The Hero Shot | Landing Page

The next key component for success— actually, do you guys all have mission or vision statements for your businesses that you know offhand? Rashid, do you have one?

Yeah, we do.

What is your— like, what would be your mission statement?

Mission statement is called redefining air commerce in email.

Redefining air commerce in email? Do you guys have one? For your— what is your best thing? Help technologists fly? That's a good one.

How about you, Ed?

Universal access to credit.

Universal access to credit?

I like that one.

Not yet. Do you guys?

Lisa.

Making travel for SMBs effortless.

Making travel for SMBs?

Small and mid-sized businesses.

Ah, Jonathan.

That depends actually because we're having a problem with saying what our mission is. So we're just saying that we're helping people to change their money in the best way. But this is not what Okay.

Exchange money or change money?

Same thing.

Exchange money. Helping—

say it again?

We're helping people to exchange— to change money in the best way.

All right.

Well, as we move on, I think maybe we'll come back to a couple of these and maybe we'll try to iron them out a little bit and make them a little bit more concise. Helping people fly, that's— I like that one. That's pretty good. Universal credit access is good. The only concern with the SMB thing is that maybe someone won't know what that— like I didn't know what the acronym is.

It's spelled out on the fact sheet.

Oh, okay. Good, good, good.

Awesome.

Alright, so the next thing on your landing page is the hero shot. So this is— Kevin's gonna explain the hero shot.

So the hero shot is pretty much like the image in the background, and the main goal of this is to show what the outcome of using your product is. So in this example, this is an example of a kind of good background image, but in a way— and I'll explain why. It's good because it's relevant to the company. You can tell that they have something to do with food, but you don't know what the outcome is.

Yeah, actually, do you guys, without even reading the text, And looking at that picture, can you tell what the company does?

A restaurant.

A restaurant?

Reserves tables?

Nope.

The ingredients, no?

They're bringing the ingredients for the food. Yeah, they deliver you the food.

I just want to make sure that the dishes here is the kind of headlines you were talking about before, right?

Yep.

And the tagline is we cook it, we chill it, we deliver it.

Exactly.

Yeah, you enjoy it.

Yep. Okay, and then the picture is called the hero shot. Yeah.

Yep. So yeah, the picture is the hero shot.

Personally, I think a better image would be maybe someone delivering or hand delivering of the food or the meal to the person in their home.

Yeah, they're delivering pre-portioned meals to your doors.

This is much more effective than showing the actual shipping.

So, on that point, and we're actually going to cover that in a second here, but one of the goals of the hero image besides obviously being a nice photograph, like get a professional photographer to take your picture or to take the picture, whatever it's going to be, because If you have a low-quality image on your site, it actually speaks poorly of your brand. But what you want to accomplish with the hero shot, and you can go next down here, is to show what the, the user can become using your product.

Okay.

So, if instead of the delivery thing, we wanted to show somebody enjoying that meal in a nice professional shot, I think you as a hungry person and seeing that person enjoy the meal, you'd get like, oh, okay. I would get, or I'm gonna be satiated from that. However, it, you'd also want, they'd also want to position it where you can see like that it's a pre-portioned thing. Otherwise, you're gonna get the idea that you have to cook it yourself. 'Cause they deliver it pre-made so you don't actually have to cook it. Whereas sites like Blue Apron give you ingredients and a recipe card. So, it kind of gets tricky. This is a better example because, okay, it's Woodbuds. It's earbuds made out of out of wood. We see a guy in the forest. He kinda looks lumberjacky. It makes you wanna grow a beard and go off into the forest and listen to music on your WoodBuds. Like, we get it. I would prefer it if he was smiling in this picture, just 'cause it feels more inclusive when you include somebody smiling.

Maybe he likes emo music, Joe.

But I think this is a much better representation of a product in a single photograph. And then the masters of this are Nike.

Right. Nike does probably the best example of this. They always show their athletes looking like superstars using their products. I mean, I'm sure everyone knows who this is. And also shows validation too. Like Neymar uses my product.

Yeah.

Like if—

How come you know who it is? Like soccer is not a big thing in the States.

I love soccer.

He's into sports.

Okay.

Yeah.

You told us before.

Well, even if you don't know who that is, you can still see that this guy is kicking ass on the soccer field using Nike apparel.

Yeah.

I'm impressed.

So if you put on your Nike shoes, this is what they want you to feel like. They want you to feel— you might not be as good as him. You're probably not as good as him. But you'll feel like it on the inside. That's the point.

I'm not.

I'm not. I just go on the soccer field and pick the grass. So here are some resources you can use for hero shots.

Yeah, and you don't always need a background image, just having a background color can be just as powerful, but make sure it matches the rest of your branding, you know, make sure the colors—

Here's an example.

Yeah, make sure the colors match up. And if you go back, the resources I like to use for stock images are unsplash.com and Pixabay. Have you guys used these before? They're really high-resolution photos and anyone can use it.

Is it possible to share the slides after?

Yeah, definitely.

I also have a list of like stock background high-quality images that I have personally collected, and I can give that to you as well.

Some sites you have to dig through and find the relevant picture, but these, it's really easy to find what you need.

And starting out, so some of you might not have pictures of your products yet, so it's nice to find stock images. However, we do recommend against using stock images because Consumers can and will see through stock images if you just go and find smiling people. It's better to try to take the pictures yourself and actually represent your own brand. But if you don't, if you're in a pinch, you can use a stock image. So, this again is a nice background just with a pattern on it that matches their branding. Here's another example of a hero image and product shot. So, if you have an app actually including the product shot on the right-hand side, it's great because it lets people understand your product. Although I'm not a fan of the background image because this whole GolfLink thing is connecting golfers together, and this just shows one guy golfing by himself. So, there's kind of a messaging error there. And then I'm going to talk real quick about image psychology. So, this image right here is from kissmetrics.com. They do a lot of data analytics. for companies. And what they did is they took a website and they took this hero image and used eye-tracking software to see where people were looking. So red hotspot is where a lot of action went, and the green is where people sort of looked but not really. So we can see here that with the baby looking at us from the screen, people decided they want to stare back at the baby. Research actually shows that babies and women get the most eye attention on eye-tracking software. And then they also changed it next to this image where the baby was looking at the text. And we can see that our people's eyes went from the baby's face into where his gaze was. So then they read the copy and they actually spent more time reading that first paragraph than in the other picture. So over here you can see that they didn't actually read the copy very much. But when the baby was looking at it, they spent a lot more time looking at it, which is kind of crazy. So, also the direction of the people that you're putting in your hero shot is really important. And if we go back to the Woodbud, he's actually interestingly enough looking down at the words, and that probably actually enhances people looking down at the naturally crafted wood earphones thing, which is pretty cool.

Mm-hmm.

I'd like to see the analytics on that, but. Something to think about that you probably wouldn't normally think about is just the, the face positioning.