Living far from a big city is not an impediment to building a digital business. Lola Ruiz (known as Lola Digital in the digital world) lives and works in a village of fewer than 700 inhabitants in Empordà, Girona, where her daughter attends a local rural school. From there, she runs her marketing agency, manages her personal brand, creates content, and provides training to professionals and companies.
A reality that a few years ago would have been difficult to imagine: working mainly with clients from Catalonia and the rest of Spain while an online course can reach, on the same day, a student located thousands of kilometers away. Among her students, there have even been some from Japan.
The internet has allowed her to eliminate distances, but one tool has been particularly present throughout this process: Canva.
“"I can live in a small village, take my daughter to a rural school, and from the same place, run an agency or train someone who is on the other side of the world."
Canva entered Lola Digital's career path as a tool to solve real needs in her daily life as a Freelance Community Manager. Creating content for social media, preparing materials for clients, presentations, videos, or resources for her own brand were part of a job that required agility and autonomy.
Over time, Canva ceased to be just a design tool to become a transversal element of her business. Today, she uses it in projects for her agency, in Lola Digital, in content creation, and in her own training.
This experience is also the basis of her teaching method: it's not just about knowing functions, but about understanding how to use Canva within a business, a marketing strategy, or a real content creation process.
“"I don't teach Canva just so they know the tool. I teach it from the experience of using it every day in marketing, with clients, and in my own business."
What began as a self-taught endeavor eventually became a professional specialization. After years of creating content and training other professionals, Lola Digital became part of Canva Experts, the select international group of creators and specialists recognized by the platform.
This relationship with Canva allows her to be in direct contact with the tool's evolution, participate in company initiatives, and get to know many of the new features firsthand, which she then incorporates into her content and training.
And here the contrast between the digital world and the place she works from reappears: while her daily activity continues to unfold from Empordà, Canva has led her to participate in international meetings and events, from the United States to Australia.
Now, artificial intelligence is opening a new era. Canva has evolved from being primarily a design platform to incorporating AI tools capable of generating and editing images, creating videos, writing text, developing presentations, or helping to build content from a single platform.
As a Canva Expert, Lola Digital has direct access to this innovation ecosystem and dedicates a significant portion of her current content to testing, understanding, and teaching these new possibilities applied to marketing and content creation.
However, her approach moves away from the idea that artificial intelligence can replace professional judgment. For her, technology accelerates processes, but it remains essential to know what to communicate, to whom, and with what objective.
“"AI allows us to do things that seemed impossible not long ago, but having more tools doesn't necessarily mean communicating better. Judgment remains essential"
This combination of Canva, digital marketing, artificial intelligence, and real business experience is also the foundation of her training aspect.
Through Lola Digital, Ruiz creates educational content and training aimed at entrepreneurs, Community Managers, marketing professionals, and companies that want to incorporate Canva into their daily lives more efficiently.
One of her initiatives is DigitalClub, a Canva course that has had over 1,400 students. In parallel, she provides training for companies and institutions tailored to their teams' needs.
Her goal is not to train designers, but to enable professionals who need to communicate to better leverage a tool that is already part of the daily routine of many businesses.
The story of Lola Digital also exemplifies one of the major transformations brought about by digitalization: it is no longer essential to move to a big city to build certain professional projects.
Lola Ruiz continues to run her agency, create content, and develop her training from the same rural environment where she started. The difference is that today her classroom, her clients, and her community no longer have a clear geographical boundary.
Canva has been one of the tools that has accompanied this journey and which, now with the arrival of artificial intelligence, is once again transforming her way of working and teaching.
