 I want to give you an overview before we start so you'll know where we're going. We're going to talk a little bit about what we're doing, and I'm going to introduce analysts to you. We will have our discussion, questions answered, and we will have time for questions from the floor. Also, if you find that there's a burning idea you need to ask while we're doing something, feel free to interrupt me, especially if something's not clear to you. I would rather be interrupted and have you understand and advise first. Also, at the end, then, we'll have time for ending comments from our panelists. So, this is an overview of what we're going to do. I'm going to cover this, and then we're going to introduce the panel. Meaning you, all of us, are putting ourselves in the position of being developers, designers for this period. Your client has developed a marketing strategy, and he's done it correctly. Research, experience, creativity, and it includes five elements. Product itself, distribution, pricing strategy, target market, and advertising promotional strategy, which includes what we're going to be dealing with your website. Now, you'll also hear something, and we'll come back to you with words like positioning, and a USP, a unique selling proposition. Every company you deal with, especially larger ones, they have their own vocabulary, their own way of expressing things, so don't get too tied down on what the words are. What's important is to get the meaning back from them. Now, our task will be to take the design we're going to work with, and use that to reflect and sync with the marketing strategy. We're going to cover four elements talking about design, three main ones. Now, what I'm doing, I'm simplifying, I'm lumping things into simple words. Words is one, meaning copy and photography, pictures, which includes images, icons, graphics, animated chips, patterns, videos, all of that. Color, view saturation brightness, transparency, gradients, all of that. A fourth one, sound, mostly we don't use, coming to the era of election. If any of you have a girlfriend named Alexa at home, you know what I'm talking about. We're going to take all these elements and bring them together and talk about a layout, and all the time syncing everything back to that marketing strategy that we got from our client. I'm going to introduce the panel now. My immediate left is Stephanie Koka. Stephanie began her career in the creative side as an art director and designer, and then she transitioned to marketing role with Oppenheimer funds in New York. In 2015, she moved to Jacksonville and became an independent consultant. Stephanie owns CO3 Marketing, which helps companies develop their marketing strategy and planning. Stephanie has a BA in visual arts from Penn State. You can see her speak tomorrow at 9.30. Her talk is titled, Creating Customer Engagement with Content Marketing. Stephanie's left is a designer developer with her own nine-year firm here in Jacksonville, Open Sky Web Studio. Her company, demonstrating by example, good marketing, clearly states in its marketing strategy that specializes in creating clean, effective websites. Two very powerful words. Karina is the backbone of the Jacksonville WordPress media group, and she's the founder and organizer for the now three-year-old WordCamp Jack. Ask Karina to describe herself in one word she would say teacher. A third member, Scott Mann. Scott is an Emmy-winning creative director, a volunteer board member, or a number of organizations in Orlando, an SEO specialist, a certified Google partner, and a community advocate in Orlando. She's also the founder and creative director at High Forge, an Orlando agency formed in 2001 that builds successful brands online. He manages a team of designers and marketers to produce award-winning results. He is a University of Florida graduate with a great creative writing and marketing. He is an active volunteer in his community, a frequent WordCamp speaker, and he's into sci-fi, digital nomad backpacking. I had to Google that. You can hear him speak this afternoon at 5 p.m. The title of this talk is, You're Fired, Now What? Our first question is going to deal with an assumption that you have gotten a contract to build a website and you're going to approach the client to determine the marketing strategy. So I'm going to ask each one of the contestants. They didn't know there was an award. This is up for grabs. Yes. The question is, and we'll start with Stephanie. I'm going to ask the same question to all of them. How do you get the real marketing strategy from a client? This is what I do every day now, now that I have my own consulting business. It's funny because I work with startups, whether it be fellow moms in my neighborhood who are starting a company to larger companies that I still work with in New York. Sometimes the questions that I have, usually I have an engagement questionnaire. Those questions along with a brand story, building questionnaire, sometimes the way that you ask those questions, they haven't thought about the company in that way. Some of them are really flipping it and it's not about the brand themselves. A lot of times people think about, well, this is what we're trying to do. They focus directly on that versus flipping it and thinking about what does the customer need. These questions that I have are very big, I don't know, type of questions. It's very much about what are your beliefs and then how are you going to portray that over to the customer. What are the values that you say you're going to add to them and it's not necessarily what are the three top selling products you have. It's what are you going to do to solve it? What are you going to do to help with the paint work? Those are the types of questions that I find are really eye-opening and really help me dig in with them, understand their brand and become a partner to them in that way. Then we can sit down and talk about how are we going to implement a strategy to get those values across. In the end there are goals, there are business goals, but we need to first decide how are we helping people first and then how are we going to portray that. What do you do when you just can't get them to open up to you? Either they don't know. They usually don't know actually. It's a lot of brainstorming sometimes and making them put on the customer's shoes. Sometimes people have a hard time with that. Now where does you work as a marketing strategist, a marketing consultant? Most of us would be more developers, but so when you're doing this, you're able to charge them. Do you think that the other people, if they end up doing that, they should refer their business to get someone like you to go and try them or should they learn to do what you can do? I think that everybody should know how to ask those kind of questions. Because I think as my background began in design and that is why I am doing what I do today is because as a designer I always wanted to know the answers to those questions but there was usually people in front of me who were delivering the answers. But I always wanted the opportunity to ask the question myself because I would ask it maybe differently. I would ask just the way that I might ask the question, I might get a different answer and that's something that I've been able to be good at is getting people to think even just beyond the box, just really thinking differently. Let's assume that you had your own design creative team. When you come back to them, how do you explain that stuff that can be a little ethereal? How do you explain it to these people who want to question the paper and draw things? How do you translate it? That's the one thing that's been a very big asset to me is because I have a creative background. I've been able to translate business speak, what the client told me, translate it over to creative. I hire writers, I hire designers to help implement the strategies that I put together and because I have that creative background I can speak the language and maybe break it down. Because usually when a client may give you information that's a lot of acronyms and there's a lot of information that might be nomenclature to a company. Trying to boil all that down and really give the creative people that I'm working with give them the information that they need and by understanding how maybe they think it's easier for me to kind of dissect that and boil it down. Can we ask you a few questions? How do you go ahead and make your client your first initial meeting and test beyond the number? Yeah, I find clients don't... I mean we have to remember that in our industry we also have words. In our words, don't translate often to our clients. So it's just like anybody here who has attempted to extract content from a client. That's like something I hear over and over, it's like I'm waiting on content from the client. Why can't the client send me? And I have literally found clients who finally say to me in desperation what do you mean by content? Like literally the word itself content is the barrier. And so we have our own language. And so speaking with the client, trying new words. A lot of times if a client calls me and they say I want a website I was like okay and I'm trying to, it's early on I'm still trying to get a sense for what their company is, what they're about. And they'll be like so yeah, so what we need is a website and I'm thinking it's only like maybe four pages, maybe five that's not too expensive. I don't try to put a page, those days are over. And then they'll say, and what I'm thinking, let's talk about a little bit what you need. I need a slider. That's a decision we'll make later. Why do we need a slider? And then if you can engage them in some level of getting off the topic of the website, that really helps. So I say before we go into that, tell me a little bit about why you went into business. I said how did all this start for you? This is so interesting. And show interest back into what they're doing. Because they're not good at building websites, that's why I hired us. They're good at something else. And if we show interest in what are they good at, you will start to hear the words. You'll hear the story of the company. You'll hear the heart behind it, the passion. You'll hear the product selling points because they will start expressing it in story form just by having conversation. But if you become way former with them and say, okay, can you send me the content for the about page and then for the product page, I need this and that. And then you need all these fields filled out and then they just freeze and then the project stalls. So as far as putting together a larger strategy out of that, I find becoming very warm and conversational with them about themselves. So if I can get them talking about themselves and not feeling like they're trying to talk website with me because that's not their thing, that's my thing. That helps. Yeah. That's a variety, yeah. How do I talk to myself? For my team because I do have a team. Yeah, and when you pass it along, there is this sense of okay, I will say verbatim. They use these words and I'll repeat them. I feel this means this. Let's talk about this, let's balance this together and go that way. I mean, of course we have to use our words internally but I will flat out talk in terms of the words that the client used because we will start to feel what is going on. And I'll say this too, a lot of, I'll talk to developers or even strict designers. They'll say things like, ugh, I'm so tired of working with clients. I just want someone else to be client-facing and I will just do the work. And whereas I can't appreciate that sense because they can be bothersome as far as their inability to say a mean the exact same thing you're saying a mean, at the same time there is a certain benefit in always being able, even if you're two levels, one level removed from direct client contact, to be, you are building tools for people. Like, we're not building for the robots unless you're doing something really spammy, I don't know. Typically you're building tools for people. So there has, even the team members who are further down the line they need to have some appreciation for the everyday language that the customer is using and what their ultimate need is and what their, because actually it's not for them, it's for their customer that we're building it for and keeping that in mind. We all need a certain level of people skills even if you and yourself are not directly engaging with it. But for more other reasons, not necessarily, if we're not communicating nine times out of ten, I look at myself like what am I doing wrong? How else could I reach them? A lot of times, if I'm hiring a client it has to do with really unrealistic expectations more than communication or kind of an abuse of the system approach that they might be taking. So those are, that's a totally different topic. I want to insert something before I go. I had a business for twenty something years and when, about three years in we decided to hire a client it was when we first felt like we had a successful business because we were able to make that decision. Before then, we started, you know, holding on to it. Once you know you made it to that point you know it. And nobody can tell you, you know it. Scott, same question? Yeah. As an agency we approach it from a consultative standpoint. The interesting thing about agency work is there's really only two general approaches. One of them is to be a boutique agency which is when you're talking to most agencies in the word camp and word press community we're very boutique. We kind of customize solutions for our clients and so it's a very consultative approach and we're building essentially a custom set of services to solve a client's specific problems. So the other approach is to take what we're doing and condense that down into a process or a package. And some clients are going to fit into the process of the package and some won't. And it's two different business models but the more sophisticated you get, the more you can choose the path you want to take. So for the purpose of this conversation we'll talk about kind of the boutique level which is doing a customized solution. So the answer here is it's just asking an incredible amount of questions and it starts with exactly what Ukraine has said it starts with where did you come from? What's the history of this company? Why was it born? Why does it exist? Why do you do what you do? Where are we at right now? So tell me about your team. Tell me about the talent on your team. Tell me about what you're bringing to this project on your side. Who are the stakeholders? What is your team good at? So that that part informs me two things. So now I've got their mission and I have their verbiage I have their words and now I also have what they're capable of doing in-house versus what we need to be solving for them. And then the third piece of this what we would call discovery is asking the client where they want to go. Why are we having this conversation? Why do you need our help? What are you trying to achieve this year or over the next quarter or next year? What we're building together what are we solving and how do we define success? That has to be baked into the cake from the very beginning. What defines success for this project? And any time one of those three steps gets missed in what we call discovery the discovery phase. If we miss any of those steps or we don't ask enough questions in any of those steps invariably we have planted a weed in the garden or we've left a weed in the garden and then we continue on with the project and then we look back and our garden is full of weeds just from not asking enough questions. So you'll know you've gotten to the right place on a conscious level. You and your team are thinking like that client is thinking and solving their problems before they've even thought about them. So don't stop discovery until you have that in your heart and in your mind until you've got that down. And as you go with clients as you build your business and as you take more projects on you'll start to learn that there's actually kind of a set that will work for the culture of your company and the talent on your team and at some point you'll have a set list and occasionally as you get more and more confident you may go off script a little bit depending on the client and their specific needs. But yeah, discovery is key and to get really practical for just one second everybody should be charging for that. One of the biggest problems I see in this open source community is that you don't charge for discovery. It's actually the most important and most valuable part of your job. It's 20% of the project but it is worth 2,000% of what that project is from an ROI standpoint. It's the questions you ask and how you plan that project that creates the value and if you're just doing discovery for free and then giving them a quote that they can say no to you have made a mistake. How many people in here have put an incredible amount of time into a proposal and asked a ton of questions and then had that client say this isn't actually what I need. How many people in here? I'd certainly have to be a lot. You're essentially giving them a roadmap to take to a mechanic. You were the artist. They took the artist's work for free and now they're going to take what you did for them and they're going to take it to a mechanic for a lot less. And that mechanic is going to look at what you did because this is awesome. I can do this. So when you then have to go and talk to your creative team do you have to translate what you've learned or are they already so? So here's a great question and to answer that we actually did it we've done it two ways. So we used to do it where myself or one of my strategists or project managers would do the intake with the client and do all the discovery and then present that essentially to our internal team as a kickoff of the project internally. But lately as we're going upstream to more sophisticated clients that have healthier budgets we're now baking into the cake the other creatives on the team. So even though our designer isn't actually actively leading a discovery meeting the strategist is leading the meeting but the designer is in the room from the very beginning. So nothing is lost in translation they're hearing it straight from the client's map and on occasion when that's not possible to have them in the same room at the same time we make it a requirement that the conversations are recorded and then in the kickoff meeting we make sure that a part of our design and our development teams they listen to those recorded conversations with the clients so that they're more deeply integrated in the project from the start and we've noticed a massive difference in how connected our creative team is and disconnections with the client and miscommunications have gone and have dropped way down by doing it that way. But it just requires having more people in the room and so there's more cost there's more overhead so but the trade off is invaluable I think the ROI is just off the charts when you do that to do it that way. I know that this design yet this information right here can be the most important thing you hear in this session maybe in a follow up but really crucial it's very critical and so often what you read about it is it can be very dry and boring because we can talk that way and make it that way we do it I don't know why but it is important we're going to go to our to our design things and we're already going through our time but we will get out of here we started late I'm going to go late so somebody else has to pay the price for that but we're going to talk about what we call color words and pictures and maybe I'm in Etsy Karina is going to talk about color based on what you've got from those meetings with your client what is the concept on being the strategy how does that affect the decision of color and how do you actually work with concrete as you can be well one of the things and I think one of the reasons we're breaking this apart a little bit in an age where there are so many pre-built things out there there's themes everywhere and whether you're using a pre-built thing whether you're building on top of the starter theme whether you are building from scratch a theme you know if we're going to drive what do we have to 30% on the internet on this platform we've got to give some attention to the visual aspect so that we look awesome because I feel like that's kind of something that's slipping through the cracks with a lot of the more technical side discussions and with the coming of Gutenberg and everything can be clicked on and changed and adjusted by every level of people who's there these are discussions we need to be thinking about like the visual aspect and when it comes to color I am not I'm not classically trained in design I got it all the way and my process was you know pure science and then you go oh I need design and if that's your path it can be learned I think we tend to one way or the other lead in our brains whether you're more technical or more visual but both sides can be learned to a point to be effective and I do want to mention that so when it comes to color theory and such like that I don't have all the fancy words and stuff like that but I don't need it because there are generators and there are things out there that help me make wise decisions I have seen so much dark blue on purple like so when you are talking with a client you're asking for things you're getting images that come to mind whether you're choosing pictures or you're asking for logos and things like that and extracting color from that is a good starting point but then also sensing what else is going on in their industry and I'll even google their industry I'm sure you guys do your own do diligence and research and see what are other people doing what's the trend do some sort of surveys and questionnaires and stuff to get a feel for visually which way you go but then once you select some colors I really want to put it out there use the tools depending on your level if you're classically trained in design then you know how to find those complementary colors you know what works and what doesn't work if you're not there's schemes out there to help you and I do this a lot I look at color schemes and I just love seeing what other people put together in the spirit of open source there's color lovers there's color.co with two O's or something like that and it's a generator you put in one you like and you hit the spacebar and it says what about these colors and you're like ooh that's an option you hit the spacebar again or maybe those colors and not that you're going to deal with those exactly as they are but it is a starting point to get a feel for what is going on so what I would encourage you to do and not just say the clients said they like purple and green and just go with that and I think there's a lot of that going on then in terms of accessibility what colors you're overlaying what's the degree of contrast that is created printability I released the site and it had a dark blue font that was just very complimentary and looked really great and then the next day the clients thought that she was printing a page every day for analytics in a way that I didn't know she was doing and she was copying and pasting in such a way that dark blue came across and when she printed on the printer it came out as light blue and she could read it and now she'd ask me for black so those types of things I had no idea that she was doing that and it affected my color choices but I so that's accessibility issues not exactly accessibility but usage issues so I just want to point out color scheme generators and if you are not great at finding schemes please use them that are already out there and the other thing is don't overdo it with color in 20 seconds would you consider doing this a website and just trace it show it sure there's plenty of industries where that strong of a statement can be made then you have to sell to the client that's their pretty specific age and the client wants that and so that would be an industry specific question and the client specific question there's beautiful things out there that done in gray and black and white space and those types of things but that's layout just a quick thing with your phones and I've had you can take a picture of a Monet and turn it into just what I was talking about there's a lot of truth now of what I use the word picture I'm talking about images, icons, charts lines, shapes, buttons, animations videos, slideshows, logos tables graphic elements, text, menus everything that's not copied in for 5 minutes I'm sure just be sure you cover all of those yeah just check those out with focusing on helping people put together the story that they're going to tell when I think of marketing I really break it down and when I say I'm a marketing strategist I really like to say I'm just a storyteller because that is to me what marketing is I just presented to my daughters in middle school about what is marketing and doing what I do and it's about telling stories and when you read a story a lot of people need to learn through pictures there are people who learn visually and people who learn by reading and then there's a blend of it that's the one thing that I've always been passionate about about being a designer is telling a story through how does this picture and how do these words blend together and tell the story across and the point across so when building websites a lot of that to me content is creating a library to tell the story that those visuals are used out in social so that you create a connectivity with the brand so that when you see those images again when you come to the website when you drive that traffic social from advertising you have that continual visual because I think people associate brands with the visuals they see them out in social media and ads and then they see them on websites and that's a lot of what I do with my clients is helping them understand that path of making sure you have a continual way of telling your story through pictures and through visuals I mean video, the stats tell the story video is where it's at people don't have a very good attention span so the video needs to be short and it needs to get the point across very quickly so if you can't tell what you're trying to tell in a short amount of time then I would say don't use video how short I mean I mean people's attention spans are sour I mean 30 seconds anymore I mean if I see something with 30 seconds it better be really good to keep my attention for 30 seconds it just depends really in the medium and also where are you putting that video you know if you're putting it on your website well if I come if I get down that path of actually engaging with a brand enough to get to their website then to me that's a better place for a little more length but in an ads and in social like I want that quick because I want you to grab my attention and then I may start engaging with you more to get to your website to see more content that's a little bit longer does that answer your question? you just got 5 minutes on photography and talking so the words on a website or on an app that you build at the end of the day that should be informing the rest of the story the words inform the design the words inform the typography choices the story behind the mission behind what the client's greater purpose is that's where it all starts so we talked a little bit earlier about where a client comes from so what can we do in copy to change people's minds convincing somebody to do what we're doing how do we convince somebody to buy a product how do we convince somebody to buy our service what story are we telling them people don't like to be sold to people like to be entertained people like to feel an emotional resonance with whatever brand they're connecting with so back in 2006 I had just started in my agency I had just started moving out of doing all the things myself and probably the biggest proposal I put together that year for a client we got fired by them within a couple of weeks because I made a mistake in thinking that design and messaging were two different things and that one could inform the other specifically in this case the client said I want to see your designs I want to see your templates I want to see what this is going to look like and then we'll work on what the messaging and copy needs to be and back in 2006 unless you have some specific college education on this subject I honestly didn't know how to approach it so I ended up doing designs first and the designs didn't really have a meaning behind them they didn't have a mission they didn't have a soul the designs were super cool looking and pretty but there was nothing to grab on to there was no story to hold on to so it was almost like this beautiful watercolor painting that you're trying to hold on to but the paint is still wet so you're sliding down it that's what it felt like the project right out of the gate because the client couldn't see the vision of what we were designing and from that day forward we've always approached it from the message first and what's the core what's the core purpose of this client's thing so what's the benefit what's the emotional story I mean pick a product pick a service I just want to know the why I just want to know the why and you can you can stretch the truth and be opaque in your story as long as I understand the why you can market me all day long I just need to know the why if the why isn't clear then I don't know why I'm there I don't know why I'm watching a video I don't know what's going on so answer the why really really fast when you're doing your messaging how do you know when people are so his question is whether or not you know people are reading the copy the answer is hot jar google analytics but hot jar is actually the most if you're a visual learner and if you're trying to see a visual story there's a couple other products out there like hot jar but you can turn on a hot jar for free it's just a snippet of code just like google analytics it'll record 100 videos for free of people using yours or your client's website and you can literally watch where their mouse goes, where their finger goes how long they're on each part and you can see whether people are reading or whether they're just skimming images or whatever the case may be you can see how people are engaging with your content in almost a real time fashion it's a beautiful thing it's quite like seeing how it actually okay we have promised you would take questions and make them so they would have short answers I don't know how to do that so I'm just throwing it out to you any questions? right here so if our two start a creative agency what would be kind of like the framework like the things that you would have to for example you guys trust for my process like I guess the intro the middle and out I guess to say lack of a better word are you talking an agency in that it's multiple people working together on a student term project or as a freelancer taking on client work as a freelancer in the beginning and then do the aspirations to grow into it to grow into that okay that one might be better for after the session because this is a little bit more design marketing oriented but like yeah hit us up afterwards we can tell you about that it's a great solution that's actually a great question I did one of you want to hit this one I'll just give a quick answer and we'll throw it on so it's best to just talk about some specific tactics here for example answer that question if you understand why somebody is on your page because there's a why that goes both directions you're trying to tell you're trying to answer someone else's why and then they're trying to figure out why they're there but if you know why they're there if you're talking to the right person if you've done your homework no button on your website for example no button on your website should ever ever say learn more maybe click here to get free pricing or click here to answer this question that you've always wanted to know right so maybe it's yes I want to sign up for the newsletter not submit it should never be submit it should never be learn more it should be very very specific to the person you're talking to so that's one of the ways but getting into very specific tactics if you're noticing things like scrolling up and down they're looking for something that they're not seeing what are they looking for are they trying to log in why is that login button we've done that right they moved it and you can see those kind of things and then make informed decisions on the change a lot of times when I hear about a new tool I will go to it and before I even spend hours trying to figure out is this a tool for me and read all their sales copy and all this gobbledygook you can show me the pricing even in my range before I start I'm very practical that way so I'm like pricing pricing pricing pricing and if that's hard to find that's going to show up in their research unless if I see a button if I see a button that's marked investment it takes my brain an extra step to realize that means pricing if I see a button marked what's this worth to you and then I got like I don't know like so you'll see those kinds of conventions either they need to be there or your industry is so avant-garde you can get away with your own cleverness in your own head but typically that kind of stuff will show up and inform them the layout if you put the video that's the walkthrough to your product on the third page D but you're finding when they get there which is very few people who got there but those who did they watched the whole thing move that sucker to the first page to see what happens those kinds of things can inform how you're going to lay things out we're going to take and save layout for maybe a session next year there's no way we're going to talk about anything of value in one minute I want to give the panelists one minute to closing comments as they wish Stephanie can go down the line sure I think in general understanding what your clients need they're building they're asking you to build a solution for their clients needs you need to understand what their goals are first understand what their products are when you work with clients you kind of have to almost live and breathe their brand a little bit to really get an essence of what they are but then what are those solutions that you're building a website or an experience for and that it really does come down to from me a lot of key words are storytelling and experience what is the experience you're having while you're telling that story because that is going to keep someone on the website how is the website interacting with all the other marketing tactics that are in play that have happened before they get to the website what was their experience before that brought them there make sure that experience continues all the way through to the story we are actually not you got your dog I don't have a ton of things except to say that when this topic of design came up like I said I'm not classically trained in design but I'm passionate about good looking things on the web in particular and so I would urge us as a community to when you put something out are you building a plugin are you building a site are you working with customers are you consulting are you putting stuff on social media please please please do a little bit of due diligence on the visual and because the hodgepodgey web is getting tiresome and also the cookie cutter web is getting tiresome happiness bar whatever if you want to talk more we didn't have too many questions time but I would just say as a community let's raise our game on the visual side of things because we're really great tools on the back end and sometimes I think that's falling through the cracks I'll say that I've never in my talk for only 60 seconds I can do this I bet you design is marketing marketing is design these things go so hand in hand and you can't take one without the other and what happens is a lot of people discount design because it's subjective it's almost like icing on the cake right but when good design is applied to a good message there is an exponential resonance there I mean it's it's magical what happens when you have an engaged designer on point with a brand following through as opposed to taking a theme that exists and is separate from lives in its own cloud and then you just stick some copy on it those are very very different things and so look for opportunities to surround yourself with both design and marketing talent so that you can more closely integrate these things and dramatically up the level of game and value that you bring to your clients because at the end of the day that's the only thing that matters is how much value you bring into the game Christine, thank you guys