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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#817: Canva's Emma Robinson on the power of visual communication in B2B marketing
00:26:33
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on
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Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love.
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I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of
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martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and
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leave us a rating so others can find us as well.
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And make sure you check out our
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sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in
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full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in with B2B marketers drowning in data and automation, have we forgotten that our buyers are still human beings who are moved more by compelling visuals than by another line on a spreadsheet? Agility requires not just the speed to react, but the insight to know what to react with. It demands a seamless connection between creative ideation and performance data, allowing teams to not only launch campaigns quickly, but to make them smarter over time. Today we're going to talk about the often underestimated power of visual communication and design led thinking in B2B marketing, including some findings from Canva's recent visual communications report. We're going to explore why creativity isn't just a nice to have, but a core driver of engagement and business results, how neuroscience backs this up, and how new platforms are enabling marketing teams to scale high quality creative while directly measuring its impact on the bottom line. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Emma Robinson, head of B2B marketing at Canva. Emma, welcome to the show.
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Thanks Greg. It's great to be here.
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Yeah, yeah. Really looking forward to talking about this fascinating topic here. Before we dive in though, we're why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Canva?
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Yeah, sure. Happy to So I lead B2B marketing at Canva, which in a nutshell is essentially the growth engine that works in partnership with our go to market organization and we're jointly working together to sort of empower business customers to achieve their goals on Canva. So most of your listeners probably know that Canva from our broader mission, which is to empower the world to design. Now that was the sort of mission around the first decade, but the second decade is around empowering organizations to design. So it's quite a lofty vision, but it's a journey that we've been on for around two years now. We're really trying to help people scale their visual comms efforts within organizations. And so that's the charter of my group. So we support full funnel cross channel marketing covering business of all sizes. So SMB to Fortune 500 as well as higher education and public sector more broadly. Think sort of enterprise scale, long buying cycle, sometimes distributed teams, lots of stakeholders. Bit interesting. Interestingly, I think what this role at Canva has probably taught me is that complexity doesn't really reduce the need for creativity. I actually think it raises the bar for it. So my role is really about proving that creativity isn't the opposite of performance, but it is one of the strongest drivers of it. So it's definitely a fun ride, that's for sure.
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Yeah, yeah, I love it and I love that mission too. And so yeah, I mean I always feel like design is making the complex easy to understand and stuff. So yeah, definitely. So let's, let's dive in. Let's start with looking at things from the strategic view of visual communication. And the report, the visual communication report that I mentioned, we'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. It talks about the neuroscience behind why design led companies win. So for those marketing leaders listening out there who might still see design as a beautification step or kind of a nice to have rather than a core strategic function, what's the most compelling piece of evidence that you'd share to change their mind?
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Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So you know, I think the simplest proof is actually in this research, in this data. I mean it's really how the brain works, right? And you can't argue with that. But you know, we process visuals far faster than we do text and we remember them longer. And you know, you mentioned this field of neuroscience, which is actually a fascinating field and if anyone has a chance to dive into it, it's interesting. And we totally geeked out on this one. We tracked brain activity using a technique called steady state topography which shows that visual content triggers memory encoding 74% faster than dull alternatives. So I mean that's really interesting. You know how I think we all feel a certain way when we look at creative and we respond to visual stimuli. But now we actually have the proven research to actually back this up that we have a language around how we describe these things. And, and so what does it mean for companies? I guess the research shows that it's clear that visual communications is not just optional anymore. Design led companies are achieving major boosts in clarity. So 66% of these companies achieve more efficient communications compared to just 52% that rely on text alone. So we've seen organizations move in this direction in particular with Gen Z being predominantly in the workforce these days. So I say the only interesting thing that we saw in the research too is that there's also this gap that only 22% of companies actually consider themselves design led. So we have a lot of work to do here. But no, I think, I think seeing the data for real really kind of just solidifies that this is such an important topic now.
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Yeah, yeah, well, and I think a lot of the companies that are maybe known for their design or just their aesthetics are often B2C companies. Right. Anyone could probably rattle off a few very well known brands that are, that are kind of known for that. But you've said, you know, creativity also remains the heart of strong B2B. And so I think this is, you know, potentially sometimes overlooked and maybe feels counterintuitive to some that are living in the world of, you know, account based marketing and lead scoring, MQLs, you know, all of the sales speak that goes along with, with B2B. You know, how, how would you advise large B2B organizations to balance? Obviously they've got to make sales and they've, they've got to make numbers and everything. But like how do they balance that art of creativity with the science of demand generation without one, you know, overshadowing the other?
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Yeah, no, it is, it's something that we ponder a lot in B2B marketing in many, many over many years. I wish I had the simplest answer, but, but I think that one of the analogies that I really like in this example is I know car analogies sometimes are overused, but creativity is really the engine and then data is almost like the steering wheel. And so one without the other goes out of nowhere or crashes. And to answer your question, I don't know if there's ever a perfect balance, but I would say that you should treat brand like research and development. Those brand efforts become really the oxygen that sustains demand over time and also accelerate channel performance when you get it right. So we've done a lot of data or data work to show that brand campaigns correlate better performance of digital. So performance marketing based on how your brand is showing up and how much work you're doing to build brand equity. And so creativity really is like working hardest, I guess, upstream in intention, in understanding and trust. And I think some of the biggest mistakes that you know, as you mentioned, that B2B teams can sometimes force that creativity to justify clicks. And you know, certainly we find that you have to kind of use both together. And you know, you mentioned that you, you know, there are B2C campaign or brands that are actually providing inspiration for B2B and I think we definitely see that. So, you know, the market is incredibly complex and competitive now, so you can't just do the same old things to scale a company these days. So, you know, we're looking at Canva, at companies like Disney and Pinterest for inspiration of how they show up in market and kind of really learning in that regard. And then AI is not just make us faster, but it should actually also make us more creative and, you know, making sure that you're leading with humanity and with authenticity, those types of things are really impactful for the brand as well. So, you know, I think at the end of the day, there's something really pure and right about genuinely connecting with your customers in channels like abm. Creativity isn't really just sort of the enemy, I guess, of precision, but it's what makes the message actually land ultimately with your buyers and sort of doesn't end up disappearing in that kind of inbox noise. So, yeah, I see a role of them both working together.
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Yeah, well, and then in the enterprise as well. One of the challenges in enabling this creativity and to take it to a more, let's say, to the tactical level as well, is enabling these enterprise marketing teams to not only be fast but also creative. Right. So, you know, some it's, it's the good, fast, cheap thing. It's like you can, you can have two. Right. So, but it's enabling all of those things to be, to be possible and to enable the creativity and the brand to really be consistent when, you know, potentially thousands of employees are working with brand assets. How does a platform approach help to solve this tension between, you know, we got a centralized brand governance and have that consistent brand identity, but also democratizing the creation of content that is on brand.
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Yeah, yeah. You know, I think the platform approach really works because it removes that sort of false choice between control and creativity. And, and you know, I personally really like using brand systems. I am, you know, I think I'm the world's best designer, so I'm always going rogue, you know, and in my experience, you know, you can't stymie content creation and ideas from being launched into the world. So, you know, the best possible approach is to be, you have to be a good steward of the brand and it's everybody's responsibility. And in a work organization to make that work. But the way we think about at Canva is we help companies to really set those templates up as the guardrails, not handcuffs. And they help people to move faster without going off the road. And in my experience, you know, these sort of good governance systems, they shouldn't slow creativity, just remove any of that friction in the process. But having said that, there's probably two important nuances that I would want to convey. The first one is around how you set this up, and then the second one is around tools consolidation. So on the first line, how you set it up, instead of brand control living in a PDF or in a separate layer, our brand system at Canva is able to embed directly into the workflows, into the work itself, which does help with removing some of that friction. I talked about things like fonts and colors and logos, templates, layouts. They're all built into the editor. So every employee starts with this foundational layer of brand control by default. That's really helpful for organizations to scale. Then secondly, the other part is just reality. Are working in incredibly fragmented environments. On average, we see that teams are juggling 8.7 tools each week, which, you know, you can only imagine just slows execution and introduces a ton of brand risk. And you know, that's probably getting worse, I would say, with all the AI tooling that's coming onto the market. So, you know, companies, when they consolidate onto that sort of single visual communications platform, the impact goes far beyond just the cost savings, but it's more about how they they achieve true brand consistency that does and allows your employees to get ideas out to market faster. So I guess the TLDR is that shift from centralized control to centralized enablement is where creativity is democratized and then the brand still stays incredibly cohesive. And that's kind of like the, that's the way that we would recommend people to work.
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So measuring the impact of this, certainly, you know, there's a, there's a way to measure time savings. Perhaps it can be a little challenging to measure brand consistency perhaps as well. But you know, this idea of integration between content creation and the performance analytics on that content that's created, you know, can be, can be really powerful. Historically these have been pretty separate worlds with time lags between and things like that. What's the practical benefit of having performance metrics directly inside a creative tool? And how does that change a marketer's day to day workflow?
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Yeah, well, look, I mean, I've been at this game for a very long time and for as long as I remember, you know, the old world was very much you create your campaigns or your assets, you launch, you wait and see what happens, you analyze. And analyzing in itself is like a week long process, you know, before you even can take action, it's like too late. And there's been a ton of handoffs in that process and so incredibly complex and time consuming. But the new world is interesting and much more performant it's ever been. So you can create these campaigns, you can create your assets and see performance and then iterate on those insights almost instantaneously. So I think these like practical benefits you get is speed, but with learning actually built in. So when performance data like lives inside the creative tools, the marketers just don't have to wait days, weeks, months even to understand what's working and they can act on it in real time. We see that in CANVA grow, which I'm not sure if you've seen, but that's a way to be able to create and publish and then get performance data all in one workflow across meta and other platforms. So being able to track those results and then be able to take action on that data without switching tools and switching that context that you lose so much time within this sort of cracks that are in the handoff process. And so that really does collapse that feedback loop. And instead of spending hours on unproductive work, it feels like you can move much faster, make clearer decisions and then really just get those campaigns out to market faster. And then hopefully the impact is that you actually also see where your customers are truly responding and what the engagement levels are like and do that in a very quick way so you can actually then respond to needs and cultural moments in the market, which always seems good. And I guess whilst we're on the car analogies, in the past I've seen teams, the creative teams, measure performance when they're looking in the rearview mirror, whereas when performance actually lives inside the creative tool, then you really, truly are looking through the windshield. So that always really helps and hopefully makes us all better marketers.
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Yeah.
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And so to talk a little more about CANVA grow, I believe the platform also has what's called brand aware AI that actually learns from that performance data, as you were describing. Describing. Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, how does, how does this help in providing, you know, tangible recommendations? You know, let's say I'm a, I'm a non designer, but I'm tasked with doing things like how does, how does this brand aware AI help improve not only, you know, initial content, but campaign outcomes over time?
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Yeah, I mean, I think you can sort of look at it that generic AI is a bit like having an intern with no context.
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Right.
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Whereas with brand aware AI is more like a coach who knows your playbook and constantly learns from it. So it goes far beyond just creating on content in isolation and does, I would say, a few things really well. One is that it understands your brand rules, so the visual identity, your tone, your creative patterns. It then learns, as we've talked about, from the performance data and then recommends what to adjust so not just what to actually generate. And yeah, canva Grow is a good example of that. Performance data is built into that feedback and creative process and then over time will actually surface smarter recommendations about the types of formats, the messaging, the visuals that tend to resonate. So teams are just not guessing. They're actually being able to improve with every campaign. And it's not just asking what can I create? But it's actually asking what should I improve based on what's already working? Which is a very different nuance. So yeah, I think that there's this really interesting shift from generic gen AI to AI practical impact and that's, you know, being able to then have AI handle the optimization, the learning at scale, and then freeing marketers like myself to be able to focus on what we do best, which is tell really incredible human stories and be creative and be able to do that strategically. So yeah, it's a journey, but I feel like that's where the industry is headed.
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Yeah, And I want to talk a little bit more about that as well. And just being able to democratize content creation, tying the content creation into the performance, you know, in the analytics part of it means, you know, creative functions, analytics functions, channel management, marketing. There's a convergence here. Right. So what does this mean for, you know, what, what does the ideal marketing team look like over the next few years as you know, more, more of this becomes democratized and you know, which roles may become more important and, and which ones may merge. Yeah, there's a lot of questions, but.
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Sorry, it is, but I get this question a lot actually. So I'm trying to think of the best way to simplify, but I think it's not so much where the roles are changing per se, it's more the skills that you want your teams to continue and invest in. And so the most valuable marketers I think in the future are going to be more T shaped. So blending this really great balance of creativity and data fluency and AI literacy and those things are not easy to come by. But I think that's where we definitely seen a lot of the talent that's coming through now, really having that sort of intersection of those three things. So I don't think roles necessarily be disappearing. I think many will merge, as you said. And what really matters is most is judgment and understanding, brand and culture and then being able to use data to learn fast and applying technology to do better work. And those are more skills development. And then I think the piece that we probably just need to all be very acutely aware of is that human stories, authentic stories, will become incredibly important in the future. And being able to connect zeitgeist and culture moments and those things together with human stories is going to be the standout in this sort of AI world of content creation. So the future feels a little bit like it's not just is it left brain or right brain, But I think marketers need to be fluent in both.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And then looking ahead, what would you say is maybe either the single biggest opportunity or maybe threat for B2B brands that fail to embrace a more visually driven and agile approach to their marketing?
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Yeah, yeah. Well, look, I mean the B2B buying journey is, is nonlinear, as you know, and is heavily influenced by peers from creators and communities, not just ads. I think brands that rely on really slow, sort of text heavy, rigid marketing will not stand out and I think they will really struggle where decisions have been shaped in companies, but the opportunity is actually in the opposite. So visual fluency, agile brands are going to move really fast and 90% of Gen X, Gen Z, I'm sorry, are doing their best work visually, 83% are using unapproved tools to communicate effectively. So brands that enable visual on brand creation will actually really earn that sort of relevance, the trust, the attention in these really crowded markets. So do the right thing by the Gen Z community, I think get them doing their best possible work, give them the tools they need to be successful and just watch what happens because they are the future for sure in this world. Yeah.
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Love it.
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Well Emma, thanks so much for joining us. It's been great talking with you. I just got two last questions for you as we wrap up here. First, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
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I would love it, Greg, if we could be talking about how Creativity has become really truly measurable at scale and how that's changed budget conversations in boardrooms. I think it's something that we probably don't give enough credence to, honestly. And so by being able to do things like this research we've just done and really codify what creativity means, it's going to really help us shape those conversations. So yeah, I think we'll be talking about as well like brand aware AI and how we're moving from simply generating content to actually learning what resonates and then what opportunities we have for speed and scale. And so yeah, I think the best marketers, we're not going to be competing with AI, we're going to be directing it through workflows. I hope we're going to talk about that. I think we will move on significantly in terms of where AI is taking us much more into how do you truly make it change shape of things like new products, new services, new experiences versus be more productivity led. So I'm excited to have those conversations with you this time next year, Greg.
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Yeah, absolutely. Well, and Emma, last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Yeah, look, I try and stay really close to the work, so I think particularly Canva, it's very easy to do that. We use the platform each and every day, but also close to customers who are using Canva too. I think that really helps to be able to understand their problems like really deeply where they're struggling, where they what they love, what they're missing. And then that agility comes, I think more from the curiosity, not just the speed. So yeah, I think being able to use the product and be able to spot friction faster really helps us to kind of keep grounded and curious and consistently agile.
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Yeah, love it.
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Well, again I'd like to thank Emma Robinson, head of B2B marketing at Canva, for joining the show. You can learn more about Emma and Canva by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker
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for your next event, feel free to
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to reach out, just visit gregkillstrom.com that's
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G R E G K I H
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L S t r o m.com the
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Agile brand is produced by Missing Link,
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a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay stay agile.