Defining key messaging to give a new freelancer-focused brand a unique voice.

Archie builds cold, hard financial tools for businesses to manage and pay freelancers so they may thrive in a better-served creative economy. But they like to have fun along the way. As a consumer-friendly startup building momentum with its high-energy visuals and social presence, I came in to help the team at Archie build a brand book that defined their voice and tone while accounting for the B2B side of things, too. I also worked on in-product copy for payment and enrollment user flows.

Team

As an independent contractor, I worked with the founding team at Archie to develop their brand voice and style guide to launch their website.

Primary goal

Develop a consistent voice that resonated with two (very) different user groups–freelancers and the businesses that hire them–and provide guidance on when and where to shift tone in the appropriate places.

Getting started

My partnership with Archie started as a quick freelance opportunity to help write some copy for their career page. After kicking off the project, I got to know the team more and pitched a larger project on expanding verbal guidance in their brand book around voice and tone. This quickly led to deep conversations that extended my contract to focus on defining their value props and launched a larger project to write the copy across their website for its initial launch.

My role

As a freelance copywriter, I helped push a visual brand book to include verbal guidance. This work led to helping the team define their value proposition for their different audiences, define a messaging strategy, and ultimately draft copy for their website’s launch. This process included:

• Conducting research to understand how key stakeholders perceived their brand and its need to evolve to better speak with their business users. I sent out surveys and ran a workshop with the product team to get early insight and move forward.

• Working collaboratively with their lead designer to push the brand book with sections the team identified as uniquely helpful to them (i.e. a polished “manifesto” to live by) that inspired social media posts on Instagram and Twitter.

• Building information architecture for their website and careers page to speak to different viewers and attract top talent during a critical hiring phase early in their latest funding round. This architecture led to the toggle on their homepage (pictured above).

Deliverables

I wrote the copy in the Brand Guidelines (screenshots to the left and below), covering the brand voice, tone, and language (pardon Archie’s french). This included captured information on their core value statements, the overall mission of the company, and brand pillars for creating content. This document survives as a living resource to help writers and designers at Archie keep the voice and tone relevant and consistent across the board.

I went on to write copy across other touchpoints, on social media, in-product snippets, and beyond. All social assets were collaborative, and other UX Writing examples can be shared privately one-on-one.