Canva is a great platform for creating images, videos and for your wellness business. I used it when I ran a fitness and nutrition coaching business. The one thing that I regret is not switching to Canva Pro sooner.
Here are several reasons why I think Canva Pro is a great choice for health coaches and other wellness business owners.
Images that look professional
There are a lot of stock photos that you can find for free on Canva and on other image sites like Pixabay and UnSplash. But it takes a long time to sort through the free images to find ones that look good. As you scroll through Canva, you are likely to find many premium images that suit your needs before you find a good free image.
If you decide to use a free stock photo site, you’ll have to spend the time searching for images on various sites (and their search features are often lacking), and then load the image into Canva or other graphic design program and make the edits you want. You may actually find some of the premium Canva images on other sites for free, but it will take a lot of time and effort. Having Canva Pro will save you tons of time and frustration.
The other problem with free stock photos is that everyone is using them so your image will not look unique. Canva Pro is much cheaper than most paid stock photo sites, so it’s a good stepping stone to the world of paid stock photos.
Premium videos
If you want stock videos for things like exercise demos. Canva Pro has an amazing library of videos. Doing your own is always a better option, but sometimes that isn’t an option.
Premium templates and graphics
You’ll also get premium templates for creating things like pdf guides, social media graphics and blog post, podcast or YouTube images. This can be another big time saver and another way to make your images unique and to stand out.
Premium graphics are really useful to give you more options for your designs.
What Tech Do You Need?
To start and grow your wellness business
Inviting team members (only with Canva teams)
Canva no longer allows you to invite team members with the Pro version. You’ll need to upgrade to Canva Teams to do this.
If you have a team, a virtual assistant or a designer you can add them to your team using this. But if you have someone else creating all your graphics, then they might already have Canva premium so you won’t need it.
Another option is to purchase Canva for teams with a group of coaches. You’ll each get to use Canva Pro for a fraction of the price.
Background remover
This is one of my favourite features in Canva Pro. Use this to remove an ugly background behind your picture and place it on a clean background. You can use this with both images and videos.
Premium Fonts
Canva Pro gives you so many more options for fonts if you want to create a custom look to your graphics.
Folder system
With the free version of Canva, you only have one folder, so if you’re creating a lot of design this can easily get out of hand. With Canva Pro you can create as many folders as you like to keep your designs organized.
More storage
If you are a Canva power user and you don’t clean up your designs and uploads, you’ll probably run out of storage on the free version. But Canva Pro offer ample storage for everything you do with it. This includes uploading your own photos so they are easily availble and creating tons of social media graphics that you can easily reuse.
Social Media Scheduling
Canva Pro offers a basic social media scheduling tool. If you are a heavy social media user, this probably isn’t enough for you, but the ability to schedule directly from Canva or the Canva app on your phone can simplify your workflow.
But there are several issues with the social media scheduler that I’ll talk. about below.
Things I don’t like about Canva Pro
Canva Pro offers many advantages, but there are a few areas that I find are not as useful as they could be.
The social media scheduler
My workflow consists of adding several social media posts to one design. But with the Canva scheduler you can only schedule one of these images (or a carousel) at a time. And you can’t edit other posts in this design until a post has been posted. These issues make the scheduler not very useful.
The folder system
While having the folder system is useful, I find the organization is lacking. In some views you can’t see which folder a design is in.
Working with teams
Canva for teams is useful if you have a team, but it what is shared is difficult to understand. Your brand will be shared, but uploaded images are not shared. Images created by team members need to be shared with you or placed in a shared folder for you to see them.
If you’re used to the simplicity of sharing things with your Google drive account, you might find that Canva for teams is clunky to use.
Summary
Canva Pro was one of my first premium subscriptions. I find that having Canva Pro easily saves me enough time to make up for the annual cost. And the amount of frustration it saves is priceless.
