Discovery sessions – the essential first step in your marketing strategy

When you’re ready to get a marketing, branding or website project underway, first you’ll need to invite a few agencies to submit a proposal so you can get an idea of their processes and associated costs – but once you’ve reviewed them and chosen who you’d like to work with, how do you get the project underway?

Here at AMA, we believe that a ‘discovery session’ is the crucial first step to developing an effective marketing strategy or digital project – after all, while our proposals are based on an original outline of requirements, we can’t deliver the great results we promise without first identifying your objectives, your audience and the challenges your business needs to overcome.

What exactly is a discovery session?

Any form of business development is an in-depth and complex process if you want to get the best results and ROI – and while we may be the experts when it comes to websites and marketing, you’re the experts when it comes to your business. So before we get started with anything, we invite all of our clients to attend a discovery session where we can drill-down the details and get to the heart of their business.
Our discovery sessions are tailored to each individual client, but these are the main things we’ll cover:

1. Your brand – what’s your brand’s personality? How do you want to position yourself and communicate with your audience? Do you have or need a brand identity? Think about colours, images and tone of voice.

2. Your audience – who are we talking to? What are your audience demographics?

3. Your industry – we need to gain a thorough understand your industry. Who are your main competitors? What’s working for them? What do you like and not like about their approach? What are the main challenges your industry faces in terms of customer engagement? What fears do you need to allay? What regulations do you need to adhere to?

4. Historical activity – what kinds of marketing have you used before? What worked and didn’t work? How does your audience engage with your current website?

5. Search – how does your audience find you? Where do your enquiries generate from? How are you performing in the search engine rankings?

6.Analytics and data – what data can you share to give us some firsthand audience insight? Think about website traffic, social media engagement, and the different marketing strategies you’ve used in the past and the results they’ve delivered.

7. Objectives – what do you want to achieve from the project? What are the key deliverables and how do you measure success?

8. User journey – what process do customers follow from initial contact to conversion? What are their ‘pain points’? What reassurances do they need to gain confidence? What questions are you most often asked about your products or services?

9. Brainstorming – this is the fun bit! We’ll take some time to throw around ideas and thoughts, based on the information we’ve extracted so far. There’s no such thing as a bad idea here, we just want to get the creative juices flowing!