As someone who works in digital marketing, you may be fully aware of how your services can help your clients, and confident in your abilities to deliver. However, when it comes to winning and keeping clients, the competency and knowledge you bring sometimes aren’t enough. There are barriers that can get in the way of you delivering those services, or that can prevent your clients from truly understanding the benefits of what it is you can provide. Here, we’re going to look at some of those barriers, and what you can do to bring them down.
A Limited Marketing Budget
If you are working with smaller businesses, then you need to be prepared to deal with the limited budgets they can bring into your relationship with them. Small and new businesses might have ambitious goals, but without the funding to make them a reality, they may not be able to pay for the comprehensive digital strategy that could truly be what they need. As such, it’s important to manage their expectations early on to avoid frustrations on both sides. Be transparent with them about what resources and services are available at their budget, and focus on low-cost, high-impact strategies like organic SEO, content marketing, and social media engagement to make the most of their limited funds. Offering a scalable plan so that if they are able to free up more of the budget to support your work, you’re able to provide.
Scope Creep
While you should offer scaleable services to grow your offerings alongside your client’s needs, you should be careful to avoid the danger of scope creep. Clients can often request further services and deliverables beyond your original agreements, without any adjustments to how much you’re paid or the timeline that you’re delivering them on. Newer digital marketing businesses can be susceptible to giving in, as they might be too willing to bend over backwards to satisfy clients regardless, or afraid of losing the source of revenue. Scope creep not only costs you money and opportunity that could be spent working on better-paying work, but it can also derail projects and affect the effectiveness of your services. Establish boundaries within the initial agreement and stick to those boundaries.
Unresponsive Clients
A lot of clients do not know exactly what to expect when they work with digital marketers. Some may simply consider your services to be a “set it and forget it” kind of deal. They may not have expected to communicate much with you beyond the initial meeting and progress reports along the way. These clients often don’t respond to emails, approve deliverables, or offer information when you need it, which can cause your efforts to stall. As a digital marketer, you can help avoid this by setting clear deadlines for communications, and use automatic reminders to keep communications current with clients.
Lack of Client Knowledge
Often, you can be precisely aware of what a client needs for their digital marketing strategy to be effective, but you have to sell them on it as well. You are almost always going to have more knowledge of certain areas of digital marketing than your clients. After all, understanding SEO is hard, due to its multifaceted nature. If you don’t take the time to communicate the essentials of your methods, it can lead to misunderstandings about the process and the kind of results your clients should expect. It can also cause them to fail to see the benefit of the services, which can make it harder to get them to agree on your plans. Take the time to educate your clients, avoiding jargon and providing reports that elucidate your explanations.
Poor Expectations
Unrealistic expectations about your services, the speed that you can deliver them, or the goals they should be hitting can lead to dissatisfaction with those services. For instance, SEO takes time, and clients expecting immediate returns from them can look at metrics that aren’t going to be an effective short-term measure of their effectiveness, like page views, instead of conversion rates or SERP placements. Take the time to set the right expectations from the beginning, explaining the KPIs you use to measure marketing success, and why they are the metrics that are worth focusing on.
If you’re running a digital marketing business, you need to learn that delivering great services is just a part of the equation. Managing your clients is an important part of the process, as well, so you need to learn how to do it.
