4 Ways You Can Better Collaborate With Your Clients

In today’s business world, the ability to understand your client is a valuable skill. Due to marketers and other organizational leaders every once in a while tend to neglect the customer needs before and after sales, customers have become less trustful and less loyal. As a result, the communication barriers are becoming more stringent, complex and multidimensional to deal with. Anyway, managing multiple clients and multiple social media accounts is still possible and without hard efforts. This is why we accepted the challenge, and as we’ve already told in the previous article, together with Dylan Hey we have decided to invest our time, experience and knowledge and launch The Agency and Freelancer Academy to ensure that you sell and deliver Social Media Marketing Services to your clients in the right way.

Last Thursday, September 20, 2018, Dylan held the first webinar From Onboarding to Content Creation. Whether you watched it or not, this shortcut with the main points highlighted may be more than useful for you.

#1 Onboard your clients

Every agency knows that winning a new client depends on a number of things and one of them is the onboarding process. The first experience your client has with your product or service plays an important role in the further relationship built, and in case it’s consuming, you’ll be in a trouble.

Among one of the very first difficulties agency owners usually struggle with, Dylan points out the expectation settings

“For me, the biggest learning point was also making sure that I’m doing everything in the right way at the beginning. I was worried if I haven’t been explicit with the client explaining about what they can expect from us or how we communicate with them, or what the process looks like”, he adds.

Other factors include getting clients to use the project tools and collaboration, getting content from the client, and creating pricing tiers for clients.

All these things are crucial to pay attention to, but it is worth remembering that there is a lot of other things that can be missed. We know it may sound a bit confusing, but you should learn onboarding your clients before they actually become your client. For this reason, start with the questions. It’ll help you understand your clients’ needs.

Prepare an onboarding questionnaire for all new clients that must be completed before any initial kick-off calls

It can be in a form of a paper questionnaire or on the landing. In order to understand your customers better, you can schedule regular calls with your clients.

Encourage them to share their thoughts by asking their opinion without projecting your own and use simple language. Here it’s an open-and-closed case: be concrete and talk to the point.

Then, clearly set the next steps, when and how you will communicate, when your next meetings will be, what kind of behavior is and isn’t acceptable, timelines etc.

#2 Create the right content

A plan for future customer engagement is extremely important exactly as well as a plan for today. During the webinar, agency owners openly admitted that telling the story and building unique positioning is hard for them.

Content is nothing without a proper strategy. Before to start working on content creation, you have to be sure that you have everything for that. First, analyze who your clients are, so to say, determine them.

While creating content, put yourself in the client’s shoes. Take a look through the client social media channels and their competitors. This information can easily help you prepare some case studies which will be really relevant to these clients specifically.

Keep in mind, that your audience is interested in different types of content. It’s not only about the articles, some, if not most, may also be interested in graphics, videos, or pictures.

The truth is that the ultimate goal of content creation is traffic and sales. However, you need to make sure that you’re connecting with your audience in a relatable manner. Good content should be interesting, no more no less.

Coming with ideas to posts can take a lot of time if you’re lack of inspiration and time, PromoRepublic Post Ideas Library can help with that.

There you’ll find a number of handcrafted templates which fit well your consumer’s buyer journey.

You can also change the way the picture looks like and change it up to your liking using Graphic Editor. That means if you want to play with the colors and letters, no fears.

#3 Let Approvement Happen  

Before the webinar, the PromoRepublic team and Dylan made a survey. The results said, 78% of agencies name approval process the most consuming and the most problematic area of their business.

As an agency owner, surely, you don’t want to waste your time on editing. Yes, changes are always expected to happen during the approvement process, but you can shortcut the number of them, or, at best, avoid them at all.

What you should do is invite your clients into the content calendar and let them leave their comments or remarks right on your calendar.

PromoRepublic suggests the collaboration area where you can create the content and then schedule it for the approval. This feature also helps to improve agency-client relationships, because your client sees that you do everything you can to ease the workflow and make it comfortable.

#4 Work Together

Make sure everyone from your team who will be working on the project is involved and present in the initial kickoff meeting. This may sound very obvious, but just let them be involved in the process.

Since everybody in your team has a defined role and a number of responsibilities, it’ll be easier to deliver your message about your activity, ideas, and explain why this or that was done.

The purpose is to solve the problem or generate ideas for the future. Make sure that both, your team and your client, can freely exchange their opinions.

What’s more important, you can give a comprehensive explanation and additional comments to the weekly or monthly reports on content effectivity your clients get. In this way, your show how much you care about the end result not in words, but in deeds.

Too much information is never enough. If you want to get as more insights as it’s possible, watch the video above.