What happens in our Think Big! research and discovery workshop?

When you plunge time, money, and resources into marketing, it’s disheartening when your efforts don’t reap results. And with other departments (like sales or finance) looking for returns, the pressure can quickly raise the stakes even higher, risking pushing you towards a desperate scattergun approach – throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. This only drains budgets faster, taking you even further from the outcomes you’re aiming for.

So, what’s the key to breaking this cycle? Take a step back, look at the entire customer journey, and understand which pains, gains, and ‘moments of truth’ define their interactions at each stage. This way, you can meet your audience exactly where, when, and how they need you. Our Think Big! research and discovery workshop is designed to help you do exactly that. Here, we take you behind the scenes, explaining each phase of the process, revealing how we uncover opportunities, and showing how deeper audience insights can help you market more effectively.

What is a research and discovery workshop?

Guesswork doesn’t solve problems – it wastes time, money, and trust. And in the age of AI this and marketing jargon that, trust is something that shouldn’t be gambled with. It’s hard to earn, and even harder to get back if you lose it. So, before you set out on any campaign, whether you’re marketing a product, service, or something more abstract, you need to know the lie of the land – and well. Our workshop looks at this bigger picture.

From unaware to fully fledged advocates with lifetime value, we dive deep into your customers’ journeys to understand the pains, gains, and moments of truth (the key triggers behind every decision) at each stage. Armed with this insight, we form hypotheses about their needs, desires, and behaviours, before validating them with a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. Then, we recommend a targeted therapy that’s grounded in reality and primed to make a difference. If something isn’t going to move the needle, we won’t waste your time (or budget) on it. 

Five steps for a successful research and discovery process

When a client comes to us with a specific channel request – for example, “Can PPC generate leads?” – we don’t always need to map the entire customer journey. In this case, we’re focusing on a segment that’s already on the brink of conversion – they’re actively searching for a solution to their problem. But even so, research and clear goal-setting are non-negotiable. These steps keep us attuned to your objectives and ensure we’re chasing the right results, whether you want to generate 100 potential orders (POs) per month, reduce your cost-per-lead (CPL) by 20%, or increase your conversion rate by 15%.

However, if you’re scratching your head about your customers’ experiences altogether and want to market effectively at every stage, here’s the process you can expect to follow:

1. Persona mapping

Understanding who your customers are is an essential starting point, providing foundational clarity that keeps your stakeholders on the same page. At this stage, we’ll outline basic attributes including a name, photo or sketch, job title, goals, behaviours, and pain points, building an ideal snapshot backed by data or experience. There are three different types of personas:

• Proto personas: quick, assumption-based, and created to align the team’s existing understanding, without new research.

• Qualitative personas: built from small-sample research like interviews or usability tests to understand user needs and behaviours.

• Statistical personas: derived from large-scale surveys, using qualitative insights and statistical analysis to identify user segments.

We’ll often start with proto personas to learn key characteristics of your audience. However, validation is always key (we come to this in the next step). If data is inaccurate or fictionalised, it can give brands false confidence and, ultimately, lead to poor decision making. Not to mention, demographics don’t show the true depth brands need to understand a person’s experience. Think of Ozzy Osborne and King Charles – the two are virtually identical on paper, but their needs and behaviours couldn’t be more different.

2. Empathy mapping

Armed with your personas, we delve into the nuanced experiences that define their interactions with your brand to create detailed empathy maps. For example, they may feel overwhelmed with jargon or instilled with confidence in your expertise, be prone to procrastination or have a more decisive approach to decision making. From thoughts and feelings to speech and behaviours, we’ll work closely with you and your stakeholders to uncover deep-rooted knowledge about customer needs, their critical touchpoints, current challenges, and goals and motivations.

Where multiple questions remained unanswered throughout the research process, it uncovers gaps for further probing. And, with a visual canvas to refer back to, it generates an easily customisable template to finetune as your customer personas evolve.  

3. Research and data validation

Here’s where we get forensic. While internal perspectives are invaluable for context, your stakeholders can offer a goldmine of knowledge into the needs, perceptions, and mindset of your market. So, we adopt qualitative methods, such as interviews and surveys, to gather firsthand insight into the “why” behind customer behaviour. 

Meanwhile, quantitative tools like search data, analytics, heuristic research, and social listening give us the hard numbers to test and validate our ideas. For example, if a B2B software company notices a drop in demo requests despite strong website traffic, this data alone isn’t enough to remedy the problem. However, by cross-referencing the challenge with high bounce rates and good search volume for features not highlighted on the page, they can identify content needs to be adjusted accordingly. The result? More demo requests and qualified leads.

This might sound intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. At this stage, we’ll help you gather, clean, analyse, and visualise key findings, empowering your team to make more informed marketing decisions that drive better results. And we’ll monitor them to ensure they evolve as your audience does.

4. Customer journey mapping

We’ve created hypotheses on the back of our empathy mapping exercise and validated them through targeted research. Now what? It’s time to plot our findings for different stakeholder groups on a customer experience journey map (CXJM). With a detailed visual, you’ll have a constant reminder of your audience’s needs at every stage of the journey, from being unaware of your brand to fully fledged advocates with lifetime value. 

Then, by extracting key themes (especially from the ‘moments of truth’), we can prescribe specific therapies as part of your ongoing CX and digital marketing strategy. And there’s no second guessing. This map is informed by factual data and firsthand insights, providing a clear focus that improves the resulting uplift in customer experience and tracking of KPIs – whether these are direct sales, leads, customer engagement or brand awareness. So, you can confidently keep existing customers satisfied and engaged with focused communications, while effectively acquiring new ones.

5. Diagnosis and recommendations

Only when we’ve nailed down the diagnosis will we prescribe a targeted therapy that works. Sometimes, this might even mean we challenge you, but only because we treat your budget as if it’s our own. We want you to get maximum bang for your buck, with a high-impact marketing strategy that drives real, measurable results.

Our holistic approach means you’re never limited to one or two static services. So, as your business evolves and your audiences’ needs change, we’ll flex our strategy in tandem, employing the best channels to deliver impactful results.

Maximise your marketing potential

We take our professional obligation to start at square one seriously. Rather than jumping to conclusions that could fall flat – wasting time, money, and resources – we dig deep into your business, audience, and objectives to fully understand the challenges you face, and develop a watertight strategy guaranteed to deliver.

By grounding recommendations in reality, we give you the clarity to show up in a way that makes your audience think, finally, someone who gets it. Powerful, right?

Hungry to stand head and shoulders above the competition? Make your customers feel seen, heard, and valued at every stage with our Think Big! research and discovery workshop. Get in touch to get started.