. And in the process, the Australian startup has grown into a six billion dollar company. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot. I'm going to show you how Canva mastered every aspect of online marketing and its mission to disrupt the digital design industry. And if you like this story, hit the like button and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel. Modern day marketing requires more captivating visuals than ever before. Text, photos, graphics and videos all compete for our attention in an endless stream of content. Brands need to create literally hundreds of assets to keep pace with the demand of online marketing. That's why millions of marketers rely on Canva to let them design without having to learn traditional graphic software. But Canva isn't just a helpful tool for marketers, it's also a fantastic case study in online marketing. So what can we learn? Let's take a look at the four ways that Canva successfully sells itself, starting with search. Canva dominates the search engine results page, or serp, by focusing on transactional queries. That means that the user is conducting a search with the intent of completing a transaction or getting something for users seeking design help. Transactional queries like Design Ads Online and Free Online Proposal Template show Canva as the first result on Google. In other words, users may never have heard of Canva. They just ask Google what they're looking for and Google determines that Canva is the best answer. Thanks Google. But how does Google decide that Canva is the best? Canva beat out the competition by creating programmatic landing pages based on the most common queries for their product. One search term they identified is Create. So they made a landing page with the URL canva.com create and the headline what do you want to design? So inviting. Thank you. No one's ever asked me that, and I'm glad you did. Through its simple layout and extensive list of things you can design, the page serves up a large trove of easy to parse info that Google reads. And Google loves reading. Bunch of nerds over there. Honestly, just oh, let me parse this, let me parse that. Whether you search how to create business cards, how to create brochures, or how to create bingo cards, this one page on Canva comes back at the top of the results. Pretty crazy. The second query term they identified is templates. For that use case, they not only put up a landing page titled Discover Templates, but they also built an entire hierarchy of subpages, more than 50 different template categories to help Google see all of the templates that are available. And each of those parent pages have up to 75 child pages with subcategories or templates. It's like the Genghis Khan of parent pages. You know what I mean? That's good stuff. That's a lot of well organized long tail search terms with URL paths like presentation templates, keynote or posters templates. Lost dog. You can practically guess the URL for birthday cards. It's not what you think, so imagine how easy it is for search engines to index the pages. Canva also knows that site authority is critical for rising in the search ranking. That's why it has invested heavily in cultivating backlinks, over 10 million of them. A lot of those are organic, but Canva also invested in one on one outreach to get thousands of blogs to write about and link to pages on the site. They also wrote thousands of their own blog posts for other sites to link back to. Which brings us to Canva's next marketing method. Educational Content when it comes to content marketing, Canva is a powerhouse. Its design school launched as a blog in 2014 and has grown into a complete educational portal with online courses and tutorials and events that can help users level up their design skills. The Canva blog also lives on as a superb resource for design information and inspiration. Infospatient Infospiration the blog is divided into five sections Design, Marketing, Branding, Nonprofit Teachers and Students the first three, design, Marketing and Branding, serve dual purposes of acquiring new users via traditional inbound marketing and, maybe more importantly, retaining those users. Retention is critical for freemium businesses like Canva that let users see the service for free, then make money by selling premium content as well as subscriptions to Pro and Enterprise tier services. Frequent users are more likely to convert to paid users as they come to rely on the service, providing content that helps users improve their abilities as designers and marketers. Canva keeps them coming back, which is a huge driver of revenue. The final two blog categories, Nonprofit and Teachers and Students, target two additional groups that make up large parts of Canva's user base. The companies, Canva for Nonprofits and Canva for Education Programs, offer free Canva Pro accounts to certified teachers and organizations. They also generate plenty of press and backlinks as well as positive word of mouth from some very appreciative users. And seeing as 76% of canvas traffic is direct. It's safe to say that word of mouth has played an important role. And if you're thinking to yourself, there's no way I can be like Canva and get that mature traction sh you can't. I believe in you. And HubSpot Academy does too. That's why we've got a content marketing certification to help you get to Canva levels of cloud. That's big clout. Read more about that in the description below. The third pillar in Canva's marketing strategy is partnerships. In a press release titled strategic partnerships supercharge Canva's global growth in 2020, Canva pointed to 42 partnerships in 18 countries. These include a design to print marketplace with FedEx office, a global pre install agreement with Samsung, and an integration with HU that lets you design ads, emails, social posts and website content using Canva from inside your CRM. It's neat stuff. That's how I made Jamba a direct competitor to Canva. I'm gonna run them out of business. Just you wait. Finally, Canva's not shy when it comes to paid online advertising. According to third party analysis, Canva targeted an estimated 3,000 keywords and phrases for Google Ads in the US last year, for which it received about 500,000 clicks at a cost of $1.5 million. That works out to be just about $3 per click, well below the $6.4 industry customer services. They're equally active on social media, with Facebook and YouTube ads generating the most incoming traffic. However, all that advertising still only makes up about 5% of total traffic. Organic search, much of it the result of Canva's SEO and content marketing strategies, generates 16% of that traffic on the site, proof that SEO and content marketing really are crucial drivers for any online business. Check out the HubSpot Academy courses we offer on SEO and content marketing in the description links below. And when you need design work done, we've got you covered with the help of Canva. Now if you'll excuse me, got a makeup tutorial to watch. Trying to be cute. I'll see you next time. Canva pointed out to 42 partnerships in 80 Badoop Badoop. Just going to come out and say it. Badoop.