In the agency world a large portion of your job is maintaining client relationships and expectations. You may need to revisit your approach to how you handle your client relations. Mark Schaffer notes how this is changing, “Build trust with clients and make sure they know you have their best interest in mind. To take risk, they need to trust you…” This is also valuable advice due to those times where there are tactics that have high risk and high reward and you need that trust to be able to execute them. We need to have rapport and strength with our client relationships so we can have their confidence when thinking outside of the box with our campaigns. Part of building this trust is to make sure we know how our clients make money and make sure we’re studying their business. We need to take a moment and remind ourselves what our goals are. Get inside your client’s mind. Remember, your job is to make them look good and help them keep their jobs.
Part of the theology at Avocet is to make sure we are hearing from real people. We believe that a great idea can come from anywhere, even a client. Clients have good ideas and they want to know where their ideas are “where’s my idea?” Plus, they usually know their business better than anyone else. By the way, what did you do with their great idea? You need to be ready to answer that.
You have to make sure you are open and listening and make marketing decisions because it is the best decision, no matter where it came from. When they have meetings with your agency it should be highlight of their day. Make them feel involved in the process. Let them talk.
I hope these insights help you refocus and grow as we head into a new year!
