Making Clients' Live Easier, Not Busier

If you work in client service, this situation might feel familiar to you:

• You onboard a new client, everyone’s excited

• Your team sends over your first few deliverables and makes a few easy changes

• Performance improves and there’s some momentum building

• Then you spot a few opportunities that aren’t directly related to your scope and submit a few requests to the client team

  • In the paid media world, these requests often take the form of new ads, new landing pages, or reviews from other team members

• The client acknowledges those requests and say they’ll get on them

• First a few days go by, and there’s no progress on those new ads. Not a big deal, everyone’s busy.

• A few days turn into a few weeks, and there’s still no progress here. You can feel the loss in momentum, and performance is starting to slide.

• You feel stuck because you’re not contracted to deliver these types of assets, but the frustration is starting to build on both sides. The client hired your team to help them out and make their lives easier, but you can’t deliver on those promises without this additional support from the client…

Coming from the agency world, this is something I’ve seen play out a countless number of times. This scenario can be a big contributor to client churn as well.

I don’t have the perfect solution here since this is always something I’m working on getting better at, but I feel that I’ve made some good progress here since going out on my own. What I’ve realized is that there are two components important to solving this challenge: ownership and onboarding.

Ownership

By owning more components of a paid media program, it’s possible to eliminate bottlenecks and delays. For example, for some clients I own the majority of the process from strategy development, to campaign planning, to creative, to landing pages, to measurement and reporting.

This significantly reduces the time it takes to launch, test, and iterate because I’m not waiting on other resources to get through a long queue of projects before addressing the requests I’ve placed. Instead of me sending out a handful of asks to a client each week, I can send out a handful of updates. This significantly reduces the time commitment on their end.

However, I recognize that I’m in a unique position because I’m a one-man shop and can make my own rules and processes. For teams where broader deliverable ownership isn’t possible, the onboarding process can be critical.

Onboarding

This is a great point in a client relationship to set everyone up for success. A critical update to my own onboarding process has been to identify all of the relevant stakeholders to marketing and paid media, and make sure I have access to them and am familiar with their processes.

For example, if a client has an in-house creative team I make sure that I’m directly connected with them via Slack, email, monday.com/Asana/whatever. This allows me to communicate and prioritize with these resources more efficiently. Instead of going back to my main POC, who might be a marketing director, and asking them to coordinate and delegate, I can own that work myself.

I’ve found this approach to be helpful, and is something any freelancer or agency team can adopt.

At the end of the day, companies want to bring on third party support to help them, not fill up their to-do list with more tasks than what they had before. I’ve seen first hand how teams can move much faster with a centralized point of ownership or coordination in paid media projects.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.