Our Clients Are Our Partners

This post stems from conversations I’ve had with Mark Richardson (@mitchrichie) many times and also from a great breakfast conversation with Tim Kilroy (@timkilroy) of PM Digital and others at the OMMA Global conference in San Francisco this year. I’ve posted about partnering before, but I want to look at the different stages in the life cycle of a client.

Every so often I stop and take a look at the clients that I am working with and what we are doing for them. We have clients at various stages in the client-agency life cycle. New clients we are just getting to know, clients who have been with us only a short while, but we are getting to know their business and what works with both their customers and their management and older clients that we’ve been working with for years and are trying to come up with new ideas, new ways to do things to keep them on top in their arena. I’d like to talk about partnering with these groups individually.

First, the new clients. When we take on a new client it involves getting to know their business and what they care about. That has meant everything from learning advanced computer networking protocols to snowboarding lingo. At this stage you need to immerse yourself and your staff in this new business and put the time into becoming a part of their business just as they are becoming a part of your business.

The clients who have been with us a short while are starting to see some benefits for our relationship. They are seeing creative ideas being produced into actual ads/videos/online materials. We still talk to them every day it seems and we always have questions for them about how they do something, or how do we explain something in terms their customers will understand. We’re getting to know them, but are not completely involved yet.

The last group is in the perfect place. We are still in constant contact, but that may be more like a few times a week rather than multiple times a day. We understand their business, we are gathering analytics for them and receiving honest feedback from different departments on their end. We are developing new ideas and getting ideas from all kinds of sources. You never know where the next best thing for a company will come from, but you should be able to work it into the best advertising possible no matter if you came up with it or the CFO suggested it in an email. I am not so egotistical that I believe the best ideas only come from the ad agency.

Those groups define where our work lies. We always want to have as many as possible in the last group, but there seems to be a couple new people lately that have been welcome additions to the Star Moose community. I like to think I have the best staff and we produce the best work, but I’ll admit that I’m biased. Either way, the more client-agency relationships can be like partnerships, the better the advertising and the results that will come from it.

This post originally appeared on the Star Moose Blog.