Tone Guide 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 define a writing style, or tone, in order to purchase the correct services. The challenge was to define these tones in clear, concise ways that helped to direct the purchaser to the correct type of content.
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.
One thing I found consistently missing from all these sites was the option to select the desired tone for the copy.
Iterations
The need for a tone guide wasn’t something that was requested in any initial testing. After several beta tests it became apparent that there was a disconnect between the final copy and what the client was expecting.
Because this was often not something the client was consciously aware of, it wasn’t enough to ask more general questions like “what type of article are you looking for?” Clients would only give technical answers to these types of questions.
We tested options with open format answers (What tone would you like the article to have?”) and when that was still a pain point we moved to selecting a single tone. This worked well for the client, but was too broad for the copywriter and did not fix the underlying issue.
Final Deliverable
Our final iteration was to expand the selectable tone guide options, and force the client to select at least two options. This was still relatively easy for the client, and significantly more helpful for the copywriter.
After testing various tone keywords, I selected the ones that clients chose most often and responded most positively to.
Key Takeaways
It was interesting to see that a factor that no one was consciously aware of played such an important role in both client and copywriter satisfaction. It motivated us to look for other questions that could similarly open up communication, such as our Client Brief question. You can see that case study here: Client Brief Cast Study.
