Live Workshop: Bridge the Design-Content Gap

Key Takeaways

hey everybody what is up I am super super excited for today's live stream and workshop we have a very very special guest today and this is a topic what we're going to cover today that is actually very kind of like dear to my heart has made a big impact on my business and I've been talking about it a lot um yeah here on YouTube so without further Ado let me get started by uh by introducing our guests so we've got Damien valalonga here hey Damien what's up uh thank you for joining us today um so just to give you a little bit of context about about Damien and what we're doing together um so Damien and his partner Matt have created a course couple of years ago called right site which is basically teaching copywriters for web designers and they've collaborated with us in the past we've basically recommended their course to some of our students and they loved it actually they loved it so much that we've decided to partner with them and bring the right side course to flux Academy and we're doing that today and to celebrate that I've invited Damien here to come here and do a free Workshop because I want him to share his knowledge and his framework any thinking and hopefully get you all excited about this and give you practical tools because as I said I really believe that this can make a big impact on your value as web designers and about your ability to charge more money for the website that you're doing so without further Ado I'm gonna head it over to um hand over the mic to Damien to go over his presentation I'm going to be here in the comments and uh yeah answering some questions and we're going to do a little discussion q a in the end so if you have any questions drop them in the chat I'll either comment on them right now or we'll cover them and discuss them in the end Damien take it from here thanks Ron so I'm excited to talk to everybody about strategic copywriting for web designers a little bit about myself uh I'm a brand messaging specialist but also a web strategist copywriting designer I've been a graphic designer for 20 years web designer for about 15 and then like the last like seven years I've been really focusing on how do I take my design skills and make them even more valuable to my clients and in this long journey this long process you know I continually ask myself how do I continue to improve my skills and bring more value to my clients because I want my clients websites to be doing as much for them as possible and I started to to think about after all these experiences with clients um in terms of the the content and the design where were there opportunities for me to be bringing more value and time and time again over the years there there was this common problem that which just rear its ugly head on projects and it was that no one was taking responsibility for the content so we're talking about the words like the copywriting um it it wasn't part of my scope because it wasn't a skill that I had and clients don't really understand much about that component of a website project and so often it just gets ignored and that's not a good thing for for anybody involved in this in this project because it results in a ton of confusion like who's uh who's responsible for this who is going to ultimately add some insight and some clarity to the words that actually get written into this website which are crucial uh you know when I started to learn more about marketing um because that's design lives within the world of marketing most of the time and I started to realize like this is this is just stuff that that we have to understand because the website is is a tool for this business owner to help their business grow and they're they're just confused about um who's going to write the words or guide some of the thinking about the the website content it almost always results in delays because if no one's taking responsibility the client thinks oh well I just assumed that they were doing it because I hired you to build a website and without a process things break down and there are always tons of delays and then there was almost always frustration um actually on both sides because often for us uh because I experienced this numerous times we would have to redo our design because if the client was given the responsibility because I didn't know what the hell I was doing with with the copywriting I would just say well you know get me the get me the content whenever you have it and I would start designing things and then I would have to change them because they would bring some content late to the game or it would just they would be changing it as I was doing my design so I was super frustrated but they're also frustrated because they're not getting the guidance that that they really thought that they were buying when they signed up as a client and that's that's not that's not good I didn't feel good about that after I experienced this a number of times I really felt bad about that and and what this can actually result in if you don't do this stuff is an unsuccessful website and when I say unsuccessful I mean as I said before clients hire us to help them with this really important marketing tool for their business and they need it to be a success because it's going to help their business grow um and so we're partially responsible for that and which is an exciting opportunity but if we don't do this it can actually result in a less successful website and sadly an unhappy client so I I'm pretty sure over the years I have lost out on repeat business um referral opportunities because I didn't provide as much value as I really thought I was um and that and that sucks like I I don't feel great that I didn't provide as much as my client needed um you know they still May really love the look of the site because if if you're doing a professional level of design like that's a given we're going to be presenting them in a in a really nice way visually but that's that's not the whole story it's not the entire picture we're trying to consider both design and copy in this process so we really feel like this is a great opportunity once I started to to wrap my head around this I realized oh my gosh like if I can get a process together and really start providing this service to my clients along with the design it's really going to give a a boost to my business which which it act absolutely has um because it's it's not just impactful for me because I can charge more for offering the services but again it goes back to being really impactful for our clients and that's sort of like this North Star that we have to keep in mind is out are our services providing a lot for our clients is the value there is the impact there for our clients and if it is that's excellent you're heading in the right direction so this apologies this is this is an opportunity to really be begin a shift from merely just a designer which I was for a long time to to becoming more of a strategist when we can help our clients strategize the best way to to communicate through their website to their prospective customers to Their audience not just how can we make the site look good you are positioned in a much better way they start to see you in a different light and that you're able to represent your business in a different way and ultimately charge more um than previously with maybe just offering the visual design design and development it's also going to allow you to attract better clients because once you start to be known as the strategist who can design a beautiful website and also influence the message that's coming through on the website wow that's much more valuable and you're also going to be way more competitive because not very many designers are offering this skill set or offering this service and you will stand out when a when a prospective client starts interviewing designers looking for the right one and you come to you come with I not only can design a beautiful modern you know uh really easy to use website but it's gonna actually say the things that your customers want to hear that's going to be a differentiator between you and your competition and this is all because you're going to be building better websites which are more useful to your client and then ultimately more valuable which means more money for you so with a great process which we're going to explain comes a lot easier projects and that's that's really exciting but first I want to address the elephant in the room which is ta-da AI so we know that AI is another tool that we're we are all able to use to help our uh help our businesses help our clients and AI right now in the context of content strategy and copywriting it does a lot of good things it writes pretty damn well um and and that can help in a lot of different ways it also saves time and it can generate new ideas that you hadn't really thought of which is super exciting but unfortunately AI also produces a lot of really generic content and that's Troublesome because if everyone thinks they can just rely on AI to do this work sadly it's going to fail them in you know in your business it's not going to produce the results that your clients need because your clients are all unique right and and they AI doesn't know your specific client um and you know unless you're working with like Global Brands a lot of us have small business clients and there's millions of them around the world and so AI doesn't know your client like you do and so you need to be able to to understand the uh the unique characteristics of their business and then and then use AI as an assistant that can really strengthen your process so you know now more than ever it's super important to understand how to do this strategically and develop that the messaging that's going to be really really useful and valuable to your clients so again AI should really be thought of as an assistant that's how we employ it in our in our client work um and there's lots of ways to use it and it's really exciting because it just makes it makes the process much more efficient but I I fear that a lot of people in the design and marketing and copy World fear that AI is going to replace them but uh we really feel that if you are if you have the skills at a stress as a strategist and somebody who understands content strategy copywriting and and design that AI is going to be a tool that you can leverage to really speed things up and make your work even better but will not replace you because we're all human and we have clients with very unique needs so let's dig into what this the Strategic copyrighting process actually looks like so we start with Discovery and research we want to begin by have getting a really deep understanding for our clients business and that doesn't just stop with understanding what they do um way too often you'll see a website that just lays out all kinds of dry detailed background information about a company's services and the methods they use and the equipment they use and their Awards and all that stuff that's not enough to to build a compelling website you really need to understand your clients customers so we interview our clients and try and collect as much information about their services or products and as or more importantly their customers what they're looking for in the solution that our client provides and we even go a level deeper and we do customer interviews we ask our clients hey can you give me you know three to five uh you know loyal customers that we can interview you know 10 15 minutes on a zoom call and we really dig in trying to understand their needs and compare them to what our client thinks they know about their customers and that's where you can really start to see the the messaging that's going to resonate with the client's audience because you've gotten it from from the people themselves the first person feedback then we also want to do a little bit of competitive research we don't want to land on messaging that sounds exactly the same as a competitor and and ideally you have a client that that has unique services or delivers them in a unique way but sometimes you need to just develop a storyline about their services and their customers that's unique to to their competition and so it's a really critical uh perspective to get um then we take all of that information and we develop a messaging Playbook this is where we sort of condense and and come up with the with the highlights of these talking points um this really ends up being our first Milestone and first deliverable that we hand over to the client and we go back and forth just a couple rounds to refine it make sure all of the information is is accurate um but what this does is it really sets the stage for wireframing and copywriting because you've already had an opportunity to review these essential uh talking points and and have actually gotten approval from the client on those ideas then before we get to the wireframes we want to do a round of strategy just on the on the website as a whole and that really comes down to what is the goal of the website and then how do we structure the website meaning the the Ia and also the content strategy of each page to make sure we're serving that goal because the the client has a specific need for their website most of the time they needed to do this for their business and so we want to make sure that everything is really focused on that goal and and we often this is you know we often pick up projects that are redesigns I'd say almost I'd say 90 95 of projects I work on our redesigns so we we do an audit we go through the the current site and we find Opportunities to refine the the existing IA and the existing page content and then we develop a site map that they can approve and we then take that and once we get to the design phase we know what we're working with so then after we have that information we go to wireframe and this is where that messaging Playbook comes in really handy because it allows us to develop the copy um in a in a perfectly informed way right we're not guessing that anything we have the information we have the data and this allows us with uh certain formulas and structures that we employ allows us to like plug these ideas into place and develop the the messaging uh in a really beautiful way that that is super accurate super compelling and concise and and then what this does is when you have these wireframes because I didn't start my design and web design career with this part of the process even before copywriting wireframes are just super important they're like they're they allow you to focus the client on one step at a time and so wireframes are essential to this process because it strips out the design like phase and the design criticism from your clients and just forces them to focus on the words and the hierarchy of information from top to bottom and really keeps things neat and makes communication much more clear because you're not confusing them asking for feedback on you know the you know is this button shaped too round it's this headline compelling enough is is this background image or like you we often I would do this we often just ask too much of our clients for feedback it's really helpful to them if you can step through a phased approach and keep them focused on one uh one step at a time and then once we have approval on the wireframes man designer development can go so much faster because you have the the actual uh the skeleton the blueprint of the of the design already approved so you have the wireframes in place it's more efficient because you're not going to be redoing the layout because the the client is like oh I need to change this paragraph or or take this take these these features out and put that there like this all gets much more efficient because you've done that in the previous step and then it's also just more for more focused because you know that the the time spent determining what the best content is has been completed and now you are free to just focus on the visual design which to me was super liberating I I was I felt so free now I'm just like I don't have to think at all about these words I don't have to think about if this section should be below or above that section I can now just go and get to designing this thing in a in a beautiful way that really elevates the content and and presents this gorgeous website for our for our clients so just to recap the process we go through Discovery and research doing interviews getting all this Rich information about our client and their customers developing A playbook from that coming up with a strategy for the website and then developing wireframes which then moves on to design and development so this is content first web design right it's not designed first web design it's content first web design it it not only builds much more effective websites but it's a process that is so much smoother and a really critical point to all this is that when you present yourself in this way where you're offering more of a full service web design offering to your clients you can actually shift from being an order taker to being a trusted consultant early on in my career my clients are just tell me do this that's not I don't like that color do put that there and I didn't have the authority to like make any recommendations to the contrary I just took what they said and implemented it now that never happens I'm not joking it never happens because we have brought a process to bear that they trust and are super confident in and are super excited by and so they totally feel comfortable just accepting our recommendations and sure there's going to be some discussion about about certain things if they have a question or if they have a concern but they trust us they see they see me as an advisor now not just as someone who's there to just do their bidding it's pretty exciting it's been a pretty exciting transformation so moving from an order taker to a trusted consultant allows us to have a more complete process which builds trust in the client we can better serve them right because clients need this they need more than design they might not say it but their business needs a website to support the growth of that business and that website needs to have a compelling message and a professional looking design so when you better serve your clients you can make more money so with that we want to introduce this new course which is called Write site strategic copywriting for web designers so this makes the process easy we teach you how to develop compelling messaging for your home page about Pages services and products Pages a process like how we work pages even careers Pages which are like you know mini landing pages for employees we provide interview questions for your clients and also their customers we have a template for the messaging Playbook we help you translate that Playbook into copy for your for the website we have wireframe templates already built out figma XD and then we do two demos full sites full wireframe sets for two companies two fictional companies so you really get to see how this information gets sourced from our client and then gets translated into really compelling compelling copy uh for the website so we've had some really great success um hearing from our students to date so Schnur says before right site I would wait for clients to send me the copy and the project would often get stalled for months at a time I love the step-by-step process that rightsight allows me to apply which gives me amazing copy now I don't have to wait for my clients to send over copy and I'm able to get more work done in a shorter amount of time right so super efficient Conrad says rightsight helped me immediately double my Revenue I needed a system to get effective website projects done more efficiently and rightsight was exactly what I was looking for and Antoine says this course has been a lifesaver for me I used to wait for the client to provide content which took forever because they're not accustomed to writing copy but now I control the whole process rightsight has made it possible for me to increase my rates by five times that's not a joke he five X's races pretty amazing so we're offering right site uh for a limited time normally 6.95 through the end of this week which is the 25th of August 4.95 and you can get it at fluxacademy.com awesome Damien thank you so much uh and for everybody who's interested uh there's gonna be there is I think already a link below this video uh so I want to I want to share kind of like a personal my personal take on this and then uh you know have some some questions um so friends if you have relevant questions either about you know what Damian was talking about or about the course feel free to put them in right now so first of all I want to say I've personally you know discovered this when I was freelancing as a web designer that if I'm going to wait for their copy it's never going to happen um because this was like 10 years ago or something like this I don't think I've found many courses on the topic so I just basically read a lot of copywriting books um but and and I started doing this and found that it works really really well and helped me you know increase the my pricing but what I wanted to share is right now we're doing a project I don't know maybe some some of the people in the audience have heard me talking about this we have a new project called Studio experience when we're doing a real client work with some of our students and working on a real client work and on that project we've used um we've actually used uh I've showed here on the channel are relumes AI kind of like sitemap and AI writer and we've used basically that for the the copywriting on the website so initially the the students asked when is the client going to send us you know the copy and I was like you were with me together on the kickoff meeting and you've heard him talk they're never going to do it right we have to do it on our own right so and because you know some of our students and this was before we had right side and and they didn't watch the course and they were like not ready to um to write copy on their own so they were kind of like struggling with this and I said all right let's just you as AI took the AI from uh from the you know from the relum AI thing and I was looking at it and I could tell that the copy is not good enough right uh actually I think Damien gave it told me something which I think is really cool kind of like take on this like the AI copywriting is like the you know I was looking at the website and yes it had like copy on it but it looks so generic and I was thinking about you know our kickoff and everything they told us in the discovery but honestly I didn't have enough time to kind of like go and do this on my own so I basically send it to the client this way and the client itself said you know what the copy feels a little bit generic uh and I was like all right all right we're gonna go down and fix it and so we've we went ahead and did it like manually trying to improve the copy but it would be so much helpful for you know for our team if they had this process and they went through it before we kicked off this project because you know we we got stuck like everybody does I guess so that's kind of like just sharing From The Trenches how much how necessary uh this is I was actually happy to see I did a poll during the during the presentation about 50 of the of the people watching uh said that they do write the copy themselves so way to go uh that's that's really great um one question I wanted to ask you Damien is how much time and effort goes into customer interviews you've mentioned you've done that in the past I personally did not do like actual client interviews I one time I've sent their email list kind of like a survey uh can you talk a little bit about how much time and effort goes into that well luckily it doesn't take a lot of time um the only the only challenge sometimes is just scheduling with those people um but it I've just gotten to the point where I am okay with uh some of those Logistics because the interviews yield such high quality feedback in terms of effort is this like three interviews of 30 minutes 10 interviews of one hour like what's the the scope of time that goes into this now they're typically 15 minutes um and you can get a lot from between three and five people got it got it that's that's kind of good so it's technically like in terms of time spent on this it's about an extra hour or two that goes into this and it gives you a lot more context exactly fantastic all right so there was a good question in the chat about whether the client writes the copy or you write the copy who thinks about the SEO implications of the copy so it's important for us to consider SEO um you know on page SEO that's really the the limit that we that that we work within you know we're not gonna We're not gonna do a strategy for blogging and other content in their marketing and on their website um but it's important to understand the words and phrases that people are searching for but that's where it's funny because you can get much of the same information that you would if you were on semrush or using some seo seo tool you would get almost the same information from those customer interviews because they're using their own language which is typically the stuff that they type out when they're searching for something so the client themselves it might not be a hundred percent and you can augment that and strengthen it with some keyword research but if you are able to and not every client will give you access to their customers so I gotta say that straight away it's an ideal scenario that I push for on every project um it's just because I know it yields such good information um and it and it all supports the SEO really well um just by employing a structure a messaging structure copywriting structure that we use your SEO is strengthened because we have taken the time to think about who is on the other end that's what SEO is all about yeah okay so basically if I understand you by doing customer research I write copy that resonates which basically is good for SEO it's I'm not thinking about this from the SEO lens but it's actually also serving as a good SEO it's like the more it's like the natural the natural non-techy way to do really good SEO is just to understand who these people are and what their needs are and what they're looking for fantastic all right um I'm not seeing any other questions in the chat right now so Damien thank you so much for giving this introduction to our audience I hope that you are sold on the idea that you need to write the copy on your websites as well and it's going to help you position yourself as a strategic partner to your clients uh Damien welcome on board the flux House of courses excited to have you on as as a partner and uh excited to to have more students experience your courses and learn together with you thank you very much thank you Ron fantastic see you soon everybody bye-bye