Every Monday morning we fire five questions at a C-suite technology industry interviewee. Today we’re pleased to be joined by Crello Head of Project Liuda Nebozhak.
Biggest Challenge for your Clients?
The biggest challenge for our clients, which mainly comprise small businesses and freelancers, is creating visually engaging marketing and social media campaigns with a limited marketing budget and limited time.
Our clients generally don’t have the budget for large-scale OOH campaigns or for producing and placing TV ads. More often than not, in the beginning stages of their business, they don’t have the budget to hire a professional motion designer full-time, or the time to coordinate a team of external graphic designers.
In a business landscape where strong content and design is a prerequisite for almost all brands, there is a growing demand from professionals who need to create content daily for tools like Crello, which can help them generate quality content for social media and other channels fast, efficiently and cost-effectively by helping them shape their ideas into visual content and stand out from their competitors.
One of our clients, the charity CommUNITY Barnett, pointed out to us that their major pain points were around increasing their social media engagement and specifically reaching a younger audience, without the need to dedicate a lot of time or financial resources to doing so. This is where such design tools can help with both inspiration and timely execution.
Technology that Excites you Most?
I find everything around motion design very exciting – it provides marketers and designers with amazing ways to deliver a message in the shortest amount of time using what we call ‘micro-videos’. To me it showcases the perfect blend of design and technology.
And this isn’t only my opinion: it looks like everyone in the business is drifting towards motion. According to the MarketingProfs latest report, 49% of enterprise content marketers have used micro-videos in the last 12 months.
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What’s interesting about motion design is that it has evolved as a direct result of technology improvements. With many graphic design installations now incorporating digital components, I believe that motion design will grow in importance and evolve as technologies continue to evolve.
Greatest Success?
Our greatest success was reaching our first million registered users this past March, in just 20 months. This was something we were working towards since the first day of the project, and we were happy to share this success, both within the team and with our users.
We now have 19+ million design projects created by our users since Crello’s inception in the summer of 2017. We’ve really come a long way from where we first started; integrating animation within our offering as well as launching a beta version of our iOS and Android app which will be broadly available later this year.
Worst Failure?
I would say that our worst failure was not launching an onboarding program soon enough. It actually took us months to realize what exact guidance a newbie user might require and what messages we needed to include in the interface to guide them around our tools and templates.
Internally, it seemed to us that the first steps to editing a template were immediately apparent, but we were just too familiar with the product to be able to offer any sort of unbiased judgement on that question. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of projecting your own perspective onto others.The lesson here is that it’s vital to get continuous user feedback and test a variety of factors before settling on something you think will work best when it comes to developing your product.
In Another life I’d Be…
A linguist or an etymologist. To me, it’s exciting to see how people use language to express their thoughts and ideas using just the right words. Language is such a vital element of any culture anywhere in the world! That said, even in linguistics, I’m sure I’d be developing some sort of software to help me figure it all out…
Read this: Five Questions with… Paperspace CEO Dillon Erb
