Every agency wants perfect clients to be a part of their business. The kind of clients who know their needs, seek advice from you, and bring work in your funnel. But it would be too good to be true if your interaction with each client of yours is so easygoing. And it is one bitter truth of life that not every relationship is built to last.
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The good news, however, is that you as a company can take some pragmatic actions that will help you build better and improve relationships with your clients. The main aim should be to build a robust and valuable relationship that functions in any situation, partnerships that last, and happy clients who’ll return back to you with more business.
Mind you, these valuable relationships are not built in one night. You have to put a decent amount of effort into your side of things. But in the long run, the result is sustainable and does wonder for the future of your industry. Here are four practical ideas that can help your digital agency in building better relationships with your clients.
1. Create Emotional Connection
Companies like Apple, Tesla, and Nike are the first ones to come to mind when we think about customer loyalty and evangelism marketing. These are consumer-facing companies. The reason their customers are so loyal to them is because of the formation of deep bonds over the years. The bond is deep to an extent where if you talk negatively or criticize the brand, the customers come forward to defend it.
Many might argue that such relationships do not exist in the B2B space because here companies are dealing with one another. Wrong, because even though businesses are dealing with one another, it’s still a person (not a building) that visits your website, office, attends meetings, and requests demos. And like all humans, these people have feelings too, which means tapping emotionally will always be beneficial in some way or the other. The more these clients are emotionally connected to you, the more they are going to spend with you.
There are many ways of building an emotional connection with clients. You can start by building trust, personality, and inspiring confidence by delivering the highest-order of customer experience. Moreover, you can get in touch with clients using different ways, one of them being, the use of handwritten letters.
Handwritten letters are a way to add a personal and emotional connection to your communications and customer service outreach. There is no shortage of reasons for using it. To start with, handwritten letters enjoy an open rate of 99% compared to 22.7% of email marketing. And because they are rare these days, they work more effectively. These letters stand out and unlike deleting the email, these letters are kept. The longer they stay with your client, the more likely they are to think positively about you. There are many various companies in the market that provide handwritten letter service, which allows you to scale your outreach, create a positive impression, and have long-lasting bonds.
2. Collaboration is Key
It is essential for any sort of relationship to be collaborative. Even if it is the agency that has to make decisions about most of the day-to-day activities, the clients must feel included. To do this, you can focus on delivering great creative briefs, and with regular sharing of information, the effects will be long-lasting.
Additionally, as an agency, you need to foster good internal relationships. If you and your entire team are on the same page, you are already setting a prime example of how you would engage and collaborate with clients.
Together, both clients and agencies, have to ensure that they are working to reach a common goal, and in the process of doing so they are sharing all the relevant data, materials, and results with all the members involved on both sides of the table. Collaboration is critical in the early stages of engagement where both parties are still testing out the best ways to present a brief.
3. Leverage Your Community
When your agency is purpose-driven and also has a good connection with your customers, eventually communities will form for you. In simple terms, at its core, a brand community is an essential set of people who support, promote, and take a stand for your brand whenever they can. But these communities also require some effort from your end.
- Bringing the community together: In the majority of the cases, the members of a community are spread across various platforms- be it on your website, discussion forums, or on social media. Bringing them together in an online or offline event can be a really good way to connect with them.
- Listening to the community: It is a fact that customers engage more with the brand than the prospects. They read the content, use the service, and share feedback on social media or forums. When they do so, it is your duty to respond proactively and acknowledge them.
- Make it about them: It is not always about the company. Sometimes you can consider giving some limelight to the top supporters. You can invite them to some event to speak about their journey with the brand, you can feature them on your social media, or even arrange giveaways.
- Let them promote you: Your community contains one of the most passionate people about your brand. They feel pride in spreading the word about you and bring their family, acquaintances, and colleagues onboard. You can provide them with some help by creating customized marketing campaigns for them.
4. Treat Clients Like Partners
If you do not want your business with the client to be completely transactional, then it is best to not treat them as a business opportunity. And if you go too friendly and start treating them like a family, the rooms for miscommunication will be vast and there will be a lot of unmet expectations. This is why most businesses, these days, are treating their clients as a partner.
When you treat your clients as partners, you get a healthy mix of personal, professional, purposeful, and transactional encounters. In this case, the identities of both you are your clients are preserved, and all the requirements are met from both sides without much hassle.
When dealing with clients, it is essential that you:
- Embrace the truth: You must always keep in mind that no matter how good your relationship is, at the end of the day, both of you are businesses that aim to make money. There cannot be any compromise in this aspect. You need their continued business to make revenue, and they need your service for the same.
- Be flexible: Keep a clear picture of what you as an agency need to deliver and try to stick to the base plan as much as possible. You should also remember that there’s no perfection and you can make mistakes too. So, keep a door open for inputs and feedback.
- Let them in: As a digital marketing agency, you might work with some tools and processes that you can’t share access to. But giving them access to a non-confidential dashboard will strengthen the relationship and will only make you more reliable.
Final Words
For building a strong agency-client relationship, you have to be on top of the virtues like trust, reliability, transparency, and personability. And when you keep these in check, the outcomes for everyone involved in the business become better. With the relationship marketing strategies outlined above, you can easily appeal to their emotion and make a good impact.