Elevate Your D2C Meat Business Using Canva: A Comprehensive Guide

How Canva Can Transform Your Branding and Marketing Efforts

In our fast-paced digital world, establishing a strong and recognizable brand is key to standing out, especially for Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) businesses like those in the meat industry. This week, our hosts from ChopLocal, Sydney and Katie, offer invaluable insights on how to leverage Canva to elevate your D2C meat business in a webinar that is a must-watch for marketers and entrepreneurs alike. Here’s a deep dive into the core elements discussed.

 Watch the recording below or scroll down for a summary and full transcript.

Easier Graphic Design with Canva's Magic Switch and Templates

Canva is revolutionizing the way businesses approach graphic design. One of the most notable features discussed is the Magic Switch, which allows users to change graphic sizes effortlessly. Templates are fundamental in Canva, providing a starting point that can be customized to meet specific brand needs.

Perfecting Your Design: Logos, Text, and Backgrounds

Resizing and adjusting design elements such as logos, text, and background images are crucial steps. The key is to maintain consistency while ensuring each element complements the others. Katie emphasized the importance of tweaking each aspect to align with your brand’s look and feel. Transparency manipulation, for instance, can enhance text visibility, making your design more readable and effective.

Stock Photos and Basic Photo Editing

Finding the right stock photos and integrating them into your designs can significantly elevate your visual content. Canva offers a wide array of stock photos, with options available for both free and Pro users. Furthermore, basic photo editing tools such as filters, light balance adjustments, and color saturation settings are beneficial for making images more appealing. Despite some limitations in AI-based photo editing, these tools are robust enough for most business needs.

Animation Options for Dynamic Content

Animations can add a dynamic dimension to your graphics. Canva excels here with options for animating individual objects and text, such as typewriter effects, as well as entire page animations. These features not only make your posts more engaging but also help in catching the viewer’s eye, especially on social media platforms.

Customizing Templates with Your Brand Elements

Editing templates to match your brand is straightforward with Canva. Sydney and Katie showcased how a user-provided template could be modified by changing text, fonts, colors, and images. This flexibility ensures your designs are uniformly branded, presenting a professional image consistently. They also shared the tip of using sticky notes to save colors and fonts if Canva Pro is not utilized, making it easier to stick to brand guidelines.

Creating a Brand Kit for Consistent Branding

The discussion progressed to the importance of a brand kit and how Canva Pro simplifies its creation. A brand kit stores all essential elements like logos, color schemes, and fonts in one place, streamlining the design process. This makes maintaining a consistent brand identity across various platforms less daunting.

Strategies for Effective Social Media Design

Batch scheduling of social media posts was also a key topic. Katie shared a practical tip: duplicating and customizing templates can save time and ensure that posts are ready for publication in batches. This method provides a structured approach to content creation, allowing for smoother execution of social media strategies.

Downloading and Sharing Designs Efficiently

When it comes to downloading and sharing edited designs, Canva again proves user-friendly. Designs can be downloaded as JPEGs to reduce file sizes for better storage and web performance. Reels and videos, on the other hand, can be downloaded as mp4 files. Despite some issues with desktop scheduling, this functionality supports effective social media management.

Embracing Continuous Improvement and Upcoming Topics

Wrapping up, the hosts discussed Canva’s ongoing updates that continually introduce new tools and templates, benefitting small businesses and creators. They also highlighted that while this was the last webinar of 2024, they are excited to kick off the new year focusing on the value-added producer grant in their first 2024 webinar.

Final Thoughts: The Impact of Consistent Branding

Sydney and Katie emphasized the vital role branding plays in making your business recognizable and professional. Through Canva, you can create a cohesive brand experience that resonates with your audience, creating trust and loyalty. By sticking to your branding elements—colors, fonts, vibes—you can effectively communicate your business’s unique story.

Consistent branding not only elevates your market position but also ensures your business stands out in the crowded digital marketplace. Whether you are new to Canva or seeking more advanced tips, embracing its extensive toolkit will undoubtedly enhance your D2C meat business’s online presence.

Full Transcript:

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:00:00]:
Thank you for joining us tonight. We're really excited to talk about Canva and how you can use this to really build your brand and create a consistent look across all of your platforms. So it's kind of crazy that tonight is already the last webinar of 2024. We've had a really great year and hopefully you guys have enjoyed the this series. We will get started back up again in January talking about the value added producer grant. So we always like to talk a little bit about chop local before we get started. We are an online farmers market specifically for meat and we are always looking to add vendors across the US. So if you are looking for an online platform to sell your products, we would always be interested in talking with you.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:00:54]:
But without further ado, I will pass the reins over to Katie and we can get started.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:01:00]:
Okay, awesome. Thank you, Sydney. I will point out, Sydney said this is the last webinar of 2024. She's jumping us a little bit ahead.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:01:09]:
Sorry, I got ahead of myself there.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:01:11]:
But we are already planning our first webinar of 2024. Just to let you know, it will be about the value added producer grant and features Stephen usury. Again, he does a great job and we're going to have a lot of time for Q and A and we're going to get really detailed into what some projects and budgets look like. So if the project is for marketing or going to more farmers markets, you know, what does that budget look like? Where's the matching coming from? That type of thing. But anyway, right now we're going to talk about canva. I love canva. I use it on a daily basis for chop local and I've used it in previous positions as well. And it's something that is really a valuable tool for us and can be a really valuable tool for you as well.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:02:05]:
But like any tool, it can be used really effectively to create something amazing or it can be used moderately effectively. And a lot of times we see people that are kind of using it, but maybe not to its full, full potential. We're really taking advantage of the tools that are available in canva. So we're going to talk today about elevating your meat business using canva. And the biggest thing, Sydney, this turned it into a video. I don't know how we turned it into a video. I will say we are not necessarily canva experts, but we do use it a lot. So.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:02:42]:
But one of the biggest things that you can do to really take your canva designs to the next level is by creating a brand that represents your meat business. Now, most businesses start their brand with a logo, but it goes a little bit further than that. It goes into the colors, the styles, the fonts, and really then like the feel or the vibe that you want to give people when they think of your brand or they look at your brand. So we recommend, you know, thinking about your farm, your small business, and the look that you want to portray and pick three words that really describe that, that feeling. The reason that branding is so important is that it makes your company really recognizable, especially on social media. It'll help stop the scroll. And really, they say that people need to see things several times before they purchase. And I've heard that that number has increased even more in recent years because we're just so flooded with information.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:03:51]:
Having a recognizable brand helps them realize that they're looking at your content. It also looks really professional. And that's important because when they are buying food from you and something that they're going to serve their family, put in their bodies, they want to know that you are a trustworthy business. And so when you use a very professional looking brand and graphics, it makes you look like you have all your ducks in a row. Right? Makes them feel like if you're paying attention to this part of your business, you're probably paying attention to all the other parts of your business too. And then the last point here is that it's easiest to implement your brand and really use it effectively. If you use canva Pro, we use canva Pro. It is.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:04:36]:
I think it's $14.99 a month or 119 a year somewhere around there. We think it's a great investment. We do recognize and realize that you need to invest some dollars in marketing in order to grow your business. And this might be part of that that is worth it for you. There's a lot that you can do without canva pro with just the free version, and I'll show you that too. Regardless of which version you have, you can use canva on your phone or your desktop. I typically use it on my computer. But let's get into some examples of brands and the feelings that I feel like they evoke and the colors, fonts, that type of thing.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:05:20]:
So this first one here is chop locals brand. Okay. And. Oh gosh, hold on. Maybe I can't have. Let me back out of this for a second. I'll zoom in my page here a little bit instead. So chop locals brand here.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:05:43]:
This is not like a brand style guide that says we want chop locals brand to be fresh, clean, green, high contrast, that type of thing. But you can actually create a brand guide, especially if you have an intern that's making social media graphics for you or multiple people in your business. You might want to sit down and decide these things together. So that's exactly what shop locals brand is. We want it to be fresh, green. We want it to evoke feelings of a green pasture. Very clean. We use simple fonts.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:06:19]:
Not a lot of cursive or text or handwriting type fonts, but really clean, high contrast. Because we want people to associate that freshness, that outdoorsy greenery with fresh meat and fresh food. Here's another really great example. Victoria is the farm marketing mentor. If you don't follow her on social media, I'm going to put it right up here. Farm marketing mentor. Hopefully that's big enough that you can see, but you need to go follow Victoria on social media. We're actually going to use one of her tools here in a little bit.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:07:01]:
She does a great job teaching farmers about using social media to sell direct to consumer. And you can see she has a really recognizable color scheme. You can see she's using the same fonts throughout her different designs, and she's also using similar templates. So you can see this one here and this here are really similar, where they have that jagged top, they have that jagged bottom. They've got a photo on the left side and the text on the right side. And so Victoria does a really nice job of making her stuff recognizable on social media to stop that scroll and get people to pay attention. Here's another one. And I don't know if Margaret hopped on tonight, she was registered, but Margaret is one of our chop local vendors.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:07:52]:
That's her in the corner here. And she has this great photography style that is part of her branding. You don't see a lot of graphic design in her stuff. I'm not seeing a specific font or anything like that in her Instagram feed right here. But these pictures all have the same feel, the same type of filter or editing applied to them that is really consistent throughout. Another thing that you'll see in all three of these brands is you see faces of people, and that can be part of your brand too. Do you show a lot of faces of the people that are working in your farm or your small business? If you don't, I recommend that you do. You might also see a lot of the animals as well, and that can be part of your brand too.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:08:45]:
Okay, so when you are in canva, let's see. To make branding really easy, once you've sat down, you figured out these are the colors that I want to use. That type of thing. Canva Pro makes it really easy to manage your brand. And I'll show you what that looks like. So if I go back home here, it always, my computer takes a little bit of time to load when I'm sharing my screen. So I apologize. Hopefully it won't be too bad tonight.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:09:17]:
You can see that there is a little crown here. That means that this is a canva pro tool, but you can click on the brand and you can actually make a brand kit. And so we have a chop local brand kit already set up, but I'm going to set one up real quick for chop local university, which is what we kind of call this, these classes, these webinars and things like that that we do. We can add a logo. Oh, gosh, you guys are going to see my downloads folder now. And it's a mess right here. And then it's actually going to pull the colors straight out of my logo to create my color scheme here. You can also, let's say you don't have colors in your logo.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:10:09]:
You can actually add colors from wherever you want to as well. You know, just kind of play with these and grab a color that you think looks nice here, too. I might just do that one. I mean, I've never. Hold on, I'm going to, I've got two color palettes going on right here. And I didn't mean to do this, but I'm going to merge them real quick. But this is a good opportunity for me to show you these numbers underneath your colors. This is called your hex code for the color that is like an official code that is used across platforms on different websites.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:10:50]:
If you have squarespace or wix site, it uses hex codes. Use that everywhere. So I'm going to copy that hex code, come up here and press keep, and then I'm going to add. I can put that hex code in right here and it pulled up that exact same color for me. Okay. I might add another color that I actually kind of like where that ended up, that lighter green, which is one that we use in chop local quite a bit as well. I'm going to go ahead and delete this palette. And I've got my chop local university palette right here.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:11:24]:
Then I'm going to go in here to my fonts. So we recommend probably at least two to three different fonts. And you can see here that it gives you an option for title subtitle heading subheading you don't have to have a separate font for each of those. You can have the same font throughout. For my main title, I actually spent some time looking some up earlier. I'm going to use this mount and it is canva Pro again, so you get more access to fonts. If you have Canva Pro, then for my subtitle, I'm going to choose something that is actually a script. Olio script is what I'm going to use.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:12:09]:
What's cool is if you haven't picked your fonts already and you have a vibe, let's say you want to do like a western vibe, you could type in western and it will bring up some fonts that might fit into your brand. Okay. And you can pick a font there. Same thing. If you wanted to do rustic, there's a couple rustic options. Handwriting. There's a lot of different fonts that look like script or even like a children's handwriting. If you were running a daycare or an education based business, you might want to do something like that.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:12:49]:
We're going to go back to my Olio script and that's what I'm going to use here. And then for my heading, I'm actually going to use this aggrandeer and I'm also going to use that for the body. And you'll see when I click on these now it's, it should show me. See, I've already got some brand fonts in here, so I can go ahead and reuse these throughout different areas. You can keep going with that. I have not played around with the AI brand voice writer, but this is really an interesting new thing. You can also add photos and graphics and icons, but honestly, I haven't really had a lot of luck with that or I felt a need to do that. I upload photos to the upload section instead and I'll show you what that looks like.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:13:46]:
But basically we now have a brand kit for Chop local university. And if I go back home and we go back to this document that I was working on, I'm going to show you how easy it is to take that brand kit and apply it to template in canva. So for this page right here in my document, I knew I needed a list. And so I actually searched under templates, under this is under design templates. I searched the word list and this template came up. And if I click on that now, I can go ahead and add it as a new page. And I'm going to take a second to kind of show you how I would edit this and you can ask questions if you want to. It's going to be a little bit of clicking around, but hopefully it's really helpful for you to see what my process looks like.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:14:49]:
So right now it has colors in here. Now I could click on an individual piece and I could go up to the color and I could change it and it will allow me to go ahead and choose my brand kit right here and it has the colors here. But another thing that I can do that's really cool is click over on the left hand side where it says brand and it already has the colors right here. And if I click shuffle, it's like magic. It just applied them to the design, spread them out across the design right there. With my colors, you can click it again and it will keep changing the combinations until you get something that you really like. But it makes it super easy to create a template or to use a template and make it match your branding. So all those times that you look up something like sale or happy Thanksgiving or whatever it might be, you can take those templates and change them to match your branding.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:15:54]:
Then I need a photo in here. Up here I added, we use these grid photos, I call them with a lot of faces, a lot of photos of farms. That's part of our branding as well. But in this case, I'm just going to go to elements and I'm going to search elements for farm photo and it has some different options for me here. Photos, videos. We want to look at the photos and I'm actually going to narrow this down to a vertical photo so that it will fit in my frame really nicely. And now you can see I have a bunch of different farm photos that are all vertical. And again, the ones with the crown are part of canva Pro, which means that you can only use those if you have canva pro.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:16:45]:
But the ones without the crown, anyone can use. And there are quite a few options here as well. So you can just take one of those photos, drag it over. If I decide that my purple is a little bit bright here, I can click on this, go up to the color and I can change it manually and it will actually pull colors from my photo, which is really nice. So let's say I wanted to play into that blue a little bit more, or maybe this lighter blue gray. I could change this one to a light blue gray as well and give it a little bit different look there. Now if I didn't have canva pro, I would have this on a sticky note, kind of like I have right here I have my fonts on a sticky note. I would have those hex colors on a sticky note.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:17:34]:
I have a sticky note right now with chop local green sitting on my computer so that I always have it in front of me because I use chop local green in Mailchimp, other programs that we use as well. You can write down your fonts, but you can also, so like I said, use a sticky note. You can also use templates. Now if you have canva Pro, when you go up here to share, you can go to more and you can actually create a brand template so you can save your document as one of your official templates. Before I realized that you could do that, what I did and what I would recommend that you do if you don't have canva Pro is when you name your documents, put the word template in there because then when you log into canva, you can search. And there's two different ways to search. This is you're searching all of, if you click on templates, you're searching all of canvas templates that they have there. But if you click on projects, you're searching your own things that you have created.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:18:49]:
And so if I click, if I type in template, one of the templates that we use frequently through chop local is for customer reviews. And so that pops right up and I can go in here and instead of creating a new document every time, what I like to do is I will just duplicate the page and I will go ahead and change the text, change the person who left the review, what they ordered, all that kind of thing. Change the photo behind here and then I can go ahead and download that and schedule it to our social media. This is a tip that works really well for me. For things like this, I like to batch them and schedule them in advance. So I like to do like ten or so at a time and do them in advance. Typically I download it here. I've never tried sharing it directly to social or Instagram.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:19:45]:
I will typically download it. And one thing I wanted to make sure that you realize is if you download as a ping, your file size is probably going to be very large. It's going to fill up your computer, or if you're uploading it to your website, it's going to slow down your website. So pngs, if you want a transparent background, like if you downloading your logo for the first time, a ping is really valuable because you can get that transparent logo. But other than that, I always take the time to switch it to a JPeg and switch the file size. I know that it says that it's recommended to leave it as a ping, but it will eat up your storage space. So this is what I recommend. Also, if you download a bunch at once, it will download them in a zipped file, which is great for file storage space and for quick downloading.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:20:39]:
But it's inconvenient for me. So a lot of times I will download them one at a time and just repeat that process until it's done. This. Like I said, we use this template quite a bit. And this is a square graphic which is perfect for Instagram and also works really well on Facebook. So I do a lot in these square graphics. It's what I work in primarily. However, there's this really cool tool called Magic Switch.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:21:11]:
Again, a canva pro tool that allows you to change it into a different size with one click. And so in this case, I don't want to change all of my pages. I don't want to create a file that has all of them. I'm going to create a file that only has this first page and I want it to be an Instagram reel. We're going to take a second. It's going to take a second to load and then I can copy and resize it. And it has made it into this Instagram reel or a mobile video. Now, it's not perfect, right? But it has the basic elements.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:21:57]:
It has my colors, it has my fonts, that kind of thing. That's really helpful. I'm going to tweak this a little bit. So I'm going to spend a few minutes again clicking through and kind of explaining what I'm doing. First thing here is I'm going to line up my logo a little bit better with that green bar. I'm going to grab both of these things together and I just drag my mouse across there and I'm going to group them and I'm going to move those down just a little bit. Then I'm going to drag and grab all of these items, group them together, and I'm going to make this bigger just by dragging the corner. It's okay if this goes off of the edge, there's no big deal whatsoever.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:22:38]:
Okay, then I've got my text up here, which is way too small for this thing. I'm actually making this narrower first so that I can grab this corner and drag it. There's other ways that you could do that. You could highlight all the text here, get this up to the size that you like it. You could, of course, type in a size in here. Either way, we're going to end up with some bigger text that's looking a lot more appropriate for this vertical design that I'm doing here. Okay, I don't, now that we have this vertical design, I do not like this image in the background. So we're going to go back to our elements.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:23:23]:
We're going to search elements, and I'm going to search turkey. Actually, I'm going to search Thanksgiving turkey. Otherwise you get all kinds of wacky photos. I'm going to make sure that I want that I look for vertical. You can also, if you want it to have a really dark background, you can click on black and you can see it's bringing me up photos that have a lot of black in them. If you want it to have a really light background, you can click on white and it's going to bring up photos that are really light. In this case, I don't want either of those. I just want to make sure that it's vertical.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:23:57]:
And you can see, I've got some great options here. Hopefully you can see this on your screen, but none of these have the canva pro symbol on them. So these are all stock photos that you can use in your marketing. I'm going to go ahead and use this one. And if I drag it over there, it drops it on into the frame that the previous image was in. Let me see. Did it go? Oh, nope, it didn't go into the frame. I want to make this one the background behind my green bars.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:24:28]:
So at this point, I'm going to right click and I can change the layers. If you're not handy with the right click, you can also click on position and you can drag it. This doesn't want to. Let me. Maybe I can drag these in front of it. Oh, here we go. Because I grabbed the wrong one. Were you helping me, Sydney? Thank you.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:24:56]:
I'm going to drag that one all the way to. It. Must be on the front. Now I did it backwards. Drag that one all the way to the back. And now my words and everything else are in front of. You can also, like I said, right click it and you can layer. It's already in the back, but you can also click replace background.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:25:15]:
And it took over that other photo that I had there completely. Okay. Now, obviously, this is not done right. One of my favorite tricks that I love to use, and this is part of, like, like you can identify this as Katie did. That design is I like to click on the photo and mess with the transparency. Okay. It still looks light. And bright to me.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:25:41]:
But you can see, you can see what the photo is, but you can see the text a lot more easily. In this case, we're going to do kind of, we're going to decrease the transparency a little bit to about 80%. I'm going to switch my font here to white. Switch my text to white. I'm going to switch it to one of my brand fonts because I haven't done that yet. Let's see. We'll use that time and I'm going to make it bold down here. Kathy.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:26:18]:
I'm going to ungroup Kathy for a second. I need to grab Cathy's name and I'm pressing shift to grab these other text boxes. Oh, wait, actually, I'm going to leave those dark. Sorry, guys. If I double click on this photo, I can actually stretch it a little bit. And what I'm trying to do is get more white space right here to put Kathy's name. So move this down a little bit further, grab these things and move them down into that white space. And then I'm going to move Kathy's name and I'm going to actually make it to lines so that it will fit really nicely right here.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:27:00]:
Now, another trick that I love that you may not know about is right now, it's very subtle, but the spacing between these two lines is a little bit far apart for my liking. So if you click on this text box and you click up here where these three lines are with the arrows, it says spacing. And I know this is small. Let me see if I can zoom it in for you. Small and hard to see, but you can increase your letter spacing, decrease your letter spacing, and smush them together. You can also change your line spacing, which I do quite a bit. So there's no reason we need double spacing in between Kathy's first and last name. So I'm going to smush those together and we'll move that right in here.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:27:50]:
Same thing here. Actually, I think I'm going to do change my line spacing just a little bit here as well. Let me see what that looks like. Now, it was a unanimous decision. The best turkey ever. I'm going to move that down there and maybe even make this a little bigger. Okay. Now this is my next favorite trick.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:28:14]:
When I've decreased the transparency a little bit and I've got a light colored text on top of it, I like to click on the text and go to the effects and there's some different options. You can do a shadow but one thing that I don't like about canvas shadows is that the default shadow is white or the same color as the text. And that, to me looks a little bit weird. So I do like to go in here and change the color to a dark shadow. Did you guys watch? Watch what happens when I do this again. So right now it's got a dark shadow. This was the white shadow. This, to me, makes me want to like, rub my eyes and clean my glasses.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:28:58]:
But if we put that dark shadow on there, I think it crisps it up a little bit. But even better than doing a shadow, in my opinion. Let me go back to my effects, is lift. I really like to use the lift off the screen. Can you see the difference from here to there? It just puts a really slight. It is like a shadow or a darker halo sort of around it. This again is without it. This is with it.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:29:33]:
So subtle. But it really does make a difference in making your graphic easy for people to see. Okay, now, because we are using this as an Instagram reel, it has made it a five second video automatically. But we have literally nothing going on in our video. Okay, I see that. I need to move these guys over just a smidge. Move my stars back over there. Okay, so the next thing that I want to show you is how to use the animations in canva.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:30:08]:
You can click on any object that you have in canva and click on the word animate. And you can animate each object by itself. Text animations. You know, sometimes a typewriter is a fun way to do that and it creates a video, basically. You can have it typewriter its way in, you can have it typewriter its way in and then typewriter its way out. So you can do on enter, on exit. There's a lot of different options here and you can play around with those. What's even simpler though is if you go to page animations and you just choose one of these and it will do the entire page.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:30:51]:
And as I hover, it's showing you what this would look like. Party is a little bit like wham. Simple just shows up like this. There's a lot of different options that you can do here. I really like the kind of this corporate one. This one is a little bit too much for me. I know it says it's sleek, but it doesn't look sleek to me. I tend to lean towards corporate quite a bit, but there's no right or wrong answer.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:31:23]:
Again, it depends on like, what kind of personality or what kind of brand you want to portray. There. Okay. But now when I click on my video, I have a five second video with some stuff moving. Okay. So it's more appropriate to share it as a reel at this point because there is some visual interest there. And that's how you can really easily take one of your templates or one of your. Yeah, one of your templates, one of your designs, and use it not only as a still post, but use it as a reel.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:31:56]:
Or you can upload this to your stories as well. All right, the next thing that I want to show you, and again, I want to invite you to put any questions that you might have in the Q and a feature because I've got one more kind of big thing to demonstrate for you. And then I'll take any questions that you might have. Okay. You will see, there it is. Okay, so Victoria and other farm gurus, you know, farm marketing gurus, sometimes top local, we do this too, will share templates with you. And it is basically a design that you can go in and edit, and I want to show you how you can do that. And again, how you can use it to match your brand.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:32:45]:
So we've got a design that Victoria gives out in her social media classes that she does. And all you need to do is click on use template for a new design. And it's going to load here. It's made a copy of it, so now it is yours to edit. Victoria will never see your edits. It doesn't affect her canva or anything like that. One little trick here, if you've never used the grid view, you can see all of the pages that are in one canva document here. And you can actually change the order of them if you need to.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:33:26]:
Now, these three are all the same, so it doesn't really matter. But if I go back here, I've got this design from Victoria. It's very nice, but I want to customize it to match my branding. Okay, so the first thing I'm gonna do is actually click on this text here. She used maven pro. I want to change it to. Here we go. Chop.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:33:55]:
Local universities fonts. And so I'm going to change it to my title. Whoops. It changed the size too. Let me back that up a second. Control Z will undo anything that you do. Control Z, it works in a ton of programs. It's a lifesaver.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:34:13]:
Let me go back to. So I'm going to type this in so that it doesn't change the size, change it to that month. And down here, I can click change all and it will change it on all of the pages. I'm going to do that same thing for meet. I'm going to change it, change all, and it's done it across all the pages. And then instead of this, this text, which there's nothing wrong with it, but I want it to match mine instead. I'm going to use my script text, which was that olio script, change all of them. And it's changed every time that she used that script.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:34:57]:
It's changed it now to my script. Now I don't need my name, address, I don't need that contact information that she had at the bottom. The next thing I'm going to change are the colors. So you can grab, like, objects by holding down shift when you click on them, and you can change the color all at once. And if I use these colors from the chop local university logo again, I can change them all at once. So I grabbed kind of the objects. Now I'm going to grab all of the text and do that same thing and click on change all because I want it to change throughout the entire document. Then this picture thing here means that this is a photo frame.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:35:49]:
So I could go to elements and I could look for a random farm photo or something. I can also go to uploads and it will show all of the photos that we have uploaded to our account. Now, because we work with a ton of different vendors, we upload a lot of photos because we use them to promote our vendors via social media. But in this case, this is my family, these are our many Herefords. And so I can just drag and drop that photo right in there. That's kind of the basics of editing this template. You can go through each of the pages and change it up a little bit. And then again, when you go to share, I recommend that you download it in a JpeG file.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:36:40]:
Medium size is fine for social media. You can do all the pages or you can do it all at once, and then you can save your download settings as well and download it all together there. So end of the day, what I wanted you to get out of this today is that it's okay to tweak these templates, and it's really preferable that you tweak these templates to match your brand to give you that really cohesive look on social media. Also, once you know that, there's just a lot that you can do in canva. It's a very versatile tool if you know how to use it. And I think, Sydney, did I forget anything that we went over earlier today or did I hit most of the main points there?

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:37:24]:
I think you hit most of it. And, yeah, it's just really useful and it's great to play around with it and get comfortable with it. And hopefully there were some good tips tonight to help you get started. You're kind of just talking about file types. I'm going to bring up this question that we had in the Q and a box going back to the real that you created. What file type do you download reels as?

Katie - ChopLocal [00:37:50]:
I believe it downloads as an mp4. Yep. That's so that's the only video option that they give. You can download it just as a still jpeg for stories. You could use a still jpeg in a reel too, and put audio over the top. Or this is Victoria's land. Victoria can talk more about doing like a green screen type thing on a reel, and you could create a graphic that goes behind the green. You know, with the green screen gets a little bit more complicated, but I downloaded as an mp4, and then you can schedule them via your desktop.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:38:33]:
It's a little bit trickier to schedule it via your desktop, so a lot of times it's cumbersome, but I will upload it to Google Drive, download it onto my phone. I'm not an Apple user, so I can't like, just sync files. I don't know how that works, but download it to Google Drive, download it onto my phone, upload it to Instagram. Kind of a pain, but it does work. That's a really good question. Other questions, feel free to enter them. One that we have here is what does canva have for photo editing options? And I'll show you. Sydney's going to warn me if I get too far into the weeds because I get kind of excited about this.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:39:18]:
But if I click on my photo here and click on edit photo, it's not. My favorite photo editor. My favorite photo editor for I actually use on my phone is called Snapseed. It has these really great tools. We should do a whole separate snapseed tutorial sometime, but there are some of their AI tools here. We messed around a little bit with magic. Expand. Like, let's say I wanted to put some more green space on the left side of Adam.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:39:53]:
It was hilarious. Maybe if we get time, we'll show you those later. But there are some AI tools here. These are all canva Pro, except magic edit is not canva pro. And what you can do with magic edit is you can highlight a portion of your photo and then you tell it, I'm going to tell it to add clouds, click generate. And it's actually going to give me four options of photos to choose after it ends up adding clouds to my sky. So I've used that before. See there? I've got a nice friendly little storm cloud or some of them are better than others.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:40:37]:
This is where the AI tools. It's not perfect. It says this technology is new and improving, so it's not perfect, but it can do some pretty cool things. I will tell you, it cannot replicate animals well at all. But other things that you can do in editing the photo, there are some filters. Typically, I don't think that they're great. They don't give super great results. But if it fits in with your brand or you use them really consistently, that could be an option for you.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:41:09]:
Okay. You can also change the intensity. So do I want it really turquoise or just medium turquoise? Let's see. Go back to no filter. You can do some cool things here with blurring and focusing. You can also go up here to adjust and you can change some of the light balance. So let's say that my photo was a little bit dark. I could make it a little bit brighter.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:41:35]:
You can actually change the highlights and shadows. So let's say that it's not completely dark, but the shadows are really dark and we want to lighten those. We can mess with that. You can also edit these colors a little bit. It's not super helpful. Let's say my green is a little bit too yellow and I want, well, that's very blue grass now. And I don't mean like the seed for, you know, the grass variety. I mean, my grass turned turquoise there, but so you can make little adjustments like that.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:42:07]:
Editing the saturation. This is a very bright photo. If I decrease the saturation, it's not quite as bright. It kind of mutes out those colors a little bit. Lots of options. You can do a vignette which means it's darker around the outside. I'm going to reset that. But there are quite a few different photo editing options and that can make a difference.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:42:28]:
One thing that I tried earlier for the first time that I thought was kind of cool is this magic grab. I just clicked it and what it did was separate my family from the background and it just copied some background. I mean, if you look at this really carefully, it's not perfect. The grass isn't perfect. There. They did something kind of funky to this cow's legs. I don't know where her udder went, but it is kind of cool. That they've separated that.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:43:02]:
And now if I just want to get rid of that part and get rid of that frame, I now have my family just cut out here, which is really neat. And I can go back to edit photo and one of the tools here with shadows and I can put a little shadow behind us, which I think is just kind of fun. Oh, I don't know what I did there for a second. I wouldn't overdo this for sure, but I definitely think it's kind of a fun thing that you could play around with and use in different ways. Is magic grab. We just had a photo. Is magic grab a pro feature. It is a pro feature.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:43:42]:
They give all the good stuff to the pro users, I think. And the other thing that I'll say about Canva is that it is always being updated. There's always new things. I listened to a podcast about Canva and it was actually started by a couple of, I think they were in high school at the time, they were trying to create high school yearbook editing software and so just a couple of teenagers that started to create this and it's become an amazing company, really great tool for small businesses and creators online. So I think that's all we have for questions tonight. I hope that this was helpful for you and that maybe my enthusiasm for canva rubbed off a little bit. If you have specific questions that you want to email me or anything like that, happy to answer it or try to walk through things with you, but I just encourage you to play around, around. Stick to your brand branding, your theme, your color scheme, your fonts, that type of thing, and really see what you can do with canva to enhance your social media and your website and really your business.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:44:49]:
You can make postcards with this, flyers, things for the farmers market. I mean, so many ways that you can use this. Victoria's handle is. Sydney, can you double check this for me? It farm marketing mentor. Let me make it a little bit smaller so we can actually read it here. I should have put that somewhere else. I think it's all one word, one line, but it is really long. Is that right, Sydney? Okay, awesome.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:45:27]:
Victoria is great. Highly recommend. She's got a class starting in January, but registration for it closes today. I think I did the class last year and I think I'm probably going to do it again this year. I highly recommend it. So, and she's a great friend because I emailed her yesterday and said, do you have any templates that I can use to demonstrate? And she provided one and it was great. Okay with that. Thanks everybody for hopping on.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:45:55]:
Hope to see you. Check out our YouTube channel for our other webinars. Check out sell dot Choplocal.com to see all of our blog posts. If you haven't signed up for our email list there, please do that because we send out tips like this all of the time. Maybe we'll start sending out more canva templates. Watch for more webinars after the holidays. For sure. We're doing one on value added producer grant.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:46:20]:
We're considering one on email marketing and mailchimp, and we would love other suggestions of what you're looking for. What tips and tricks do you need or what topics do you need us to cover?

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:46:33]:
We'll also be talking about shipping again, and we know that's always a hot topic, so stay tuned for that one.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:46:41]:
Yes, our most popular webinar is our shipping frozen meat webinar. You do have to sign up for our email list to get access to that link, but I promise you it is worth it. But we've learned a little bit. It's been about 15 months since we did that webinar. We've learned a little bit since then, and so I think we're going to update it coming up here after the first of the year with that. Thanks everybody for sticking with us and good luck with your meat marketing.