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Agency life has its pros and cons. On one hand, it offers a huge amount of organizational freedom, and in principle allows the careful selection of appropriate clients. On the other hand, it’s frantic at the best of times, and has slender profit margins (relative to those of other types of business) that ensure there’s little room to breathe.
If you work in a marketing agency (or even run one), then you might get caught up in the process of trying to optimize delivery — and spend the rest of your time on the prowl for new clients, hoping to put together pitches so compelling that they can’t be resisted. It’s enough of a grind that it’s tough to find moments for other things.
Even so, that’s exactly what you need to do, because there’s an excellent chance that you’re not sufficiently committed to auditing your clients on a regular basis. Here’s why it’s a task that fully warrants a strong place on every marketing agency’s list of priorities:
Processes can almost always be optimized
There are numerous practical elements that go into dealing with a marketing client. There’s reporting, for instance: depending on the client, you may need to send a full performance report every quarter or every month. Then there’s payment: what does your invoicing process involve? Do you give too much leeway, or not enough? Do you make unprofessional mistakes?
Because clients can be handled in silos, it’s possible that different practices have arisen on an ad-hoc basis to meet their needs. You might look great to some clients but amateurish to others. Regular audits will help you keep things in line and ensure that client-related admin is being addressed logically and efficiently.
To use those examples again, there’s a difference between a slapdash performance report thrown together in Word and something generated through Google Data Studio. And if you’re spending hours manually assembling a plain invoice every time you need you have a new project, you should start using templates: there are Excel invoice templates by Wave and FreshBooks that are perfectly solid, so you don’t need a specific accounting system to use them.
They might be underdelivering or overdelivering
No matter how precise the initial calculations are when taking on a client, they’re not going to hold much significance after a few months. Marketing isn’t static in the way that, say, providing a daily lunch service is: the tactics inevitably change on a frequent basis, and are scaled up or down to accommodate shifting requirements (new products might be released, for example).
Due to this, there can be a breakdown of the link between project funding and project work, and workers can end up completing tasks without knowing exactly what the agency will be paid for them. This can easily lead to under-delivery, with efforts not rising to meet an uplift in scope that wasn’t properly communicated.
It can also lead to over-delivery, which is even more frustrating in some ways because you can put in extra work to correct a deficiency but you can’t retroactively subtract it. If you’re doing twice as much work as a client is paying you for, you need to know about it as soon as possible, and that will only happen through regular auditing.
It’s good for maintaining client relations
When things seem to be going well (or are at least stable), it’s tempting to leave them alone, especially since client conversations can be complicated. Awkward questions will invariably pop up to pursue difficult answers (this is rife in SEO): why certain decisions were made, why a particular measure isn’t proving successful, when the desired results can be expected, etc.
If those answers are formulated very carefully, they can make things worse — but avoiding them entirely will always have much worse consequences than inadequate answers ever could. One of the key advantages of regularly auditing a client is that such questions can be anticipated and addressed before they’re even asked.
That leaves you with two options: be proactive in addressing any issues (and highlighting successes that might otherwise have flown under the radar), showing an eagerness to perform, or simply figure out the explanations ahead of time so they can easily be provided in the event that the anticipated questions are asked.
Some clients might not be worth keeping
As hard as it is to overcome the startup mentality of clinging to every client, and as nice as it is to work with a client long enough to build a great working relationship, the truth is that some clients — even long-standing ones — just aren’t worth fighting for. They recoil against any additional investment. They not only doubt your methods but also actively challenge them.
The problem isn’t generally that agencies don’t know about their problem clients, or even that they simply believe them to be profit-drivers regardless. It’s that they don’t know for sure, so they default to assuming they’re valuable simply because it’s better to retain a customer than it is to bring in a new one — but it’s better in general, not in all cases.
If you bring in a great client that listens to you and follows through with your suggestions, the value of that client will go up over time. But if you bring in a client that’s reluctant from the outset, responds sluggishly, and expects far too much for what you’re being paid, that client isn’t going to get more useful over time. If anything, your efforts to keep it happy will essentially encourage it to be even more demanding, making the situation a huge mess.
Regular audits will present you with the facts and figures you need to make necessary actions unavoidably obvious. It’ll also prove extremely useful if you have to sell your conclusions to others in your agency — if you don’t have the power to make unilateral client decisions, for instance. Make your case, and move on from clients that aren’t getting you anywhere.
For all these reasons and no doubt plenty more, it’s of paramount importance that marketing agencies find the time — make the time — to audit their clients on a regular basis. It will subtract from hours going towards tasks with more immediate financial value, but it’s absolutely worth it.