Communicating with clients regarding marketing strategies and results can be difficult, especially when you can’t seem to be on the same footing. This is quite ironic, considering that marketing is communicating ideas with the aim of having receivers subscribe to the idea you are selling.
In order to effectively convey your proposed strategies and the results of your work to your client, you must take a look at where you both stand, and how you can reach out to them in a language and a manner that they can easily digest.
Get Inside Their Head
When your client approaches you, they are looking for someone to help them get their message out to their target audience in a way that best represents them and what they stand for.
In order to understand them, you must put yourself in their shoes and understand where they are coming from, in relation to what they want to achieve, and how they want to achieve it. Getting to this point of understanding requires communication, and you have to be very open and willing to listen, instead of merely relying on what you know or what you’ve done before.
Communicating with clients will help set realistic goals, strengthen your relationship, and aid in the translation of your strategies into results.
Related: 7 Amazing Communication Tools You Can Use With Clients
Make It Make Sense – Do Not Overwhelm With Data!
When you’ve successfully entered their headspace and identified what the client needs and wants, it is time to start with a plan. Identify your goals, the tools and channels for accomplishing them, available resources, the cadence of reporting on progress, and the metrics required by stakeholders. It is very important to have a measurement plan that is tailor-made for the project and can accommodate all its complexities in order to accurately track your results.
But this is where it gets tricky: how do you present all of these to your client in a way that they would understand and would make perfect sense to them? Oftentimes, it is helpful to present things as simple as possible, with the least complications, in presentations that are specifically cut and constructed for the intended audience – your presentation has to be understandable to the people who are hiring you. This is where what you’ve learned from getting into your client’s head comes in handy.
Do not overwhelm your clients with data that may not be relevant to their function. Give the right people the right information that they need, so that the process becomes more streamlined, no one’s time is wasted, and everything is kept efficient. To achieve this, consider using marketing reporting tools built specifically for agencies to make the process a whole lot easier and faster.
Contextualize Results
The reports you will make from the data captured in your metrics plan will show how well your marketing strategy worked. Numbers are important because these are real indicators of the success of your efforts.
However, while numbers are well and good, it would be better if they are contextualized in order to show what worked, and what didn’t. Share with your client the hows and the whys, and take note of these in order to help you in future goals.
Letting the client know how you achieved your goals will also help build their confidence in you, and possibly foster stronger ties and encourage repeat transactions.
In conclusion, presenting marketing strategies and results to clients can be a daunting task, but with a thorough understanding of the client’s position, open communication, marketing reporting tools, tailor-made presentations, and contextualized results, you would be able to showcase what you can do in the best way possible and build client confidence in you.
Which of these tips are you going to try today? Let us know in the comments.
