Researching the specific design tool needs and expectations of marketing teams

Expanding to the realm of B2B

Canva is a free graphic design tool that’s popular with content-creating consumers. A darling of the Australian technology start-up scene, Canva has historically been a tool for individual freelancers, entrepreneurs and hobbyist designers rather than an enterprise product. In 2022, Canva made a concerted effort to explore and expand its B2B customer base.

To this end, Canva asked Paper Giant to help them better understand some of these specific business customer cohorts. We conducted research in Australia and the USA to help gain a robust sense of the day-to-day tasks and workflows of marketing professionals in small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). We learned about their daily activities as well as their priorities and processes when purchasing software and designing products to support their work. These insights will enable Canva to improve its value proposition and messaging to better align with marketing teams’ needs.

A day-in-the-life of marketing professionals

We designed our research approach to match Canva’s time and budget constraints and consider prior relevant research. We conducted a qualitative study, undertaking 60-minute interviews with qualified SMB marketers across Australia and the USA. Some were current Canva customers, and some were not. (We defined SMBs as organisations of between 2 and 250 people.) Each interview covered the professional’s basic workflow and task-oriented questions, as well as an in-depth inquiry into their marketing needs, pain points, troubleshooting and the processes involved in their purchasing decisions.

Understanding SMB marketers’ behaviour

From these conversations, we generated a high-level behavioural report showing the common tasks marketers perform (according to team size) and detailed information on the kinds of software products marketers use for different tasks. We found that content creation is at the heart of what SMB marketers do and that, increasingly, design tasks in marketing teams are being completed by non-designers.

It was clear from our research that there is a growing interest in SMBs for design tools like Canva, but we uncovered some gaps in customers’ understanding of the Canva product suite. Our exploration identified a variety of needs and pain points in relation to design and collaboration across teams of different sizes and dynamics. We distilled five different customer behaviour profiles that influence the requirements and challenges SMB markets encounter in their workflows.

A purchasing journey and messaging matrix

Our purchasing journey report outlined how SMB marketers evaluate and acquire new tools to accomplish their business needs and goals. This journey illustrated the key stages in decision-making according to different behaviour profiles and highlighted the barriers and channels that affect their adoption of new products. Finally, we presented a messaging matrix with value proposition messages tailored for different stages across the buying journey. The messaging matrix presented key moments for Canva marketing messaging to influence customer purchasing decisions positively.