 Hi everyone. Thanks for coming to this room to hear this thing. It's 2.15 so I thought I should start talking. So my name is Shannon O'Malley and I'm going to talk about this content, these content things today. Have any of you guys ever read Memoirs of Agatia? A lot of you, awesome. So I'm reading Memoirs of Agatia right now too and I'm struck by her Demure language, the author, whenever she talks about meeting a man and she's going to entertain him, she always goes up to him and she's like, sir, may I beg your indulgence? And it's because she's a woman and they're all men and she has to be Demure and everything. Well, this is the first time I've ever presented anything at DrupalCon so I feel like I have to like beg your indulgence. I don't like where this is. Okay, that's better. Yeah, so I've never presented at DrupalCon before. I've been working at Calamuna which is, we make websites primarily in Drupal but we do a lot of other stuff. I'm pretty new to this world. I come from the world of advertising. I spent eight years as an advertising copywriter which meant that I conceived of the horrible campaigns that are then inflicted upon society through commercials and billboards and things like that. But I left the dark side and now I'm here and I'm glad about that. So I work with Calamuna, we're a shop in Oakland and we make the internet for universities and nonprofits, arts organizations, you know, the light side, right? So I've been there for about a year and now I do content things, primarily creative direction and content strategy. So I try to bring what I know from the advertising world into what we do here and I've been learning a lot about development, content strategy, information architecture. So my brain has kind of turned into this like synthesis of like the development and content strategy world and my past as an advertising copywriter where I learned a lot about marketing strategy. So part of what inspired this presentation is kind of like the merger of my background with what I do today now at Calamuna. So I'm going to start talking about all this content stuff now. That's out of the way. That's me. So now we can talk about TV, which is also a great topic of conversation. One of my favorite shows is Orange is the New Black. That's fantastic. This is Tasty from Orange is the New Black. And I just wanted to talk about this for a minute. It's just kind of step outside of like the content stuff just for a minute because everyone's been talking about UX and development and I want to take a kind of philosophical step back for a minute and say that I noticed that since I've been working with Calamuna and learning about all these other great shops in this world like Four Kitchens and Atten and Pantheon is whole ecosystem of Drupal, the Drupal world. I noticed that it's kind of one step away from like specializing in content and meaning and it's kind of more focused on form. Like how can we use what we know to make websites or products that work and like look amazing and have exceptional interactions and get people to do what we want. And I'm like, whoa, what about like meaning and content and all this stuff. So I just want to give a little anecdote here. So Netflix has been around for like a long time and because of Netflix, we have the glory of Orange is the New Black and House of Cards and all of this stuff. But Netflix used to be this company that helps you get DVDs through the mail. I don't know if any of you did that like 10 years ago when Netflix was like still like coming up and that's what they did. They were just a conduit, kind of like Drupal. They were just a form for movies, for other content, for content producers. They themselves were not a content producer. But now we have the glory of Orange is the New Black because of Netflix and Orange is the New Black is a Netflix original. You can only get it on Netflix. And so throughout the years, Netflix as a kind of conduit has realized that they kind of own the means of production. They can decide what they want to show people. And so they've gotten into distributing premium content such as Orange is the New Black. And so I just want to kind of put it out there that just because you're at a Drupal shop, you may or may not have thought of this before. I don't know what you all think about, but you can have influence over content and the meanings of those contents of that content with your clients. I realize that some shops are kind of further along in that regard if they even feel like that's a benefit to their business. We at Calamune are finding that it is. A lot of clients come to us and they say they want a website. And that is sometimes part of the problem that they don't even realize that they have is that they're just like, I want a website. So they look like this. And this is what they say. And you're like awesome. You want a website. That's fantastic. We make websites. But then they're like, here's all this content we wrote. Here are these pictures. These great pictures and we have this headline and then we have a picture of our CEO and we have a paragraph about our widgets and then we have another paragraph about our gremlins and we're going to sell them all. And even if they don't sell anything, if they're a non-profit or they're an arts worker or whatever, they have something they want to say. But they give it to you in these chunks. And they may or may not have really considered this content in a strategic way. So this is usually what happens. They give you content or this is what happens in my experience. Like I said, I've only been working at a Drupal shop for a year, a year and a half. And in my experience is what happens. They come to you, they give you the stuff. And then if the stuff is kind of okay or not okay, you're like, okay, well, we're going to put it through the content strategy machine. And then you're like, okay, then I get it. And so the expectation is that you're going to give me your content and I'm going to like Tetris it around and maybe rename some things and do a dance and make it jazzy and we're going to give it to the next people on the conveyor belt, you know, the interaction designers and then later on the developers and then we're going to have this website. But sometimes I get the content and I try to rearrange it and I try to rename things and I try to do stuff to it, but it is still like relentlessly bad. And what I mean by that is that it's not strategic. A website is, it's part of a, it's part of a huge like marketing mix for an organization. And a lot of them, they don't see it that way. And they're just like, hey, here's this content, we know we need a website, we think we need some buttons, can you move things around and just make it work, right? Sarah like. So if content strategy tries its best to move all your bits around and rename things and make you a website without talking about, or without having a discussion with a client about like, well, what are you really trying to do with this website? Like, what are your, who is your organization? Who are you trying to reach? You end up with a website like this. And I'm sorry if any of you went to Davenport University. This is a fine website, right? It's got colors and it has a name and has a URL. And it's got some, you know, very obvious like main navigation items, right? It's a university. So it has a button you can click on that says college of business. And there's another thing you can click on that says news and events. And that's all great. I'm not going to like, totally dog on this website. Like, I'm sure the user experience designer is fine. The developers are fine. They're competent. This website is like, maybe doing stuff that Davenport University needs the website to do. It's all fine. It's fine. But if I were a student, kind of just searching for a place to go to school, and maybe somebody told me some names of some places I should go, I somehow end up on this website. I don't really know how I would understand it as a different entity than say Harvard, or UC Berkeley, or something very different like DeVry University, or ITT, or, I don't know, maybe even a culinary institute. Like, I look at this website, and I think, okay, I don't know, health professions, technology, business, urban education, what does that mean? I don't know, arts and sciences, should I get an, can I get an English degree here? Maybe, maybe they have a culinary arts, maybe they have PE, I don't really know. I don't know what their point of differentiation is. What I mean to say is that it's pretty generic. I don't know what I'm going to get when I look at this home page. And that's too bad, because the website is like one of your main, it's one of your main marketing vehicles. It's where people go to learn about you, it's where they go to get an impression about who works there, what kind of mission you have, what kind of people go there, how big you are. They want to get a feel for what your entity is, whether it's a school or a nonprofit or a commercial business or whatnot. And so I pulled this one out just as an example of a website that doesn't, it's not very articulate in terms of look and feel and messaging. All I know is that they're a university and maybe this guy goes there, I don't know. He probably goes there. Or he's a model or something, I don't know. So that's generally what I see as a problem. And to put it more specifically, I see a lot of clients thinking of their site as a utility versus a marketing vehicle. They're more concerned with it as a thing. Where are they going to go to click on apply? Which is important. But it's not everything. They're concerned with questions like, well, we need to have five main navigation items instead of four. Or where's the president, the picture of the president going to go, things like that. They have these agendas or whatever. And they're not necessarily thinking of it as a marketing vehicle. Many of them are. But they could be, in my experience, do a better job at it. So I want to talk a little bit more about this difference between thinking of a website as a utility and thinking of it as a marketing thing. And forgive me if I say anything that maybe a lot of you already know, or if I'm harping on things that in your agencies you already talk about, I don't know what you talk about. I'm just going to talk about my experiences and what I see with clients. So what I mean by looking at a website as a utility is the nuts and bolts of it. Things that don't really have to do with thinking of the site as a piece of rhetoric, which it is, a piece of persuasion. What are the calls to action? Where do they go? These are all more tactical content strategy concerns. Other questions like this. You know, we have a blog. What are we going to do with the blog? And they get stuck on these questions. Like, well, we have it. We have to keep it. Where's it going to go? We have writers for it. We got to keep it. We spent all this money on it. Let's put it on the home page. Ah! So I hear these things. What I don't really hear so much, and what I don't get a whole lot of background on maybe half the time when we engage in a web project are questions like these. They come, they want a website. But they haven't really solidified who they are, the way they talk about what they do, and why they do it. Some organizations do think about this, right? They have a mission and a vision. Organizations seem to be on a spectrum of being able to answer these questions. In the worst case, they haven't really addressed them much at all. And in the best cases, they have somebody or many people there who just address these questions and who are constantly working on them. And I think of these as marketing strategy questions. Who are we? What do we do? How do we say that? How do we say who we are to people? How do we say who we are to different people? In the case of a university, for example, I may have, as a CMO or somebody in the marketing function at a university, I may be speaking to many different kinds of people, potential students, faculty. What if one of our huge things is that we need to hire faculty? I need to speak about our university in a very particular way to those people because they're looking for something specific. If they're looking for a job at my university, other audiences may be staff members. What does staff members want for a website? They want to be able to access back end stuff, whatever that is. A lot of organizations seem not to have sussed these things out. Who are we and who are we talking to and how do we prioritize these audiences? Some of them don't know. In the best case, they do know and they're like, we'll say in the case of a university, our number one audience is potential undergraduate applicants. That is who we're talking to. And those are the people our website really has to appeal to as opposed to faculty members or donors or alumni or any number of people in that giant world of university audiences. Some of them, some clients haven't asked these questions. These questions are also important if you are a company or you're a client that sells things. Maybe you sell, your client sells like three products. Maybe they sell 300 products, I don't know. But a lot of them have these products and maybe the products have names and the marketing people at the client's office talk about the products in a vastly different way in an inconsistent way, which isn't good. Because people need to kind of be able to latch on to that one product benefit or that number one and number two product benefit. A lot of clients, they haven't been thinking about these things maybe because there's nothing wrong with them. Maybe they're very early on and they're development as a company or for whatever reason the marketing and messaging function inside of their organization is having tension with another department or something or there's something going on there where they haven't been able to really even ask or answer a lot of these marketing strategy questions before they come to you. So they come to you, they haven't had these things answered and they're like make a website. So I'm like great. Okay. I'll make a website. We're going to do it. It's going to be awesome. But inevitably I end up wanting to go back to them and say wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's hold on. Yeah, we're going to do your website for a minute. But what have you done before you came to us to talk about this website? As this slide shows, so what this slide is is basically like kind of, you think of it as a timeline maybe or a waterfall-ish schedule, ideal schedule of events for a client in terms of their marketing strategy or communication strategy. What they should really be doing is like answering these questions. You know, like what is our what is our brand value proposition? We have three products. What are the value propositions of these products and how do we talk to the, how do we talk about those products to different audiences? They should have those things all sussed out. Not only like kind of abstractly, but also in terms of like people-facing messages and things like taglines or product descriptors or things like that. Sometimes they come to us and they just, they don't have those things and so we get the content. I try to move it around but I can tell that it's just, it's not thought through and if we implement this content we're going to end up with a bad website. Anyway, so what they should really be doing is starting out with communication strategy. You know, this is the kind of more abstract work that includes research and a lot of other things I'll get into in a minute. And then people or consumer facing messages. So we called it an advertising was consumer facing. Just so weird. And then once you have those messages down, you start thinking about, okay, well what are the media that I need to be manifesting these messages through? Are our audiences more apt to be online? Are they driving around on the 405 and they see billboards? Like where do they go? What kind of messages are they going to want to see? What are they most amenable to? And in those options, your options as a client to manifest your message are many and varied. I mean, you have online ads, social media, billboards, tracers. Let me go on and on. I mean, you could put a message in the back of a truck or in a bathroom on the top of a toilet and you can consider that advertising media. The website is just one of those. So it's a very, I don't want to say small, but it's just one of many executables for a client's message or various messages. But again, a lot of them don't think of that. They think it's like the end all be all that's going to like take their organization to the stratosphere and it's going to hold all the things. It's going to have the blog and it's going to have a picture of the CEO and a picture of the CMO and everything they ever wanted. But I try to get them to think of it more strategically than that. More strategically than that. So this is kind of like the ideal way I would like to see clients come to us, but they often don't. They often just come to us at that very lower right-hand side saying we need a website. And I end up wanting to say, okay, well we need to go back up the chain here and look at what you've done in terms of communication strategy and see what parts of this puzzle you've worked on already and see what parts of the puzzle we can help you work on so that we can answer these questions of how do we talk about who you are? How do we talk about what you do and why and what makes you different? So we get into these kind of more marketing strategy conversations with a client and they don't expect it. And that's okay. They end up appreciating the new viewpoint in most cases. So I came up with an example of this problem at work. The university space I've noticed and we work with a lot of universities at Calamuna is typically very conservative in their communications. They're not going to go out and have like Babe Booth at a university trade show or you know have language that's going to be very exciting. They're conservative, they're institutions and they want to be thought of as you know places you can trust and you can tell that in their websites. You'll see that in some of the examples that I've come out here with. But I just want to show you a few where they have been thinking about communication strategy but they could have pushed it a lot further. So this is the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing website. I'm just going to point out some main features of it to you and keep moving and show you some stuff as I keep going. Again like Davenport University it's a fine website. It has a very visible main navigation area here up at the top. If I want to know about about I know where to go. If I want to find out about degree programs you know all these main questions that many probably top audiences want to know will be answered right there in the main navigation item. There's a picture probably like somebody who looks like many of the website users. This person here could be a nurse, she could be a potential applicant, she could be a faculty member, she might even look like she works there. So not knowing a whole lot about the University of Pittsburgh I'm like okay that's probably a good picture to choose to put on your website. And then I've got some copy there at the bottom that talks about how great they are. But to me the thing I want you to focus on is the the headline there. It says a research emphasis. Okay great okay that's good. You have an emphasis on research that's fine. So this is an okay website. It's fine. This is also another fine website. This is one of their competitors. This is Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. I think they're ranked number two as in terms of like academically rigorous graduate schools for potential nurses. You'll notice some similarities in this website to the one that I just showed you. The top letterboard is blue. They have a main nav area in the same area as their competitor. And then they have a messaging nugget here and it says leading the way in education, research and practice locally and globally. It's a fine website. It looks a little bit like the one before. Okay here's another one of their competitors. So these three schools are all in competition with each other for the same students. The same people. They have BAs in nursing. Maybe there are ends. They're looking to get a PhD or another master's degree. The same person is looking at this website. This is the University of Illinois. Again we have a top letterboard that's blue. Nav is in the same area. That's okay. They have some women there who may be faculty members. They may be potential students. We don't know who they are but they kind of belong there for some reason. And then their main message. The first thing you see, the thing that takes up the most real estate for words, is UIC College of Nursing rank number two in NIH funding. So NIH National Institutes of Health. This is an organization that gives money to research institutions and individuals for health. So again we have another university that's touting their research capabilities as their main thing that they want you to know about. So here are the websites all lined up against each other. Again these are some of the top ranked nursing school. I think I believe they're all in the top maybe five. If you go and look at those academic books that rank grad programs. University of Pittsburgh their main message is a research emphasis. Johns Hopkins, they're leading the way in education. Research again in practice. University of Illinois. We're ranked number two in NIH funding. So basically what all these universities are saying is that they're the best in research. They're also saying they like blue. They're also saying we put the nav in the same place. We are speaking to women because that's what you see on the website. To me they're at first glance if I didn't know much about the world of nursing graduate schools I really wouldn't know how to differentiate them. So that's not a great thing because if these schools think of their they think of their website as the thing that's going to lure candidates which I think they are. They're not doing a great job at differentiating themselves or explaining very quickly whether it's through messaging or through look and feel why they're any different than any other university. Yes it's true that you can find these things out in other ways other than the website. A customer journey will prove that. I learn about graduate schools through my professors. I learn about them through my colleagues. Maybe my mom told me something. I look into those books like U.S. the magazines U.S. news reports and I find out which are the best ones. But ultimately I'm going to go to this website to understand who you are and why you're different than your competitors. I may not think of that as an apple. I might not think of you as a competitor as an applicant. I'm just looking for schools. I want to go to school. But if you think of these websites as marketing vehicles then the websites are there. I want to use this word but they're kind of competitive weapons right there. They're marketing vehicles for entities that are in competition with each other for the same people for the business for the money of the same people. But they're not really putting their best foot forward or making themselves look any different than any of any other university. Now again like I said the university space is typically conservative. They're not going to put a picture of a Lamborghini or have a party scene on their website or do anything that's going to like kind of rock the boat. But they still have an opportunity to differentiate themselves from their competitors and they need to have one. So that's part of the problem. And when I say like differentiated value proposition I don't just mean like the message. You know like a tagline or a descriptor or anything like that. I mean the entire way that you communicate your brand your tagline your message your look and feel even the way people interact with your website interactivity is branded sound is branded everything that I perceive from you as a brand tells me more about who you are and why you're different. Like I just showed you there they have they've kind of missed an opportunity in the case of these these universities. So what I try to do with clients like this is try to get them to take a step back and when they give me the content try to take them a step back and be like OK let me try to suss out from these people how much communication strategy work they've done. So we don't end up with a website that looks just like their competitors. You can do you can make them a website that looks just like their competitors. And that website will work for them in many ways. You know they'll have a button that says apply now and that's great. But I want agencies to think about these websites that we make as portfolio pieces. We at Calamuna when we make a website we do it for our client and we want our clients to succeed. We want the website to meet its objectives whether that be increase ROI or you know get somebody to vote a certain way or what have you. But these websites are also portfolio pieces for us. And clients don't just look at your portfolio to see to make sure you put the buttons in the right place or look at pretty pictures as you know or you know decide. Oh I like how that I like how they use that green. You know that looks professional. That's like legit. You know they're looking at the whole thing and savvy CMOs and savvy marketing people are looking at messages and they're thinking about well how does this website communicate the difference of this organization. So if you as an agency don't help the client do that you're you're in my opinion you're you're kind of selling your agency short because you're you're making a website that has the buttons in the right places and you've done your best in content strategy and you develop this awesome thing and it has bells and bells and whistles and whatever. But it's not it may not be working as a piece of marketing and a website is a piece of marketing. So I want to talk about some things that I have learned from the ad world and my history in marketing a little bit that I have been able to bring a little bit into our work at Calamuna that help. And these are the kind of tactical solutions that I use to help clients work through these troubles before we get to thinking thinking about things like content strategy or information architecture. So and there are many solutions to this to these problems. I'm just going to highlight a couple of main ones. You know the first thing you can do is start asking questions. You know like I said before like are you guys even doing these things. Are you thinking about who you are. What makes you different. How do you talk about those things. You know just testing that out the beginning is is just one step in figuring out like what you can do for them. And then the next thing you know if they you find out that they have not answered these questions they come to you and they're like we need a website. We kind of know who we are. We kind of know what we do what we sell or not sell. You know they maybe they're a nonprofit they don't sell a thing is is show them this tool called the positioning statement. I can't say that this is like some kind of you know big secret thing. It's but but it is a thing from like the kind of more content and communications oriented world. It's called the positioning statement. It's used at the marketing strategy level whenever a company is at the beginning of thinking about how they're going to talk about themselves. And you can create one using this template. Most CMOs know what this is. If they have an MBA they definitely know what this is. And it more or less looks like this. If you if you search for positioning statement template online you'll see them everywhere. They generally look like this and they answer these questions. The first one is who is your target market. And what is your name. Like do you have a brand name. What category are you in. So for example are you a nursing graduate school. Are you a luxury car maker. Are you a frisbee maker or are you something bigger like a toy maker or an entertainment company. You know I don't know but helping clients understand their category that third line there is really important. Some clients are afraid to say that they're a part of a certain category of product or service or organization because we do all these things. We don't just do that. We make frisbees and toilets. So you got to kind of get them to like position themselves within a within a competitive set. I'll talk about that a little more later. Damn this thing. So the fourth line the positioning statement says that and that is your point of differentiation. You want your organization to be able to understand within the context of their competitive set. Why they're different. In the case of you know we'll go back to the the nursing schools you know is it that you're the number one school and research you get the most money in research or is it that you're really small. Maybe your program is like 50 people and every student gets so much attention. That's very different than saying you're the number one school and research and you get the most money and you have you know you're at the forefront of everything new and medical education. A nursing school can have any number of differentiators that they can hold their hang their hat on. Once you have figured out your point of differentiation you need to be able to back it up. Once a potential customer or constituent or whomever makes up your audience. Here's that you are different because you make vinyl toilets. And they're the warmest. They want to know well why why like what why should I believe that your toilets are the warmest. Well you have to have a reason right. Well it's because they're made of vinyl and they're electric. That's why. So you have to be able to back up your point of differentiation. So if you are the number one school and research you have to be able to prove it. You are getting the most money from the NIH. You do employ the most the faculty with the most cash and the most published research articles in your area. So this is a skeleton of the positioning statement. So I'm going to take you through some of more concrete examples of this thing in action. So I'm just curious. It's like I don't like I said I've never presented at the Drupal con before. So how many of you have seen this before. So like maybe a little under half. Okay. That helps me understand how I should be talking about this. So I'm going to show you the positioning statement for BMW. It uses the template that I just showed you. So they figured out. So this probably took them. I have no idea but I'm guessing a million dollars to write this and it probably took over a year and they probably hired lots of consultants. They probably did a lot of research with a lot of different people to to get to this point. So this is their positioning statement. They figured out who their audience is. They have a name. They have a category. They have a point of differentiation and they have a reason why you should believe that point of differentiation for drivers who value auto performance. So that's their target. People who value audio auto performance. That's not my mom. My mom just wants to go to the grocery store. She's in care if her auto performs. She just wants to get her cigarettes. So BMW knows who they're talking to. It's not my mom. For drivers who value auto performance BMW is the luxury vehicle maker. So that may seem obvious to you. Like yeah that's who they are. But they could have just as easily said that they were a transportation company. That's very different. What's a transportation company? Is that Hertz rental car? Is that Uber? You may be able to call all of those companies transportation companies. But BMW has chosen this very specific category called luxury vehicle maker. And what that does is it positions them within a very particular competitive set of companies that also consider themselves luxury vehicle makers. And that's important because when they go out in the world they know that they can't say the same things as those other companies say. And they can't look like those other companies. They can't look like Bentley. They can't look like Jaguar. Or else they're nobody. They have to put their best foot forward and be different than anybody else in the luxury vehicle category. And then they decided that they delivered joy. That's their point of differentiation. That might seem kind of touchy feely to I think a lot of you who work with code and numbers and websites and things are very like exact and right angled and 90 degrees here and there. But this is a perfectly fine point of differentiation. I don't think any other car company has it. I don't think anybody else says our vehicles deliver joy. That's what they do. But BMW did the research and they decided that that was what they were going to hang their hat on. We deliver joy through our vehicles. Why. Well because of German engineering. Now I don't know how they put that together. Okay. I don't know what research they did to create these relationships between these things but this is their positioning statement and nobody else has it. And that's probably one of the most important things. Nobody else can say this. No other luxury vehicle maker can say these things or position themselves in this way. A note about this positioning statement. It's not consumer facing. I found this because I was looking at marketing blogs. It's not anything you'll ever find on a company website. You might find a mission statement on a company website or a vision statement or an about us section or like company or something like that. But this is a abstract strategic tool that they keep behind the scenes. So they're they're they're little marketing minions are back there hoarding this in a vault and they don't want anyone to see it because they don't want anyone to think that they're that calculated. But they are and they all are. Every company should be if they want to survive and they want to win. So you won't find a positioning statement anywhere on a company website. You should keep it inside your own little vault for your clients. So the next thing that happens is positioning statement is that it becomes not abstract. It becomes concrete. It becomes something that real people out in the world that all of us come to understand through various touch points through TV and actually seeing the product and seeing bill boards and whatever this positioning statement is communicated to us through various media. And one of the most concrete ways that it's communicated to us is through the company tagline. Oh I think says Volvo should really say BMW. So BMW's tagline is sheer driving pleasure. Now we would see that somewhere and we do see it. We see it on their website. It's manifested through all their creative. So what I've just taken you through is just a really quick kind of linkage from marketing strategy a marketing strategy tool the positioning statement to their tagline sheer driving pleasure which is a distillation of their point of differentiation you know all that stuff about we create joy right. So they've they've created they've translated that into this word pleasure in their marketing creative in the form of their website. So the headline here that they have is driving pleasure unmatched. It's a very BMW thing to say it might kind of feel like whatever you know it's not very sexy or I'm not shocked or it doesn't say anything that like stops me but it's good because it's it's on brand and no other brand whatever uses headline no other luxury vehicle whatever uses head line on their website. And I'm going to show you one of their competitors to show you how that works. Volvo another luxury car maker also has a positioning statement for upscale American families Volvo is a luxury vehicle maker same category as BMW that provides peace of mind because Volvo creates and tests more safety features than any other car manufacturer. So yeah stopping power no who cares language is uninteresting it's unsexy that's OK it's an abstract marketing tool but it it's very powerful when you take it and you start trying to manifest it through creative work which is what we do when we make websites we're making creative work we're making pictures and words that people will see people don't come to a website to read a positioning statement it's not interesting it's not captivating the website is a piece of creative work that is informed by a positioning statement. So again Dave Volvo has identified their main audience their upscale American families they've identified their category which is the same as BMW luxury vehicle maker their unique selling point that no other luxury vehicle company can own is that they provide peace of mind. So you don't go to Bentley because you want peace of mind you don't go to BMW because you want peace of mind you might not think about these things but because of their communication strategy that's kind of what's in the back of our mind when we think about Volvo peace of mind safety our kids might have a logo because we have kids but we still want a luxury vehicle and they back all this up in their positioning statement with proof they create and test more safety features than any other car manufacturer no other luxury vehicle maker can say that. So they've owned this position and they use it to to do their creative work whether they do it in house or they send it to an agency and so the way that this positioning statement has manifested through consumer facing messages is their tag line for life. So whoever wrote this tag line was also looking at a marketing positioning statement. Again we don't ever see the positioning statement in the public but we do see the tag line because the tag line is kind of like okay it's marketing strategy further down the line it was designed for us to see and then further on if we keep on thinking about Volvo and how their positioning statement manifests through their creative work we can look at their website and see how it has seamlessly been manifested on their site through words imagery, interactivity. You don't see like a Boxster here you don't see Volvo's top of the line speed demon car I mean it's like a minivan and it says if it matters to you it matters it's everything to us. So this website is right on strategy it's on brand it's a seamless execution off of their marketing strategy. So I want to say to you that everyone you know when your clients come to you and they haven't had any of this done they haven't thought about any of these things or maybe they have thought about some of it but it really needs some work it's not so great maybe they're you know maybe they have worked on messaging but it sounds like I'm one of their competitors and you want to help them because you don't want to make a website that looks like their competitors website you're not serving them and you're not serving your own agency but you don't have 300 people working on marketing strategy maybe you have nobody my suggestion is that you just do your best these huge companies like Volvo and BMW you know they have tons of money there's like they're they're global like who knows how many marketing minions they have around the world thinking about these things and tracking them and evolving them like who knows we don't I mean we at Calamuna I think what are we like 10 people or 14 people I don't know there's not many of us and so we we we don't have the resources to like really hunker down and help these clients answer these questions you know we are not a marketing strategy firm we we specialize in in Drupal and we make websites and you know we've done some other things we have a thing called Calabox which you should check out but anyway we don't specialize in this so so when we find out that sorry no we'll talk to you about that later we don't we don't specialize in any of this stuff and I am not a special I'm not a specialist in this I'm a copywriter I spent eight years just like writing taglines and like you know working on Meow mix or something like marketing strategy and research is like not my forte but I know about it and I studied it and because I know about it I'm able to kind of see the cracks when clients come to us so I'm just doing my best I'm like okay well we we you as a client you don't have a hundred thousand dollars you might even have a hundred dollars to come to us to do any kind of research on your brand to figure out what your message needs to be but if you can just spend even a half an hour thinking about it you're doing something for them if you can just spend an hour being like hmm okay you make the warmest toilet seats but there are these other companies that make the hottest toilet seats how are you going to deal with that how are you going to talk about your toilet seats let's can we just talk about it for an hour so we can like figure out how to how to express your brand differently because we really want to sell these hot warm toilet seats or whatever it is you have you know so what I mean to say is do your best that's what I do do research when the budget allows try to sell this kind of work when you need it and when the budget allows even if you think you they don't have money sometimes you can get the money to do this thing if you can educate them and show them that they really kind of need to be thinking about these things and at worst of course you can make it up so I'll show an example of how we did it following with the UCSF school of nursing they were our client they actually are the number one in research they actually do employ the most faculty with the most publications and the best pedigrees and the highest funding and this that and the other and they can prove it so they came to us and they're like well we need some web work I actually can't remember if it was just a migration or if what do they want I can probably ask about it later with my developer dudes here but they didn't they did not come to us for any kind of communication strategy they were like we need a website I think they said actually that we needed to migrate to triple seven or triple eight or something I don't know I'm new to triple but then they gave us this content they're like here's all the content here just take all this and put it in that and then here's the money and I was like I don't want to do this website I do not want to have like God bless UCSF they're an amazing organization and our client was also amazing but I didn't want to make this website because I was like oh my God we're gonna have this website on our portfolio that has all the right buttons and all the right colors but like is it in English is it even screwed like it was inscrutable the content that she wanted us to put in there was like inscrutable it was redundant and most importantly like it did not communicate the UCSF school of nursing's value proposition and it was a huge it was going to be a huge missed opportunity for them because they actually are they actually do get the most research funding than any other nursing graduate school I think in the world definitely the U.S. so probably the world right because we're ra ra America so I had to back up and I and I forced room in this conversation to talk about this stuff with our client and say hey you know the content that you have it doesn't really communicate like the strength of your brand and you really do have a differentiated brand you have like a way to back it up so let's communicate that to your audiences so I only spent maybe a couple hours putting this positioning statement together based on what I knew about our client and she was cool with it you know I talked to her about it and she you know it made sense to her so we came up with this positioning statement for nursing graduate candidates because that's who they wanted to their business objective was to attract candidates applicants as opposed to higher faculty or use the website for some weird back end purpose their main point was to attract a certain kind of candidate for nursing graduate candidates the UCSF school of nursing is the graduate school that prepares students for an innovative evolving nursing career because only UCSF offers the best number one funded NIH research training in the country all in San Francisco the U.S. Heart of Innovation this was all new to her she wasn't thinking about these things so I actually reverse engineered all this stuff this kind of was their tagline that they didn't really like have a positioning statement that kind of like helped push the website forward so this is the creative messaging that came that like kind of works in symbiosis with their positioning statement and this is how it manifested in the creative work it's a university space again they're not going to have a Ferrari with like frat parties and whatever those nurses do on their website but it doesn't look like any it doesn't look like any other competitors website and it does actually claim the position of being number one in research being number one in funding this kind of world of like being at the forefront they use this word pioneering they are they actually are able to claim that space that their competitors do not rightly have the they shouldn't be allowed to do that because they don't they can't back it up like UCSF can so this is the creative that came out of our short strategy work here with UCSF so marketing strategy and content strategy I've tried to like suss out the difference between those two things as I was creating this presentation because I know that they're different I'm still learning about content strategy content strategy to me and my reading and my work at Calamuna it seems more tactical and less abstract than the marketing world content strategy is more about okay how do we name things how do we organize things how do we get the user to do this and then this and then this versus marketing strategy which I think is like a step above and it has more to do with like business objectives and rhetoric so I want to talk a little bit about how you all may do it differently I don't even know if any of you even are working in the kind of marketing strategy area and your agency but you probably are working more in the content strategy area so I want to talk a little bit about how I've been able to merge my thinking in marketing strategy into what I've learned about content strategy so at Calamuna we use this tool called user stories how many of you guys use user stories and content strategy okay awesome so you're familiar with them so usually when we end up doing a user story exercise with a client you know we ask them to we work with them to prioritize these user stories and after we prioritize them we may or may not agree with how they prioritize these stories you know like if we're you know making a website about the warmest toilets you know the number one user story that the client may want to prioritize is as a user of a toilet seat I would like to know how hot the seat is so that I can decide to buy your toilet seat we may or may not like that that's the user need that we need to satisfy in the website but in any case we end up with a prioritize list that looks something like this so what I try to do is we work in the content strategy space we try to prioritize the user stories so that we can start understanding where the buttons need to go and the user flow where the paragraphs about x y and z need to go but I'm always thinking about the user stories that don't exist and those are the ones that have to do with marketing so I make up my own so for example this is a UCSF school of nursing spreadsheet for our user stories for that project I've created a fake user story that basically makes it so that we have to satisfy we have to we have to be thinking about the website as a marketing vehicle because the user is not they're not asking to be marketed to so my number one user story whether the user wants this to be the user story or not I put it there says as a potential nursing school applicant I want to know how UCSF is different than other schools so that I can decide if my interests align with the school's strengths so that allows me to prioritize the website to think of the website as a marketing vehicle using the structure of the user stories and it doesn't have to just be one user story you should be satisfying questions like who am I talking to how do the different audiences need to be talked to how do we communicate the different value propositions of different products you could you could morph all of that thinking into user stories and then prioritize them in terms of the other stories that you've been working on through a kind of more traditional condo strategy process in my experience this kind of gets kind of hairy it's a work in progress but it's my way of integrating my thinking about marketing and rhetoric that has to be done to make these websites work for the client into a more traditional content strategy process so the way that we've implemented these stories or satisfied these stories here's an example with this project is we've used a homepage sketch for example or some site comps to start thinking about where we're going to prioritize these user stories so this is a homepage sketch that my colleague who's here at Tiago made a long time ago and it's a sketch that shows how the most prioritized sections are going to be used in terms of user stories so these are all numbered right so this is like the main area of the website this is where eyeballs are going to go this is where we have the chance to solve or solve for needs of our most important audiences so right here what I've done is written down the numbers of user stories that this area can solve for and down here and down here and I'm just focusing on the number one user story which is why are you different as a user of your website or as a potential candidate I want to know why you're different I want to know who you are basically in my experience the traditional content strategy disciplines use of user stories doesn't really account for that from what I've seen so this is me trying to kind of nudge it in there and make it work so that we can start doing information architecture and site mapping with that kind of marketing with those marketing considerations in mind and again so this is a homepage sketch and this is how it ended up working out in the final creative which is live these days so this is just a little sketch of like where all this thinking and all this work how it all works together kind of in a macro view just to kind of wrap all that up ideally your client here at the top should have done some research about who they are what they do how they talk about who they are how they talk about what they do and who they do it for they should know who their category is they should understand their competitive landscape what other people are saying about their companies that are like theirs what other websites look like you know what is this landscape that our users are accustomed to seeing and who are they your client should already hopefully have been thinking about these things sometimes they do something they don't but it's up to you whether or not you want to kind of do a couple steps back and help them to start thinking about these things and after the research process you can come to the positioning statement which is a very foundational marketing tool that you can use to kind of help ground them and help kick start the conversation about well who are you what do you do can you even back it up what you know what's your point of differentiation these sorts of things and once you have that down they sign off on that then you can start doing creative and this is why I get so frustrated with our clients because they come to us here they come to us down here at the bottom they like make a website and they haven't done all this stuff up at the top in many cases one of the problems that I've come up with in trying to get this thinking through to clients is like well how do we get money for it in my experience in the case of making websites you start out with an SOW that says you're going to make a website you don't start out with an SOW that says you're going to rethink my whole content strategy you're going to think of my whole marketing strategy you're going to be doing this research for me like they usually don't come to you for this kind of stuff and it's only until you start talking to them that you realize that they kind of need this kind of work so the sooner the better to have this kind of conversation when you in your sales process when you start with your SOW start asking them these questions what do you know about your competitive landscape do you have a positioning statement do you know do you even have a mission statement like where are you in terms of positioning yourself against your competitors and why do you guys think you're different than your competitors if they can't answer these questions then that kind of gives you a red flag you're like okay they maybe need some work on strategy they need some work on content let me be thinking about this so it's kind of like stuff that you can understand through your intake process through sales if you have a discovery process which is what we use to start understanding more about the organization and if they have a current website we start understanding what their current website needs what their audiences are you can start approaching the client and asking them these kinds of questions during the discovery process and as early as possible you can kind of start leading the client to thinking about these kinds of things and kind of seeing if maybe they'd be interested in furthering these conversations and more importantly doing a change request or opening up their contract with you to start doing this kind of work it takes some education but it's worth it because they're gonna end up with a website that pays off their business objectives and you're gonna end up with a website that looks great on your portfolio not just because of where the buttons are how you click on things but because it says the right things so that's just some information on how to sell oh why you should do this it's not just about money earlier I was talking about Netflix Netflix used to just be a conduit they were a vendor but now they dabble in content and that means more money for them it means more opportunity it means an enhanced brand in the culture they're not just like a tool they actually influence culture so we in the Drupal community we're not just tools obviously we're not just technology vendors we have the opportunity to impact content and help clients say the right things that are gonna help their bottom lines of course you can sell more services you're really, you're solving the real problems instead of just like being like okay we'll do a website sure and then of course you end up with some better portfolio pieces for your own company that's what I got I don't know if I'm over time or whatever but I saw that a lot of you actually do work in content strategy when I ask you to raise your hands do any of you kind of dabble in these questions or have these kinds of conversations with clients I'm curious yeah yeah I hear you I mean I can think of some of our own clients that are similar to the ones that you're talking about was a property management group yeah yeah I guess I don't know I mean I hear you tell the story the first thing that I think of is a lot depends on the relationship you know like you have some clients who you know you would hang out with and have a drink with and then some were just like are we even speaking the same language you know and when that's the case it's like harder to like get them to open up and have a conversation with you that is like kind of more on the level and like be like okay look let's have real talk here your shite sucks like you know can you please trust me to show you the way you know like not everybody wants to hear that you know like some clients are like I know the way you make the thing well sometimes sometimes they're right though because like I didn't talk about this so much in the preso but sometimes you are the category and if you are the category then that is your point of differentiation so like it's kind of okay you know until someone else enters their space and then they have a category in which they have competitors so they have there's this term whatever that I've heard in the marketing world that's like called category killer which means like you know you maybe came as up as a competitor but now you've created something that no one else like people can't even understand it because there's nothing else like it and if you're a category killer you have your own category then the conversation about a positioning statement or what's your value prop becomes really different and it's more about how do we remain our own category I don't know so I think about that I don't know so I think it's like it's about the relationship and then you know if there's room in the relationship to educate them I mean no one really wants to be like I'm gonna sit down and educate you you know like if there's a way to show them some of this thinking that you've been doing and kind of open their eyes then that's great maybe there's some room in there to start opening up some new contracts but if they're not they're not and then they just want a website it's like you have other opportunities I don't know that's what I think about that oh thank you so are you talking about your own organization are you talking about a client that you work with yeah that's something that I thought about in creating this presentation and I didn't include it but products themselves also have positioning statements just like a brand you know so like Volvo for example I'll use that one since we talked about I talked about it we didn't do anything Volvo does a lot of different things they make trucks they make you know they make trucks for business they make consumer vehicles and they also have weirdly a financial services arm but what all of those have in common is that they all fall under the Volvo umbrella brand about like quality and safety and peace of mind and that trickles down into those business verticals or whatever you want to call them but I guarantee you that those three verticals have their own positioning statement and if they have their own discreet products within those whatever units departments or whatever their products have their own positioning statements too because those products themselves just the minute products have competitors like you know the BMW 2X5Y Roadster is in competition with the Volvo whatever you know so they have these like marketing minions who are just working on that one product and positioning that one product I don't know I mean I would encourage you to like and actually look that up because that's like getting into some like business strategy stuff that like I don't I know a little bit about but that's kind of as far as I can go is saying that I know that products do well when they have their own researched positions against their competitors we had a client come in not too long ago who does a lot of different things a lot of different things like they send kids on like farm adventures but they also run a haunted house and so I'm like oh my god like how do we even do this like you're you're this like octopus of things you know that all fall under this kind of adventure entertainment group you know we didn't get to have a conversation about how do you position your Halloween haunted house against other people's haunted houses or how do you position your farm field trips against other outdoor activities for kids but that's what we would have done if we had continued the conversation so yeah I guess my answer is that like I would just do positioning for products yeah yes Rob I've only done this work in a waterfall way marketing strategy firms and for the most part advertising agency although they're changing work in a waterfall project management style in the creative space that's becoming a little different now these days but I'm more of the school what's what's the cliche a stitch in time saves nine your findings from your research could change that's why companies do rebrands is because their audiences have changed their competitive landscape has changed so these like tools that I presented here like positioning statement like I definitely don't present them and it's weird to say I present them because they're just a kind of common tool of the marketing world they're not set in stone and they're not like well this is us forever you know I think you do have to keep on reassessing like you know what's my space what's my point of differentiation if that changes but but I do think that if you do your research well up front about like well who's my competitor you know like who who's trying to bring down Rob Loach you know if you do that research and start thinking about like what are those people's competitive advantages you're gonna have a really good starting space to like build something that you won't have to revisit over the next six months or a year maybe when you say project what do you mean I would say that ideally you've done enough research about their about their company and their value proposition that you don't have to revisit it like when we do web projects generally you know they're like six months to a year or longer I would be like not happy if six months down the line we had to revisit the positioning statement because that would mean that we did not research the competitive landscape properly or we did not keenfully identify their value proposition I would be okay let's say eight month down the line if some new competitor came along that invalidated our value proposition I think that would be a reason to revisit your your positioning statement but I don't think of it as something that it's like you're constantly rethinking and hey Tiago what do you think about my positioning statement you think we should change it because whatever it's like no it's like it's based on research that takes a long time and that is considered so I don't want this to be agile that's what you mean sure thanks for coming