Good agency-client collaboration is about more than every morning status reporting about what has been done. Not only you have to speak the same language with your client but also think in one language.
Despite the number of books and articles citing management gurus, the buzz around the word “collaboration” is yet fading away. And no wonder why, the benefits of it are significant, mostly because creating a deeper relationship leads to better customer retention and increasing sales.
Agency-client collaboration is a perfect blend of creativity, flexibility, compromise, and work. For keeping balance, both sides must be equally dependent on each other and absolutely equally involved in the project.
Only in this case decision-making process will be painless, and the division of responsibilities, from global to macro levels, will be fair.
McKinsey company shares the research proving the increase of productivity by 30% after proving the collaborative way of work.
According to Priyanka B. and Gregory M.Walton, from Department of Psychology at Stanford University, people who work with other stick to the task 64% longer than solitary workers, which proves that collaborative work drastically improves the performance.
Let alone the fact about the lower percentage of fatigue and higher success rate.
So if you want to invest your time and efforts in developing a collaborative relationship not only in your team but with clients, there are some things you have to keep in mind or at least acknowledged them.
1. Onboard Clients With Love And Care
Better agency collaboration starts with welcoming your clients. This is something more than hello-email. It’s about making sure your clients feel confident about your services.
Get your clients attention as much as you can and provide them with information about your service and product. Onboarding clients as well as having a client onboarding checklist are the most important parts of building a relationship. They are also crucial for starting your business down the path of success.
At first, you have to play a far more hands-on role to guide your clients through your product, making sure they are well aware of the main priorities they get using your services.
It’s like making attempts to grab the attention of whom you’re falling in love. First, you learn the interests and hates of the person, and then you’re making moves to positively impress this person.
So if you want to get client information, think of making a questionnaire. With tools like Typeform or Google Forms, the list of questions won’t be boring or annoying.
Once you have gathered all the information and discussed it with your team, set up a meeting with your client for a thorough discussion of the contract and finalizing areas of your work.
At this meeting, you should approve business goals for the client. You should also cover major responsibilities, and establish a framework of your plan.
It is supposed to be a good idea if you draw down the plan in three periods: 3, 6, and 12 months. Logically, each period should have its own short-term goals and expected results.
By the end of the meeting, you should let your clients feel free while asking questions. Nothing but a mutually acceptable solution to the issues can dispel any doubts from the client side.
2. Use A Social Media Collaboration Tool For Agencies
The outburst of tight deadlines, tighter budgets, and higher expectations, even in traditional Google Spreadsheets, have shown that no one is safe from this danger, which may be called a workflow chaos.
Does this have the end?
The sweet word as “automation” promises to solve the well-known problem of disorganization, it pledges to save time, and bring true productivity gains. And it helps not just in words but in deeds.
The thing is that automation tools free up time spent on repetitive task and allow focus on work that brings a much higher return for the business. Let’s get this straight, most agencies strategies for effective collaboration can’t go without social media automation tools.
The problem is, there are literally thousands of tools which are supposed to be the greatest. However, buying them all, on the one hand, may not be cost-effective, and on the other hand, it will only make matters worse.
That’s why it’s necessary to choose the one-at-all tool which let your agency to collaborate with the client directly.
You really need to build transparent relationships with the client and let them be involved in the workflow. Did you know that 78% of agencies are struggling from the approval process?
This number could be less troubling if only everything had been argued beforehand.
Such tool as PromoRebulic will be handy in this case. This agency collaboration platform not only keeps and schedules content in a calendar but also allows clients to leave their comments and suggestions just in one place.
PromoRepublic’s social media calendar with all the content scheduled beforehand.
You can create your client profile and invite them to collaborate with the email within the interface. No matter how many clients you work with, they won’t be able to peek in the content plan of each other.
When you have doubts about the perfection you’ve prepared for your client, just take a breath and send the invitation to your client’s inbox. As soon as your client follows the link in the mailbox, they can go to the calendar and take a look at the scheduled posts.
This is how you can invite your teammates and clients to PromoRepublic.
Proposing post for approval in PromoRepublic.
Don’t worry; your client can’t edit the post changing everything on the way. There’s only a possibility to click on the Approve button (in the best case scenario) or let the comments with suggestions about what you must change as soon as possible.
Besides the unique approval process, your agency gets the white label solution. That means, your logo can be put on the content you make.
Approval workflow can come easy. There’s no need to share thousands of documents, screenshots, or pictures.
If you want to learn more about automation of social media marketing process, ask for a demo by following this link: Social Media Marketing Control Center for Agencies.
Watch this video to get a better understanding on how everything works:
3. Work On Creating The Right Content For Your Clients
Being on the same page with your client is crucial for creating content people will love. Creating visuals, videos, and writing content for specific people is hard, but still possible.
If you write text for a nameless mass of people, you will not get any effect. It is important for you to create a strategy that will help to communicate specifically with the target audience of your clients and find the very style that resonates with their potential customers. Then, with the help of content, you can not only talk about something important but also get a good profit.
If you don’t know where to start, look at what the competitors do. Analyze their blog, social media pages, and keep an eye at their ads. After all, for successful promotion, you need to understand what parameters you should have, how long it will take to achieve good results and what budget is needed for this.
Armed with knowledge, you are more likely to determine the best piece of content and the best posting time. The good news, you shouldn’t spend time without sleeping in front of your computer.
You can leave this work for artificial intelligence. PromoRepublic’s Smart Planner tracks your content effectiveness and picks the best time for a specific piece of content by analyzing numbers of parameters.
In other words, you can stop to wonder whether you could drop the ball on planning entirely.
4. Work Smarter, Better, Faster Together With The Team
Imagine a pyramid, a skyscraper, a towel…could any of these architecture masterpieces exist without a solid fundament?
Whatever you do, your team is your power. You must preserve your team and the atmosphere among people you work with.
Real-time concerted actions are the hallmark of effective teamwork. Instead of having a discussion in one application (for example, in a chat) and doing work in another, we recommend finding a single tool that allows you to discuss work in the same place where it is done.
As a result, if you have to enter a new participant into the project or delegate some of the work, you can immediately transfer all the information about the latest decisions and discussions on the project. The new employee will be able to quickly get to work. Besides, you do not have to spend time explaining all the details.
Such optimization will help all employees, from the general director to ordinary executors, to interact better with colleagues, manage projects, generate ideas, cooperate more actively in carrying out tasks and work more efficiently.
5. Don’t Forget To Underpromise And Overdeliver
Communication should be honest. Of course, your promises and goals should not contain deliberately false information. It should also be free from any attempts to manipulate, move accents from the objectively important to the unimportant, hide important information (the so-called “fine print”), give the ordinary properties of the product for its advantages.
The client often has several ways to further verify the information you share and the revealed lie can destroy cooperation.
Obscure promises will definitely kill the desire to share feedback. When you are honest with your customer, you can count on them, to be honest back.
You know, the greatest gift you can make to your client is to learn how to say “No” when it’s necessary.
In management and collaboration, the most terrible phenomenon is the appearance of “yes”. This happens when everyone thinks that the project will fail, but they still agree to work on it.
The results won’t be good, the client won’t be satisfied, and your agency will get a poor feedback.
For that reason, be honest with people, give them your powerful word “no”.
If you doubt, you can make dreams come true. Maybe, in this case, you will help your client move on.
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