Amanda discusses how using canva as a tool for her law firm’s marketing has kept her organized and elevated her campaigns.
Marketing tools are essential when trying to cultivate quality campaigns. The use of tools will help usher your budding campaigns and help keep you organized in the process.
Marketing tools were designed for product development and promotional strategies. So utilize them! These tools will help any law firm or company to develop and promote their products or services in a successful manner.
In this week’s #FollowAttorneyAmanda, Amanda talks about a tool in particular that has helped her create content, establish good organizational skills, and establish quality campaigns.
Video Transcript
Amanda Shaffer: Hi, I’m Attorney Amanda Shaffer. Today I want to talk about canva.com, C-A-N-V-A.com. This is the website I use to create all of my graphics. It costs me $120 a year annually. It’s a little more if you pay monthly, of course. And it has just like an endless supply of templates and photos and what they call elements, which are like graphics, animated graphics. They have everything you could imagine from designing a graphic for Facebook to designing a t-shirt that you can actually purchase through the website. It’s been incredibly helpful because I don’t have any background in design. However, it’s important to note that there’s a lot there and it’s really hard sometimes to sort through it all. Like even for texts, like if you’re just picking which texts to use. There’s – I don’t know, I got to say over a hundred different types of texts you could use, so it can get a little overwhelming for sure.
I mentioned in another episode of #FollowAttorneyAmanda, that I had wanted to do a post on a client appreciation because the client sent me a gift. I wanted to put a little graphic on it and it took me like hours. It was not a great use of my time. It’s a good post, but I have to figure out how to streamline it a little bit more. I know if you hire someone to do it, they can use the program too, which eventually is where I think this will head. But it’s a really, really good price and it gives you the ability to save your designs, put it into folders. So like I guess the easiest way to explain it, would be like for my game show Are You Smarter Than A Naturalized Citizen? We’re up to episode number eight. So I have a folder for our returning naturalized citizens. And then I have a sub-folder for each episode. And what this allows me to do is that when I have to do a new episode, I copy a folder and then I just go in and I change it. And then I keep all the past ones that I have.
So this is important because if you know, one of the things I have to change each time for each show is the states that people live in. Because it’s one of the questions -a few questions about where you live, like who’s your Senator or representative, Capital of your state. So instead of having to redo graphics every single time, I can go back and I’ll name the folder on my computer, like New York plus California. And then if I have someone in a future episode from New York, California, I go to that one and save me a nice amount of time, at least. So it’s important whenever you’re doing something that – especially like live because if I’m looking at my folder right now, just my marketing folder alone like there are 15 different categories and they’re not even organized that well. So it’s really important to have organization so that when you want to repeat things, want to reuse things, it’s easy to find. I’ve had this problem a lot. I’m not the best at organizing. It’s something I have to do better with. It’s partly about naming; what you name your files, what you name your folders, so you can find it easily. And then of course, how you organize everything.
So if you can get a good hold on that you’re in much better shape. Canva helps you with that. I ultimately do download from Canva onto the computer. So I try to emulate the same folder structure that I do on my computer. One thing to keep in mind with Canva. So it seemingly has this nice function where you can each place you post Facebook, Instagram, even Facebook business page, Facebook event page, every separate post seems to have a different graphic size, which is incredibly frustrating. But Canva has a system where it’s like, you can size it. It’ll be like, what kind of posts do you want? Okay. Facebook posts. And then all of a sudden, 1080 times, 720, I don’t know if that’s the right size. Then it has like every single type of post you can imagine from YouTube thumbnail to Facebook posts, to the Instagram story, – cover story or something. It sounds nice and it sounds helpful, but their measurements don’t always seem to be accurate, which drives me insane. Because if it was just, if it could just resize it properly and then when you do resize it, not everything resizes, you have to go back in there and fix it all up. So it takes a lot of extra time. And you got to keep that in mind, because for a while I was kind of posting blindly thinking, all right, it’ll resize, it’ll be the right size. If I’m saying I’m doing an Instagram post, it’ll be an Instagram post size, but it turns out that doesn’t really happen.
So you have to be careful, you have to play around with it. And once you are able to figure out the right size, then you should definitely take note of that for the future. So, canva.com is a great, great tool. It is a bit overwhelming, especially if you don’t know much about design or you don’t have a lot of time. I do find it a little difficult to filter, but I haven’t found any alternatives that even come close to giving me the amount of content amount of options that this does. So it makes my graphics definitely look a lot more professional than before I discovered this. And I’m going to continue to use it and hopefully, it will get a little more tailored or their searches will be better and whatnot going forward. At least that’s what I’m hoping, especially when it comes to the sizing of the different posts. That is all today for #FollowAttorneyAmanda, I’ll see you next time.
