← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Strategy Behind Canva’s B2B Growth with Emma Robinson and Kristine Segrist
00:54:36
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- [00:02]
Dave Geart
This episode is brought to you by Walnut. Why are we pouring all of this effort into marketing? Driving traffic, crafting campaigns just to push buyers to a request, a demo or contact sales button? Come on. Today's buyers, just like you and me, we don't want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works and understand its value before booking a meeting. 70% of the B2B buying journey today is done before someone even contacts a vendor. So putting your product the center of your marketing is the best approach in 2025. And that's where Walnut comes in. Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self guided product experiences in minutes. No engineers, no delays. This is something that I could even do on my own. You can embed these experiences right on your site, in emails or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms. From awareness to close and beyond. That's the beauty of Walnut. You're getting a product that your sales and CS teammates can use to showcase your product before someone buys. And the best part, you get intent data. You can see which features prospects love, where they drop off and what's actually driving pipeline. The demo qualified lead is the new MQL. That's why over 500 companies today use Walnut, including Adobe and NetApp. And they're driving 2 to 3x higher website conversion rates and seven figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical CTA on the website? Go and check out Walnut IO. They're actually going to build out your first demo for free so you can see what this looks like and how it will work for your business. That's Walnut I.O. and tell them you heard about them from Exit 5. They'll hook it up and build out your first demo for free. You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Geart.
- [01:52]
Emma Robinson
Exit.
- [02:06]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Oh, hey everybody. I just wrapped up an awesome conversation with Double Barrel Action out of Canva today. I don't know why I show you this. These are my notes from this conversation. But I just had Christine Segrest and Emma Robinson on. They are two of the marketing leaders at the marketing org at Canva and one of them runs the consumer side of the business, one of them runs the B2B side of the business. And we, we talk about what is it like, what does Canva do for marketing? What is a company that has, you know, something like 3 billion in revenue and they have basically 95% of the world knows what Canva is.
- [02:40]
Dave Geart
What do you do from a marketing perspective?
- [02:42]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
We talked about their out of home campaigns, we talked about running their big event Canva create. We talked about how they structured the team to be set up to perform across all these different roles and Personas. Just had a great conversation, really enjoyable, a little bit. You know, we fast paced in some areas. Then we slowed down and talked about the orget Canva where things are going with AI. If you like this podcast, if you're a B2B marketing nerd like we all are here, you're going to enjoy this episode. So enjoy my conversation with Emma and Christine from Canva.
- [03:13]
Dave Geart
All right.
- [03:13]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Hey everybody. Excited to do this episode. We got double barrel action coming at you from the team over at Canva. Maybe you've, you've heard of Canva. I'm joined by Emma Robinson and Christine Segris, two marketing leaders that are helping scale one of the most beloved brands in tech. I mean, Canvas makes me feel like I can do things I don't need to know. Photoshop to remove the background of my photos. I've done everything from, you know, we use, obviously we use Canva at Xdefy. We run our business on it. I don't know if this is a Gen Z thing, but do you know that the two Gen Z folks on our team, they don't, they don't use Google Slides anymore. They're making their decks in Canva. That's a noticeable shift. The presentations are happening in Canva. I hope she hasn't listened to this, but I made, I made my daughter a note from the tooth fairy in Canva. Once.
- [04:03]
Christine Segris
You helped her out.
- [04:04]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Yes, absolutely I did. So we got Emma here. Emma leads the B2B side of marketing at Canva. Focus on go to market customer marketing and growth for the enterprise products. And then Christine is VP of consumer marketing leading a global team across performance, brand and everything in between. What a cool idea to have you both on. I can't say that I take credit for this. It came in inbound, but like heck yeah, excited to talk to and we just had a great chat behind the scenes. Just curious, like what does the marketing org look like at Canva and kind of what brings you both on to talk to this? Like why not just talk to Emma or just talk to Christine? I'm curious about what does that say about the marketing Org at Canva?
- [04:40]
Christine Segris
Well, Emma, I was kind of laughing with that double barrel intro. I don't know if you agree with this. But I feel like we are two parts of a whole, actually in our working life, whether we're, like, running with passports, trying to make a flight together, or addressing our teams together. So this is very natural for how we operate. And I would say in terms of how our team is structured, we really kind of think about fluidity between how people work and how people live. And, you know, kind of this really strict binary of like B2B and B2C. We just feel like that's a little bit of an outdated notion that people are constantly moving between different spheres of their life. So it's very natural that when we're building programs or we're planning things together or even working with our teams, it's all about just not having those boundaries, knowing that people are experiencing our brand in the world in a way where they're not like, oh, what part of the org chart sent me this communication? They're just seeing things from Canva. And either we're delivering value in that moment or we're not. So we're pretty joined at the hip, I would say. So great that we're having this conversation together.
- [05:45]
Emma Robinson
Yeah, I would echo that. I think we spend an awful lot of time together, but for good reason, because, you know, as you. Even at the beginning of the year, when we start the planning process, I think it's an incredibly important unlock to have everybody in the room. So we also have an international leader as well. So this sort of the three of us who get in a room, and we all represent parts of the business that are nuanced and different to the audience that we market to. But the channels are consistent across everybody. So it is important just to make sure we have that consistency across the channel, regardless of the audience that you're speaking to. And then I could probably just dive a little bit on the structure. We have sort of like our business unit for those audiences I mentioned B2C, B2B and international. And then we have core channel support. So across the organization, it's sort of more centers of excellence that allow you to kind of get deep into a channel and into providing the right subject matter expertise for that channel. But then that sort of ladders into those business outcomes we're trying to drive across the different business units. So it's sort of like a very heavily matrix model, which I feel like Canva is such a collaborative company that that works really well. And, you know, we obviously use Canva to do a lot of that briefing and sharing documents of strategy and so forth. That that helps. But It's a lot of fun to build this. And I think B2C gives us a lot of crazy ideas for B2B, which we can talk about shortly. So, yeah, that's how it works.
- [07:07]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
It's interesting because I'm just like, always logged into one account and so I'm not like, oh, let me hop into my person, let me lock into my, like, consumer Canva account and make this. And so it's interesting to think about that split. And do you. So you have B2C, B2B International. And, like, is there. I don't even know, is there a CMO at Canva? Do you all report into one person? Is it the founder? Who is it?
- [07:28]
Christine Segris
We do the amazing. Zach Kiske is the CMO across those different areas, pulling everything together. And he's directly into our founders, Mellencliffe. So that's the way we're structured. And even though the company's grown and scaled, we still try to work in a really scrappy way. We try to make sure the org still feels flat. We don't want things to feel highly hierarchical. Like, we're very intentional about that because I thought some of our best ideas or most interesting ideas come from all over the place. You know, whether it's our experiential team, someone in pmm, they're not just the domain of maybe a small group. So we want that fluidity. And we're really focused on trying to build teams that feel kind of small and empowered, like little swift boat pods that can just chase after areas that they believe will have impact without a ton of friction and, you know, kind of whatever it is, approvals, running things up a chain. I just think those kind of bureaucratic elements can suck the life out of experimentation and trying things and moving quickly. So I think that's also part of the spirit of how we're trying to structure. And Zach definitely sets that tone for the team.
- [08:40]
Emma Robinson
Yeah, I know. We probably just add to. I think that AI has accelerated that process too, because, you know, there's a lot of functionality we can bring in that helps us scale really fast, particularly in the area of performance marketing. And so that gives us the ability to test a bunch of things very quickly, but then find the kind of quality and the high performance piece within that and then sort of rally around that particular asset or creative idea. So I think there's just something. The spirit of the way that you test and learn very quickly in these small sprint groups helps to sort of give the rest of the org, like learnings and leverage on what is actually working. And there's just a lot more insights I think we're getting, particularly in that sort of realm of AI, maybe like.
- [09:25]
Christine Segris
A practical example in terms of testing something in a small group and then pulling it across the organization. We have an amazing team in Japan and they were discussing, hey, we have this logged out homepage and it's like this amazing surface that millions of people are going to every day. Are we really sweating it? Like, are we thinking about how to make this, like, the most visually stunning, fun, inviting entry point into the product? And there was a million reasons maybe to not do those experiments. It was working well for growth. It was optimized to do certain things. But they did some experimentation in terms of looking at fun partnerships, creator content, things that they could bring and showcase to feel truly local for the Japanese market. And then we took some of those learnings and pulled them into other spaces, other markets, and found ways to scale that. So I think it's also kind of provoking. Sometimes things are working really well to drive certain outcomes. So maybe you don't look at them again or push on them. But I think actually that constantly trying to beat yourself and not getting into, like, control because something is working well is something we're constantly trying to do. Like, hey, we're hitting our numbers. Well, could we 3x those numbers? Like, are we happy with that? Can we maybe test something that feels a little wild and just make some space for it? And then having that kind of central connection that Emma was talking about to make sure that when we do something that shines, that we can tell our friends across the globe, like, let's see if this, if this works in other regions. Where else can we land this?
- [10:52]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
All right. And like, especially when you get to the stage and size that you all, you all are at, like, that is, that's like a free money, found money opportunity where, like, there's probably so many eyeballs and so much traffic to that page, but you're not thinking about it day to day. You got so many other things going on. Like this other team surfaces this opportunity. Hey, let's see what we can do for our world. I want to go back to planning a little bit just because one of the most common questions that we see, like, among Exit 5 in our community, and everything is like, okay, marketing is really easy. Well, when you're selling like one product to one Persona. And so I always think it's the question is something like, hey, we sell this one thing that has, like a wide use of applications across lots of Personas. And so like Canva's a perfect example of that, right? You can do a bunch of different things with it. It can be applicable to almost any Persona. And then on top of that, you have these kind of business units that are responsible for different things. You have the consumer side, you have B2B side, you have international side. Any size company, there's always going to be some internal score keeping, counting. Like, how do we know? Oh, that was, that was actually a B2B lead, but that should have gone to Christine's team. That was B2C. How do we get credit for that? Oh, international expansion. Like, I don't really have a question, but I'm sure you all can figure out what I'm getting at. Like, as much as you could tell me, like, how do you track the success of marketing? How do you plan? Like, you can't just do these things in a silo. Anything that gets done from like the Canva brand side is going to trickle down and raise each of these other business units and markets. Like, I don't have a question. I'm hoping you all can figure out the question. I want that, that's the thing that I want to try to understand a little bit. How do you get good at that? What lessons can we share with others?
- [12:28]
Emma Robinson
Oh, it's really easy, Dave. It just all happens. No, it is. It's complex first and foremost. But like within that I think we actually spend a lot of time. The founders really set very visionary goals for what they want to achieve. So we still have there to be very honest. And so then that unpacks into, well, if these are the goals and these are the outcomes we want to drive, which is typically how do we create awareness, how do we build on the already strong customer base we have with paid offerings, how are we driving, you know, whether that be AR or other revenue metrics. And then how are we driving the sign up, the trials to enable that? And then really it's kind of the funnel view. And then how are you driving loyalty, Continuous use of the product and making sure that people feel, you know, empowered to use all functionality, not just one piece of it, like designs or maybe video or whatever it might be. So I think there's sort of again, like this matrix idea, but each of those metrics around, like performance will be measured incredibly heavily. So we have a huge data science team that spends a lot of time working on these things. And ultimately do we get to see, you know, the inside of all of those metrics and how we're Growing them, improving them, and we'll set targets around them based on the founder goals. And then on the B2B side we actually do more of an attribution model. So we're looking at as the sales cycle starts, what is that so compelling event that marketing either creates the lead or helps to influence the opportunity. And then all of the touch points across that funnel journey are measured and tracked and we have algorithms that weight things. So we are working on attribution. There's not so much of the this is sales contributed, this is marketing. I know sometimes in attribution models you sort of get this like finger pointing that you know, would you not do this thing? Or why are you not responsible for this? And so we actually have a very tight agreement with sales that we're pretty much driving sort of 50, 50 across this sort of attribution funnel. And then of course that ladders into all of those different activities that we're running that get measured and then it becomes a really productive conversation. Like we have to be accountable on the B2B side for the ROI, how we're spending, what is returning from the spend we're making. And so we need to have that narrative created for our ex CFO and our finance teams to be able to continue to invest. So we definitely have a lot of rigor around that. It's a very well agreed and aligned model with our sales team and they feel very comfortable with it. And then it's really about accountability and how we're driving that across the teams to both be responsible for a total pipeline contribution number. And that sort of then takes a lot of the steam and the heat out of those sort of sometimes unproductive conversations where it comes to well, marketing source this. No. Well, we had this conversation and you know how those things go.
- [15:19]
Christine Segris
Emma, that was much more eloquent. I was going to say we just arm wrestle for whose MQL it is. So I think that was a great way to explain it for sure.
- [15:26]
Emma Robinson
We throw pencils across the office. Yeah, something like that.
- [15:29]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
There must be like, is expansion? I don't even know if that's the right term. But like if I'm Dave at Gmail and I start using Canva, like my first thought will be, well like Dave like must have a job of some kind. Could we possibly sell him the team plan? Like is there a lot of the overall goal is like get people using Canva and then on the. And that that's maybe the consumer side and then the. And I don't know anything about your Business. I'm just riffing because it's what I do. I'm a thought leader. But there must be some of that where it's like, okay then can we use signals from the product to actually, you know, is there an opportunity to sell these people on the team plan? Okay. Dave was using Canva by himself for a year now he's like growing his business and I, oh shoot. I want to have my brand style. I want to. Okay, now I have a 5 person team at exit 5. Like we should upgrade to that plan. Like how do those motions all kind of, they got to all connect in some way.
- [16:13]
Christine Segris
I mean, absolutely. You know, again, kind of the heritage of the business was more of these self serve models. Right. Kind of probably what you have where you're making these great tooth fairy outputs and hopefully things that work too by using a subscription or maybe something for your team where you're all working together maybe in, let's say there's a small business or a group of entrepreneurs working together and those are self serve products that you can sign up for and of course are a big part of our consumer led marketing or a PLG motion. We do get a ton of signal in product of, you know, are there moments that would be appropriate for upsell because someone is, you know, perhaps they want access to more AI credits. They're doing really cool things with some of our AI features. And the way to get more of that would be to convert them from. We have a huge free user base too, from a free user to a subscriber. And then there might be other signals where it'd be valuable to think of migrating someone to teams, but not everyone that will be appropriate for but finding those right pockets. And then also like I mentioned earlier, we find that in 95% of Fortune 500 companies, people are using Canva. They're using it at work for all kinds of use cases. So that's all from that kind of like bottoms up, demand growth. People realizing that this tool is unlocking outcomes for them. It's helping them to bring their ideas forward in a more fluent way. It's helping them with workflows. So that really creates a nice conversation for us to then maybe have a conversation with the C suite or decision makers to say, hey, we're just observing that obviously there's some value here. Is there a way we can structure this to help accelerate and unlock more for you at a top down level? So that's where we really see this coming together. And I think it also comes back to what we're building, we're constantly getting input from our community, what they say, what they do, both in a work context and in a personal context. So it's helping us to build the right products and keep closing that loop.
- [18:08]
Emma Robinson
Yeah. I would also add for the enterprise specifically, you know, of course their requirements are a lot more complicated than, you know, being on a free or, or even a teams or pro license. And so there are legitimate things about, you know, how do you stay on brand, how are you kind of curtailing a lot of organic usage around unbranded content, which is very productive for the enterprise. Great brands, you really want to be able to represent everyone in the best possible way. So what we offer on the enterprise side is a lot more kind of rigor, granular controls and brand kits that people can feel really compelled to use without having to compromise kind of their creative needs. So that is sort of a way that I think and the enterprise was really put in place for that because, you know, CIOs don't want to have this sort of crazy organic content usage because the actual unproductive for brands. So being able to really land brand kits and then also things like security. So SSO being able to sign on, control usage and views and all of those types of things are really important. So sort of like there's different needs for the different pockets of folks across all these different audiences. But ultimately we see a lot of product signals that allow us to be able to go market to those audiences with this right value proposition around usage and the features that might be more important to them as we go do that based on the signal.
- [19:35]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
You mentioned having this data science team before, is that a cross functional, like is that its own team or is that part of the marketing Org?
- [19:41]
Emma Robinson
So they are cross functional but they fit in. We allocate them to business units. So we have a few folks that are working on measurement and brand tracking actually as sort of part of like research and brand tracking and data science instead of one measurement team and they're responsible for. I mean there's a lot of data as you can imagine across all of Canva. We have so many signals that we can leverage in marketing. So it's really about that team being able to find those things you just described. Like how do you sort of see patterns of usage that might show that actually, you know, our whiteboard feature is really growing and people are really, there's a lot of good repeat usage of it. So they go and market that more and things that sort of just allow us to be able to influence our content strategy and then the right sort of messaging that we want to lean.
- [20:29]
Christine Segris
Into and this idea of like the next best action. So if someone is working with certain products, making certain things, driving certain outcomes, what's the next best thing for us to share with them to help unlock more value from Canva? Because as you mentioned, you can do a lot of things with Canva, but I think the beauty of it is it's a place that can really kind of enable end to end what you're trying to do. But someone may have a lot of love for the product, but their usage might be more shallow, like their knowledge of what they can do. So like, how do you bring them on that adjacent journey of like, you're crushing it with these presentations. You're having a lot of great outcomes. Maybe the next adjacent way for us to bring more value to you could be thinking about how you might bring, you know, documents or video creation into that. And that's there's a lot of science behind like, how do we sort of open that value up for people?
- [21:16]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
A part of the reason I asked the data science question was just like a lot of times in marketing we and I wrote about this the other day. It was like, your job in marketing is to be great at marketing, not to be the cfo and you have a business partner who's in finance and it's important to understand finance. I'm not people when I Write this on LinkedIn, people turn this into like, he doesn't care about measurement and he just guy doesn't know he's. It's more just like, is your job to be the marketer or the cfo? Like at any company company that grows to a certain stage, you have ideally you have business partners and you have other smart people inside of the org. And so this is a good example where it's like, obviously canva grew to a certain level and it was like, hey, we could do better work if we could better measure this stuff. We need more than just like whatever we can track in Google Analytics or whatever the heck enterprise thing you all use. And so let's build out a data science team to better enable our marketing team. And my guess is you can do better marketing because you have partners that are experts and working in data science. So like Emma and Christine aren't spending 90% of their day trying to like comb through data to make decisions, but you have a partner that can help you make decisions. So then you can go and let's go do this, let's go create this like, love your work campaign, let's go spend time on the things that matter. As opposed to like you trying to be the data scientist for this.
- [22:29]
Christine Segris
Yeah, totally. And I think that's a nice spicy topic about being a great marketer and a cfo. Like what is kind of your, your role as a marketer? I mean, I think it's about working with your data team in the right way to be empowered by that information, but not limited. Because I think sometimes when you have a lot of information, you can start just doing kind of thinking in incrementalism or doing a lot of like local optimization. And I think sometimes you still have to swing for the fences and bring in informed judgment and have conviction around creativity and a big idea that you just can't have full like measurement sureness of what it's going to deliver because you're trying something for the first time. So it's really the balance of, I think it's important that marketing is seen as a driver of the business, not a cost center. And we all want that. We're here to help our communities flourish, help our businesses grow and impact more people positively. But I think it's just using the data as a way to make you smarter, not a way to make you play smaller, if that makes sense. Maybe one example I'd share. We do a flagship event every year called Canva Create. We hosted in LA for about 5,000 folks and it's really about one, you know, setting the narrative about how we can look to reshape work, empower people to bring their ideas to life. It's also just a very fun, joyful, confetti filled festival where we, you know, have musical numbers, where we bring our community in to do everything from printing Star Wars T shirts to playing in ball pits. I mean, it's really like our brand personified. And there are things in that investment that maybe on paper, when we're first pitching this idea, does it math, will it make sense? But we have a lot of conviction around the power of having this tangible experience with the brand and having it brought to life. And then it's bringing in all the great intelligence and great marketers like Emma to say, okay, we have this great flagship moment. How are we going to make that work for enterprise audiences we care about? Let's build a special track for them. How are we going to make this work for teachers that we care about and educators who are using Canva in the classroom? How can we use this as a springboard for our creator community? So it just becomes this Kind of like center of gravity that we can make work really hard for us. But it is about making space for that creativity and big swings as a brand and kind of living our purpose in a way that maybe wouldn't make sense in a spreadsheet, but we think allows us to bring that sense of creativity forward to the people we're serving.
- [24:53]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Good lesson is like just because we have this fancy expensive data science team, don't get it twisted. Like the great stuff in marketing still comes from like taking chances and being creative and doing the stuff that's harder to measure.
- [25:04]
Christine Segris
Yeah. And I started out science team, I just to give them props, are creative and fun and adventurous. So they're like the right left brain. Right brain. So we're so, so lucky to have them.
- [25:14]
Dave Geart
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- [26:47]
Emma Robinson
Yeah, no, I, you know, I would just add, you know there's always got to be a narrative and I think there's also to the CFO around investment and of course everybody wants to see the right return, the right math model of these things and it helps as we go, you know, sprint towards know have that rigor in place in terms of the sort of projection of where the business is going. You need a lot of this to sort of set the foundation. But there's a higher purpose brand piece that is around really building long term brand equity for Canva. That is a philosophy and if you subscribe and believe in our founders that they do absolutely passionately about this then that really does set the company up to have the right balance between like the long term growth and you know, doing the fun and friendly unapologetic Canva staff and brand work with also very tight measurements around the types of things we're trying to drive and those outcomes they mentioned around the goal. So I think the best possible model is you have to balance the both. And I fully appreciate not every company has the same philosophy around brand and brand investment but we're very lucky that that really does help us to find those new eyeballs, the new audiences for us to kind of like build long term help on. So yeah, we're blessed to have that. But our data sciences do keep us accountable to the spend. At least they do in B2B.
- [28:14]
Christine Segris
That's a good way to frame it, Emma. It's kind of we believe our investment in brand is an investment in growth.
- [28:20]
Emma Robinson
Yeah.
- [28:21]
Christine Segris
So you're playing to obviously what are we trying to deliver this quarter, this half. But you can't lose sight of the big picture and where we're going and how we're building equity for the long term.
- [28:32]
Emma Robinson
Yeah. And I think sometimes the way that that actually manifests in sort of more practical example, we just ran a huge awareness campaign. Love your work. Which you might have seen some of the ads we had a lot of out of home and digital. But when we're driving those assets out into the market, we're actually pulling people through to landing pages which do have more of a B2B call to action where they're signing up for a demo, they're signing up for contact sales form. So actually you find you have this really nice blend between the brand awareness and then sort of like brand demand gen which can come through. And so you do actually see that you can solve for both in that regard. And then the way that we look at it is that brand is the investment in lead the future. Like it's how do you protect the base for lead gen, for future stake. And that is a very easy kind of mental model for us to prove when we start to track these things and then build that narrative for the CFO investments around it.
- [29:27]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Okay, since you mentioned this love your work, obviously, massive campaign that you all did, and I wanted to just pull this up real quick. We had this, okay. Canva has 240 million active users in 190 countries. There are 376 designs created every second and over 3 billion in revenue. Okay, so that's just setting the stage for what Canva is then. Then you do this massive campaign. Most of us listening this podcast have never spent this level of money, have never done this level of advertising. I've been in marketing for a long time. I still go to the airport and I see a huge Cisco billboard and I'm like, I wonder how they know if that's working or not. So let's go inside this Love youe Work campaign from a. From a strategy. Like, how do you know if this worked? I'm trying to be broad and ask you kind of like a basic level question because I'm curious to how we can teach our audience for how you all think about something like that internally.
- [30:21]
Christine Segris
It's a great question. I think what's interesting about Love youe Work, and I will cat. I will also caveat because we believe in being truly local. This is, you know, our usual strategy. We have different things to unlock growth in different markets where maybe awareness is low or consideration is low. The US Problem we're trying to solve is that Canva is well known, well loved, but sometimes the knowledge of Canva can be shallow and people may feel great flow, the ability to achieve goals in certain pockets of their life. That, and, you know, sometimes it might be like, hey, I made an amazing menu for a dinner party. Like, this has been great for my kids at school. School. But helping to pull across that actually canvas an amazing tool for work. It will unlock that same sense of.
- [31:06]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
So it starts with something like this. It's not like, hey, we want to grow sales, you know, 6% in the U.S. it's like, hey, strategically we have a lot of people that use our product, but we don't feel like they know all the features of it. Let's. Let's try this like mass media campaign to show all the things you can do with Canva. That's kind of like, yeah, I think.
- [31:24]
Christine Segris
It'S a higher order. It starts more strategically. Like, what's the unlock in this market? And really this idea that we talk to our community all the time. We're getting insights directly from them. And we know people can experience this sense of feeling stuck at work or not having the tools that are intuitive enough for them to use to take whatever ideas in their head and present it and package it in a way that will literally cut through and help you to succeed at work. Increasingly we're seeing the marketplace at work as more visual. We just did a piece of research. 92% of employers expect their teams to be reasonably adept at being able to communicate visually. But say you're in HR or you work in sales, like that may not be your core competency, you're not a designer. But everyone should not feel stuck or blocked by the inability to present their ideas, their thinking in a way that will feel powerful and get attention. So that's kind of this highest order insight, the sense of getting people unstuck. And then we try to look at like what's a broad entry point for people. In this particular campaign we focused on presentations and kind of a tongue in cheek idea of like presentation trauma, bad presentations. We've endured them, we've probably given them. And this sense of Canva is not you, Dave, not but you know, the rest of us unfortunately. So you know, this idea that Canva is going to help you kind of move past that and be able to be an effective communicator, a visual communicator, someone who can land their ideas. And that was kind of a broad idea of showing a powerful use case in the workplace that a lot of people can relate to. And then we were able to bring it to life with storytelling, humor. Lorraine, the great Lorraine Bracco was our therapist, which, you know, she's played so effectively in the past on shows like Support Sopranos and brought that really great credibility. So that's kind of our big campaign is this idea that you can love your work and that you can feel that sense of flow, unleash, unlock empowerment at work and that becomes this broad sense. And how we know it's working is we're actually measuring that it's shifting people's perception around, considering Canva as a powerful tool for work. And we're measuring the full funnel activities through in terms of is it also helping us to increase mao? Is it also helping us to increase incremental revenue on the self serve side? And we're doing that with a combination of whether it's media mix models, looking at experiments to measure incrementality, whether they're geographically based or conversion lift, looking at things like attribution so this kind of suite of measurements to pull that together.
- [34:01]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
How do you look at something like perception?
- [34:03]
Christine Segris
We would work with brand tracking, as Emma was mentioned earlier. We would have health measures to be able to survey folks in a substantial way, and then we would connect it through behaviors. So is the perception shifting and then is the behavior shifting in a way that's driving our goals? And then to pass that to Emma, a campaign like that creates a springboard for us to then say, well, what are the targeted things we want to do with enterprise customers that can be more tailored to micro audiences, whether it's sales or HR, C suite, et cetera, CIOs to then do things like account based marketing or field marketing events, or looking at our life cycle and email communication. All these different levers to help land this broad campaign that helps to make Physicam as a credible unlock for you in the workplace. And then thread that through into our B2B motions.
- [34:53]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
How do you decide a campaign like this? Is it a year long thing? Is it three months? Is it six months? Like, how do you time box this? How do you decide what should be in it like you're gonna do? I saw the ads on TV streaming. How do you decide what levels down the campaign is gonna have? You're gonna have, you know, out of home. You're gonna have influencers, like, how do you make all those decisions? And my 15th question on this topic. And then you all can choose to answer and then maybe talk a little bit about just the creative process. Because I get overwhelmed of even like spending money at a smaller scale at another company. It's like, well, the CEOs got to be okay with this and this. How do you not play the dance of like, there's going to be people inside the company who don't love it, but you need to commit and ship it and then prove that you're never going to create something and invest something that everyone in the company's like, this is amazing. They're like, well, no, we should have done this way. So that's the messy part of the creative process.
- [35:46]
Christine Segris
First of all, everyone loves it. I'm just kidding. And there was a lot in that and you want to build on it first. And maybe I'll take a little bit on the media in the comments.
- [35:56]
Emma Robinson
Absolutely. I mean, look, I think, you know, ultimately the point I made about the philosophy I think holds true across our, you know, certainly our founders, but it also permeates through their executive leadership team. So in general, these things, you know, you obviously have to prove the value of them in the right placement. But they subscribe to this idea that it actually put great creative into the market and be differentiated will actually get us a good return in terms of all the metrics that we've mentioned around sign ups and MAU and all the rest of it. But I think to just sort of go back, this is the nice thing about having a B2C and B2B team together because you start this process together and you work through it together in more of those sprint teams that we mentioned. So we have. And props to the creative team. They run these things incredibly tightly. It's like he's the inside to the idea, he's the expected strategy and then you have opportunities to be able to input into that process in a very early stage. And then once you get the idea to some point then the creative process can kind of unveil itself and they. They go through all the steps they need to do in terms of production elements and then it's a matter of checks and balances around the creative when it comes back. But that early ideation, that early planning strategy work is always done across the company, like across B2C, B2B and even international would see that too. So I think that really helps from a sort of planning point of view. And then the way the channel plays out is about the strategy we brief in media agencies and look at ways that we can hit our goals and they are very tangible goals for the most part. And so then they build the right sort of set of media planning for us that we then back into with all of the creative assets. So I mean we, you know, and I mentioned earlier that sort of love your work has a pull through element into a lead gen platform like the lead gen element is in. Well, you've seen this great out of home. Here's the landing page content and here's the next action we'd like you to take to sort of explore Canva more and how you can find that, being able to continue to change that perception and then it's about the customer proof. So we have a lot of enterprise customers that if they are sort of starting this journey and seeing something like an out of home ad, how do you find that sort of through line into an experience that will help them but also prove it with customers. So we have companies like FedEx and DocuSign who are doing a lot of really being able to empower everyone to create but also be able to do it on brand. And so you sort of have like this nice ideation Part then the scale comes in, in the way that you create the content. So it's got like a really nice through line and we can actually prove that using the incredible measurement team to be able to see the impact we're having for the top of funnel right the way through to the bottom.
- [38:43]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
It's interesting that. So on the enterprise stuff, and I've always kind of wondered this, is there, is there also some level of like being and feeling legitimate to your top customers? Like if you're an enterprise customer and you're using Canva and you're traveling for work and there's a massive billboard at JFK for Canva, you're like, oh, that company's not going to go out of business tomorrow. Like feels legit. Like I, I remember for a couple, maybe a year or so ago getting a subscription to Anthropic and you know, starting to really like Claude. And I thought it was like super cool because everyone was using Chat gbt and I'm, I'm using Claude, you know, now everybody is right. And there was a massive billboard for it at, at the Logan Airport in, in Boston. And I remember thinking like, ah, all right, this thing's legit. Like there's some perception to there. And I, I've always wondered like if that's also part of like an enterprise marketing strategy. It's like being legit to customers in some way. Is that, is that my silly belief or is there some truth to that?
- [39:35]
Emma Robinson
Yeah, no, I mean, I think there's definitely some truth to that. I would say on our strategy was more around how you change perception. That canvas not only for consumers and for knowledge workers, but also for, you know, everybody up to CMO level in organizations or C Suite. So you have to kind of like allow us to, or all this part of that, we try and allow people to see the robustness. The fact that we have a lot of enterprise customers, you know, using this Fortune 500 company. So there's an element of taking people on that journey, but in terms of seeing just out of home, like the purpose is really is creating awareness around that perception change. And that is the strategy. It's, you know, of course fundamental to show that we're in market in different channels, showing up in different places, but it's more about mapping to the journey that they go on, which is that sort of research journey that sometimes starts with them being able to see an ad in an airport when they're traveling. And there's many other things. I mean, it's not just the out of Home. I think, you know, when we look at things like awareness, we're looking at PR and comms, we're looking at, you know, the relationship we have with analysts like Forrester and Garner. I mean, these things are incredibly important as you go into the enterprise. And so it's far more than just sort of that like awareness piece. It's really how you go drive credibility as a total outcome in a market where you have skepticism around a consumer brand. So it's trying to get ahead of that.
- [41:00]
Christine Segris
I mean, the spaces and places where we are, the point of like, you know, what's the logic in choosing the channels and choosing the places? It is about credibility. But I think credibility is connecting with the people we're trying to speak to. And we internally call them knowledge workers, which is just this, this idea of you're working and you're trying to drive outcomes. So it's kind of a broad lens that can include lots of different professions, but also like, what are we saying to them? So you mentioned FedEx earlier as an example, Emma. You know, what's the story there? If you are a decision maker at a company, they're in 1400 teams in 40 different markets and everybody on the ground has to produce assets. And if you don't have some kind of central brand kit or governance like that can get pretty out of control quickly in terms of making sure that everybody can produce content at scale, but also make sure that you're reinforcing the brand and having high integrity for the brand. So what's the takeaway? There would be like, hey, this brand team, maybe a central brand team of a few mighty folks, they can't govern that. That's too much scale. So by putting Canva in people's hands, you've just reduced, I think that brand team. It was like 77% reduction in brand reviews because people could just run because they had like the right guardrails, the right governance, the right tools. So it's about seeing that out of home when you're walking through the airport, Dave. But also like, why do I care? I care because this is going to reduce time for my team. I care because it's going to drive efficiency. So what is that kind of like ding, ding, ding moment for a decision maker at a company to look at Canva different and understand that there can be a different type of value that actually will matter in their organization. So it's those two things coming together.
- [42:44]
Emma Robinson
And I think the last piece of it is memorability. I mean, you use that at home because you Want your creative to shine and to cut through the sea of the 101. I live here in the Bay Area, so my drive to work in San Francisco is full of AI ads the whole way up the tech market. And you have to find a message that's going to connect your audience that stands out from those messages as well, and. And just kind of find the way to be, you know, maybe a little bit humorous, maybe more human. But I think we're constantly trying to push the creative on those things because that is the thing that will compel people and compel them to sort of go and investigate your brand. And our brand is very true on empowerment. It's about, you know, the levity, like, having a bit of fun with work. It doesn't have to be boring. It can be very feel consumery, but also be very robust in the enterprise. So there's a lot of those things we're trying to hit when we actually finalize creative, but one of them is definitely to sort of give you a little bit of a smile and a flirt on your drive and your commute, wherever you are, and then just be memorable. Like, people will have to connect into the Canva magic, and that's the intention of those apps too.
- [43:56]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
I guess we have to try to do quick answers to these. So a couple things I want to get at. Who's responsible for the Ariome collaboration?
- [44:03]
Christine Segris
That's our team. Did you see it? I love that.
- [44:06]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
He's one of my favorite creators, and I thought I was, like, the only one. And I'm like, man, this guy's amazing. I'm totally gonna do something with him. Like, I bet we could, you know, sometimes, even though he has millions of views on YouTube, and I'm like, damn it. I go and I see he's got a Canva ad. I'm like, I don't have that kind of budget, but this is the stuff that I love. It's like, sure, you can do the big billboard stuff, but. And so people who don't listen, there's Guy Ari at home. He walks around New York City with this keyboard, and he makes beats live on the street, and he gets rappers. It's just this amazing organic stuff. And somehow he made a beat with Canva sheets and then some guy freestyled over that, which is incredible. So I'm mad at you all for that, but I respect the game. That is a great. It's a great play. That's the stuff that I love. Like, it's not. Yeah, the billboard stuff is cool, but finding these Kind of more niche creators and doing stuff on the street is great. You each have backgrounds working. Emma, you worked at Google. Christine, you worked at Meta. Just curious how maybe if you could each talk about like one or two marketing lessons that you both worked there, you know, not for just like a year. They were a portion, a big portion of your life. Curious to how that has shaped your philosophy and how you do marketing today. I think for both of you, my guess is that was a huge part of your, your marketing career arc. And so maybe Emma will go go to you first, what one or two lessons you took from there and how you do marketing or think about marketing and business strategy today.
- [45:26]
Emma Robinson
Yeah, y. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, as you know, Lorraine Tuchill has been at Google as a CMO for gosh, I think she may have been there close to 20 years now. But she started with a very, very simple thing which was about being able to know your products, know the magic of the product, connect it to the user and that's the marketing lesson. Like it's very formulaic and actually it's so foundational and so simple, but so many people miss it as they're going through their campaign creation. So I'm constantly thinking about ways that we can have thought leadership, have really great content assets. But if you're not bringing through the product magic, if you're not explaining that and how it translates into how this can help you, then that's going to be a myth on everyone's path. So I love that lesson from her and it holds true for most folks at Google because it is such a foundational way that they go to market and then look, I think the other thing I've learned from my time at Google, where we were also doing this sort of enterprise transition which is now Google Cloud, is that it's not something that's done overnight. And you know, it's not like you can go from a PLG company to FLG very, very quickly. Like it is a multi stage, multi step, multi year journey. And some days, some months and quarters it might be, you know, you might see huge uplift and some, you may not see as much of a growth. And that's okay because this is, you know, I know, I hate to use the analogy, it's a marathon, not a sprint. But it, you know, it truly is. And it's reminding the people that maybe haven't seen this or expecting to see the silver goal approach is that actually with patience and time and like the right strategies, the right executions, you'll get there but it is something that builds like changing perception is something that you build over a period of months and years.
- [47:12]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
It's a great. I'm down for any lesson that's timeless, that it always going to be around. I love that. Christine, what about you?
- [47:17]
Christine Segris
Yeah, I'm loving those lessons, Emma. Especially if it's staying the course. Right. I would say two things. One is really, this has been a theme throughout this discussion, but being very anchored in your community and who you're serving and never failing to use that as a true north. When I was, for example, some of the best products that Meta has launched has been by observing what is happening organically and how can we build products and serve those needs. An example I would share is Facebook Marketplace, which I think is just a killer product. That came from observing the fact that. That people on Facebook were building buy, sell groups all the time. They were doing that naturally within groups, but didn't have sort of a structured way to do that until Facebook Marketplace launched. But that idea emanated directly from the community, not from some kind of ivory tower brainstorm happening in Menlo Park. And I think it's very similar to Canva, how we've moved into enterprise. That's because that's where our customers were going. That's where our community was going. They were demonstrating, they had this need. So just using your community as your North Star and your source of inspiration and constantly closing the loop with them will never steer you wrong. And the other thing I would note is creativity is a superpower. It is. And I think if we. It's very important to be high integrity with your data and your measurement, your credibility and roi. That's all very important. But you mentioned that peace with Ari, like launching a new product like Sheets in an unconventional way. We also launched our enterprise product on stage with a rap number, which got a lot of attention.
- [48:47]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Oh, I saw. I was not gonna. I. I have it on my list, but I was gonna see how this conversation went. I wasn't gonna bring it up. Regardless. That was a perfect example of like, maybe all PR is good pr, because it did drive a ton of awareness for Canva, whether, however, you feel about how the rap actually went down.
- [49:02]
Christine Segris
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about this is you have to be absolutely unapologetically yourself. You have to do that. Otherwise you lose yourself. And taking things to market in an unconventional way that has credibility, but also playfulness is very true to who we are. And at the end of the day, B2B, B2C. These are people and it's very easy to get lost. We live in a noisy world and we want to create work that demonstrates value and also delights people and makes them want to start a conversation, makes them want to share. And we actually think that's not a frivolous exercise, but it's actually creating the best value that we can for the business.
- [49:41]
Dave Geart
Love it.
- [49:42]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Amen, sister. That's a great. The people thing is great. Like, and I. I think that is just a underrated thing. Granted, I saw a stat today that said, by 2027, 97 of the B2B buying journey is going to be done by AI. So maybe, I don't know. I. Every day I'm learning and changing my opinion about what the future holds, but I'm half kidding. But I do always go back to, like, the timeless lessons in marketing. Understanding people, understanding psychology.
- [50:08]
Christine Segris
Yeah.
- [50:08]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Anyway, I could hang out with you all for forever. Maybe we'll hang out in person sometime in the future. But this is great. Thanks for help making this happen. Do me a favor. If you're listening this episode, send me a message. Daveexit5.com or reach out to Emma and Christine on LinkedIn. That's actually my favorite form of feedback. I don't care about a cta. I want you to go to them and send a bunch of LinkedIn messages and connections and be like, huh. People actually do listen to that podcast. That means a lot. So I appreciate you both hanging out. Awesome. Keep doing great things at Canva. I could be in your next ad if you want. Like, you know, from tooth fairy messages to board decks. Like, look what Dave did. I'm just saying.
- [50:48]
Christine Segris
Already scheming on that collab.
- [50:50]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
Yeah. Reach out to my people. We can make something happen. But seriously, it's great. I am like, truly a marketing nerd with this. Like, this is me scribbling like, I got so many notes from this today. So awesome. Great to hang with you both. Hope you have a great rest of the day, rest of the week, and I'll see you all soon.
- [51:04]
Emma Robinson
Thank you.
- [51:08]
Dave Geart
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast.
- [51:10]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
If you like this episode.
- [51:11]
Dave Geart
You know what?
- [51:12]
Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
I'm not even going to ask you.
- [51:13]
Dave Geart
To subscribe and leave a review, because.
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Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
I don't really care about that. I have something better for you.
- [51:18]
Dave Geart
So we've built the number one private.
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Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
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Dave Geart
And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com our mission at Exit.
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Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
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Dave Geart
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Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
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Dave Geart
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Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
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Dave Geart
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Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
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Dave Geart
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Podcast Host (possibly Dave Geart or another host)
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Dave Geart
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