 pain points for clients and how to help them through it. Take it away. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I hope you're all enjoying the weekend so far. We certainly are. This is actually our very first word camp ever. So we're very excited to be here. Our talk isn't techie. So I really hope you still enjoy it. My name is Meg, and this is Rachel, my business partner. And we are from Sussex. And we run a design and marketing company called Shake It Up Creative. And we've both been sole traders before as well. And we have over 15 years experience with all different types of clients. Getting to know our clients and what drives them and their passions is part of our job. And it's something that we really, really enjoy about our jobs. And for me, in particular, as a web designer, it's my job to solve clients' problems. So I have to work really closely with them in order to help them find solutions. So there is a fair amount of client management involved in what we do. And it's probably the same for a lot of you guys as well. So hopefully you'll know what I'm talking about there. And we work with other developers and designers too. And the story is always the same. Our jobs would be so much easier if we didn't have clients. But of course, we have to have clients. We wouldn't have a business if we didn't have clients. And what do we mean by pain points? Well, it's the concerns that clients have when getting their website built. So it could be anything to do with hosting or domain names. Perhaps it's content. Or maybe they're not even really clear on who their target market is. And also it could be about costs as well. Sometimes it's not even about the website at all. It's about maybe an experience that they had previously with another service provider. So for example, we recently started working with a mobile ice cream retailer. And they had actually already selected their work development partner. But they were really concerned about their search engine rankings. They wanted to work with someone that understood that they wanted to preserve what they had, but also build on that and generate more visitors to their site. And they began to ask us some questions. We talked them through how we would find the right data and how we would use that data and try and preserve what they had and build on their traffic over time. We actually gained their trust. And they decided to switch. And we got the contract. And we've just built the site, which is brilliant. So once we'd explained to them how we could do those things and we took that pain point away from them, then they chose us and we got that business, which was fantastic. And pain points will be different for every client as well. So when I was at university in the States, which is where I am from originally, I took a class during my sophomore year called the Philosophy of Art 101. Now this class was really, really intense and we studied philosophers such as Jung and Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I say et cetera because actually, I really don't remember very much about that class at all. My main takeaway from that entire year is something that our professor told us. He told us how an artist sees a horse. So if you ask people, picture a horse, they'll probably see something in their minds like this, an average horse. If you ask an artist, or we could say designer, to picture a horse, they'll see something more. They'll see the details. They'll see the muscles beneath the skin. They'll actually hear the way the tail sounds when it swishes. They'll see the mane and how it flows behind the arch neck. They'll see the nostrils and how they flare. They'll also see the shadows that the horse makes when it moves and the sheer beauty of this animal. And not just that, but they'll see how it affects people. Clients see a website. That's their average horse. We see everything else. We see more. We see the details. So we see the design, the copy, the HTML, the CSS, hex codes, plugins, blah, blah, blah, all of that kind of stuff. We see everything and anything that has to do with a website, with user experience, with SEO, with marketing. Our clients don't see any of that. Well, most of them don't. We could show them this, but that might not be the best idea because they might freak out and say, where do I start? I don't really understand that. What's going on here? So our job is to turn this into something that our clients will love and be proud of. How much does a website cost? Great question. We know the answer. We hear that all the time, but sometimes we have to extract a little bit of information from the client first. But what we really need is to get answers for the questions that potential clients don't even know that they need to ask. We have to listen to them and solve their problems with a solution that also understands the value of their spend. Even if you have a range of packages, it may not fit their need. And of course, sometimes you actually have to say no to a project. And learning to say no is really difficult. So how do we help our clients? Well, you've got to know your stuff. You've got to gain knowledge and share knowledge. And you can do that by networking, by talking to other developers, other designers, creators, innovators, by coming to conferences like this, by coming to WordCamp, is a great way of gaining and sharing knowledge. Be part of a business community in your local area. And if there isn't one, then create one. Create a group that you can all go to and share ideas and gain knowledge. So my background is in marketing and PR. When I worked in-house with developers, they couldn't see past the code. And not unless I was very specific with them. Their brain naturally focused on functionality and not the aesthetics. So I learned to discuss the aims and the ideas behind the project and build their understanding, just like we do now with clients. So I also put on the screen confidence, and I put that in capital letters. Because being confident in what you do and how you do it is really helpful for clients. Confidence is key here. Your client is looking to you for the answers. They're looking to you to create what's in their head that doesn't exist yet. So you need to have the confidence in order to help them. So, hands up, anybody knows what this is. I'm not sure how clear it is on the screen. Okay, that's fine, it doesn't really matter. It's a work of art by Damian Hurst, and it's called Black Sun. And I'm just gonna give you a quick little story about when I was a kid in school. One day the teacher said, everybody's gonna draw a picture. And what did children draw? Well, they draw what they know. So everyone was drawing the house, a yard, clouds, sky, and a sun. So I was doing that as well. And I looked around the classroom and everybody's sun was yellow. But I colored my son blue, because I like the color blue. And when the teacher started to come around, I started to feel really kind of like, oh, everybody else's sun is yellow, mine's blue. So when the teacher got to me, I actually covered up my son with my hands. And she came to me and she looked down and she physically pried my hands away from my drawing and she tutted because I had a blue sun. And so that really made me feel really self-conscious and not very confident in my own creativity. Your confidence may be knocked from time to time. And you may have your own blue or black suns. But going back to your passion and what you love doing, that will enable you to go from strength to strength and to take your business forward. So don't lose your confidence. So you need to find a balance between demonstrating your expertise and giving succinct explanations. You've quoted, you've itemized, you've nearly won the job, but your client still has questions. Now from your quote and your conversations, the client has a better idea of what a website entails and knows that it's not just a website. Some will want to understand more, others won't really want to know the inner workings of it. You want to win the contract, of course. And once you do, you'll want to build a good relationship with your client. Now that may have already even begun before they even were a potential client. Maybe you knew them from a networking event or something. And with web design, you can demonstrate expertise while keeping it understandable. So break down the process for them. Tell them how you start, how you get started, then what happens next, then what happens after that. So for example, some clients come to us, I mean even though we do graphic design, some clients come to us with the logo and brand guidelines all good to go. So we know, then we can tell them. All right, so the next step really is to focus on the content. The page, the page structure, the page titles, all of that kind of thing. Then next will come the layout design, then after that the web build and so on and so forth. And there may be other mini steps in between that as well. You can let them know the processes without getting bogged down with the technical. So who finds this question easy to answer? That really must mean that you'll find it really tricky because it's actually really hard to give an answer that's easy to describe in one brief sentence. But the client needs to know this and you need to know this to create a website that serves them well and generates conversions. Help them work it out. Ask questions as if you were the customer. Challenge them to focus and prioritize. You can either consult together or alone but if you skip this step, this pain point, then you'll find that the content becomes unclear and wishy-washy and it won't speak to the target audience. Asking what they don't want and what they don't need and what they don't like is actually really important. Don't waste time including things that they've just forgotten to communicate to you. Extract the negatives as well as the desirable. We've asked this question many times and the response has always been good question. Actually, I don't want any blue on the website possibly or we don't want to use any of those images from the old site. We need a whole fresh photography session booked. We wouldn't know those things if we didn't ask and it does help avoid disappointment and amends. So make it clear what you will be doing and make it clear what they will be doing. When information needs to be supplied, logins and content, we will talk a bit more about content later. Guide them, steer them in the right direction. Who's going to be the main point of contact? Break it down into stages and schedule calls and meetings ahead of time. It sounds obvious that sometimes these things get forgotten and deadlines get missed. For larger organizations, we find that having one person is the main point of contact works best. Let them fight out over the options themselves and come back to you with the answers and not steal your time away from the project. So your job as the designer is to solve problems and the more you do this, the easier it will become and the more you'll have kind of those ready-to-go answers and the more ideas you'll have as well. So think of your clients' challenges as your own challenges. Go on their journey with them because then you'll have a better understanding of what they need and what they want and you'll be better equipped to serve them. So just to give you an example, this website here is a site for Headway West Sussex which is a local charity that supports people affected by brain injury. And the challenge here was to create a website that was going to be understandable to the end user. So we felt that we needed to actually run a focus group. We attended one of their support groups where people that have unfortunately been affected by an acquired brain injury and their carers or their family attend and help each other and do activities and support each other. We learned there that we should avoid bright, white backgrounds and we toned it down to an off-white color. We also learned that the curved edges around the boxes would help people digest the information and find things better and that content in smaller chunks was better for them. We wouldn't know those things if we hadn't have asked. We found the unknown information by running that focus group as well as including the usual accessibility features like the double-a and text sites. And just to tutor on Horn here real quick, this website is actually up for an award. It's been shortlisted for a digital award in Sussex. And we're really proud of that, whether we win it or not, it doesn't matter. We're proud that it was chosen because we worked really hard with the client in order to achieve their goals. So here's another example. This website is for artist Carrie Sanderson and she actually built the website herself in WordPress but she got to the stage in her business where she wanted to take it from a DIY look to a more professional looking website. And that's where she came to us to help her. So it wasn't a straightforward site build. We needed to first ascertain what it was that she had already achieved and then what it was that she wanted going forward. And there were also cost implications as well. It's really important to build a good rapport with your clients. Find out what really matters to them and what specific concerns they've got. Talk to them and reassure them. They're not buying a t-shirt in small, medium or large. It could be a change of career for them or it could be a company moving to get clients internationally. It's life and it's emotions and it's bigger than a website. So if they feel like they are a problem, it will dull their enthusiasm for you as a supplier. I don't know if you've ever had this but we've had clients cry because they've been so emotional about their website because it's actually not just a website, it's a life change for them. And be flexible about how you communicate with your clients. Some will be fine with email, others will prefer face-to-face. Some people just face-to-face people. You can minimize client pain points by communicating with them in the way that they respond best. Not how you respond but how they respond best. And it may not always be convenient or cost effective or time effective to meet up face-to-face all the time. We just can't do that. So that's when things like video Skype and Google Hangouts can maybe be a solution. So themes, there are lots and lots of themes, hundreds of themes. It's probably best not to overload your client with all the different theme options out there. They often don't even care and they don't really know that their website is actually running on a theme. It doesn't matter to them. They just want it to do what they need it to do and to look great. And there may be times when a client does come to you and says, I really want to use this theme. So I've put up on the screen the DV theme. You probably all know it. It's a very popular theme. This one is the one that clients have come to us and said, I want to use this theme because I went on a course and that's the one that they recommended or my friend has a business and she set hers up on DV and so that's the one that I want to use. And that's absolutely fine as well. Plugins too, don't overload your client and say, oh, which plugins do you want? Because they'll kind of look at you and say, well, what's a plugin? You probably already have all the standard plugins that you install on a website automatically like Yoast SEO and Jetpack and things like that. So you can help your client by just taking away those pain points and helping them through that. You could buy a batch of themes. Put up on the screen elegant themes and template monster. I mean, there's so many out there. And then based on whatever project you're doing choose the right theme for that project and you just take that decision away from the client and you can always talk them through and tell them what you're doing and be open about it but they don't necessarily need to choose it. If you say to a client that you haven't really worked with them before, go away and choose a theme, you'll probably never hear from them again because they won't really understand what you've asked them to do. Also, if there are cost implications with buying a theme or buying a plugin, let's say they're running an events website and they need a specialized events plugin where you can explain to them that they need this and the cost involved with it from the outset. And I'll also just put up here. One of the themes that we use all the time is a theme called Weaver Extreme. It's just a really good theme. It has everything you need. You can make the front end look pretty much however you want it to look. And it's just a really, really good versatile theme that we use all the time. And most of our clients don't even know that they're using that theme. So it's going back to what we said before about building a really good rapport with your clients. They'll trust you and they'll trust your professional judgment. And it's at the very beginning. Make sure that clients don't leave this till the last job. Have clear expectations in the beginning and schedule stages to come later. If a deadline is looming and you haven't received any copy, pick up the phone but also email them as well. We've actually had plenty of happy clients despite a late launch because they know that it was their fault and not ours. And also talk about blogs. Are they going to have a blog or not? If they immediately say, oh yes, yes, yes, I'm going to have a blog. I'm going to blog all the time. Really, are they really going to blog? If they're struggling to even get the content together for their About page, then maybe having a blog isn't the best idea for them or maybe it's an unrealistic goal because blogs are part of the overall marketing strategy. They need to be thought out. They need to be given time. There's a time commitment with blogs. We're really, really thrilled and pleased when clients take on our recommendations and our suggestions and it makes a difference to their website or their business. So we've had clients who've built up a really good following from their blog after we've built it for them and showed them how to do it and how to blog and done the content, planning and the strategy and done the training with them and everything. And it's fantastic. We love that. But we've also had clients who say, yeah, yeah, we're going to blog as we go through the whole setup, the training and everything and they've got their plan, their six month or a year plan and then the site launches with maybe one or two blog posts and then they never blog again. The client often doesn't even know that they need. They're invisible to them. Make them aware that they have to be there but also actually help them create it. We've got template versions available for all these things just to make it easier and they can use those or they can add to them if they have time later. Often a client will view a development site on a PC or Mac and they won't really think about the end results that actually their site is going to be viewed on mobiles and tablets and various browsers and screen sizes. They don't really think about the fact that it's going to take a whole heap of time to dig things around to make it work in all these different browser sizes. So help them understand that and that that's part of what they're paying for. Make sure that they know that it's going to be tested and things are going to be altered because that's your job and if they launch the site and then they view it on a mobile and it's not right you can be sure that you're going to get a blame for that. So if you don't help your clients the website won't get done. Be flexible, offer add-on services to help them get the website done. They might be stuck on the copy. They might not really have decided on the photos or don't have photos. Perhaps they, they're not sure about the social media side of it and maybe they also need training. So you could offer these services to help get the website done and if you can't do them yourself then you can help them find the right people to do it for them. It's going back to what I was saying before you know, build your team come to conferences like WordCamp and find other people that you trust and that you know will be helpful to your clients to offer the whole package and just get things done. What's better? A website launching on time and empty with an unhappy client or a website launching late and great and one that you can put on your portfolio. So be flexible and help your client. So why bother? Why is this important? What's the big deal? Well you want and you need client satisfaction. You want those Google reviews. You want testimonials and retainer clients and bigger clients. You want more clients. Helping clients with pain points and solving their problems will help to build your reputation, gain clients and make money. So we hope you enjoyed our talk. Left screen there. And I hope you feel ready to go out there and build your five-star reputation so that you can take your business to the next level. Thank you very much. Does anybody have any questions? Hi. Support what you said about a single point of contact. That's absolutely, yeah, we've found that to be totally vital. One of the things that that tends to cause, as you said, is that they go off and they disappear into an internal huddle. And we've had projects go quiet in us for months and months, you know, and we just stop getting anything back. Any tips on that? What do you tend to do in that situation? Do you bother them all the time? Do you let them, do you just sort of say, well, we'll just invoice for everything we've done up to this point and leave it with you? You know, what's your approach? Sometimes it does drag on and it's really hard because you don't want to be nagging them to the point of annoyance and losing them. So you really have to judge it on the type of client. Sometimes if we've got stages of work in place, there'll also be payment stages and that does help. But obviously you just want to get the project finished and out the door as best as you can. So that's really where the deadlines along the way come in. Not just waiting for those deadlines to come around, but also babysitting them a bit and just reminding them actually in a week's time, this is going to happen. So have your meetings, get what you need to get done and then come back to us. It's inevitable that some projects will just drag on and it'll be out of your hands. But just, unfortunately, it's more of your time but do everything you can to remind them and just push them on the things. Yeah, I think just to add one small bit to that, I think you just have to be very proactive with everything that you do, especially when it comes to, yeah, impatient as well. And sometimes it may be out of your hands. Like an example that we've been working on a website recently where the project manager is actually a different marketing company and they've outsourced the web design and development to us. So we don't actually have contact with the end client. So we're reliant on the other marketing company. So we're chasing the marketing company. The marketing company is chasing the other clients. So it really depends on your client relationship and all of that. Hope that answers it. Hi, when clients come so enthusiastic to you for a new website, what's the pain point with the content usually that makes them submit it so late? Well, they don't have it. Yeah. It's normally if they've got to write it all from scratch, we will try and say that, okay, just provide it to us from bullet points and you can pay us to a copy editor. I'm copyright trained, so I'm willing to do that. But sometimes they're very precious about their own content and they will only handle it themselves and that's the stumbling block of the time because they don't realize exactly how much time it's going to take them. So I think sometimes if you know or have an idea that the client might be going that way, set the deadline a bit longer than you originally would just for the old build because you know that there might be a bit of a hold up on their end and then obviously it'll get to a point where it does become their fault as it were because they know they should provide it to you on time. And a lot of clients are very visual and they can't really imagine what the content is gonna be. So we do a little bit of research and find other websites that have similar contact or similar content structure and say, okay, look these over and this might give you a really good starting point to devise your own content. Hi, I've got a 78 year old client who's just started a new business and he's got a, he had a Facebook page which I didn't know about and he asked me to do a website for him and I know he's been using Facebook for his other businesses. So instead of having a blog page, it's a good idea to just put in a plugin called Facebook feed and made that a menu item on his website just called News and that just shows his Facebook feed. So that's an idea if anybody wants to. Yeah, that's a good idea. We've done that for a couple of clients as well. We have a client who's a Pilates teacher and she has a phobia of technology and the only thing she can pretty much manage is the Facebook page and when we were talking about blogs and stuff, I could tell that that was just gonna, she was just gonna go home and go into a dark room and lie down and stuff. So we suggested exactly what you said and it works really well for her. So thank you. Hi, you've said that you do prefer to deal with an individual person in a company rather than have a whole committee bombarding you. How do you divide your side of the communication with clients up amongst yourselves and have you developed that method of working? That's a really interesting question. We tend to have one of us as the lead project manager and that really depends on what functions it requires. So really my part of the business it tends to be the marketing, the PR, copywriting and the search engine optimization whereas if it's any graphic design and web build or social media, then it is Meg's. But it also can depend on where that client came from. So if it is a contact, perhaps Meg's met them now that they're not working but it's marketing, it might make more sense. They might feel more comfortable to actually deal with her as the lead but they do know that we're a business together and they may still get communications from me as well. As long as the client knows, then I feel that it can work either way. It does for us certainly. Any more questions? How do clients react when you say we want one point of contact? Do they like it? I think it depends on the client. Because that's what we struggle with. That's why I thought I should ask. I think it depends on the client. That's up because if it's not immediately clear to them or they've got several people in the same function, then it can become a bit of a fun fight for them to actually want that job or not want that job, depending on the situation. But it just has to be the case because things have dragged on and past experience has led us to that conclusion where that is the best way forward. If you've got too many people, you're getting different answers for things and you're getting passed around the houses, it's just too difficult. So they have to. I think as long as you set out with a good plan and a good structure, it's never always going to go smoothly and it's always going to be different depending on the project. I mean, we work with a lot of charities and non-profits and they make their decisions by committee and a lot of those committee members or board members leave and new ones come in. So it is really hard to maintain that one point of contact all the time with those types of clients. Thank you. Thank you.