On marketing to a niche audience

Via the case study of setting the tone for Figma's user conference

 “If in your office, you, as an intellectual worker, were supplied with a personal computer … that was instantly responsive…how much value could you derive from that?” - Douglas Englebart, 1968 / The Mother of all Demos, and the opening line of Config 2024.

Product designers are an interesting breed. Me as a marketer – do I talk about marketing with my friends? No. Do I tweet about it on the weekends? No.  But design isn’t just a job, it’s an identity. And designers– they do not want to be marketed to.  

When I first joined Figma, I learned something pretty quick. As a marketer I’d always be an outsider looking in. At first that was pretty intimidating. There she is! A marketer, trying to sell us something! I made a lot of mistakes, like when I approved a line in a launch video where a creative director was telling a staff designer to move a pixel “just a titch.”  Eek, sorry. 

But I’ve learned some things along the way and built a solid intuition about what will and will not resonate with this group.  I’m going to share three principles that I’ve found help me navigate this world via a video I produced for this year’s Config (Figma’s annual conference).  And while my experience is largely with designers, I think these principles apply when marketing to any group of passionate experts.

The video

Every year the team I lead was in charge of Config.  But this year I had a baby (yay!) and I came back from leave just 8 weeks before the conference was taking place. When I got back most of it was done.  This freed me up to focus on something new.  The team was stuck on how to open up the keynote.  Our goal with Config is to create a  “church for product designers.”  And this keynote, especially the opening, needed to set the tone and evoke a sense of belonging. A tall order. Where to start?

Principle 1: Listen to other experts and follow their excitement.

When I was the first marketer at Figma, the first person I hired was a designer advocate.  These people are Figma’s secret weapon–former power users who have joined the company full time and as I like to say sprinkle their magic dust on everything they touch. I always go talk to designer advocates whenever I need to understand the value of a feature, gut check how something will resonate, or brainstorm ideas to hype this community.

Specifically for this project I called in two of my favorite collaborators – Tom Lowry and Rogie King.  

At Figma we usually start creative projects with a jam (named after FigJam, of course.)  I prepped by pulling examples from a bunch of other keynotes, analyzing our past keynotes and proposing a few different routes we could go.

One of the directions was something Tom had mentioned to me in passing, that he and Rogie had spitballed at last year’s Holiday party (because they’re designers - they talk about this stuff at the holiday party.) “What if we just showed all of the cool shit that brought us to where we are today?” - aka the history of interface design. When we got to that idea they started furiously adding stickies. They kept riffing off of each other, looking for links. I proposed a few other concepts. They engaged there too, but I could tell they weren’t as into it. They kept going back to the history of interface design.

I’ve come to learn how important it is to read that kind of energy. I watch how excited these canaries are about ideas. If the advocates are excited, our audience will be excited.  If they aren't, it's likely the project will feel forced and won’t resonate.

I like how Rick Rubin put this concept in The Creative Act – “Excitement tends to be the best barometer for selecting which seeds to focus on.  When something interesting starts to come together, it arouses delight. It’s an energizing feeling of wanting more. A feeling of leaning forward. Follow that energy.” 

Principle 2: If the marketer understands it, you probably haven’t gone deep enough.

So the history of interface design. Here we go. I am going to make this extremely specific and yet comprehensive video that is meant to be a rallying cry for a subculture. So we start with… the iPhone? Wrong. 

Here’s the second lesson marketer. If you can come up with and understand all of the content, you haven’t gone deep enough.  Whatever you are doing will come across too generic, and thus will not resonate.  They’ll sniff you out.

You have to get information from the experts. I would never be able to come up with the elements we’d need to include in this video.  I’d have to get it from other people who were in that world.  So instead I crowdsourced. I tapped many of the product designers I worked with and had them all add to a massive list. 

WinAmp? Googles “what is WinAmp.” Neopets. Ah yes, nearly every designer I’ve ever talked to brings up how they learned how to code with Neopets. Dynamic island… I have a vague memory of people talking about that on twitter back in 2017. I don’t get it, perfect. 

From there I was able to come in and synthesize all of this data, connecting the dots and pulling out a storyline. But I’d never be the one who could come up with the examples themselves.

Principle 3: Do not market to them.

So after we had the idea and started gathering all of our references a theme began to emerge.  There is such an interesting relationship between technology and design.  Technology often moves forward in leaps. But it is raw and can’t really be used on its own.  A small group of designers come in and shape how society will interact with technology, and by doing that shape a huge part of our lives.  So we were going to go through the history of interface design and show these technological leaps and then how designers - the people in the room - interpreted that technology for the rest of us, and thus shaped our lives.

And then it ends on… Figma.  We are next.  Everything has led to us. Stop. We’ve come to our third lesson– do not market to designers.

For this video, it could not be about us. We could not put ourselves in the canons of history or insinuate we were any kind of conclusion or next chapter.  This was a tribute to the people, the community.  We were just the container.  So how would we end the video? My brilliant coworker Amber came up with the idea of making the container literal… all of this was happening inside a Figma file. Aha! And, done. Ship it.

The result

In the end, people cried. It was just 60 seconds, but we were able to establish a sense of unity, that we were all part of a special group of people, what we do is important. It’s bigger than ourselves and incredibly important.

While this is just one video, these three principles have served me countless times over my years leading teams and projects at Figma and shaped how I think about marketing.  I think they’ve shaped Figma’s brand, too.  Think about it next time you are creating something for an expert audience.

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PS: There’s so much more that went into making this video - from adding in a sense of a storyline to figuring out copyright, and this was such a team effort I got to shepherd specifically with Tom Lowry, Rogie King, Amber Bravo, Damien Correll and the team at Brand New School. 

Check out where we landed. Full keynote here!

PS: I wrote this post as part of Write of Passage, a writing workshop I’m taking! Thanks for the push and feedback, friends. More coming as part of the bootcamp.