 Our next speaker is one of my very favorite people to be around. Any time I get the chance to spend time with her, I am left so inspired and so full of cutting edge digital marketing hacks and I'm so excited for you all to take some of those away today as well. Her diverse skillset and endless curiosity truly make her a force to be reckoned with. Dana even has a background in ecosystem restoration and is a tech columnist host on CBC radio. She's the president and partner at Kickpoint Incorporated and I cannot wait to see this next talk. Take it away Dana D. Tomasso. I'm going to talk to you today about doing a discovery period at the beginning of projects and I want to remind you discovery isn't a new thing, right? If you Google how to do discovery, you'll see lots of results come up and discovery is a concept that has been around for a while but not a lot of agencies have adopted it. We rarely see agencies that are leaping into discovery or even in house teams and I think it's rarely done in house so I definitely want to introduce that concept to you today. I think this should really change. I think many agencies should do discovery at the beginning of projects because based on our experience, it's going to change your life for the better and today I'm going to convince you regardless of whether or not your agency or in house, discovery should be your new best friend no matter where you work. You need discovery because there's just no way you can find all the fun, exciting things that come with working with a new client or at a new company when you do an unpaid pre-proposal review in a few hours, right? So you're sitting there, the client, you have a few phone calls about it, you learn a couple of things, you put in a proposal and then surprise, everything is horrible or you start a new job and you find out a few things in that interview and then when you get there on the first day, you don't have any time to go back and figure out everything that's led up to this point. You just have to put your head down and work and hope that everything continues along the way that has been for good or bad. So hopefully discovery process will sort of take you out of that so you can do better things. And in particular, it really doesn't make a lot of sense to invest a sizable chunk of time in a proposal that you might not even win, right? As an agency that time is money and you're not going to want to spend 20 hours working on a proposal where you've got a low chance of necessarily getting it, especially if it's you and a few other agencies in the room. And plus this review is really one sided, right? You're getting some information from the client on what's really going on behind the scenes, but no pre-sale survey or conversation is going to catch all the potential red flags in a project until you've already committed, you've signed deposits paid, you've got that NDA in place. And that's when you find out the real fun stuff. And from an agency perspective, I have to say that after 20 years of doing this, doing this a long time now, it's rare that a client knows exactly what they want when they contact you, right? If everything was great, they wouldn't need you, they would be fine. They'd be doing it in-house on their own. And I think that if they do try to do it themselves, they might know their goals, they might know how to get there and they're on their way. And maybe they just need a little bit of your help. But a lot of times people say, I need this or everything is horrible and we don't know why. And this is really what discovery helps you with. Discovery for those people who are struggling, whether in-house or agency. And so when I talk about discovery, I want to emphasize you should be getting paid for this, right? This is an entirely separate time from the doing, this is the reviewing. This isn't the implementation. This is the understanding and the planning side of things. It's really a project all on its own and you should be paid for it, regardless of whether you're in-house or agency. And what I mean by getting paid for it in-house is, yes, salary. Salary is important. But also making sure that you are getting the time you need to understand what's happening at the company before you dive into that day-to-day, as I mentioned earlier. Be able to take a step back, figure out how you got here, what you need to do to get where you need to go, and then make that happen. Because if you skip or minimize this part of the process, you're very likely to end up in a situation where, say, you have a dedicated block of hours to do work on your own project. But the result of this has to be the doing of the project, the tactics. So that means that you have to jump in without thinking about the why. And these constraints mean you're encouraged to do things as right as you can under those circumstances, right? You don't necessarily have that big picture. And I'm not saying this happens to only people who rush, or only people who are experienced, right? This happens to experienced teams, you know, all the time. It happens when you dive into the engagement without having a proper getting-to-know-you period. This is the point of discovery. Think of it like photography. So if you have a lens with a shallow depth of field, it's like jumping into monthly work. You see the month ahead of you and off you go. But what you don't see is it's blurry off in the distance. It's this enormous monster of something that you didn't realize was going to come and attack you halfway through the month. It's going to come and eat you and your time. But you didn't realize that because it was fuzzy and you thought maybe it was a cactus or something totally innocuous. And you have enough focus to keep rolling ahead and you can ignore that. You don't see as that is coming to get you. Discovery is the time that you take to build that long view before you dive into these details. So I want to start by covering everything that should go into a discovery project. And because we do lots of different things at Kickpoint, I'm going to cover all the stuff that we would do because there's an endless amount of work out there with never-ending needs. And competition is kind of an old-school concept. So if everyone who's listening today takes this and runs with it and you make your companies better because of it, I think this is really good for the industry as a whole. Anything we can do to make the marketing industry better just in general, like let's do it. And this isn't necessarily an exhaustive list. You may do things that we don't do at Kickpoint, which is great. So don't toss what's working for you just because I didn't happen to cover it in this presentation. Make sure that you're doing stuff that works for you as well. So discovery should, first off, involve absolutely everyone in a project because everyone's going to have different perspectives and goals on what they need to know before they're comfortable moving ahead. And sometimes people even on the same team who work together every day maybe sit in the same room, well, technically not right now, but in general sit in the same room. They may not even realize that they have goals that are at cross purposes because what you don't want to have happen is this. This horrible situation that happens where you get something done and somebody says, so you talk to the CEO and everything you've done is crap and we're going to have to do it over again but we're not going to pay you for it, right? You don't want this to happen. All stakeholders you want to say in project direction need to be present from the very kickoff of this discovery period. If any new voices are added to the project, we reevaluate the scope, provide an estimate for additional time and budget required. This is an actual piece of language from our proposals. We call this mystery voices. This is to protect the project from the impact of those additional people who show up at the end, mess everything up essentially. And anyone out of your stakeholders, even if they aren't specifically on your team, make sure they're there because they can also raise red flags you may not even be aware of. I mean, I can remember very distinctly an example where we had a website that was done, basically ready to go. The project manager says, I'm just going to run this by the CEO. We're like, oh, please don't. And the CEO hadn't been involved at all up from that point. No decisions at all, like had no input in the project and it's like, I hate everything we need to redo it and I'm not paying you for it. That was a super horrible weight and a project. Discovery would have prevented that and also making sure you had everyone at the room at the same time also would have prevented that. So it's part of the reason why we have this mystery voices clause. And another example too, you give a company logo concepts and they say, oh, cool, we have a board meetings. We'll just run your logos past the board. Don't let them do that because they weren't there at the kickoff. They don't know the decisions. And also, have you talked to this board before? Have you met them? Who are these people? This is what Discovery, by making sure all the stakeholders are there, at least you can have this conversation early and make sure everyone's at the table at the same time, maybe not literally, virtually, distance at the table from each other. All right, so the first thing that we're gonna do in this kickoff is we're gonna do what we call a hopes and dreams session. We usually started by talking about reporting because starting at the end, when you're starting the beginning, is actually kind of a good thing to do. Thinking ahead and thinking at the end of this project, what do you wanna be able to answer? What do you wanna be able to say? And by starting reporting, it usually turns into a big discussion of what people are actually responsible for. One of my favorite questions is to ask out of all the things we're talking about in this project, what in there affects their performance review? What's gonna make sure that they keep getting their job and they keep getting paid and they keep getting raises? So out of all this work, what matters to them? Because that's really gonna tell you what hill that they are fully willing to die on as a part of this project. And hopes and dreams as well all about ignoring limitations. So I tell people, forget everything you know or you think you know about analytics, about SEO, PPC, websites reporting in a perfect world, what would you wanna say about this project when we're done? Just tell us that. What are the questions, the burning questions that you have about your day-to-day work? What is the information that if you knew you would be able to do a better job? And maybe you can't do some of this. Maybe some of the stuff they ask for is just, whoa, we can't do that. But at least you can see how big that client is dreaming. And sometimes it's something basic like, I wanna know if I'm making money on our ads and sometimes it's, I wanna be able to send different triggers to our chat program based on different engagements that people have on the website in the past. You can run the whole gamut, but if you don't sit down and ask those blue sky type questions then you're not gonna know. This is also a really fun exercise too to do is to ask people about their best day ever. This is really fun. It was my business partner, Jen's, her idea to start asking clients this. And when we first started asking clients as they were like, no one's ever asked us this before, this is weird, but then they really got into it, which was super fun. So this is especially good for you in-house people, especially if you're starting a new job. Ask people about their best day ever because you're gonna find out what really matters to them because that best day ever can be in the past or it could be in the future. And sometimes with newer businesses, if it's in the future or if things are really quite crap right now, it might be in the future, right? Things are maybe not necessarily good for a lot of businesses at this current point in time when I'm recording this in June, 2020. But sometimes it's something in the past, right? A time where things are really clicking and then we can find out what worked and how we can get there again using a different path. And sometimes I tell myself this a lot is what got you here won't necessarily get you there. And I think that's an important thing to tell clients too because it's a good metaphor for lots of things including why people need an agency, what got them here isn't getting them there, they're frustrated, they don't know why it's your fault or maybe it's the past agency's fault but if you don't fix it, it's gonna become your fault. And without discovery, you're gonna have no way to know what that day looks like to them. And really this gives you good language to help them get on board because you can figure out the kinds of words that matter for them too. And in the past when I've talked about reporting at MozCon I mentioned the importance of micro copy, right? Saying things back to clients and in the ways in which they describe it. So instead of saying phone call conversions you wanna say did their phone ring. This best day ever is actually where you find out a lot of that language and then you can start to build reports that use the words that they use which really humanizes this relationship and makes it strong between you and the client or you and your in-house team. So another question to ask is why didn't this work last time? And this is a really great question to ask if someone's gone through a few agencies. You can ask this in the pre-sales discussion but let's be honest, right? And especially in the interview process nobody's gonna be honest about like well, we had to fire our previous marketing manager because they sucked, right? No one's gonna say that. They're gonna make up some excuse they're not really gonna tell you what's going on. So by asking this question once you've got that contract signed you've got that job or you've got that contract going then you're gonna get all the dirty details. And sometimes you also need to ask some really pointed questions too. So dig around their Google analytics or their Google ads, ask that client or in-house about who are these random people who have management permissions on your Google ads and then you might find out about some contractor that you've had no idea about up until this point. Also look at Glassdoor, see the reviews from employees how many agencies have they worked with in the past few years? How many marketing people have cycled in and out of that department in the past few years? What does the C-level makeup look like at that organization? Who owns the company? What does the board look like? Did they have to report to stakeholders? How involved is that board, right? Now because you're getting paid for this time you can dig in and really start to get a much fuller picture of the organization not just this narrow silo of must buy ads or must do SEO. And there's always a few foundational pieces that we look at in every discovery. And of course your experience is gonna vary but this is what we consider if the scope warrants it. So first thing is analytics. What do they use? Do they have Google Tag Manager setup? Having GTM or not is a really good barometer of how they're doing in terms of their analytics sort of health. And one good rule of thumb as well in how advanced an analytics setup is is if they're using custom dimensions or if you ask them what actions would make a visitor no longer be considered a bounce and if they know the answer to that, right? If they've documented it even better that gives you sort of a sense of their analytics maturity. What other pixels do they have running? Are there services on their site they no longer using and they just keep the pixel on there? So a lot of times for example we'll see that somebody tried out say crazy egg or full story or one of those types of programs and they decided not to continue with the trial but the pixels still they're happily running. So that's a good sign to you that they don't have a good internal audit or a governance strategy and that'll help you dig in to figure out what other sorts of exciting surprises might be waiting for you. Ads, not just Google ads of course there's all sorts of other ads platforms and offline ads and other online ads. Are they using tagging to properly sort ads? Is there lots of stuff showing up in that other channel in Google analytics? That's where good traffic goes to die. How do they look at attribution? Do they use a custom attribution model? Do they know what attribution is? Do they know their ad budget? Are they able to tell you their ad budget when you ask them? Do they have blocking charts? Do they know when their ads are actually gonna be running? Do they have media buyers? How do they scope out their ads for the year? I know all these sorts of things. SEO as well, of course, gotta talk about that. One of the things you might ask yourself is what year is their SEO program in? Are they using tactics from 2020? Or are they using tactics from 2010? Heather Fizioch had a really great SEO maturity model. She talked about at MozCon, I think it was two years ago. Look at that and figure out where they are on that maturity model. And similar to ads, how do they decide to attribute business and revenue to SEO versus other channels? How is that content process attached to the SEO process? And is their answer to more traffic, more content? Because sometimes more content is not actually the answer. Sometimes you have volumes and volumes of really poor performing content. More content is not always the answer. In fact, at this time, it's probably not never the answer. Social media, who's managing it? Is that person an actual expert or do they run it off the side of their desk? Are they spending an appropriate amount of time on social compared to what they're getting or could be getting out of it? I find that a lot of companies, when you look at, say, the traffic or the revenue that's coming from social media, it's a tiny little percentage of the overall bucket, but they're spending an outsized amount of time and money on social media. How do they measure success in that case? Are they chasing likes for the sake of likes? What does their management team care about? I find a lot of management teams are like, we just want to know that we have more followers in our competition. Well, if that's the case, just go buy some on Fiverr. Or are you actually investing in social media for the sake of engaging your customers? When it comes to branding and SEO people, maybe you just work SEO PPC, you don't touch this branding stuff, you should still be asking these questions because at some point, you're going to need to know this information. So is there a brand guide? Just start with that. You might be surprised if a few places actually have one or have one that's actually been updated in the past couple of years. Maybe it's a dusty PDF that no one's ever updated. How are branded items evaluated? So when new products are created or when new documents are put out, who evaluates it to make sure it's following the brand standards? Who's responsible for maintaining the brand? You should definitely talk to them and do they have a brand voice? That's going to matter when it comes to content and ad writing. And then of course, the website. What platform is it on? WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, something else. Is it attached to a CRM of some kind or is there a marketing automation system? And if there is a marketing automation system, is it just a really expensive email program or are they actually setting up automations in their marketing automation system? Where is the site hosted? Where is their domain registered? You would be shocked at how many companies have no idea where this stuff is. We were recently dealing with a client where we had to add something to their DNS zone and their domain record and no one knew where the domain was not even their IT company. So that was thrilling. Make sure that doesn't happen to you. And in fact, this client used to have it. They switched IT companies we didn't know and the new IT company just lost the domain. So that was a weak delay on launching a site that shouldn't have happened. How do they maintain their website as well? How are changes approved to the website? Can anyone just go in there and do stuff or is there a process people have to follow? How often is content reviewed and audited? There's obviously way more here you can think about for a website but you get the idea of the sorts of things that we jump around on when it comes to websites. And we've often asked the client as well to sit down and write out everything they use that wasn't already covered in those previous questions. So are there other things you're advertising on or using some sort of third party or marketing solution for example? And for each touch point, what phase of the client journey is that in? I mean, the funnel, you know, that's a nice concept. They may not have a nice linear one, two, three, four funnel. Maybe it's sort of one, six, eight, 15 type funnel. But they must have some kind of client journey. Maybe they've never written it out though. That's something you can probably do as part of the discovery or at least the implementation. So if they have that journey, what tools are involved in that touch point and who manages those tools? Do they know or do you have to figure out how much they're spending on each touch point? Does the amount they're paying for each touch point is it actually counted in their overall cost per acquisition and does it make sense? So let's say for example, they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on tools that are super top of the funnel and then when it comes to bottom of the funnel or re-engagement of existing customers, there's nothing showing up there. They spend $8 on that but they spend $1 million on top of the funnel, right? Obviously super imbalanced. And no one has probably sat down and did the math on that before. You know, something for example that we recently did even for ourselves is we went through the money we were spending on all the different tools. Are we actually using it? Who's using it? When's the renewal period, et cetera. And it was a really eye-opening exercise. If you don't do this regularly, you're gonna accumulate a lot of crud and you're probably wasting money you don't need to. And then once you have this journey written out, I want you to be their client and follow that journey. Basically Mystery Shop that company. My business partner Jen, she loves using chat programs on client websites and having conversations with them as if she was a customer and seeing how that goes. And then as your data goes into the system, follow it as it moves through their systems, goes to the website, does it go to CRM? What happens to it? Is it tied to analytics in some way? Buy something, see how that fulfillment process goes. You know, this is how for example you can have discussions about, there's a recent Twitter thread about, you know, should you allow Gmail addresses and B2B download forms. Some people are pro, some people are against. You know, that's the time to have that kind of conversation. Is this something that you wanna try or do you wanna cut that off, right? And I think that's a good conversation to have at this point when you follow that journey. Try lots of different things, try to break it and see what happens. And the outcome of all these different questions and things we've done and digging up the dirt and everything else that's happened is your plan. So this isn't just what you're gonna do, but it's also how long it's gonna take and how much it's gonna cost in house or agency, doesn't matter. You need this discovery outcome to be as clear as possible because anyone, you, another agency, someone else in your team, they should be able to take it and run with it. Because you were paid for this time if you were agency or because you were able to take this time if you were in house, you can get rid of the vagueness around details and actually outline exactly what you're gonna do. I know from an agency standpoint when I first started in the field in the Stone Age, one of the things that I always worried about is I would write out a plan for a client and then what if they took that and ran with it and they didn't pay me to do implementation? That's a scary thing. And so you end up in this Western standoff where you're like, well, you tell me your plan. Well, you tell me your plan. You signed the proposal and I'll tell you the plan, right? You don't wanna have that kind of situation. So this is where discovery can really help you just be open and honest and here's what we think you should do. Let's talk about what we're gonna do next. And the plan should include, and at a minimum of course, because you may have more and some of this depend on what you're covering and discovery and what sort of fun surprises you find. So this is what this should include. So first off, a gold charter, because when you get six months down the road, you're gonna need this to remind yourselves why you're here in the first place. I talked about gold charters last year at MozCon. I recommend watching that video. I also talked about it a little bit the year before and we have a blog post on our website here at kickpoint.ca slash gold dash charter that you can check out to read more about gold charters. And a good example of where a gold charter could be, for example, the recent Core Web Metrics announcement, the Core Web Vitals from Google, where does that fit into your gold charter? You know it's important. So what are you gonna do with it, right? Your charter should be nimble enough for you to know where these exciting new things fit in without having to move everything else around. But certainly you wanna make sure that you're not getting distracted and saying, oh, everybody pivot to site speed when actually no one's converting because maybe your forms suck, right? So really making sure you're still staying focused while being able to be nimble and responding to changes. Analytics plan. I think the analytics plans, I might be biased. I think that he'd be done as early as possible. Again, talked about this last year at MozCon. I recommend watching that video because I don't have time to get into it too much, but really make sure you've got an analytics plan as early as possible because again, the earlier you put this in, the better your reports are gonna be at the end of the day. Website Blueprint. This is a sitemap, but it's extra. It has title tags, it has meta descriptions, it has what kind of content's gonna be on each page. How long is that content? What is the main point of it? What's the CTA? What's the URL? We build these for new websites that we're developing, but also if you're auditing an existing website, build a blueprint anyway, because out of the blueprint, you can see this page has no call to action or we have no idea why this page exists or Bob's super responsible for this page. We gotta make sure to interface with him every time we edit this page. All that kind of stuff should come up in the blueprint. And the marketing strategy. If that extra thing you have to do and make sure to include tactics. This isn't a template. This is built custom for them based on the discovery to achieve what you've covered in the Goal Charter. The specific here. So, and then on top of the actual plan, you're gonna find out new exciting bonus content here, DLC. Like internal politics. You're gonna find out who the true decision makers are, which may not be your main contact when you thought was a decision maker. Timeframes, for example, is this a hurry up and wait client? Do they get you stuff on time? Do they feel the deadlines, just no illusion? They don't really matter and they really enjoy the noise of the mushing by. And how much does everyone you'll be working with actually know about the different things you're gonna be doing? And are they willing to admit when they don't know things? Which is a really important thing to find out as early as possible in a project. And another thing too, like, is the project manager you were given actually experienced enough to carry the rest of the project through? Or are you maybe not even talking to the right people to make this happen? You know, all this gonna come out in the discovery. You're also showing your own expertise as part of this. You might find some quick and easy wins along the way too. So for example, one time in discovery we found that on a client's website they were double counting telephone call goals when they came from mobile because they were counting when you tap on the phone number and they were counting the call tracking from call rail. Not great. So it meant that their ads looked way better than they should have been from mobile. It was kind of sad when we had told the client that'd be like, actually, your ads aren't as great as you think they are. They're still not bad, but they're not spectacular. But, you know, it's something that you find early on. And for them, they were like, yeah, we always wondered the report seemed just a little too good, but we didn't know what the problem was, right? And so that's something you can fix super easy as a part of discovery. And then, you know, you've already built this relationship. You started this momentum with the client to keep going. And sometimes too, the answer is you don't need that, right? Maybe you don't actually need a brand new website or maybe you horribly needed a website before you spent one more dollar in SEO or PPC. Or you discover when you're going through Google reviews that one individual is responsible for 80% of the bad reviews at your company and maybe you internally need to make sure that HR deals with that little problem before you keep spending time trying to get good reviews when this person is going to undo all of your good reviews with all the bad reviews that they're bringing in. You know, the discovery is the perfect time to shine a light on this because it's not going in their doing, it's just we looked at everything, here's what we found. So and so is really causing you a lot of problems, right? You don't want to spend this time spinning your wheels trying to combat someone who's undoing all your hard work. And an important point too is, you know, how are you going to sell this, right? And get the team on board, especially when you have people from lots of different diverse teams. You've got your paid media team, you've got your content team, you've got your IT team, you've got your analytics team, right? How are they all talking to each other? And this is where you need to make sure that you're really having a conversation with people about what they're going to get out of this. Sometime you might even want to tell a horror story, right? I've shared a few during this talk, but you might have your own as well. But be honest and say the result of discovery is so that they're getting the clearest quote possible and they're getting the best fit for what they actually need. You're not just going in there and doing stuff and hoping something works, you're going in there and doing stuff for the purpose. You know, you could say this is how as well for in-house people, you need to know if you need an outside agency or not is by doing this discovery. The plan is going to be just that detailed so that everyone knows what the plan is and that everyone can actually do their part of the plan to make it happen. And also, you might get this objection, you know, no thanks, we've had enough research, I'm full, we don't need it anymore. And you probably think, you know, this sounds silly, I don't need to do this, I know what I'm doing, you can just dive right in. And I have to tell you, the more discovery we do, the less confident I feel about just diving in with clients. You know, I mean, I've been doing this for, as I said, 20 years now, and discovery has really honestly changed the way in which we approach clients and the way in which I myself approach clients and how we approach new projects. It really makes a big positive difference in how the outcome of the project is going to be. I really recommend that, maybe you think you've done enough research, great, use that research as part of discovery, maybe it won't take as long, but you're still gonna find some pretty crazy stuff that isn't gonna come up in any sort of research report. And sometimes two people might think the grass is greener on the other side of discovery, and you know what, I think that's true, the grass is actually greener on the other side of the discovery because the client isn't committing to a big project or retainer or monthly engagement, you're not coming in there and saying $20,000 a month, thank you so much, sign on the line, you're saying we're not sure yet, let's figure it out, and then we're gonna know exactly what we're talking about instead of just picking stuff. They get to know you as well as you get to know them, right? This is a marriage, you wanna maybe date a little bit before you decide to get married. And there's actually some movement, which means it's really nice to get that momentum going before you get into the actual doing of the work. And they get a really honest deliverable because you want everyone to start off from an honest point of reference, and so everything you've looked at is just uncovering stuff without judgment so you can put a solid plan together. It really almost feels like a DNA test you send away from, right? Like some of the mysteries that have haunted this organization get unpacked and explained, like maybe we should have more business, look at all these conversions, something's going on in sales, or look, you're spending $4,000 a month in Google ads, but you're close as competitor and you're spending $1,000 a month, why are we spending so much more than them, right? And often too, when you have a task to do, and it's big like marketing, it can be really hard to get that task going, but once you started, it gets way easier. This discovery is the start of that task. Discovery means that you have a project that's built specifically for you based on your goals and your needs and your team and your budget, instead of just taking someone else's successes, rewriting it with your name in there and hoping that their successes can become yours.