14 marketing agency client onboarding tips: We asked the experts

For us, onboarding begins even before the discovery call, before they even become a client. Whether they realize it or not, we're training them on how to be KOR|UNLIMITED clients.

It’s important that proper expectations are set throughout the sales process when our team defines the ‘next steps’ in the buying journey. Once someone comes on board, our account management team understands those expectations and can ensure they are met.

The process actually begins from the moment you get a verbal confirmation that your proposal or plan has been approved. Even if the work hasn’t officially started, find reasons to remain in touch as you await the official contract to be signed. Losing contact with the client early on might mean losing the client completely. One great way to do so is to comment on one of their social media posts, retweet them, or share one of their recent blog posts on LinkedIn.

The less amount of guesswork a client has to do as they begin to establish a relationship with you, the better. Start by providing an marketing agency client onboarding checklist so that your client knows what to expect from the process. As part of your onboarding checklist, include information on what they should expect from you in the next 3 to 6 months, so that you establish alignment on goals and desired deliverables. Take the time to ask what success means.

We have multiple onboarding calls and touch points in the first month to make sure we have all of the needed information, so we don't have to ask for it again.

You’ve got to engage with a customer and have a schedule of when you're going to call out to your customer. Now we've got the experience over the last 10 years of knowing when to reach out at certain points to fill them in on their status and where they're currently at.

We ask them how often they want to hear from us. Some want more communication than others, and, if we communicate in the way they want to be communicated with, that's a huge plus.

We have an entire onboarding process where clients fill out a form and we get really detailed. We have a few account managers that are onboarding them and a few understudies. So, if anybody ever leaves our company, we have somebody that still understands them as well.

Ensure every team member understands the client’s objectives and everyone’s role and responsibilities in obtaining those objectives. Grant them access to a shared folder where all relevant information gathered on the client, thus far, is housed. Once you’ve done this, host a kickoff call with the client and the entire agency team to ensure everyone is on the same page before moving forward with the work.

If you come at them with marketing terms and acronyms they’ve never heard of before, they’re going to look like a deer in the headlights. Be sure to keep the language and instructions in your marketing agency client onboarding process simple and easy to understand, and ease them into their familiarity with your product and your team.

If it makes sense to your business, pre-record parts of the marketing agency client onboarding process that are pretty straightforward—video is a great way to onboard new customers. You may also want to consider using an email sequence to onboarded clients that can drip instructions, follow-ups, surveys, and upsells across a pre-set period. To keep clients informed of services performed and to track their progress, establish an Executive Report automation that shows transparency. But be careful not to automate too much of the process, as the human touch is important to maintaining strong client relationships and capturing any special requests or questions.

As your agency continues to establish its value to the client with measurable results, it should find ways it can add even more value through other services offered. But remember, do so because you genuinely care about your client instead of just to upsell. This will be most effective if you put efforts towards learning more about the client beyond the initial onboarding stage. Gaining insights as you get to know your client’s business better will lead towards other possible offerings that your agency could provide to ideal clients.

You have to be really specific on what your offer is. Everyone has amnesia once that onboarding process is done. So you always have to reiterate, this is a statement of work, this is what we're tasked to do, and this is what’s outside of the statement of work.

When we deliver strong results for the client, maybe a new five-star review or we see them ranking high for a particular keyword, we reach out to those customers to inform them of that and let them know about those types of wins. We then do all our follow-ups with clients to make sure that they understand all the products we’ve provided them and actually how it's helping their business.