Digital Agencies: What Are the Top 10 Red Flags for Your Clients in 2022? đ©đ©đ©
source link: https://www.semrush.com/blog/red-flags-for-agency-clients/
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
Digital Agencies: What Are the Top 10 Red Flags for Your Clients in 2022? đ©đ©đ©
Apr 11, 20226 min readIf you run an agency or are responsible for drumming up a new business, youâve probably encountered hundreds of different objections from speaking with your prospects.
The problem, you may have realized, is that you canât be too sure which of those objections have the most impact on your prospectâs decision.
While one business might give several reasons for why they wonât work with you, another business might have completely different reasons for declining your offer.
So, to understand the decision-making process that companies use to hire agencies, we surveyed business leaders in 30+ industries and 100+ marketing firms. After compiling and analyzing hundreds of responses, we identified 10 key factors that most companies look out for when shopping for agencies.
Whether youâre in charge of business development at a multinational digital agency or you run your own boutique marketing firm, these red flags might be costing you business and negatively affect your chances of closing the next deal. So to help you turn your leads into clients, hereâs a list of the top 10 pet peeves that turn away businesses â and what your agency can do to avoid them:
1. Poor Communication
When it comes to maintaining a strong agency-client relationship, constant and consistent communication is paramount to keeping your clients happy.
Plenty of things can go wrong when thereâs a breakdown in communication between you and your clients. Between missed deadlines and ambiguous expectations, poor communication not only spells disaster for a project, but also leaves your client fuming at the lack of professionalism.
Solution: Incorporate scheduled client updates into your agencyâs project workflows. This can be as simple as setting a specific day during the week to let each of your clients know what deliverables you're working on and when they can expect them. Providing a constant line of communication keeps your clients informed and prevents them from second-guessing what youâre up to.
2. Lack of Transparency
A lack of transparency and openness is just as damaging to your relationship with your clients as poor communication. In a field where trust is the dominant currency, failing to be forthcoming about project hurdles and attempts at covering up mistakes are glaring red flags for any business that works with your agency.
Solution: Be honest with your clients when you run into issues. Itâs expected that projects wonât always work out according to plan. But your clients also expect you to let them know when things go awry.Â
3. Overpromising Results
If there's one thing agencies are notorious for, it's overpromising and under-delivering.
Far too many businesses have been traumatized by agencies that sell them on a dream and leave them in a nightmare.
As an agency, a track record of disappointing performance can turn prospects away the moment they hear your name.
Solution:Â Underpromise and overdeliver. You might think that overestimating project timelines and underestimating results will make your agency appear less competent. But being honest and realistic with your client when it comes to setting expectations goes a long way to building trust.
4. Inability to Stay on the Same Page and Achieve Mutual Understanding
Nothing is more irritating to a client than receiving work that does not align with their vision. For creative projects, this often means seeing artwork and copy that are off-brand. For conversion-focused projects, this means generating unqualified leads or targeting the wrong audience.
Solution: Invest more time and energy into onboarding new clients. Prepare onboarding checklists that will help to guide you and your clients through defining the scope of work and branding guidelines. Ultimately, clients want to work with like-minded people who can speak the same language. The more time you spend learning their language, the more comfortable your clients will feel working with you, and the more likely your work will reflect what they originally had in mind.
5. Forcing Long-Term Contracts
Simply put, forcing anyone into any type of long-term commitment is a terrible and ineffective way to form a relationship. While it may sound counterintuitive, the key to developing a lasting relationship with new clients is offering them the freedom to decide how long theyâd like to work with you. This allows the relationship to grow organically, without clients feeling like theyâve been pushed into an agreement against their will.
Solution: Start off your clients with pilot projects or trial periods. Short-term engagements are helpful for both your agency and your client to gauge how well you work together and whether longer-term collaborations make sense.
6. Rushing into Tasks without a Proper Plan
As the saying goes, âif you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.â Undertaking a project without a detailed plan in place leads to a whole host of issues down the road. Not only do you have to manage concerns from your clients, but pursuing one project without a structured process makes it exponentially harder to accomplish other tasks for other clients within your agency.Â
Solution: Before your team starts work on any new project, plot out a timeline that outlines what tasks need to be done and when they need to be completed. This will help keep your agency organized while youâre juggling multiple projects, and it also makes it easier to sell potential clients on how youâre going to achieve their desired results.Â
7. Lack of Industry-Specific Expertise
Another red flag for prospects is not having working experience in their industry. Your clients donât just want a specific service. They want a specific service thatâs specific to their niche.
Just because one solution worked for one client in a certain industry doesnât mean itâs suitable for another client in a completely different industry. Failing to understand the nuanced parts of your clientâs business can often lead to unforeseen obstacles during the course of a project and leaves your client questioning your every move.
Solution: If your agency doesnât already have a target industry or niche, pick one. At the very least, you should be looking for clients and projects that are similar to those youâve worked with in the past. Focusing on a particular type of business not only simplifies your business development strategy; it also gives your prospects peace of mind that the service youâre offering is something youâve done before.Â
8. Bad Reviews
Word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews are arguably the most influential factors in the buyerâs decision-making process. This means even just a couple of bad reviews is enough to scare prospects away from your agency and into the open arms of your competitors.
Bad reviews are particularly damaging to your agencyâs reputation for two reasons.Â
- Theyâre usually permanent and available for anyone to see.Â
- People tend to remember the negative details more than they remember the positive.
Solution: Be proactive in responding to negative reviews. Although poor reviews may initially seem like theyâre bad for business, theyâre also an opportunity to win back clients and attract new ones as well. How you treat your clients at any point of interaction speaks volumes about what itâs like to work with your agency.Â
9. The Agency is Vague about Intellectual Property Ownership
Most companies wonât do business with agencies that arenât clear about who owns what following the execution of a given project. While there may be a great deal of valuable information and assets at stake with any project, in many cases the matter of IP ownership all comes down to one factor: trust.
If a prospect doesnât know how your agency is going to handle their IP, then they canât trust you. And if they canât trust you, then thereâs no point in doing business with you.
Solution: State in no uncertain terms exactly how you plan on protecting your clientâs IP. Make sure to include IP ownership clauses or nondisclosure agreements in your contract to explicitly show your client what they can expect.Â
10. Lack of Testimonials and Case Studies
Itâs almost impossible to get your prospects to believe that you can deliver what they want if you donât have any proof.
Social proof like client testimonials and case studies is one way for a business to determine whether or not youâre the right agency for the job. And nothing turns prospects away like an absence of social proof.
Solution: Ask your clients for testimonials if you donât already have them. Get your team to write case studies about your most successful projects â just make sure your clients are okay with what you choose to share.
Key Takeaways
There are plenty of red flags and warning signs that businesses look out for when hiring an agency. At the end of the day, the secret to encouraging prospects to sign with you is providing a foundation of trust.
Be authentic. Be honest. Be yourself. Communicate effectively and in a timely fashion. Donât be another bad experience that will cause a business to forget about hiring another agency ever again. Put yourself in the clientâs position to understand their concerns and give them the quality of service youâd expect.
Read our full report to get an insiderâs perspective on what prospects and clients really want from you.
How to generate better leads for a digital marketing agency?
Find out in our new free study, How Businesses Hire Agencies
Recommend
About Joyk
Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK