How Canva is approaching B2B customers with AI-powered tools

Creative technology company Canva launched its latest campaign promoting a growing number of collaborative and AI-powered tools for businesses. The “What Will You Design Today?” campaign was created with Canva’s platform by an in-house team and depicts real-world use cases for AI tools used by marketers and colleagues across any organization.

Why we care. Canva’s platform for businesses, Visual Suite, was launched 18 months ago. In that time, the company doubled its MAU to 170 million and quadrupled its paying subscriber base to 16 million. These are clear signs of a winning B2B strategy, which Canva’s marketing team had to adapt to accommodate a growing roster of enterprise tools and AI capabilities.

Magic Studio. Canva’s Magic Studio suite of AI tools gets close attention in the new campaign. The tools have been in development for the last two and a half years, according to the company.

Magic Studio includes generative AI technologies like DALL-E and Imagen for generating images. The Magic Write tool aids in creating on-brand text at scale. The suite also has visual editing tools like Magic Eraser, Background Remover, Magic Morph and Magic Animate to clean up images and easily add effects. Magic Edit allows users to edit images using short written prompts.

This 18-second spot shows how creative people on different teams can use Magic Write and written prompts to make content.

Magic Studio tools are available for enterprises, small businesses, individual creators and educators. The company offers three main pricing plans — Canva Free, Canva Pro and Canva for Teams.

Expanding B2B approach. “Something we’re keen to do as we move into the B2B space is that we think about it as ‘B2H’, or business-to-human, because we all are humans at the end of the day,” Canva’s Executive Creative Director Cat van der Werff told MarTech. “I think what we’re conscious of doing is not losing our brand voice, which is playful and unique, and even when we’re moving into the B2B space, our brand voice doesn’t need to shift. Obviously, our messaging does, because we’re talking to key decision makers, and they care about ease-of-use and the visual impact you get with Canva. They also care about saving time and reducing costs and scaling output. [The campaign speaks] to what they care about while maintaining our playfulness.”

The campaign uses a recurring cast of characters to personify certain tools, including collaborative whiteboards, social media posts and document tools. In the shift to enterprise solutions, Canva’s audience expanded to teams within the organization that use Canva’s tools together. For instance, last year’s effort focused on marketing and creative teams.

“In this current campaign, we’re starting to look more at, wall-to-wall, how anyone from HR to sales can use Canva to design and to work,” said van der Werff.

This 30-second spot shows how different teams can use the entire Canva suite to make compelling documents and presentations.

Campaign. “What Will You Design Today?” kicks off this week in the U.S. with social media, digital ads, TV and out-of-home in New York and California markets.

Out-of-home ads, including transit and office buildings, aim to catch people’s attention on their way to work.

“When it comes to large organizations, we’re showing them that Canva is a viable enterprise tool for saving time and costs,” said Frank J. Cortese, Canva’s global head of brand media. “Why we’re in real life, on billboards and in transit centers, and in their lobbies and building elevators, is because we’re not trying to interrupt [professionals] in the middle of their work, but we’re trying to reach them when they’re in their work mindset. That’s also why we’re on LinkedIn when there’s a little bit of a work mindset, but when they’re also not diving deep into reading industry trades.”