As the economy starts to rebound, creative agencies and technology vendors are welcoming scores of new clients. At Buddy Media, we are adding new clients at a rapid pace while carefully growing our team. We have worked hard to build a culture that works efficiently -- on time and within budget -- and delivers unique social campaigns that not only excite our clients, but also engage our clients' consumers.
Our system for handling an emergent client list is based around four basic principles. Maybe some of these will work for your company as well.
Listen
When working with a new client, avoid multiple rounds of iteration and guesswork by asking questions and listening early. At Buddy Media, we are immersed in the world of Facebook pages, Twitter management, app-vertisements, widgets, and mobile applications, and we have a deep understanding of the social marketing tools that have worked well for other brands.
When we meet with a prospective client, we immediately begin thinking of innovative ways to launch the brand in the social marketing realm. However, each client is different, and all of our knowledge and expertise won't matter if we don't listen carefully to their marketing objectives. If we run with our initial ideas without truly listening -- not only to what is explicitly said about the objectives, but the unspoken wants as well -- our plan would be inadequate and only half-baked. Instead of spending valuable time pursuing what we think will work, success for us is about listening to the client's objectives and using that, along with our expertise (from listening to social networkers and observing their behavior), to best meet their needs.
Understanding your client's audience and voice is critical. We have a standard set of questions we review with all new clients -- questions we've developed over time and continue to add to. Those questions have one simple goal of truly learning a client's brand and message. Learn to think like they do and understand their objectives from the inside.
As we've grown, we have continued to refine our listening process. For example, we discovered that we were spending time designing sites and apps for clients, but just weren't hitting the mark every time. Learning the unspoken wants of our clients was a challenge. Our solution, however, proved to be quite simple.
In meetings with new clients, we now ask them to provide us with an extensive list of sites and apps they like and don't like. With this simple process, we've been able to focus much more clearly on a client's and brand's aesthetic. Ultimately, that saves us valuable time in the design process so that we're not spending our energy proposing and designing campaigns too far afield of the brand.
Summary: By listening early on, you can streamline the process by cutting down on multiple iterations.
Focus
Most agencies know this already, but good products are elegant. Feature bloat is a recipe for disaster, as well as wasted time and effort. Cramming too many features into one product, campaign, or app ultimately leads to a weak, muddled final product. With every added feature, more time is spent making all the parts work together when the primary focus should be quality and functionality.
If you are a brand or marketer, what is the ultimate goal for any website or application? To engage an audience of users. Yet with every added feature, you're creating a distraction for the audience. If you want your customers and/or potential customers to have one central experience, keep it simple. Less is more.
This is usually easier said than done. There can be multiple, competing desires from a client. You may have to marshal all your diplomatic skills and argue your point-of-view. In the end, simplicity wins.
A great example of this is the Food Fight! page we launched for the "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" movie promotion. We defined one simple goal for the page: We wanted users to virtually throw food via the virtual gift module. We focused on that one goal in our design, and 80 percent of the users who came to the page threw some virtual food. That audience participation number is much higher then we see on typical pages.
Summary: Cut down on features to save time and build more effective products. If feature requests or suggestions don't directly contribute to the goal of the product, don't implement for launch.
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