Customer discovery is a fact-finding process used to learn more about the client and what they expect from your products or services. The client discovery process is a crucial phase in forging a new relationship with your customers. It helps to build trust with your clients and is an essential ingredient for any successful project.
How to Run a Client Discovery Process
The customer discovery process is usually run by the person responsible for defining the goals and strategy of a marketing campaign, client setup or process mapping. This person needs to have an in-depth understanding of the client's company.
This enables them to hold result-oriented conversations with customers and translate these sessions into a strategic document outlining future campaigns and projects. The document could be in the form of a creative brief, a proposal, an onboarding plan or a marketing project plan.
This is what ours looks like:
#1: Define Client's Goals
The first step in the client discovery process involves determining the customer's goals. Defining these goals should be a guided process where you can learn what the client aims to achieve. Sometimes the client may say they want to accomplish one thing while they mean something else. Asking the right discovery session questions will help you align the problems you uncover with what your team can achieve through their marketing campaigns.
#2: Conduct Industry & Competitive Analysis
Designing the future strategy for your customer's marketing or advertising campaigns requires expert knowledge of the client's industry. It is also important to have intelligence on their competitors and the sales and marketing tactics used by competitors.
# 3: Deep Diving into Data
You can only define the strengths and weaknesses of the client's marketing and brand opportunities by having a firm grasp of the current state of their marketing campaigns. You can do this by auditing the customer's content, email marketing, social media strategies, and analytics data.
#4: Auditing Client's Marketing Assets
Uncovering what content assets exist will help you organise and align content with the client's desires and identify gaps and any lost opportunities. Find content assets that can be used in a quick-win campaign for your clients and build trust with them.
# 5: SEO Analysis
SEO analysis will help you better understand your client's online presence, target audience, and competitors. Identify about ten keywords that the client considers as high value and determine their ranking and their secured position.
#6: Interview Stakeholders
Decisions are made at the executive level, and interviewing them can is a great way to understand the brand from their perspective. These interviews will help you highlight your goals, track record of success, and assure them of your commitment to the brand.
#7: Experience the Brand
Becoming the consumer by buying the client's products will enable you to have a customer experience that will help you shape a marketing strategy for the client. Follow the typical buying process and focus on customer experience to provide your client with advice on how the experience can be improved.
Why is the Client Discovery Process Important?
The main goal of the client discovery phase is to discover the client's desired outcome from the marketing campaigns and help them craft a practical approach to achieve their goal. The discovery phase entails uncovering the customer needs, challenges, and the results they desire.
The information gained from the discovery phase is used to gain insights that will help you develop a goal-oriented marketing plan. Other benefits of the client discovery process include:
- It enables the drafting of a properly planned budget and fewer expenses
- A better understanding of the scope and goals of your client
- Knowledge of the challenges and needs of your customers
- It gives a unique value proposition and defined market positioning
- The ability to outsell your competitors by learning about their weaknesses and making your brand better
At DigiKat, we are a HubSpot partner whose goal is to help our clients reach wider audiences. We can take care of the customer discovery phase and draft a result-oriented marketing strategy. Contact us to learn how we can help you prepare a marketing campaign that will bolster your growth.
