“Look good, feel good, play good, paid good.” Deion Sanders said that, but it applies to pet stores, and pet store marketing, as well. Whether you like it or not, potential customers are going to judge your pet store before they ever set foot in it via your Instagram feed, your Facebook page, and your website’s appearance. Therefore, if you put some thought, effort, and design principles into those online assets of yours, you’ll be looking good, feeling good, you’ll have customers coming into the store (i.e. your business will be performing), and you’ll be getting paid!

“Look good, feel good, play good, paid good.”

— Deion Sanders

But Jet, how do you create great-looking content for your pet store? Don’t you need a graphic designer or a social media expert? Don’t you need to be trained in art and design yourself? Don’t you need to know how to use programs like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator?

Well…yes and no. At Pet Engine Marketing, we ARE all of those things: graphic designers, social media marketers and managers website designers, photographers, videographers, experts with Adobe software, and more. And we’d love to use our expertise to take all of these issues off your hands, so if you don’t have time to worry about the “looking good” part, then let us worry about it for you!

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If you DO want to worry about it, then we have a freesource for you that can help you with the look good part. Enter stage right, Canva.

What is Canva?

Canva is an online platform that allows you to create stunning graphics, icons, logos, photos, collages, presentations, flyers, handouts, headers, business cards, and more.

Almost anything that you would pay an experienced graphic designer a lot of money for, you can create a passable attractive version yourself through Canva. For those pet store owners of ours that understand what Adobe Photoshop and Ilustrator are, Canva does a pretty good job incorporating the simple and necessary elements of both, while eliminating 90% of their more complex capabilities that would remain unused by more inexperienced users.

When it comes to marketing your pet store, keeping your branding and coloration consistent is important. It will help you create engaging content that goes further on social media, it draws more potential customers and followers in, and it increases your brand’s credibility and professionalism.

Benefits of Canva

It’s Free

Seriously, there’s a free version and it’s great. Browse, design, and build from thousands of layouts and templates, or make your own. Certain icons or graphics or templates are not free, but the selection is huge enough and cheap enough that you can truly make whatever you’re imagining. The pro version of Canva allows for animations, easy social integrations, creating a branding kit, and some other features and amenities that can be worked around.

Mobile

The Canva app is great. It’s extremely quick, user-friendly, powerful, and simple by nature. Again, it can help you with layouts, templates, and the selection is massive. Available on all smartphone app stores, this makes creating beautiful graphics for your pet store’s live content (such as for IGTV, Instagram Stories, Snapchat Stories, and Facebook Stories) quick enough and easy enough to still be considered “live!”

Learning

Canva offers “Design School,” which is basically a handful of 101 courses on design principles, tutorials and interactive testing grounds, and confidence-building stations. In addition to these courses, the Canva blog is a lively place where you can get some inspiration from other designers, get feedback on your own creations, and learn about new features to add to your knowledge base.

Branding goes Big with Canva

Millions of images to choose from, photo filters to find the perfect emotion to portray, free icons and shapes to build with, and hundreds of fonts to pair with your content. Used by millions of people across the globe, it takes longer to read this freesource post than it does to learn how to use Canva, the design tool for non-designers.

Conclusion

At Pet Engine, we think that the overall point of these freesource posts is that you don’t have to be an all-star at using some of these free platforms to make an impact on your pet store and move the needle. Your pet store’s marketing strategy can benefit from using a business tool like Canva to create a unified branding vision for your online platforms. On top of that, it’s a pretty fun tool to use and poke around with and we guarantee you’ll be impressed with what you come up with.

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