We asked agency experts to share their advice – here’s what they had to say!
What makes agency-client relationships thrive? How can you, as an agency, make sure your clients are succeeding and meeting their goals?
Obviously internal success is tantamount, but for agencies, client success is directly correlated to an agency’s own success. That’s why figuring out how you can do the best job you can for your clients is crucial in securing your own company’s wellbeing.
We asked some of the top experts in the field of marketing how they’re working to ensure client success in the year to come. Here are just a few of the top answers we received!
1. Teach clients to treat their marketing strategies as an engine, not a project.
The purpose of your marketing is to deliver consistent growth over the long haul. Instead of treating marketing as a series of “projects” that result in a herky-jerky, start-stop effect, think about your marketing as an engine that’s always, ultimately leading to a smoother and more effective ride.
Your website, blog, social media properties, emails, and your advertising are all major components of your marketing engine. And fuel? Your content! Keep your tank full of customer stories, testimonials, product explainers, and advice that will drive each aspect of your marketing.
Aron Schuhmann
Director of Growth Marketing at Pronto Marketing
2. Show them how to build additional value.
This year, we’re working with B2B and B2C clients to build additional value within their existing customer base. Most people already know that it’s way more expensive to onboard a new client than to retain an existing one.
Still – taking the time to gather context, survey or interview users, develop a plan to keep them coming back (while encouraging brand evangelization), and reporting/refining the strategy based on data is no easy ask for the already time-strapped folks in business development.
That’s where Salted Stone comes in, launching persona-aligned, omnichannel customer success strategies to help brands reach their growth goals, ensure more repeat purchases or renewed contracts, and make 2019 their strongest year yet.
Abby Thompson
Director of Marketing at Salted Stone
3. Track the success of your clients’ marketing efforts.
One thing we’re doing to help our clients succeed in 2019 is assisting them in tracking their marketing efforts. We’re showing them the value of tracking their marketing and how it can benefit not only their relationship with their marketing company, but also with their bottom line. Setting up a system to track their efforts and getting their entire team on board is crucial to marketing success.
Shay Berman
President at Digital Resource
4. Show clients how to attract customers in the right places.
The one thing we’re doing to help our clients succeed in 2019 is teaching them our Weighted Growth Hacking Formula, showing them how to get customers without wasting time or money in the wrong places.
As a marketer, there are tons of tactics that could work for a business with some amount of time or effort. But the biggest challenge is narrowing it down to the lowest-hanging fruit, or the tactics that’ll move the needle most given a company’s goals, budget, and timeline.
Sometimes you’ll see running traditional channels like Facebook or Adwords will work best, but other times, it’s the scrappy little growth hacks that might work, or building up an SEO presence without spending a dollar. So we really just want to help our clients focus on the few things that will make the biggest impact.
Hailey Friedman
Head of Marketing at Growth Marketing Pro
5. Show clients the power of full-funnel marketing.
This year, we’re focused on implementing full-funnel marketing and closed loop reporting for our clients.
All too often, companies have disconnected systems and processes, and are unable to decipher which marketing efforts are driving the most ROI. When disparate technology platforms and teams don’t communicate properly, you’re losing valuable information.
With the right integrations and structure, companies can unlock this holistic data, better understand what’s converting their best leads, and help their sales team members close more deals.
By focusing on seamless integration and multi-touch attribution, you’re setting both your sales and marketing teams up for success.
Jennifer Lux
VP of Client Experience at LyntonWeb
6. Encourage learning and growing year after year.
Start from scratch (…not really!)
Consumer expectations and the digital marketing ecosystem have evolved faster than marketers, and too many brands plan next year as “this year + 5%.” They don’t re-evaluate their priorities or the changing landscape in which we’re all competing.
So this year, as we help our clients plan for what’s now and what’s next, we’re using a new strategic planning process nicknamed “Goal Therapy” to make sure that our tactics and budgets for 2019 roll up to our goals and objectives, rather than going with plan A.1 and then A.2 year after year.
Skip the assumptions and start from square one – while of course learning from and building off of your data, successes, and failures!
Dan Golden
President & Chief Search Artist at BeFoundOnline
7. Set goals internally and externally.
We have two sets of clients: independent consultants and the marketing and advertising clients who hire us to deliver world-class talent and solutions.
For our consultants, we’re focused on providing them community and all the benefits of having colleagues, while supporting them in finding harmony in their business and personal lives. This means building out a more robust Slack community, starting up a mentor/mentee program, developing our rewards and recognition program, and partnering with like-minded organizations who can support our team with financial empowerment.
For our clients, we’re delivering a turnkey way to access the best talent in the world. This means that we’re thoughtfully creating teams of people uniquely suited to approach their business challenges and opportunities in an authentic, straight-forward, no-BS way.
Stephanie Nadi Olson
Founder and CEO of We Are Rosie
8. Focus on being memorable and measurable.
The most important thing we’re doing for our clients to help them maximize their success in 2019 is yielding brand response advertising that is both memorable and measurable. Our focus is on investing client dollars wisely – with advertising that’s highly accountable, while always building and enhancing the brand.
Karla Crawford Kerr
VP of Marketing at Hawthorne
Bonus: Help your clients with measurement and attribution.
One thing we are doing to help our clients succeed in 2019 is helping them along their measurement and attribution journey. As marketers today are expected to directly tie their activities to revenue generation, we know the place at which everyone would love to arrive is impact attribution; that is, truly understanding the causal effect of their marketing channels, freeing them to reduce wasted ad spend and focus on what matters.
Yet, we also know many marketers remain stuck on last-click attribution. In 2019, we’re excited to help them move past last-click and even multi-touch attribution to a holistic view of their customer journey and, ultimately, unlock data-driven attribution.
Laura Smous
Director of Product Marketing at AdRoll
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