Canva is Not a Social Media Strategy [Episode 140]

Molly: Hello and welcome back. Um, thank you so much for being here again. So today's episode is gonna be super short. I love how I always say that and it ends up not being short, but I really think today's will be short and it's gonna be about something that has come up recently that I just did not ever think would be like, I don't wanna use the word objection, a hurdle to you using Instagram for your clinic or office, and that is Canva.

This has come up now three times in the last week. I'm not good at Canva. I don't understand Canva. I don't think I'm tech savvy enough to do your program because I don't know how to use Canva. I'm not consistent at posting on Instagram because I don't know how to use Canva. I don't mean to like minimize anyone's.

Mindset or anything like that, or like questions or, I just, like I said, I think I'm just like surprised 'cause I just didn't ever, uh, see this as being something that would come up. So I cannot wait to talk about that today. So let's dive in.

Hey, welcome to Holistic Marketing Simplifi. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions, and you didn't go to school to learn how to be a full-time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day every day.

So let's come hanging out while we chat. All things ease in your marketing and my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote, should to a I get to more dream patients and clients. Yes, please.

Kristen: Hi, I am Kristen Spz and I am a life coach and a sound bath facilitator, meditation and breath work teacher.

And I live in Evanston, Illinois, outside of Chicago. And I listen to Molly Cahill. Holistic marketing, simplified podcast. It's so great.

Molly: Let's talk about Canva. Let's talk about Instagram in, you know, 20 25, 20 26 versus what it used to be. Just a little history lesson. When I first started doing Instagram for my personal chiropractor back in 2017, I think I made literally everything that we posted in Canva.

It was just so different then, like you could get away with like generic graphics and tips and tricks, and you could get a National Holidays calendar and oh, let put, national Day is coming up. Let me post about that. That could not be farther from what works on Instagram. Now, you could quite literally have an extremely successful Instagram page that brings you new patients or clients.

Never even use Canva. I think it would be harder, I would say, to never ever use it. But we post four times a week for our Instagram management clients, and of those, let's just say 16 posts in a month, maybe four of those 16, we use Canva now. So typically what we're doing now is. Yes, we'll have maybe like, if you're thinking of four posts a week, we'll have like one, one we make in Canva with like a photo in the background with just like a text box on top of the photo, like a carousel.

We never, almost, never post single image posts anymore. Then maybe we'll have like a B roll reel with like five to eight seconds of just video footage of inside the person's clinic with a strong hook text hook over the top. Then maybe if the client provides it to us. Ideally we would have a face to camera reel.

We don't have a face to camera reel. We would have like another B roll re. Then lastly, what we've been trying to do is create these really native, more casual uncurated carousels using Instagram like I teach my holistic marketing hub and content sprint, which is my group coaching program. Students how to do this with like a tech tutorial, but it's not, you don't need a tech tutorial.

It is not hard just to pull up a photo. Right on Instagram. You can do it like in the posting interface, or I prefer to do it in stories screen because I find it's much easier in the stories interface. And you just pull up a photo onto your stories like you were gonna post it as a story. Use the AA text box feature to type your text on it.

In the top right hand corner, there's three horizontal dots, and then you can tap that and you'll see a little download arrow and I just download that to my camera roll. I'll do that for carousels. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can go to my Instagram feed and see these carousels that I've made using Instagram fonts and not made in Canva.

All that being said, it's just for that to be a barrier to entry for you. I just want you to know is not necessarily a problem, but something I see here, and I would love to take credit for being wise enough to figure this out, but I'm not. My business coach, who I work with, Lacey sites from a lit up life, she's like, Molly, it's not about Canva.

Their fear, their objection is not Canva. It's usually something deeper, right? Because here I can say to you all day long, oh, you don't need Canva. You can, you know, just make it right in Instagram stories. And then you'll say, well, I don't know how to use Instagram stories. I'm not good at technology. And I could say, oh, it's okay.

You don't need Canva. You can just do like a reel with, uh, you know, five to eight seconds of video with text on top of it. I'm just not good with technology. I don't know how to post a reel, and you see how that cycle continues and goes on and on and on. So I want you to kind of think to yourself, what is the thing that's really tripping me up here?

Because if you can learn how to adjust someone's cervical spine, if you could learn how to treat someone's fertility with tiny needles, if you can learn how to do all of these incredible things that so many of you do. I promise you, you can go to YouTube and figure out how to post reel or figure out how to change a font in Canva.

There are a million templates inside of Canva that you can use, and as I said, I teach all of this step by step, like sharing my screen, showing exactly what buttons to push inside of Holistic marketing hub and inside of my content Sprint group coaching program, even if I didn't teach it there, like I said, the resources.

For learning something like that are endless. I think the problem is a little deeper, or like I said, I don't think my coach pointed out that the problem is typically goes beyond that. I came across this quote when I was preparing for this episode, and I just really like it, and it's basically about saying, of course I couldn't find it.

I like screenshotted it and then I searched my camera roll forever and couldn't find it, so I must have accidentally deleted it. But it basically said like there's a big difference in saying I'm not good at this. Versus saying I'm a beginner. So think about whatever it is that you do. Say the very first time you reviewed someone's, you know, lab results, were you like, oh, I know exactly what to do.

This is gonna take me five minutes. I know exactly what to give this client, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, it took practice, right? You had to practice it and learn it, and it's a skill that you had to hone. So I think if you can stop telling yourself that you're, quote, bad at technology. Think of it as like, no, I'm a beginner.

I'm learning and not be afraid to push buttons. Then like everything changes. Like nothing is going to blow up in your hand if you just start pushing buttons or clicking around. And like I said, allow yourself to be a beginner and it's. I post real hooks like this too, like easy and simple and make this real in less than five minutes and all of that.

And if it's not easy and simple and you don't make it in less than five minutes, I could totally see how you probably think to yourself, oh, I'm doing this wrong. You're not doing it wrong. You're just a beginner. Okay? And that's okay. However, if after hearing all of this, you're like, yeah, this is well and good, Molly, but I just literally have no desire to learn, that is okay.

I bought an Instagram, or like a meta ads, like Facebook ads course, I don't know, three years ago. And I watched the course and I'm a tech savvy person. Like I can pretty much usually figure stuff out on my own. So I'm like, I'm gonna figure out how to do my own ads. And so I brought, I buy this course, I open it, and I cried.

Not once, not twice, but three times. I almost said thrice, but I was like, I don't feel like I'm cool enough to say that. I cried three times trying to figure out how to do my own Instagram ads. Okay. And so instead of this being a bottleneck or a hurdle in my business, I just outsourced it. So there are, if you don't wanna make Canva graphics.

Do you know that you can pay somebody like, you know, less than $20 an hour to do your Canva graphics for you? And like they could batch a whole bunch for you if you wanted them to. It's, it does not have to be something that, you know, you do if you're just like, dead set on. This is a skill that I don't wanna learn.

Um, there are so many places to find a virtual assistant. Um, my friend Sarah Wiles, uh, S-A-R-A-W-I-L-E-S. We will put the link in the show notes and she has been on my podcast before, but if you go to sarah wiles.co, so S-A-R-A-W-I-L-E s.co. At the very top of her website, you'll see matchmaking and you can click on that and you can fill out a form of what type of virtual assistant you need, and they will pair you with someone.

You can also go on Upwork. Um, we use a Upwork video editor. For a lot of our like longer face to camera reels for our clients, just 'cause he's so much faster than we are editing them. This doesn't just apply to Canva Graphics, right? Like if you want someone to do more complicated edits on your videos, you can hire somebody on Upwork.

The only thing about that is I will say they're gonna try to make it be like. This fancy like video tip. You have to be very specific of what you want because they'll try to throw in like little like cheesy B-roll clips and fonts that don't match your brand and colors that don't match your brand and make it like, that's not the type of thing you want.

But yes, like I said, go go there and see, like I said, hey, I just need somebody to help me make graphics when I need it. It's, it's not, it does not have to be something you, you learn to do. I mean, even can, I should have mentioned this earlier, Canva even has their own design school. So if you go onto canva.com, there is a whole design school and like they have a a ton.

I was looking through the tutorial videos 'cause I was hyperlinking some of the basic tutorial videos inside of Holistic Marketing Hub the other day because I don't wanna make Canva. Tutorials, like for like the basics because they change their interface sometimes. So like I said, I just went just hyperlinked to, like, Canva has a whole thing of tutorials.

So if I'm zooming out and I'm kind of identifying what I think the real problem is, and it's like I said, it's either a, you've, you're underestimating your ability to learn a new skill and be a beginner. The other thing that I see is that Canva really does not equal. So many people think Canva Graphics equal a social media strategy, and that is just like so far from the truth.

And I'm not gonna cover in this episode what is a social media strategy because I've covered so much of this and very many past podcast episodes and on my feed. And if you want to learn quickly, then like I said, join Holistic Marketing Hub. I literally go through all of this step by step by step by step with screen shares and clicks and show you what to do.

So I do wanna wrap this up by, um, answering kind of a secondary Canva question I get sometimes, which is about branding. And it is important if you are going to use Canva for, you know, because you can go look at my feed and you can kind of see how I use Canva sometimes. And a lot of times I just, like I said, make my carousels like native, right?

In Instagram, if you are using Canva. You want to make sure, and this is, uh, something I've worked on with my, um, group coaching. My content Sprint students recently is helping them get their brand colors and fonts together. You do want to always use the same fonts and colors, and that's another, like I said, if you are going to use Canva, you don't want every single graphic on your feed to be different colors and different fonts because that.

Establishes like zero brand consistency. I've told this story before about my daughter. We were on Jane booking an appointment with my chiropractor and she was sitting next to me and she saw their logo and then when we walked into the chiropractor's office and her, their logo was on the door, and at the time she was seven.

I'm like, even my 7-year-old was like, Hey mommy, that's the same picture that was on the website. So it is important to have brand consistency. One of the questions that my students asked was like, well, how many fonts should we have? So typical design, like brand rule of thumb is to have like a, um, title font, a body font, and then you can have like a third like accent font if you want like a script.

You do wanna make sure that you don't use your script font for like words that you really want to stand out because it's, they're too hard to read. So that's like a Canva like design mistake I see often is that people use like really pretty scripty fonts. Or you don't use enough like contrast on your text.

And when you do that, people don't stop their scroll 'cause they can't like easily read it. Like their brain doesn't easily scan it. And so what I do, I use the same exact fonts on my Canva Instagram graphics that are on my website. They are the same fonts. So you don't have to be like, Hmm, which fonts am I gonna use on Instagram?

If you have a well-designed website, you can either a, ask your website designer, what fonts are these? And then they very likely have them in Canva. Or you can use there as a Chrome extension called Font Finder, or you can Google what the font. What the font. And it's from a website called My fonts.com. If you just go straight to my fonts.com, it's not gonna take you to the font finder.

You can literally, like I said, Google what the font. And um, I'll, we'll put that in the show notes as well, that link. You can, uh, put your URL of your website in there, or you can, like, if you wanna take a screenshot of your website, you can upload it to that website and it will tell you exactly what font is used on your website.

So then you don't have to like guess, like you just use the same font that's on your website. And again, you have so much more brand consistency that way. So if you pay attention to, like I said, any can graphics that are on my feed, and then you go to my website, you'll see it's, it's the exact same fonts, exact same colors.

If you don't know, um, like I said, if you're trying to like pull in your brand colors into Canva, again, ask your website designer or your logo designer or the hexa decimal codes. And if you don't have those, then again you can just take a screenshot of your website and pull it into Canva and you can literally use like an eyedropper tool and match the exact colors that way.

While it doesn't matter in on Instagram anymore to have like super polished, like pretty feed anymore. If you are going to be using graphics, you still want to make sure they are on brand. So anyway, I hope that was helpful. I kind of feel like I went a little bit all over the place, but like I said, if it, if it came up three times in the last week, I was like, this is something we've, we've got to cover.

So if this resonates with you and you're like, Hey, that's me, or that was me you were talking about, or I also had this, this like block, then will you please do me a favor and DM me so we can kind of chat through it and I can kind of help you get to the, the bottom of like, what's really going on. And also I hope it didn't feel like I was like minimizing this as a, as a issue.

'cause like, clearly I told you about my, my issue trying to run Instagram ads by myself and me crying three times. Right? Like, we all have our blocks and I, I totally get it. Okay. I hope you have a greet rest of your day. Thank you so much for letting me be in your ears today. Bye friends. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified, and hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast?

Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram Stories and tag at Molly a Cahill, that's C-A-H-I-L-L.

I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.