Canva's campaign to drive expansion into B2B

Welcome to on-strategy showcase. I'm Fergus O'Carol in Chicago. We are the official podcast partner of the Effie's Worldwide, which is what led us to New York City last week for the Effie's award gala. We had a brilliant time, met a lot of people who have been on the show, but we hadn't met in person before and also saw just a ton of great work and it's always good to see people getting awarded for work that is truly effective. And B2B was really interesting this year. A number of awards were handed out in that category, which is also relevant to today's episode. We know Canva has really initially a B2C play that was started in Perth, Australia in 2013 and has grown to have today 220 million monthly active users with revenue of $2.7 billion. And so really extraordinary growth when you look at their numbers, particularly over the last four years, it's been terrific. But part of their growth plans going forward is to expand into B2B. They've sort of, you know, they've sort of indirectly ended up in B2B through individual users using their own accounts. But as a SaaS platform, they're really looking for sort of an enterprise sales opportunity in major companies. So we are going to have a conversation today about their new B2B campaign and about their point of view on how a product like Canva can work in an enterprise system. So this is Christine Seagrist, global head of consumer marketing for Canva in San Francisco. And she's joined by Kat Vanderwerf, executive creative director for Canva in Sydney, Australia. Kat runs their internal creative department or their sort of internal agency. And they are the folks who created this new campaign. So this is a conversation about Canva and its efforts to get into the B2B segment in a big way. One of the interesting things in a few episodes we've done recently is some brands that are not moving, but they are adding a B2B component to their offering to their brand, to their target audience. And it's not that it's changing products dramatically, but it's recognizing that some brands are more flexible in how they can stretch and some other brands need to sort of make adjustments to certain attributes or certain aspects of service, depending on what category you're in, when you move in to B2B. Because B2B is a different buyer, it's a little bit more dynamic, the expectations can be sometimes pretty different. So an example of that recently, if you want to go back and listen to it as Uber for business. And a couple of key points came out of that, I thought that we're pretty interesting about that evolution to B2B. We now today have Canva, a brand that built an amazingly strong multi-billion dollar business off of an innovative approach, and we'll hear more about it in a second. And it is now expanding into B2B. And so we're here to talk about that expansion of the new campaign that's come out of that. So it is great to have both of these folks with me today. Welcome, Kat. - Hi, nice to be here. - And Christine. - Hello, great to be here. - We are really happy to have you. Your CMO, Zach was on the cup maybe last year and we talked, he was part of a panel discussion that we had. It was a little bit about how Canva originally grew, and it had phenomenal growth. But because it was a panel discussion, we didn't have a lot of time to dig into it. So I thought that we could actually start this out, Christine, with a little bit of a background on what Canva is and the source of that extraordinary growth in those early years. 'Cause it's been around, I think, 10 years, I think. - Yeah, a little more than 10 years. So yeah, it's been an incredible journey. I'd put it quite simply if folks don't know Canva. It's an online visual design or communication platform, which sounds a little fancy, but all that means is it's essentially this simple one-page interface where you can create anything you sent your mind to. You could develop social media posts, you could develop a presentation, you could do visuals, you could create docs, whiteboards, so kind of if you can conceive of it, you could build it on Canva. And a little bit of just the background, our founder, Melanie had this vision around Canva when she was back in Perth, teaching design to students. And she thought, wow, it feels hard. It feels like it's more complex. There needs to be, there's a lot of fragmentation. And what if we brought that all into one simple page and just made it dead, simple, intuitive for folks. So people could just open the platform and just start designing right away. So that was sort of the bad rock at the vision. In terms of the growth, it's incredible today, 225 million people around the world use this platform, which is wild. I mean, that is wild. I mean, stop for a second. This is a founder who, for my understanding, she started off as you say she was a teacher. Then she started doing was a yearbook designs, or was it something that she started? That might know this better than I was you've been around for this. But yeah, the first prototype, the first use case essentially was creating yearbooks. I mean, I don't need to say that unbelievable. I mean, some of the tools in the marketplace are great tools, but they just take a bit of learning, right? You don't open it up and essentially anybody in any department or any capacity can start designing right away. So I think we can owe a lot of this growth to the fact that all of a sudden, it wasn't just the 1% who were empowered to design. You didn't have to be a designer by trade or an art director, but you could really be anyone who had an idea that you wanted to render and bring to life. So you could use Canva to kind of bring the rest of us. I'm part of the 99%. Bring them along so they could start feeling that kind of empowerment more of their fingertips. We're obviously talking to people who may not perceive themselves to be creative or to be designers. Like we believe that everybody is born creator, but it's something that kind of gets like, you know, taken out of you as you kind of move into your career and adulthood and to like really help people reconnect with that creativity. It wasn't about, you know, how do we actually connect with anybody and how anybody feel like they could personally design. And that was the kind of biggest challenge, making sure that everything is approachable. Everything is almost like a work in progress. Like it has that imperfection and celebrating that imperfection so that it doesn't feel unattainable to the everyday folk. So before we move on, just going back to that growth, 225 million users today, 10 roughly years in business, was there a point cat where marketing spend kicked in and did that sort of take it from being word of mouth to then suddenly seen this hockey stick of growth once marketing spend began to be deployed. Or what do you think triggered that sort of hockey stick approach volume? I definitely think in like any company's growth, there's a point where word of mouth is going to plateau without the additional kind of marketing spend to help to boost that. And so we saw that I think like probably I would say five years ago, we really started to look at where built this amazing product, we've got this amazing community, people love it, people talk about it. But how do we kind of take that next step in and building the brand and starting to put to look at our marketing as well. I think what we're pushing into now is giving space for a bit more emotive storytelling that helps to bring our brand personality forward and expands the role that we can deliver for people. And the way we can bring more value, maybe beyond how people have engaged with us in the past, you know, letting us push into that broader space and doing it in a way that I think reflects on, you know, our sense what we're saying can't magic in the middle where we can help people achieve real outcomes, but do it with a sense of creativity playfulness and humor that's very true to our DNA. It's allowed us to both meet people where they are with performance and expand our conversation with brand. Now, I do, I do too think that for camera brand and product are like incredibly interlinked, there's sort of no, there's no disconnection between the two. Like often you can work on a brand and the product is almost enough to thought or, you know, like there's a mode of brand spots where the product doesn't really play essential point. But for all of our storytelling, it's always been about how is the product at the center of the story and like really the protagonist that everything's built around. Because the brand stands for empowerment for everyone and that's what the product does too, it's just really intertwined. What was the motivation for going after the B2B segment? And do you think you have a completely different buyer and therefore it needs a different approach, Christine? I don't think in every instance. I mean, I think one thing we try to do is look at how people are using our product organically. And we observe that in 95% of the Fortune 500 companies, people were using Canva, they were using it at work. Maybe they were using it, you know, maybe it was. As an enterprise-wide SaaS platform or their own personal account? They were using it signed up with their work emails. So we were able to go into all these large organizations and we have a lot of conversations today from a sales perspective to say, hey, just so you know, you have thousands of people. In your organization using Canva today. And they're doing all kinds of interesting things. They're making presentations. They're lighting up your social media. They're making videos. So it was very clear that this was happening anyway. Our community was embracing Canva for personal uses, but also bringing it into the workplace to solve workplace problems. You get that so much easier to use than Microsoft and Keynote. I think it's also the impact of communicating something visually. You know, think of your trying to like pitch a new idea or close a deal or inspire your team. It's, you know, it's tried to say a pictures worth a thousand words, but we've all gotten those dry documents that just feel like a chore. I think people are realizing the impact of taking an idea, executing it in a way that's very visual, very accessible. And people are just getting better outcomes. It's also very, very purposeful growth like our mission is to empower the world to design. And that literally means the entire world. And so we've always had this sort of pyramid where at the bottom of the pyramid is all about like the most broadest possible use cases and the individual uses in the, and the big populace where we want to provide this really, really valuable free tool. And then as you move up the pyramid, you've got your small or medium businesses and then your enterprises and then professional designers at the top. Which is the one percent that Christine talked to. And so our past decade where we've kind of got to now is like really empowering individuals. And so the focus for the next decade is like moving up to that empowering enterprises space. We'll be right back. 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And so when you when you look at it strategically, I try to think who we had on here recently, which was a SaaS platform. But they talked about the fact that they they needed that they recognize that they were going after a different buyer because it was an enterprise wide buyer. And they had they had significant growth with doing working with individuals. But it needed their marketing needed to sort of play to different triggers. And the new buyer might be it might be a chief technology officer or some of somebody who's buying enterprise SaaS. Did you recognize that you had that new buyer even though you'd come in saying that you had individual people who are already using it. What did having that new buyer require you guys to do both from a comms perspective and from a sales perspective. I think we talk a lot about bottoms up and tops down. So the bottoms up where the people, you know, the people working in large organizations or organizations of all sizes who are using canva. Anyway, and we're having these great outcomes. But I think what was new for us is to think as cats that very intentionally about, you know, who are those decision makers in large organizations. So part of what we had to understand is what's important to those decision makers and making sure that our product could meet some of those needs. So these will be folks who are more concerned about compliance, security. Also understanding a use case for let's say like a big company like FedEx, for example, who has 1400 teams in 40 countries. They need to make sure that their brand assets, their fonts, their photography, their color palette, their templates can be not all accessible to all the teams. They can be empowered to design and create, but also has some governance. Right. So it's a bit of freedom and a framework that the brand is locked down to maintain integrity. So we built a brand hub to allow big organizations to do that. And, you know, that's something I think is very appealing to more of these decision makers. So that was what is a bit new for us. And I think some of our communications are more broad. So we're speaking to both of those audiences and some are more tailored. We tend to do some more laser focused decision maker extensions to some of our campaigns to really connect with those sea sweet folks who will be looking at that really important consideration sets that I just described. While still making sure it's a really valuable product for everyone working in a big organization. So, you know, one of the interesting things is I think a lot of a lot of brands of startups face this. It's sort of understand, you know, you're not a startup. But understanding that most times you're not bringing a totally new product, you're bringing a partially new product and you're trying to dislodge a massive user base if you're a challenger of any size. I mean, I'm curious what's the pitch when you go to a sea as chief technology officer, chief information officer. Is it that your value proposition is better value? Is it better usability? Is it more as you said earlier than it can be used by people who don't have the sophisticated design skills? You're dislodging like probably at least Microsoft PowerPoint. What's the pitch? I would say we aren't always coming with a dislodge message. It's a really big space. And I think the needs in organizations are changing with. But I got to think that there's no organization out there that doesn't already have PowerPoint or keynote. You know, for their everyday users. So you are kind of saying you don't really need that. You just need us in essence. Well, for some organizations, it's a presentation use case if they're very focused on visuals. But for many organizations, I think we do tailor the pitch. But I think that what's the connective tissue across everything is how can you empower everyone in your organization? And the organizations are large and they're disaggregated. And I think a big part of that picture discussion is often about scale and efficiency. You might have a really small group of designers. It's not reasonable that they're going to be doing design approvals for every single piece of content that's created across an organization. Or you want your small maybe group of creatives to feel like an army of a hundred. Well, how are you going to do that? How are you going to scale across your org? There's also a huge slice of the population young adults who are coming up having used Canva. And you're not going to be able to force them to use Microsoft anymore. So I think there's that brilliant market that's emerging into the enterprise space that is going to be naturally comfortable with your products. You do also a lot around education. And we're very fortunate to empower teachers and schools and a lot of young adults. So they do absolutely come into the workplace with this mental model of what's possible and an expectation around the tools of their fingertips to help them be successful. So let's talk about the new work. So tell us Kat about the process of getting through into this. Where did it all start for you guys? Was there a brief? Was there a word? Was there a thought? Was there an unlock moment that was brought to you that sort of said, OK, here's here's where we can all head down conceptually where we can begin the process of developing concepts. I think from everything we've just spoken to the biggest. The biggest business challenge is the perception shift that Canva is not only good for personal use, but it's also good for work. And so that's really kind of one of the key metrics that all of this creative letters up to is like can we actually really shift that perception of Canva being good for work and not just for play. And so as we looked at the creative brief for this, we kind of really looked at people in the workplace and all of those users that we've talked to whether it's the marketing team or the sales team or the HR. And the mindset that we wanted to connect with it was like, you know, those go getters in the office. We kind of like turned it as like the every day, Leslie, nope, like just like there for it and like carrying so much about what they do. And you know, wanting to make sure that care comes through in your in the output and that and everything that they create and communicate with. But feeling stuck because the tools get in the way. And so that led us to this creative strategy, which I do have to shout out to Lindsay, our creative strategist and an amazing job of bringing the brief together. But we had this existing campaign platform called love your work and it was something we wanted to continue to build equity in. And love your work is sort of this twofold thought about that one that people want to get recognition in the workplace for the amazing work that they do. So you're like, I love your work to a colleague and that's like a really great feeling. But then also that personal feeling that you have when you decide loving what you do because you're in the flow and things aren't getting the word in the way of you being able to achieve your goals. And then where does it go creatively? Do you guys develop multiple ideas over time? The place we started for this one and in the concepting stage, we actually started with the writers room because we really wanted to focus on storytelling approach for this campaign and we had we have a checklist framework for storytelling. We have four things on the checklist, the two are the most obvious. So what is the biggest problem that we can solve that's just something a problem that's felt by many, many, many people that they can relate to. How does Canvas solve that problem? And then the two other point points are, how do we bring product to the center of the story as we've talked about? And then the fourth one is, how do we create sizzle? So how do we create something that people actually love to watch and it gets talked about and it gets shared because it's just like a beautiful and a piece of storytelling versus something that feels like an ad. The way that we got to lots of ideas quickly was I had recently been in this workshop with Nicole Balak, who has an organization called Ideas Bodega. And she taught me this technique called the how to method. And what you do is you take the broad, the big broad challenge. And then you go, what are the barriers and like what is standing in the way of us achieving this challenge. So from that, you find like all these different smaller barriers, you take the barrier and you flip it into the positive and create almost like a micro challenge out of that. So to give you an example, our big broad challenges, how do we help people reach their full potential using Canvas presentations? From that, a barrier to that is like lots of people actually just hate presenting, like it's not something that they love to do. So when you flip that to a new challenge, it's like how might we help people fall in love with presenting. And you get to kind of like a pizzeria thing to build an idea around. So we did lots of that. We had many, many, many of these micro challenges. Trying to explain the film, I'm never going to drop it in here, but maybe just give us a 20 second description and then we'll drop the film in and then we'll talk about the other aspects of the campaign too. Yeah. So I guess the story behind this film is really based on this idea of a misdirect. And so we start in this space where you have this couple and they're in therapy. And so you kind of getting into that and you're like, OK, couples therapy, but then she says it's your presentations. They're bad. And you realize, oh, these aren't actually a couple, the colleagues. And so that misdirect and trying to create twists and story along the way keeps happening. And so further on in the film, you are kind of still in the space of the therapy office, but we swing the camera to a window that reveals an entire office floor. And everybody's there for it because it's this intervention from the whole entire office, like they're already using Canberra and they're like rooting for this guy because he's the last one to switch. And so that kind of flip is like, oh, OK, we're actually not in the therapy room anymore. We are in an HR office. And this is not a therapist. She's the HR lady. Now, what's interesting here is that the therapist is actually Lorraine Braco of the sopranos fame. She was Tony sopranos therapist in that series. How difficult was it there? How easy or challenging was it to get Lorraine to do it because she hasn't played that role or a version of it in an awful, long time. Oh, my God, sopranos is probably is it gone for like 20 years already? I'm like something like that. I think with Lorraine. So we were looking for a character to play this role who was obviously an iconic therapist and culture, but more on the fictional side. We didn't want to use a real therapist because I guess treating that line of serious therapy versus the playfulness we wanted to bring to it. And like surprisingly Lorraine was just super excited about the role. And we kind of didn't expect that we thought we might have to fight for it for a bit that she was really, really excited. So that was, that was awesome. And the thing is not it's not evident if you just hear the spot. Hopefully people will see it or have seen it out there. This is a relatively new campaign. The villain is the archaic software that other people are using. It's that idea that that things are not simple that things are too complicated and that there needs to be a better solution. So that's a very obvious part of it. So there's these characters. There's the younger girl. And then there's the middle aged guy and the middle aged guy is representative of that more archaic embedded way of doing things. And this younger person is coming in representing the Canva brand and it implicates the implication. Well, maybe you should start. Everything's feeling a bit predictable. He isn't willing to try anything new or exciting. I see. I thought you liked the way that I do. I get the job done. Okay. This is a safe space. But we really need to do the work. It's your presentations. They're bad. There was the quarterly review employee training week, Gary's retirement and even the office pet policy. This template is timeless. I mean, sometimes I mix things up. Oh, last week. I learned how to use the transitions. Look at this. Epic, right? It looks like 1996. And let's not forget the annual review. That one heard. That's a powerful realization. Show them the thing. Canva. Canva? It's easy. Oh, wow. You made that? You made that for me? I literally did it at lunch. Okay. Canva make me do like. So I'm super curious in B2B. How do you extend the campaign? Where are you deploying against scalable audiences in social and with other content? How have you approached that? There's going to be those channels that are more mass where you'll see this program. You know, whether it's just tent poles that index well against folks in large organizations. So you'll see this campaign and think it was like March madness, for example, and other kind of lead forward moments. But we also really look to find contextual environments where you would sort of have that work mindset, whether it's the New York Times or a fast company or wired. We also look to align with podcasts where you are sort of in that mindset of more kind of work head on. So how I built this might be an example. We did some custom content with Morning Brew, for example. And we also did some really targeted out of home in places that are just highly traffic for, you know, those organizations that, you know, are kind of relevant to what we're doing and are places where people are just, you know, commuting into work. So like Hudson Yards in New York could be an example, commuting on the 101. And you'll see this around San Francisco with and so many other relevant spaces. So we did all of that. But then we're doing things that are also even more targeted. So things that we're doing with B2B lifecycle and email. And then we partner with our frontline teams who are focused on customer success. Some of the really targeted social media where we're doing extensions on to LinkedIn. And then aligning with thought leadership pieces we're dropping, which did something recently on the state of AI. So we're really thinking about how all this comes together through all of our channels, our partners from the really kind of mass, which will be relevant to everyone that we're speaking to. And we get very, very targeted, even down to the one to one level. So can't what surprised you the most about developing this campaign and deploying it? Were there any lessons or anything? I need sort of light bulb moments for you where you were like, this makes a lot of sense. And maybe that even will work in B2C. We actually haven't pushed a smash into humor before with our brand. So it's been a really fun process. And I think that's the learning process that we've had is like when you tap into humor. You know, like you do tap into that sense of joy that people have when they're when they're loving their work and that feeling of of being in the flow or like kind of achieving your ambition and that kind of thing. And so I don't do think that humor has helped a lot. So how about for you, Christine, what recommendations would you have? Because I wouldn't describe you as a B2B marketer. I mean, you're a marketer. But is there is there things that you might recommend to people who are B2B marketers about things to be conscious of when you produce a campaign like this? There's very few actual human beings you'll meet who are at B2B human being or B2C human being. We have these complexities. We have these different roles. And we're moving really seamlessly between spaces within any given day. So I think pulling back and really trying to understand who you're hoping to connect with or influence and taking that broader context in the mind is going to help you be more successful. It is Kat Vanderwerf executive creative director at Canva. She's in Sydney. And it's Christine Segrist, global Hado consumer marketing for Canva. And she's in San Francisco. Thank you to both of you for your time today. A real pleasure. I love that thank you for a good conversation. Yeah, awesome. Thank you. And we will see everyone on the next episode.