Episode 283: Canva Smart MockUps
If you are in a small business and you create your graphics, chances are you have heard of Canva. In today's episode, Fiona talks about looking at what Smart Mockups can do for your business, whether you decide to use them from Canva or elsewhere. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
What is a mockup?
Canva mockups
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Welcome to episode 283 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today you're listening to a quick tip and if you are in the design field, or if you are updating your website, updating your brand, this is going to be super useful. The quick tip episodes that we run every single Tuesday morning Australian time are a chance for me to share a tip tool or tactic that you can implement immediately in 10 minutes or less before we get stuck into that. If you are interested in Marketing for Your Small Business course and coaching program, get on it. People get on over to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. You can buy that course any time of year, but if you want to be part of the upcoming course and coaching program that kicks off very soon, you will need to get on it very soon so you can find out all the details and enrol over at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com.
The other thing I want to acknowledge is the traditional owners and custodians of this land on which I record this podcast, and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that we all have a long way to go and sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
If you are in a small business and you create your graphics, chances are you have heard of Canva. If you've not heard of it, go and check it out at canva.com. I have been using Canva since 2014, or 2015. I would say that I am pretty much in Canva, once every two days at least. I'm not using it once a day because I have an amazing OBM Yricka who is in there for me now. We do everything in Canva and graphic designers don't necessarily love Canva. A lot of people still want to use Adobe and InDesign and all of that, which is amazing and they are fantastic. I'm married to a graphic designer and I understand that Canva has many limitations, particularly if you are working on complex things.
It is not the same as InDesign or Photoshop, but for many small business owners who don't necessarily have the budget to invest in Adobe products or who don't have the time to learn how to use those because it is a skill, I think Canva is an incredible solution. We use Canva all day long, and one thing that I wanted to talk about today is Canva mockups Smart Mockups. Now, if you've never heard of the idea of a mockup, let me tell you first what that is. A mockup is, I'm trying to think of another word except for mockup, but an example of what something could look like in a particular medium or format. For example, mockup of a website, you may have an image of say a Mac or a laptop of some sort with the image of the website on the screen.
That mockup is a mockup of what the website could look like with a desktop computer behind it to make it look all real. Like you've just taken a photo of your computer with your website on it, but it's not actually, it's a mockup. Likewise, maybe you are thinking of publishing a book this year, and you can do a mockup of a book. You'll have somebody holding a photo of somebody holding the book and you'll put your artwork on the front. The smart mockups make it look like somebody's holding your book before you have a book out. And this can be great for like vision boards, it can be great for if you're updating your website, maybe you're putting new products in and maybe you got a photo shoot, but you didn't get photo shoots of say, an iPad or somebody holding your book because it's new or it's self-published. Maybe it's an ebook, but you want it to look like a cookbook.
There are smart mockups of all sorts of things. You can have mockups of t-shirts, tote bags, cups, mugs desktops, laptops, iPads, and iPhones. You can have a mockup of anything. Likewise, maybe you are thinking of creating an app but you haven't created it yet, but you want to show people it's coming and maybe create a waitlist. You could create just a cover page for that app and then put it on a smart mockup of somebody holding a phone and it looks suddenly like somebody's using your app. Smart mockups used to be, and I know this because we used to have to buy them in some of the places where I was working, you'd have to pay quite a bit for a mockup for these programs that allowed graphics designers to drag onto them certain products or certain images so that it looked like there was a real book or somebody was holding a phone with your course on the front of that phone, or somebody had their laptop open and it was your new website that hadn't been designed yet.
All of those things used to cost quite a bit for graphic designers to buy them. Now those have become cheaper over time, but what I discovered recently, and I don't know when they actually launched this because I just pulled it up and was like, “Wow! Canva has now got Smart mockups.” I'm on the paid version of Canva. This came out just in September 2022, I'm not too far behind when it came out. But the Canva Smart Mockups has 2000 mockup templates for free. If you're on the Canva Pro, like me, we pay for Canva, it's 8,000 different smart mockups. This can be incredibly useful. Like I said, whether you are, say you have a web design business and you want to show your clients how their website might look, you can create so many amazing mockups just using this free tool, like I said, the free version has 2000 that you paid version has 8,000.
I don't even know what you could do with 8,000 Smart mockups, but these are great. Whether you're a website designer and you're trying to create stuff, whether you are deciding to sell courses for the first time on your website and you want to have a cool image of somebody like clicking into the course on their laptop, you can do that so much easier now on these smart mockups also, if you are thinking of selling t-shirts or mugs or something else and you can mock it up obviously to look actually how it will look in real life. You don't want to be saying something that then people get a very different product. But it's such a great tool and it's such an easy tool to use. I've been playing around with it. I recently did an amazing photo shoot with Hillary Walker, such a great photographer out of Melbourne.
If you are keen to do a brand photo shoot, I 10000% recommend her. She was just wonderful. This was before I found out about Canva Smart Mockups, but I will still use these because they're beautiful images. We did a bunch of photos of my hands holding an iPad, my hands holding my computer, and me in front of my laptop being open for exactly this so that we could then Photoshop or put on top of the images of our courses that will then be used in our products within the shop for the brand.
Now, I was going to use those images, they're beautiful and they go with the rest of the style and everything else, but if you are, let’s say you're on a budget and you can't necessarily get a photo shoot or you are wanting to add a whole bunch of things and you just don't have the time right now to get these professionally shot, you may well find that the Canva smart mockups super useful. We'll link to that in the show notes. We'll also link to a press release that Canva has put out about why they have launched this and what it can help people do with all the links to find all of those different smart mockups and a bunch of examples.
That is it for today's quick tip episode, looking at what Smart Mockups can do for your business, whether you decide to use them from Canva or elsewhere. And just a reminder, I don't get paid by Canva. I wish I did. The number of times I've mentioned Canva over the last eight years to people is innumerable, Melanie Perkins if you're listening. Anyway, I've genuinely suggested it because I think it's a great useful tool for people. We'll link to that in the show notes. You'll find show notes over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/283. And just a reminder, if you are keen to understand marketing and understand all these quick tools and everything else, we give out so much of that in the Marketing for Your Small Business course, you can find all of that and join the next intake of the course and coaching program, which kicks off very soon over at marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. Thank you so much for listening, I'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
