The period of discovery is where you assess where you are, what’s working, what’s not working, your metrics, message and methods – it’s a review of a thousand little pieces that need to be pulled out of your teams heads and put into a format that the group can analyze.
You probably know about “discovery” having endured it in the past if you’ve worked with a decent consultant or marketing firm.
This is one way you can separate the cons from the experts in the marketing industry – one huge difference is in the amount of effort put into discovery.
If they spend a couple hours with you and then come back with a “plan” (list of things they do) you can bet it’s pure malarky, they don’t understand your specific business and their plan (just for you) is boilerplate. Or worse a menu.
An experienced marketer would spend much more effort to get the history and nuances of the company, the myriad tiny details that make your company uniquely tick.
How can you give recommendations or lay out a plan without a deep understanding of how the business works. Not “the business” in the sense of the industry or businesses like yours. YOUR specific business.
Your company is complex. Your market is complex. The answer is you can’t give solid recommendations on what to do in terms of a marketing strategy without a granular understanding of the dynamics of the business.
Our Situation and Gap Analysis is deeper and more thorough dive into the business than a typical discovery process. But it’s also organized.
The idea is to make the process the least disruptive to the organization as possible and to “compress” the time needed for the Analysis so it takes as little time from the team as possible to establish a baseline of understanding – THEN make decisions.