We take pride in maintaining excellent relationships with our clients—often for many years. While some may only need our help with a few specific marketing tasks, the best partnerships emerge when we’re able to work shoulder to shoulder alongside a client for a long period of time and learn to anticipate one another’s next moves.
As the Midwest’s most trusted modern marketing company, we delight in the opportunity to drive attention to a business and help them conceive—and achieve—the marketing goals that best position them for success. Before we deep-dive into the work itself, however, we first engage the all-important discovery phase.
This critical component of a successful marketing partnership establishes the foundation for any effort we make on a client’s behalf. We need to understand your business, objectives, and target audience—which means we need to know what you know, but also what you might not know, or what you only suspect when you’re up late at night, wondering what else you can do to solve your problem.
The discovery process begins and ends with research. Most things require light to grow, and the illumination provided by our thorough research into a client’s industry, competitors, and market trends informs everything that follows. Like a surveyor taking the lay of the land, we need insight into the competitive landscape in which your business operates so we can spot potential challenges and help you identify opportunities that might affect our collective efforts.
Every industry is unique, of course, and every good business offers something to distinguish their brand within their industry. Our aim is to deliver measurable results that help clients outperform their competition. So how do we get there?
Let’s Talk! (Would You Care for a Coffee?)
We typically meet with the client for a comprehensive discussion to gain a fuller understanding of your goals and expectations. We want to delve into your business model, understand what’s special about the products or services you offer, the details of your target audience and unique selling propositions, and what your current (or most recent) marketing efforts have entailed.
These discussions are essential to help us align our marketing strategies with your short-term and long-term goals and ensure that we create custom-made solutions your business truly needs.
Understanding the Audience
Of the different elements of the discovery phase, understanding a client’s audience might be the paramount issue, as that influences so much else of what Rare Bird can provide—everything from the tone in messaging to the color palette of a website redesign. As we work to better understand your ideal customer, we’ll gather whatever information is available to us regarding demographics, trends and behaviors, “pain points,” and other useful details.
Examining Current Marketing Efforts
Analyzing your current or recent marketing efforts—campaigns, branding, messaging, and social media profiles—helps us identify strengths and weaknesses so we can look for opportunities to improve on these efforts. This early benchmark can also be used later to track progress and measure the success of our marketing strategies.
Additionally—and this is crucial for e-commerce clients—our web development team, once provided access to your website, usually uncovers a treasure trove of insightful information. For them, such access is like finding hieroglyphics on the walls inside a pyramid: Most of us (and most clients) may not speak their language, but they can read the signs clearly, often immediately solving issues that have caused a client’s website to load slowly and recognizing other troublesome spots that need further attention. Which is good, because Google and other search engines can essentially “punish” a website for being slow—or for any other performance issues.
While all of that might not sound like marketing work, remember this: More than half of your website’s visitors will give up and leave if your website takes more than three seconds to load. If it takes five seconds, or ten? Forget it. It’s hard to market to an audience of zero.
We partner with our clients to define and articulate what success looks like. Establishing this agreement from the beginning guides our focus and ensures we track the right metrics in order to achieve your goals. The means we dig into data and details related to website traffic, leads generated, social media engagement, and a whole lot more. We love to measure our efforts. We want to see what works and what could be better, and then present opportunities and options to you that are steeped in data.
Moving Forward Together
Once we have gathered all of the necessary information, we get to work on a customized marketing plan tailored to your specific needs and objectives. We outline the proposed strategies, tactics, timelines, and budget estimates to better guide our team and set clear expectations for you, our client.
The discovery phase lays the foundation for a successful marketing partnership. By investing time and effort in the discovery, you’re helping us lay the groundwork for your future success. If you’re interested in starting a conversation—and having that cup of coffee—reach out to us today. We look forward to what we can discover together.
