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- A really important part
of designing marketing materials for a product is
to show people what the heck it looks like.
If you're marketing a physical product,
you can take beautiful photography
and show someone like, using it in a lifestyle setting,
but for those of us who market an app or a SAS product,
what we've got is screenshots.
(camera shutter clicking)
They're less inspirational, sure,
but they are still super important.
People want to know what they're buying
or what they're signing up for,
and the product imagery that we use
on a marketing site gives them a look at what they'll see
once they're inside the app.
I spoke to Cory Etzkorn about this recently
in episode four of Inside Marketing Design,
and I really liked what he had to say about
why the team at Notion (bell dinging)
prioritize making imagery that looks
and feels real on their site.
- Well, there's a trend in like SAS marketing
and like marketing for digital products
where everyone kind of abstracts things,
and instead of showing their product,
they like, doodle over their product
and they like, crop out like, they take it out of context
and they'll, instead of showing like the chat app,
they'll show just the little speech bubble
in the corner or something.
- Mmm.
- And we always like how Apple approaches things,
where you always have the context,
and if they're showing like their chat app
or iMessages it's in the context
of like an iPhone, their product.
It feels sort of complete,
and like in this package.
- That's really interesting to hear you talk about that,
'cause as I'm thinking about the Notion website,
that's very visible, right?
You lead with the giant shot of the product,
and I noticed too that all of the product imagery
on Notion's site feels real.
- Mmmhmm. - You know?
You're not using lorem ipsum filler copy in it,
same as Apple, they always pay attention
to what the messages
are saying. - Yeah.
- You know, it's not saying message 1, message 2.
So that's a really cool way to pull inspiration from that.
We're sort of going into a different direction now,
but I just want to know,
do you create all of that product imagery?
Are you the one writing up the dummy copy
and things like that? - Yes.
- Yes? Wow.
That's a lot of work. - This is
why people don't do this, 'cause it's really hard.
Yeah, I mean, I used Notion before I joined the company
and that's how I knew about the product,
and I thought it was a really amazing tool.
So, but part of the job actually
for the first few months was just getting to know Notion
and like all the features it has
and everything you can do with it,
'cause part of my job was building.
I designed most of the templates that are
in the template gallery in the beginning.
That was a very interesting design, meta design challenge.
You know, designing with the tool that you're marketing
and then taking screenshots of it.
When you sign up for Notion, it's a blank canvas, right?
So, we have to show people what you can do with it.
And the only way to do that is
to create fake, you know, workspaces
and inspire people with like,
the beautiful stuff you can make.
There's no secret hack, it just takes a lot of time.
- When you need to create a product image,
do you have in mind, like,
I don't know if you call it a persona
or if there's like sort of like an imaginary customer
that you have in your head
that you're creating this example image for?
- Yeah, yeah definitely.
We've debated like how far to go down this rabbit hole
because when you're,
if you're gonna always show real content
and real examples, say the example is,
you can take meeting notes in Notion, right?
And we have like a database of meeting notes.
We have like a landing page for designers
and a landing page targeted at like, managers,
and we could create a separate screenshot for designers
and managers where it's the same template,
but the list, the names of the meetings are like
for designers, it's like choosing colors
and you know, font choice or whatever,
and for managers, it's like one-on-one with your reports
and we've debated whether going to that level
of detail matters.
- Yup.
And what'd you decide?
- I mean, I think it definitely matters.
I think the question is,
I mean the more you see an example
and feel like this product is made specifically for you,
the more you're gonna be interested in using it, I think?
The struggle I think is that that level
of customization takes a lot of energy
and time.
And the question is, is that trade off
actually worth the whatever lift you'd get
in like conversions or sign-ups?
Maybe we'll actually answer that question
with data at some point, we'll test it out.
- Like Cory does, I also like to make sure
that the UI we're showing on ConvertKit's landing pages
feels like it could be from a real creator's account.
Our wonderful designer Holly developed
these creator archetypes,
they're like fake brands essentially
that we use as the base for coming up with content,
for a demo landing page or an email,
and we do really create these things
in ConvertKit to take a screenshot of.
But because these aren't real creators or real accounts,
we do often end up doing like a screenshot mashup
for any parts of the app that have data in them.
This image here for example is actually a shot
of my own ConvertKit account,
but we swapped out the creator name at the top.
Anywhere you see a graph or data like this
in a ConvertKit product shot,
this is your behind the scenes info,
that it is probably either taken from mine
or our CEO Nathan's account.
If you are also a marketing designer,
I would love to know how you handle product shots
at your company.
Do you do the abstract UI thing?
Do you actually design product screens in Figma using
their design system?
Or do you take real screenshots of the product?
Please share whatever your approach is in the comments,
I'd love to hear about it,
and you can get loads more great advice
and insights from Cory about how marketing design works
in Notion, in the full Inside Marketing Design episode,
which you can watch right here
or listen to the audio version in your favorite podcast app.
Thanks for watching,
and I'll see you next time.
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