discovery A Conversational Approach to Marketing Strategy Discovery

Marketing discovery conversations can be tricky.

It's easy to go way too deep and get too detailed too quickly.

Discovery is an important aspect of a successful marketing strategy.

And it's an important process that helps an organization better identify and understand whom they want to serve, what the needs of that audience are, what their preferences are, and how they behave.

The learnings from a good discovery process can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns that better connect with the target audience.

I'm finding success with a conversational approach to discovery.

As I've been working with new ReadySetMIWI clients, I've been learning, iterating, and optimizing my discovery process. And in refining my approach, I've found myself migrating toward a more conversational approach to my discovery process.

My List of Conversational Discovery Questions

I've found these questions to be relevant for both For-Profit and Non-Profit organizations.

1. Who do you work with?
2. What do you offer them?
3. What value do your offerings bring them?
4. How do they measure success through what you offer them?
5. If they didn't use your offerings, whose would they use, or what would they do?
6. What value does serving them provide your organization?
7. How do you measure success for your efforts?
8. How often do you evaluate your offerings?
9. Who does your organization report your progress to?
10. How do they measure your success?

What I like about this line of questions is that it creates opportunities to learn about the organization, its assumed audiences, and how each defines success.

Through learning more from my clients, I can then explore different paths to dig deeper and help them surface important details that might otherwise have not been shared.

A Quick Marketing Assessment

I ask them to rate their organization's success on marketing channels, like:

• Their website
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Paid Ads

And then we discuss why they rated them the way they did.

A Quick Content Assessment

Again, I ask them to rate their organization's effectiveness when it comes to creating content, touching on things like:

• Content Strategy
• Thought Leadership
• Storytelling
• Writing
• Video

We wrap up by getting back to defining success.

We conclude our discovery conversation by revisiting the bigger picture, answering questions like:

• What does success look like for your organization when it comes to marketing, communications, and digital strategy?
• What has kept you from achieving success with your efforts in the past?
• What opportunities will successful marketing make possible in the future for your organization?
• And what opportunities would that create for those you serve?

What do you think?

Whether you're looking for strategic marketing help or offering marketing services to your own clients, I hope you found this post helpful.

If so, I'd love to chat with you – as a prospective client or even as a partner in serving organizations through marketing and communications services.