Once again working with the wonderful Toaster team, I was called into the EcoR1 Capital project late, after several previous rounds of design, copy, and strategy had already been done. The team felt the need for a fresh perspective, especially around the direction of the copy, so I stepped in to help see this thing through to the finish.

Here’s the process I took, as well as the finished product.

Doing My Own Background Research

EcoR1 Capital is essentially a biotech-focused investment advisory fund. I don’t come from a biotech background, and my investment experience to date had been personal, never professional. That meant I had a lot to learn in a short amount of time. Rather than putting this burden upon the clients, I began to do my own deep dive, taking notes all along the way, and trying to draw my own conclusions about the industry, the audience, and the differentiators. These conclusions helped to form the backbone of the upcoming workshop.

Conducting an everything-at-once workshop

Because of some fatigue from a prolonged project and already conducted brand workshops, I knew I didn’t have the time or client patience to take them through a long discovery process. Instead, I structured a single session to be able to rapid-fire all the questions I needed answers to, with all of the key stakeholders in the room at once.

Summarizing the findings

Due to how niche the industry is, plus the uniqueness of EcoR1’s approach, combined with the heavy regulatory requirements, it became quite the challenge to nail the tone and brand, while remaining accurate and compliant. This was one of the struggles in the early rounds of the project.

To get ahead of the situation, before I did any copywriting for the site, I summarized my findings and circulated them with the client for early course correction. These findings included:

Brand personality
Key words
Do’s and don’ts, most of these coming from their answer to my question, “What’s working well in the project? And what’s not?”
Key quotes from investor letters (these letters were probably the most helpful resource I stumbled upon as they contained the CEO’s very words to their core audience, in his exact tone of voice)

Click on the images below to take a closer look at some of these findings.

Quick wireframes to examine page layouts

Even though page designs already existed by the time I started working on the project, I wanted to reexamine them with fresh eyes, to ensure we were staying on track with the main objectives.

Again, this doesn’t have to use up a lot of client time, instead, a tool like Mural can allow you to very quickly spin up visual outlines. These outlines were then sent back to the client, along with the key purpose for each of the pages. Based on this step, the designs did end up changing, so I’m glad we ended up doing the slight extra effort here.

The final designs

At this point, we knew what we needed to accomplish with each page, the layout that would help us make that happen, and many of the key words, personalities, phrases, and nuances that would guide the actual copy creation.

All that was left was to actually get to writing, presenting to the client, and then refining based on feedback. After several rounds of this, we had agreed upon copy and design.

Take a look at the finished pages below. You can expand them by clicking on the images.

In Summary

I encourage you to actually click through and explore the real site. There are multiple fun animations, an easter egg, and just some great site design.
I’m a huge fan of using “boring” aspects of a site, to really infuse tone of voice. This would include things like button text and eyebrows or subheads. Many companies are hesitant to do this because they worry it will impact conversion. However, this project was more about brand than about conversion, and because of that, we were able to do longer text CTA’s, like, “Explore our DNA,” and, “Our Raison D’Être.”
I also continue to insist that exact industry experience is not necessary for a creative to do great work. This is often used as a screening criteria, but I encourage you to move past that. Instead of past industry experience (that is to say, ‘Have you done this exact thing for an identical company in the past?’), I think it’s more valuable to find someone with past research experience (‘Tell me about a time you quickly got up to speed on an industry you knew nothing about.’).

Copywriting for EcoR1 Capital