With better client communications, you’ll soon find yourself bringing more to the table — and winning more business
Remember those sticking points in the agency/client relationship that we looked at in the last post?
We saw how improving your communications and procedures helped you to overcome issues such as out-of-the-loop clients who don’t understand how you work, threats of communications breakdowns and the thorny problem of missed deadlines.
Solving these issues results in very real benefits, and it motivates clients to stay with your agency. Better still, improving your communications can help foster a culture of innovation within your agency, allowing you to widen and strengthen your offer to clients.
How you innovate depends on what your organisation offers, but strong communications can certainly allow your agency to:
- Draw on additional creative talent. Using the right communications and project management systems helps you to manage freelance talent better, allowing you draw on a wider pool of talented creatives for each project.
- Integrate with your clients’ marketing departments. Clear communication enables you to work as an extension to your clients’ marketing departments, encouraging them to use your services more often and making it harder for rivals to oust you from the relationship.
- Collaborate on new ideas. Better communications involve your clients more closely with your work, opening the doors to shared ideas and new requirements. Clients are likely to entrust you with new projects if they are able to collaborate better in their development.
Offering more value to clients
Improved communications not only allow you to offer more value to your existing clients, they open new doors as well. You can use communications technology to work across borders, introducing you to a fresh market of international clients and reassuring your current clients that you can work with multinational organisations. And because your new way of working allows you to better build your service around your clients’ needs, they feel more valued and you achieve more effective results on their behalf — both surefire ways of winning new business.
Internal benefits for marketing agencies
Better ways of communicating also have a knock-on effect on the way you work internally. You’ll find it easier to work in a more connected way, joining up teams with different skills in different locations. You’ll also have a clearer view of how work is progressing across your agency, allowing you to intervene at the earliest signs of problems and manage staff time more effectively.
Best of all, good communications improve your cashflow. Well-managed projects take less time and keep clients happier — allowing you to bill faster and encouraging satisfied clients to settle invoices quicker.
Ideas for improving communications
You’ve seen the benefits of better communications. But how can you achieve them?
Depending on how your agency currently works, you’ll need to introduce a series of measures to overcome current problems and create the conditions for innovation. The good news is that many ways of doing these things have been tried and tested in other agencies — and are relatively simple to implement.
So if you’d like some quick-start ideas for improving communications in your own marketing agency, download our guide on How to Grow Your Marketing Agency. It’s filled with ideas on turbocharging your communications — helping you retain your clients, win new business and create a leaner, meaner agency that’s well placed to outshine its competitors.
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