Solutions Workshop

Overview

When clients are facing customer acquisition or retention challenges, we recommend starting the process with a solutions workshop. This is where we review and explore their mission, vision, goals, existing branding and digital strategy, identify marketing challenges, including your customer experience, competitive set, content and social strategies, SEO and analytics.

These workshops help uncover primary underlying issues, establish the main strategic priorities and help form the basis for a strategy and creative solution for the business.

Why a workshop?

We believe this is the most time and cost effective route to a solution. The workshop discovery session combines our project team and the client. It is a business immersion session; a time to ask questions you might not, identify norms, challenge your assumptions, and review your ambitions around the business and the brand. We use the insights, content, and data gathered to inform our recommendations.
Depending on the specific client requirements, especially where a minimum viable product(MVP) is involved, we can run week-long, lean inception sessions.

Who needs to be involved

It depends on the size and structure of the business or team. If a larger organization, it’s great to have a representative from each department. Buy-in is key to a smooth project. Having a range of voices in the room helps identify potential conflicts, address blockers before aligning around a shared goal. If we can’t get everybody in the workshop, we use follow-up surveys or interviews to ensure all opinions are captured. It’s important for us to understand from the outset, how many stakeholders are involved and the ultimate decision makers.

Time length

Generally, we like to allow a minimum of half a day for a strategy workshop. We love to build in flexibility to avoid good discussions being curtailed and to account for the number of, and the chemistry between, the attendees. Some clients also like to add team bonding activities that add to the time of the workshops in which case we recommend a day.
Overall, timing is dependent on each client’s requirements. For example, for MVP development, a complete product inception sessions would be a week.

Setting expectations

Setting expectations and requirements ensures attendees understand the purpose of the workshop and their role. Before a workshop we require:

Organization chart
Business mission and key goals
Branding guidelines
Latest product/services break-down and how your business currently categorizes its services.
Marketing asset examples (e.g. print, newsletters, webinars, social media, video, etc) the collateral you use to drive acquisition and retention.
Marketing or content calendar to reveal how you communicate
Competitor list (local/national)
Analytics or metrics data

We don’t require any attendee preparation other than an open mind and pre-agreement on the workshop objective

Team discussion

We moderate and encourage a lively group discussion and rating of:

Business vitals
Products/Service delivery
Target customers/Existing users
Marketing and Ad Communications
Website review
Content quantity and quality
Social Media
Competitors impact

Exercises

We tend to design the workshop around the specific nature of the organization but the following are some of the universal exercises we cover.

Map the buying cycle for products and services

We will dissect the customer journey from awareness right through to retention to identify where there are perceived issues or opportunities for the business to support the user or customer.

Audience personas

This stage involves attendees listing user archetypes or target customers their personas (demographics, needs & goals, and behaviors). Then we ask them to write the user stories to understand their motivations and needs. Building alignment on the business’ target customer and their needs is fundamental to identifying the businesses strategy going forward.

Brand values, personality, and tone of voice

We run a post-it note exercise where we ask attendees to write down a words/phrases per post-it that they feel reflects the brands values, personality and tone of voice of voice. Then we collate and see where the groups agree and select the top 5 words/phrases to give you foundations for brand guidelines.

Follow-up

A week to ten days after the workshop we will meet to present our proposed strategy and a creative solution. Our deliverables, a strategy presentation to define a plan to address your business challenges, and an original content solution, including examples of how it will be executed across different media or platforms. We will also include timelines and budget.

Quotes outlined in proposals are valid for 30 days from the date of receipt.

Ready to start?

No matter where you are, we can arrange a workshop in person or via video, making sure we cover all that is needed to create a custom strategy and proposal for your needs. Let’s start planning for your workshop!