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If you are a social media marketer and manage advertising then you must be very concerned about client agency relationships.
An amazing partnership with clients is all about embracing change. In today’s very competitive and fast-moving industry you should constantly be reinventing yourself and it’s important that a client can change along with you and reinvent along with you.
An agency should stand side by side with clients, really understand brands, and reinvent them. As an agency, you should be most outcome oriented, customer centric, agile to the core marketing team on the planet.
For an agency partner, clients should also embrace these same principles although they continuously shift. How you work with us to make sure you are all on that journey together so while you might change how you work or change your messaging platform or your creative.
There are a few constants that you should implement in terms of building a great client-agency relationship. Solid client-agency partnership is a key driver of a brand’s success and there are certain things that I have learned along the way.
Trust
You have to build complete and utter trust in your client or agency partner. They are part of the team somehow and they need to believe in you to get the work done and know you are working toward the same goal as they.
At the end of the day, you need to share reports and be transparent and really trust each other.
You can visit How to create the perfect social media report for your client for a step to step guide.
Collaboration
You need seamless collaboration, so you may travel to the client for in-person meetings. Spend a few hours together side by side working as one big team.
Make Decisions
Be clear about your decisions. It’s not always easy but you have to be a decision-maker to help keep the client and your team focused and engaged. Share on the good, Share on the bad, when something goes wrong on it, when something goes right or when something’s amazing celebrates it.
Think creatively and like a creative
Everyone can be creative in a sense. So, put yourself in your client’s shoes, change your perspective. Good clients can get themselves in the mindset of a creative partner and partner with them to bring the best work to the table.
Making a mistake, you’re not the creative team, don’t try and write for them. Don’t try and art-director them but understand the process and understand what they’re going through.
Understand the process.
Learn the process, dig into the process. It’ll help you be more informed and help identify where things might have gotten off-track. So, you could have the right discussions and really help you understand how the work gets done. Charles and Ray Eames had a saying “Don’t delegate understanding”. You need to understand how this stuff happens.
Push each other
Keep pushing each other to make each other better. Ginni Rometty has said, “Growth and comfort never coexist”. Think about that comfortable with being uncomfortable. Think about how you feel when you’re coming up with new big bold ideas. It may not be comfortable but it always ends with a great result.
Be Passionate
You have to love the work you’re doing. Social media marketing is an industry fueled by passion and creativity. There’s lots of data and there’s lots of science but if you don’t love it, find something you do love because there’s so much passion when it comes to Social media marketing you just need to be in it.
Have a Shared Vision
Align with your client on a shared vision so you can achieve desired outcomes. This is everything from a proper brief to align you behind some bold new creative to understanding what you two want out of a project, to how you’re going to sell it up the line. Have a shared vision to do that, it goes back to some of the other things, trust each other, listen to each other, communicate with each other, and lastly respect each other. Never forget to let the client know how much you respect them.
