What Is Discovery & Strategy? Why Is It Important?

Digital marketing is not the soft side of your business. In the coming years, it is going to become the most essential channels your organization will use to drum up business opportunities and communicate with your potential and current customers. Eventually, you might find yourself wanting to partner with a digital marketing agency like Top Draw to consult and even execute on digital marketing and branding goals. Now here’s the fun part: strategy!

Strategy?! Can’t You Just Get Right to the Point?

We want every client who works with us to succeed. It matters to us that the approach we propose is on solid ground before we begin a project or service agreement. Your website is your most powerful and viewed marketing tool, so before you invest effort and money into the execution of improvements or building one from scratch, you need to make sure you have the lay of the land. Would you want your doctor performing surgery on you without taking a proper medical history, performing a physical exam, and conducting tests? Absolutely not! That’s why strategy is vital to success.

Discovery is Key

We’re going to ask a lot of questions in the beginning of a partnership with us, this helps us conduct proper due diligence and lets us discover which areas might need further strategy work. We will need to:

Identify your goals: There are many goals your digital marketing efforts can achieve. Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Do you want to grow your number of leads?
Identify your current marketing practices: What types of marketing content are you creating? How often are you creating marketing content? Do you have people in your organization explicitly responsible for certain marketing tasks?
Identify your infrastructure: What channels are you currently active on? Are these channels the most appropriate for your marketing efforts? Is a platform you’re using working for you and your employees?
Identify your audience: Who is actually visiting your website? Who is engaging with you on social media? Who is responding to your online ads? Do you have a demographic breakdown of your ideal audience and the actual customers you’re attracting?

Identifying Your Goals

How we do it: First, we need to conduct interviews with the major stakeholders in your organization and understand the pain points and reasons why your organization engaged us. We want to know your intentions and goals behind the project or service agreement. This helps us identify the gap between the current state and where we need to be to qualify our work as successful. Some of these questions might have complicated answers, you might not have the answers to all of the questions, some of these questions might make you uncomfortable, but taking the time to think them through, having us help you work through the path to find these answers, and developing an approach is what will get us off to a great start.

Identify Your Infrastructure

How we do it: Top Draw makes are that we do our due diligence to understand your business and the infrastructure you and your users/customer work within.

Stakeholder interviews and client self-report
User stories/User need statements
Customer journey maps
Content inventory and audit

Identify Your Current Marketing Practices

How we do it: Top Draw discovers the content types you’re using, how often your posting, the quality of that content, and your governance procedures through:

Stakeholder interviews and client self-report
Content inventory and audits

Identify Your Audience

How we do it: We delve into learning about your audience and the

Audience analysis
Competitive analysis
Customer journey maps

If you want to experience a project or service agreement that is based on proper discovery and strategy, Top Draw can help with that and help you find the base from which to launch a successful digital marketing initiative.