Client Brief Case Study

Overview

BACKGROUND

AirWork is a company that pairs experienced and established professionals looking to work an extra 10–15 hours a week with startups who do not need full-time staff for those positions. Our mission is to de-risk the freelancing market for entrepreneurs and to give talented industry professionals added freedom and market-rate income.

CHALLENGE

Startups who wanted to hire copywriters on AirWork were required to answer several questions to adequately define the specific copy they were looking for. The challenge was to balance the ability of the client to easily and efficiently input their parameters for the copywriter while receiving enough information to allow the copywriter to successfully complete the task.

ROLE

As the Head of Copyrighting at AirWork I was in charge of writing all of the content blocks in a way that was intuitive for the client and helped ensure the copywriter completed their work to the clients specifications.

Discovery

In researching, I looked at many existing freelance sites including Upwork, Freelancer, and The Content Factory, as well as online agencies such as Copify and Creative Copywriter.

Iterations

Our initial questions, in line with what we’d found on other sites, were mostly technical and focused on what the client needed. After several beta tests it became apparent that there was a disconnect between the final copy and what the client was expecting.

After studying the questions we were asking and the feedback from clients to try and determine the missing piece, I thought the problem might be what the client was looking for subconsciously, or what they hadn’t realized they were looking for.

To get to the heart of this missing communication, I tested the questions “What is the desired outcome of this (article, email, etc.)?” This improved the outcome some, but we were still getting a lof of answers that were too technical.

Final Deliverable

Our final iteration was adding the question “What do you want the reader to do when they’ve finished reading this (article, email, etc.)?”

This simple question did something that none of the other questions had, which was to force the client to stop thinking about the details of their project, and think about it from a more general viewpoint. Because of this, the answers we got were significantly more helpful in guiding the overall direction and purpose of any given task.

Key Takeaways

It was amazing that such a seemingly basic question could completely change the viewpoint of how a client looked at their own project in a way that was hugely beneficial to the copywriters ability to communicate the underlying message so much more effectively.