3 Steps Tech Unicorn Canva Uses to Lead with Content — and how you can too!
We know that many businesses today need to invest in content marketing.
But creating more content won’t necessarily boost your search traffic. With over 440 million blogs, it’s tough out there with so much competition!
So what’s the best approach moving forward?
One of the things I love to do is to look at examples of great content marketing and see what we can learn from these companies and their strategies.
In this article, we’re going to look at Canva, an Australian Unicorn ($1 billion+ valuation) that’s leading the way with their effective content marketing strategy.
If content marketing overwhelms you then don’t worry.
You’re not alone.
Whether you are a beginner or looking to improve your existing strategy, I’ll show you how you can also use Canva’s approach to boost your content marketing efforts.
Building a Killer Content Marketing Strategy
To do this you will need to:
- Understand your Industry Landscape — what’s already out there?
- Discover what your readers really want — what do people want to read? Is there a market gap?
- Determine what makes you different — how can you stand out amongst the crowd?
If you’ve never heard of Canva and their growth trajectory, make sure you read below. But if you do, feel free to skip this part and jump to ‘GETTING STARTED’.
WHAT IS CANVA?
Canva is an online platform that allows anyone (especially non-designers) to create engaging visual content. Examples include Social media posts, personal Documents, online marketing material, and digital advertisements.
CANVA’S GROWTH TRAJECTORY
- Canva launched in 2012
- By January 2014 they had 150,000 users and publicly opened the platform
- By April 2014, Guy Kawasaki joined the team as Canva’s Chief Evangelist
- By October 2014, there were 1 million users who shared their Canva-designed images via social media, blogs, and emails
- By August 2015, Canva reached 4 million users
- By 2017, Canva reached profitability with 294,000 paying customers
- Canva raised $86 million since its launch and is currently valued at $1 billion
- Now, 34 million designs are created per month (over 13 per second!)
If you look at this blog post, Growth Story: How Canva acquired 10 million users within 5 years, you can see that there were 4 key strategies which supported their exponential growth. Building empowering content (content that helps users improve their design skills) through Design School (Canva’s knowledge blog) has been one of the primary drivers of their success.
One article titled: Benefits of Walking: Why the Greatest Minds take the Longest walks, went viral with 58.1k total shares, with 55.5k on Facebook. You can view these statistics on Buzzsumo.
1. Understand Your Industry Landscape
GETTING STARTED
1. Create a Key Vision and Clear Goal
When it comes to constructing a helpful and engaging content strategy for your target audience, you need to put together a key vision and a clear goal.
- Canva’s Vision (Design Blog): To teach and inspire people to learn design.
- Canva’s Goal (Design Blog): To create the best possible content to teach and inspire people around design
A vision and goal are similar but very different. It’s great to have a vision of where you want your blog to go, but having a goal will give you something more concrete and actionable that you and your team can work together to implement.
Where did they start looking?
There are many organizations and publications that provide excellent design content. But to narrow it down, it was important for Canva to look at those who have been creating helpful engaging design content online (often in the format of a blog). A lot of the best content came from the company’s competitors.
By reverse engineering what the most popular content of their competitors looked like Canva was able to find:
- The topics that are most popular among their target audience
- Types of content that worked well: (E.g. List posts, posts with a lot of images)
Note: To find who your competitors are, type keywords or phrases common to your topic on Google. Those who rank well in Google for those terms are most likely competing for the same audience.
How did Canva Reverse Engineer their Competitors’ Content?
- Use Buzzsumo to Find Posts Frequently Shared on Social Media
Buzzsumo is a fantastic tool that shows you which pieces of content performs well on social media. It’s loved by many content strategists. It’s extremely useful when it comes to giving you more direction for your content strategy.
- For Example: If I type in content marketing on Buzzsumo, there is very high engagement for an infographic and list. You can see what the top posts are and the number of shares each post received (and on which platforms they are shared on.)
What can we learn from the data above?
- People like the display of visual data (Infographics)
- Popular Influencers like Gary Vee, have a lot of influence and dominance in the space
Understanding what your competitors do and what is popular is invaluable because there are many different ways you can construct your content marketing strategy. As you continue to explore the content that performs well on social media, you can see patterns and trends emerging.
2. Use Quora to Find New Angles On Your Topic
Quora is a great place to understand and see what questions people tend to have on your topic. Buzzsumo can help you identify what your competitor’s top content is but Quora can help you find questions and problems your target audience has, that hasn’t been covered and fully explored.
Canva found that on Buzzsumo, articles concerning fonts performed well. They then placed this keyword into Google Keyword Planner and found that there were 800,000 searches concerning fonts on a whole. The Canva team then entered the word fonts on Quora to find these were common questions from their target audience.
After understanding what topics were popular, and what the common questions from their target audience were, Canva decided to write an article about fonts. But they didn’t stop there.
Tip: Make sure you pay attention to the small details. Do you see a grey star next to the first question on Quora (What criteria are used by designers when choosing typefaces?). This is how Quora determines which questions have high-quality responses.
The Canva team noticed that a lot of the answers in the thread were from top designers. These answers also had a high number of upvotes. Canva then took this information into account and framed the fact that a designer had written the post in the title. They received over 5,000 shares for this article.
3. Use Topsy and search for your Main Keywords
Like Buzzsumo, Topsy is also an online tool that can help you make smart, data-driven marketing decisions. Topsy, however, goes further back than Buzzsumo and the search results for particular keywords are a bit different.
- By combining Buzzsumo, Quora, and Topsy, you can gain a very comprehensive understanding of what your competitors are doing.
If you search Typography on Topsy, this is what you can find:
4. Use Pinterest to see what content is being Pinned
You can also use Pinterest to see which content receives the most pins. All you need to do is search keywords such as graphic design to find what people like.
5. Study Blog Archives to Find Evergreen Content
Buzzsumo and Quora are great but they are very biased to new, topical content. These tools will show you what recently works. Due to the sheer amount of content online, Buzzsumo only shows you popular content going back one year.
Unlike topical content (of-the-moment) evergreen content (timeless) is always relevant. I recommend you study every post from your major competitors because some topics are timeless and will always remain popular.
Looking into blog archives also helps you understand what your community looks like. The more you know your community, the better your content will be.
6. Use SEMRush and Ahrefs: Your Competitors’ SEO Ranking
With the examples above, we looked a lot at where traffic was coming from. It’s important to understand where our competitors receive all of their traffic from.
- For example: If we type in Canva’s designschool.canva.com, you can see that these are the organization’s top ranking SEO search terms
I also recommend using Ahrefs. Ahrefs helps you understand how many websites are talking about and sharing your competitor’s articles. These websites can definitely become your partners in the future that may be interested in sharing your content. Repeat this for all your competitors.
2. Discover What Your Readers Really Want
The exercises and tools above are designed to help us understand what the industry landscape looks like.
But we need to take this one step further.
It’s important to find things the things that our competitors have also not yet written. If you can identify these ‘market gaps,’ you can then less competitive content that people are still searching for.
How do I identify a Market Gap?
You need to:
- Find what exists in the market (we explored a lot of that earlier)
- Study what people actually want
How do I Study Up On what People Want?
- Talk to People and Ask Them Questions
If you’ve just started your blog, make sure you have an opt-in subscription form. There are many benefits to collecting emails, but for the purposes of studying up on what people want, it’s good to follow-up to a new subscriber, asking them a simple question.
If you go to Design School and subscribe to Canva’s newsletter, you’ll receive a personal thank you note that asks people about their biggest challenge — the challenge doesn’t need to be centered around design.
It’s so simple and easy. But most blogs don’t ask!
When you ask a subscriber what their challenges are, you gain valuable insight into their concerns and what they are currently thinking. While many believe that their problem has nothing to do with design — e.g. increasing traffic, the reality is, design can help solve a lot of these issues.
Asking also shows that you care.
Remember, when you operate a blog, you’re helping educate your readers. If they can solve their biggest challenges with your content, then you’re helping them immensely. In the content world, your subscribers’ success is your success.
2. Observe Your Subscribers Reading and Sharing Habits
The more you understand your readers, the better your content can be.
Your readers will read a number of different articles on different websites. (Don’t ever assume that they are only interested in your content!) This is a great opportunity for you to learn and understand other forms/types of content they also enjoy reading.
You can do this by:
- Finding who the people who’ve shared your posts on social media are.
- Clicking on their Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook Pages
Alternatively, you can:
- Use Buzzsumo and select the option ‘view sharers’ on your articles
- Look at the links that they have shared in the past
3. Understand Your Subscribers and The Questions They Tend To Ask
When it comes to understanding the FAQs of a specific industry, make sure you take advantage of Quora. While Quora is great to help you find different angles, it can also provide you an in-depth understanding of your target audience.
You can use this framework to understand your target audience. Make sure you can answer almost all of the questions below before moving forward.
People and Questions:
- What are the most popular questions asked in your industry?
- Who are these people (asking the questions)? Are they students? Small business owners? Parents?
- What distinct groups are there? And how large are they? (E.g. In design, here are a large number of blogs dedicated to freelance designers and a lot of them are written for designers)
Online Communities:
- Where do these people like to hang out online (which communities)? (E.g If you’re targeting startups you can find them on Hacker News, Tech Crunch, TNW. But if you’re targeting designers, you can often find them on GrowthHackers, Inbound, and Designer News. I recommend deepening your research on Reddit and LinkedIn as well.)
- In terms of these communities:
- Which posts receive the most upvotes? What types of posts are shared on here?
- What are some most popular comments? What does this tell you about the nature of the post and the community?
- What are websites shared in these communities? Can you spot any patterns — sites that consistently show up in the top list?
Community Influencers:
- Who are the influencers (individuals with large following) in the space? What do they talk about? Find these people and look at what they talk about.
- Which websites’ content do these people? Can you guest post on sites your audience is likely to read?
Trends in the Market:
- What are the general trends in the market/industry?
3. Determine what makes you different
Once you have a good understanding of the market and your target audience, it’s important to see where you fit in the industry.
Key things you should ask yourself include:
- What are the key strengths of my organization?
- What can I leverage to gain a unique advantage over my competitors?
Remember: You need to stand out. If you’re simply copying your competitors, there’s no way you’re going to shine amongst the noise.
Here are a few ways popular blogs positioned themselves:
- Thought Leadership: Requires years of experience and the need to build up a reputation — See Neil Patel, Seth Godin, and Joe Pulizzi
- Personal Experience: Each blog post — from guest posts to podcasts features first-hand experiences — See Tim Ferris, Andrew Chen
- Data: Vero openly shares its data when it comes to blogging about email marketing. If your organization doesn’t generate data, then do your research. Moz does this very well!
The above are just a few examples. Canva positioned themselves as a key resource for business owners, marketers, other professionals, and non-designers in general.
As you guys can see, Canva leads with content by having a very strong content marketing strategy.
In this example, we only explored Canva’s Design School Blog.
But these steps can be applied to all forms of content marketing.
Manh will rush into writing a blog.
But they won’t have an in-depth understanding of their industry landscape, what their readers want to see, and how to position their blog effectively.
Make sure you learn from your competitors.
Just because you want to create something different, doesn’t mean there aren’t existing competitors you can learn from.
Study and research first.
Implement later.
