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Canva CMO Zach Kitschke on Achieving Big Marketing Goals and Sparking Virality
00:18:27
This week, Canva CMO Zach Kitschke joins Google’s Joshua Spanier and Bethany Poole to talk about the brand’s product evolution over the years, and how it puts visual communication into everyone’s hands. Zach discusses Canva’s growth journey,...
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- [00:02]
Joshua Espanier
Hi everyone, this is Modern Marketers by Think with Google. I'm Joshua Espanier, VP of Media Lab within Google Marketing. I lead teams around the world who plan, invent execute and measure marketing programs on behalf of Google's brands. Each episode I talk to game changing marketers and founders who are delivering modern marketing. Today. We're here with Zach Kitchke, Chief Marketing Officer at Canva. Also joining me today as co host is my colleague and global Senior Marketing Director at Google, Bethany Poole. Let's dive right in. Welcome back to Modern Marketers, Bethany and Zach, thank you for joining. I'm reading my meeting notes here and it says introduce Zach and accolades. I'm just wondering you should introduce yourself Zach, but what accolades are you going to bring to the table?
- [00:52]
Zach Kitschke
I don't know. I can introduce myself. I'm Zach, I lead marketing here at Canva. I've been with the company now for just over 11 years. So it's been a crazy ride. Started a couple months before we launched. It was a very, very small team at that point and we're now 5,000 people all around the world. Our use base has grown to more than 180 million people using the platform each and every month for everything from creating videos to presentations to social content and beyond. So it's been an incredible ride.
- [01:27]
Joshua Espanier
Can you just spend a little time talking about what Canva really does today and how it was sort of conceived? I know there's an interesting story from back in the day for sure.
- [01:37]
Zach Kitschke
So I guess Canva, our mission really is to empower the world to design. We believe that everyone, whether you're a student, a small business owner or an employee In a Fortune 500 company, you have a need to express yourself and communicate and collaborate. And the most effective way to do so is visually. But for too long, people didn't have access to the tools unless they were a professional designer where they could create something that was really effective and looked great. Otherwise the rest of us were stuck with basic word processing tools. And so Canva really launched to bridge the gap between that world of productivity and that world of creativity and put visual communication into the hands of everyone. So we launched back in 2013 and the sort of vision for the platform was to make the design process really simple and easy so you could go to one platform. It was online, it was intuitive, template based, drag and drop. Whether you're creating a piece of social content, presentation, a blog, graphic, you could do it all sort of in one spot. And so that was really well received early on. And I Think in the years since, we've seen visuals become more important than ever before the explosion of social media over the last few years, this sort of shift in terms of how we're all working, our workplaces have become more visual too. And that sort of resulted in Canva growing, you know, to the sort of 180 million people using the platform.
- [03:05]
Joshua Espanier
Yeah, it's a remarkable journey. And so 180 million people using Canva on a pretty regular basis, is that spread evenly around the world or are you particularly strong in certain geographies?
- [03:19]
Zach Kitschke
It's very global, where in we're using 190 countries. The platform, you know, for quite a long time now, has been available in over 100 languages. So some of our biggest markets, you know, the US is definitely one of. One of the key markets for us, but markets like Brazil, India, Japan, Indonesia, you know, also some of our biggest markets. And it's sort of fun, obviously, seeing how different cultures and sort of different parts of the world use Canva in different ways.
- [03:47]
Joshua Espanier
I'm really interested to hear about being an Australian company, an Australian success story. I mean, 180 million people is a remarkable achievement in, you know, a short 10, 11 years. What is it about the Australian culture that you have that is sort of infused into the company? If anything? I'd love to hear your perspective on being an Australian champion.
- [04:09]
Zach Kitschke
Yeah, it's interesting. I think we, from the very beginning, Mellencliffe and Cam, the three founders, knew that they wanted to keep the company here in Australia. It was really important to them to build Canva from Sydney. I think in the early days, there was a lot of investors saying, you have to move to San Francisco. You've got to be in the Bay Area to build a tech company. We won't invest unless you do so. And so they actually turned down a lot of investors that sort of thought that way. And we're fortunate, I think, to find a community of investors and supporters that believed in them. And the vision, lo and behold, I think we've really proven that you can build a tech company from anywhere these days. And I think in some ways it's been advantageous to us. It's sort of great. We have the best of both worlds. We spend a lot of time in the us, you know, with our community and within sort of the broader ecosystem. But we're also able, when we're here, it's like all focus on products and just our community and really building for them. So, you know, there's sort of those two modes.
- [05:13]
Joshua Espanier
We spend a lot of Time talking about digital transformation, and it's not lost on me that Canva has gone through its own digital transformations from a tiny company with four or five people at start to where you are today. The 5,000 you mentioned. I was wondering whether you could just sort of break down in the 10, 11 years you've been there. What have been the sort of the transformation moments or the transformation eras? Does it break into so neatly? Like every two years something new comes along or how's it been for the company then?
- [05:43]
Zach Kitschke
You probably look at it on two fronts. I'd say there's like our product and how our products evolved in terms of what people are actually creating and consuming. And then I think that's probably the way that we're using technology internally. So I'll start with the first. And I think, you know, we've seen so many shifts over the last decade, it's kind of wild to think about. But we remember we launched people could create social content in Canva, but it was actually probably 612 months after we launched. I remember Nvidia came along and then mobile. Then you had the sort of explosion in other platforms. Like it was only relatively recently in the scheme of things. You had platforms like TikTok come along. We had the shift to remote work. So through the pandemic, we saw that being a really big shift in terms of users usage and the sort of engagement that we were having on the platform. People were needing to create a lot more visual content, both to communicate externally, but also even just to kind of collaborate in sort of a digital world as well. So there's constantly these kind of shifts and, you know, obviously the one that continues to be the one on everyone's lips at the moment's AI, and that's been a big focus for us of late to bringing in all of the potential of that new technology and really trying to integrate it into people's workflows in a really kind of thoughtful, productive way. So we've launched a lot of features, starting with our Magic Studio a few years ago. Things like background removal, being able to generate a design from a prompt. Just recently with Canva Create, we announced some video functionality. So being able to, with a click, enhance audio. So say you're recording a podcast and there's some background noise, being able to tidy that up. So all of that obviously helps us to realize that notion of making the design process sort of as simple and easy as possible.
- [07:34]
Bethany Poole
What do you hear from creatives? I mean, because this is the thing with AI, people worry about it, but it also, like, the things that you describe, are jumping off points that you could actually create more. It makes the process part more efficient, but it also could be more ideation. But there's a lot of trepidation there. What do you hear from your customers? Do they get excited? Do you get feedback like, hey, you're invading our process? How do you, like, would love thoughts?
- [07:58]
Zach Kitschke
I do think sentiment's shifted a lot in the last 12 months. I think as people are actually engaging with the tools and technology, you know, the conversation shifted to how do we actually leverage this? You know, and a lot of people that I've been talking to been describing like AI as sort of another member of the team. It's not in and of itself. It can't really help but as a. As a thought partner, you know, to collaborate, to help refine your work, you know, to go that last mile, you know, it is really, really fantastic. And so I think there's a lot more kind of experimentation in that way. But at the end of the day, the results are only going to be as good as purpose prompting and sort of driving. So that's. That's something that we've thought a lot about internally. How do we actually help our internal teams build understanding and capability and sort of skills? And I think that's something that a lot more companies are focusing on now.
- [08:49]
Joshua Espanier
Can we talk a little bit about how you've been marketing Candler itself? And there's a couple of flavors to this, but you're a B2B product, often serving people who operate in the B2C space. And I think you work a lot with B2C brands as well. How do you think about your sort of business audiences and how you market to them? I feel like that's changed. I've been seeing you guys show up in different places and spaces than I might have expected three or four years ago. Is that true?
- [09:18]
Zach Kitschke
That's good to hear. It's definitely the goal. Yeah. So we really launched as a consumer product and I think focused for the first 10 years on really empowering every individual. And that was like quite a broad audience. It was students, it was teachers, it was small business owners, it was knowledge workers in larger companies, but it was individuals. And over the last few years, we've really sort of turned our attention to being the kind of collaborative visual communications platform. So I've invested a lot on the product side to enable that. And I've seen a lot more adoption of teams. And so we really look at the next decade for Canva being about not just individuals, but more importantly also empowering every organization. And so that's really guided a lot of the product strategy, a lot of the marketing, how we're thinking about things. But I think the really important thing for us has been being able to have a clear message that can resonate with everyone. The notion of work can look very, very different if you're a small business owner versus a teacher in a classroom versus a CMO or a cio, a chro in sort of a larger organization. So it's definitely been about making sure we're crisp at the macro level and then we're being a little bit more targeted in terms of how we communicating direct directly with different cohorts.
- [10:40]
Joshua Espanier
So yeah, in marketing, show don't tell is often a mantra or max, in which case used a lot. And almost by definition it's really hard to describe what Canva does. You kind of want to show it. So how have you thought about that and what is the unlock in getting people to actually lean in and engage with Canva and beyond just word of mouth?
- [11:00]
Zach Kitschke
So I would say the product is our best marketing the end of the day. And that experience that people have in the products is one of delight and empowerment. Like, you know, we kind of hear time and time again people talk about Canva as like their secret weapon. You know, it's like the brightest moment of their day designing in the product. And so we really think a lot about how do we deliver on that by continuing to really make sure our product experience is really seamless, it is delightful, we have some fun. And that has been the vehicle, I guess, that has sparked virality. So even as we thought about Canva create the way we launched those new products, we had this incredible moment in the product. There was a secret place you could knock in the product. The first million people got access to this brand new version of Canva. So we had, I think it was within a day or two, a million people had gone through that experience. Capped out the wait list. But people were filming that they were sharing their experience on social. So finding those moments to sort of spark virality. I think that same sort of focus on how do we create community has also translated into what's driving our sort of success in the enterprise space as well.
- [12:19]
Joshua Espanier
We talk a lot about modern marketing and progressive marketing principles and the days of we have a campaign which starts and then stops and we all sort of celebrate ourselves. Seems to be over and there's this sort of always on mentality, you know, 360 by 365. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you're set up, how your team is set up when it comes to that community listening, community engagement, social content, CRM, always on behaviors that allows you to build that relationship continuously.
- [12:51]
Zach Kitschke
Yeah, I think we often talk about operating sort of on two speeds internally. And I think there is, you know, there's this kind of always on component of our job that is really, really important. And it is iterative and the work kind of compounds and builds on itself that kind of guides how we think about social life cycle, editorial in our product, our community efforts. And then there is this bigger moment where it is all of those teams and more really rallying to put the spotlight on a particular moment or sort of effort. And so that's things for us like Canva create. It was months of work and really the combination of all of our teams, like our press team hosting over 100 journalists and analysts. We had hundreds of pieces of coverage. We had sort of incredible social and community activation. Our community team hosted all these kind of watch parties around the world. We had paid marketing, kind of promoting the event experience, our digital team. So there's also those moments, like that same thing for these kind of brand moments that we have. And so I think it's really important that you are set up to kind of to juggle both of those things. One of the things that has definitely been really important, I think, to the way that we thought about our user journey is from the lifecycle point of view. Those first few days that someone has with the product, that experience ends up shaping, retention, monetization, engagement.
- [14:22]
Bethany Poole
Exactly. I think there's a lot of marketers out there that you start in B2C and then you said like, all of the people in the company are using it, and all of a sudden you're having a conversation with the cio. Was that always a strategy or as you evolved and kind of figured that out, how did that impact how you marketed? And also it's interesting because if you're going B2C to B2B, how do you think about the channels? You just talked about the user experience being key to getting people in the lifecycle. But what are the other components as you kind of move people B2C to B2B or is that still a key part of the kind of growth strategy?
- [15:00]
Zach Kitschke
Yeah, I mean, it's always been part of the mission. Like the mission's always been to empower everyone to design. And I think the way that we've always thought about that at Canva. We talk about mission and goals across the company, but also different teams. And so I always think it's really important to have a long term horizon and that's your North Star. But then we'll set crazy big goals. Setting crazy big goals and making them happen is one of our values. And so we're always really intentional, you know, each year, each quarter, what is the next big rock that if we achieve that, it'll propel us forward towards those goals. And so at different points along the journey, there's been different rocks that we've prioritized because we've seen them having the biggest impact towards that sort of Northstar. And so, you know, back in 2015 it was about prioritizing building a paid premium product which, you know, became Canva Pro. And so, you know, we'd invest a lot in the core experience and then wanted to start to monetize the product. And so that, you know, the company really rallied behind that. And so, you know, it's really been with that intentionality. And I think obviously that the story that we're telling and the way that we're marketing ourselves is reflective of like, what are those kind of business priorities that we have. You want to sort of compound, prioritize things in a way that sort of compound on one another. But we've built a lot of that sort of domain experience. And so with B2B, that's definitely been a learning journey over the past few years. We've really spent a lot of time and effort refining and building the products.
- [16:34]
Bethany Poole
Zach. So there are a lot of marketing channels out there. I hear you have an interesting point of view on things that you think are undervalued and things that you think are overvalued. Would love to hear it.
- [16:44]
Zach Kitschke
I think for us, two of the most effective channels, which I think brands can sometimes miss, social and community and PR and comms, both have been so critical to our success. You know, fostering community press has been one of the biggest drivers of sort of visibility and awareness from our very early days as well. So I think they can definitely be underutilised. I don't know in terms of overvalued, I do think maybe one of the areas that I think have definitely seen other companies focusing on a lot more is building capacity for things like creative for digital and performance for Lifecycle in house. And so I think that is sort of a wave that we're seeing as well. And being really deep and sort of having an intuitive and responsive understanding of those channels, I think is really, really important for effectiveness as well.
- [17:43]
Joshua Espanier
A huge thank you to my guest this week, Zach Kitschke, Chief Marketing Officer at Canva. If you like this episode, please subscribe to get the latest updates and the next recording as soon as it's ready. We'll see you next time. For Modern Marketers by Think with Google.
- [17:57]
Frankie Guadagnino
Thank you for listening to Modern Marketers by Think with Google. Our host is Joshua Spanier. Modern Marketers is brought to you by Google and attention. The podcast is produced by the Google Ads Marketing team and Frankie Guadagnino, Nagina Niazmitova and Emily Behrens for attention. Our technical producer is Kevin Fisher. Modern Marketers is edited by Sean Colello and this podcast is mixed and mastered by Andy Inglot. Our theme music is by Jerry Matei. Thanks for listening.