We always refer to this phase as the most crucial part of any part of planning - serving as the foundation and reference for all steps that follow in the Internet Marketing Process.  Project Discovery helps us understand the scope and plan for the marketing campaigns. A thorough discovery process helps us understand your online goals, target audience, industry and competition. This phase consists of the following steps:

• Audience Survey – Friendly customers are interviewed to capture relevant feedback and identify any gaps that may be missing in our marketing strategy. Any information collected will be aggregated and reviewed with you, and then feed back into the project. This is a crucial step in ensuring the new strategy will be a success and fits what the target audience is looking for.
• Persona Development -  Know your users!  Information collected from interviews with you and/or the audience surveys is tranformed into a Persona, a fictitious description of a typical user of your website, defining demographic and psychographic information.  This serves as an amazing tool in helping the marketing team identify your audiences behavior in much greater detail.   The more we know about your users, the better the plan.
• Competitive Analysis - Understanding your competition is a key piece in correctly positioning yourself online in various markets and channels. 
• Usability Analysis – A similar step to what is done when developing the site structure, an analysis will be done on the website to ensure the site will be easy to navigate and flow smoothly and efficiently, connecting visitors to relevant content to help them reach the goals that we have stated for the marketing campaign.  Usability issues identified in this step will be addressed and handled according to the arrangements made with client.
• Internet Marketing Analysis - A comprehensive analysis covering a diverse set of knowledge. The objective is to better understand how the business can market itself best on the Internet. There are a number of exciting possibilities and ground-breaking opportunities that are available but it is imperative for us to understand the market and the most efficient methods of conducting business online. The assessment and recommendations include the following:
  
  • A review of your website along with recommendations on how to improve it
  • A brief review of competitor websites to review best practices within your specific industry.
  • A comparison of your website and the website of three competitors (number of pages and sitemaps)
  • Identify website functionality that, upon implementation, will reduce costs & generate additional revenue
  • Review for potential domain name confusion with competitor sites