CASE STUDY

Beach Babes Website Copy

Timeline

March-April 2022

My Role

I was hired as the sole copywriter and content designer on a team with one UI designer and one full-stack developer.

Background

Beach Babes is a new boutique vacation rental management company with several upscale properties in St. Augustine, Florida, and San Diego, California. Established on Airbnb, they sought to improve their own digital platform where guests could peruse and book properties directly.

Problem

The existing DIY website was archaic, with poor readability, usability, and information architecture design. The content was generic, incomplete, and lacked any specific style of voice and tone. In addition, the company had no existing brand strategy—nor a defined target audience/user—making it difficult to write effective, targeted copy.

Project

Establish a voice and tone guide, create a user persona, and use these tools to write the client’s website copy—including UX microcopy.

Process

CONTRIBUTIONS SUMMARY

  • Performed a content audit of existing website

  • Conducted research, including conversation mining and user profiling, interviews with company stakeholders, and competitor analysis to identify target audiences and determine brand characteristics

  • Created a user persona and a brand voice and tone guide using research data

  • Used this documentation to write copy for the entire site, including microcopy for buttons, headlines, and pop-up messages

CONTENT AUDIT AND RESEARCH

APPROACH & OUTCOMES

Approaching this project from a user-centered design perspective meant first identifying the purposes, opportunities, and constraints for the experience, and then creating content that aligns the goals both of the user and the organization.

Since the company lacked brand guidelines and strategy, I started from scratch with research on users and the brand itself. I used existing AirBnb reviews for conversation mining and analyzed social media accounts to extract demographic, psychographic, and attitudinal data for the user persona. Next I interviewed the company’s owner/operators for insight on their mission, values, and personality preferences for the brand.

The primary goal of the organization was to secure a booking from the user, the secondary goal being to provide the necessary information and social proof for the user to consider booking a property in the future, or on Airbnb. The user’s primary goal was to find a vacation rental that met the needs of their family, and also appealed to them aesthetically—reinforcing their self-concept and validating their social status.

Once I’d determined these goals, I performed a content audit on the existing website using an heuristic adapted from the Nielsen Norman Group. The goal was to evaluate the existing content—is it accessible, purposeful, concise, conversational, and clear?—and use of voice/tone in concepts, vocabulary, verbosity, syntax, punctuation, and capitalization. I used this data to identify content weaknesses and figure out where more research and data were needed.

USER PERSONA

APPROACH & OUTCOMES

Identifying a target audience for the Beach Babes brand was essential to successfully craft their digital interface and market their product. Research yielded qualitative demographic and attitudinal data to inform the user persona, a middle-aged, educated, and cultured female head-of-household with sophisticated tastes and an eye for aesthetics.

VOICE & TONE GUIDE

After analyzing Beach Babes’ mission, values, and brand personality traits, I constructed a brand avatar to distill these elements and help facilitate appropriate voice and tone guidelines.

With this brand avatar in mind, I created a chart with one matrix of primary personality characteristics, and the other of relevant voice and tone categories. This is a useful tool that answers the “why”—not just the “what”—for grammatical, contextual, and structural choices within the brand’s content design.

THE CONTENT—MICROCOPY AND MARKETING COPY

With documentation in place, it was time to create copy designed to drive the user toward the desired actions. While focusing on copy that was concise, conversational, and clear, I also made sure to include sensory language and cultural references—per the voice and tone guide—to evoke subconscious emotion and desire in the user. See examples of microcopy below:

VOICE & TONE

voiceandtone2.jpg
voiceandtone1.jpg
amenities.jpg

BUTTONS

BUTTON 1.jpg
BUTTON 2.jpg
BUTTON 3.jpg

Challenges

The most significant challenges in completing this project were budgetary and scope constraints, due to the size and age of the company. There was no research budget, which meant I was on my own to procure free data to inform my content design and documentation.

Additionally, I had to assemble brand documentation before I could even approach the content. Like many small business owners, the stakeholders in this project had given little thought to qualities like usability, voice and tone, or even their company mission or values. Extracting and assembling this information was time-consuming—much more so than the actual writing.

Since my role was primarily as a copywriter, I also felt constrained by the demands of search engine optimization. While UX writing principles emphasize conciseness and clarity, digital copywriting practices demand higher word counts per page and keyword repetition to help clients rank in Google searches. These differing priorities sometimes felt at odds during the project.

Takeaways

This was an excellent learning experience since I was able to exercise a great deal of autonomy and creative control over the project. Creating brand guidelines, voice and tone documentation, and user personas from scratch was thrilling. I was able to immerse myself in the world of my user and intuit what would appeal to her as she interacted with the content.

Examining the psychological and emotional motivations of the user showed me a different side of copywriting—which can feel sales-y and uninspiring when focused primarily on SEO and conversion. Understanding a user’s personality, mindset, and emotions is integral to both user-focused content design and successful marketing copy.