Digital marketing comes with dozens of challenges. One of your biggest has nothing to do with content strategy, SEO, or building backlinks. It comes much earlier in the process, and it’s the foundation for all that follows. Get it right and you’ll have a happy, productive relationship with your client. Get it wrong and you’ve got a recipe for resentment on both sides.
We’re talking, of course, about on-boarding.
As with every other step in your process, it helps to think through your on-boarding process and to standardize it. That ensures you spend more time on task, and waste less time chasing down key players and important information. The checklist that follows may differ in some key respects from what you’re doing now. Feel free to customize it, leaving out whatever doesn’t apply within your organization and adding anything that helps your workflow and client relationships.
Get this right and much of what follows will be much easier. Get it wrong and you stand a higher chance of mission creep, as well as overruns on time and cost. It also ensures you’ve assigned the right people for the job.
Set up accountability mechanisms in the event that your team — or theirs — isn’t getting key information.
Executing a good campaign means understanding your client’s business nearly as well as they do. One of the best ways to do that is to learn the challenges faced by front-line employees, and how those challenges are met. Those contacts can also give you a fuller understanding of customer personas, key competitors, and important product knowledge.
You may have an amazing team, capable of SEO wizardry that’s the envy of the industry and backed by copywriters whose work makes its audience swoon. If you can’t implement, however, it’s all for naught. Asking for this information later is going to make you look unprofessional, so ask early.
The conventional wisdom is that content is king. There’s some truth to that, but there’s a caveat: it needs to be high-quality content that people want to read because it solves a problem, answers a question, or is entertaining. Quality content won’t write itself. You’ll want your client’s input so you can deliver your best work.
Perhaps the most important part of on-boarding a client takes place in the months after project completion. Follow through on the work you’ve done, because this is the time to bring everything full circle. Is everything working as planned? Are you, or the client, experiencing any unexpected issues? If your business has up-sell options for maintenance or additional products, this is an ideal time for them; just bear in mind that this part of the process is a lot easier if you and your client have had a happy and productive on-boarding process and they know you’re as invested in their success as they are.
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