This blog will cover the seven key steps of a new client onboarding checklist and help you start your workflow.
If you're after a complete guide on onboarding new social media clients, check out our video with Agency Owner, Desiree Martinez below! She will take you through setting expectations, contracts and service charges, her take on the client questionnaire, all sorts of other admin and more!
The first step includes a list of 42 questions to consider for your social media questionnaire.
This is a long list of questions - do you need to include them all? Not at all.
Feel free to ask as many or as few of these questions as you need to get a clear picture of your client's business needs before you start working with them.
Whether that means you ask five questions, 10, or even all 42, you'll discover over time that the answers to some questions are more valuable to you. You can always tweak your questionnaire to suit your needs and your individual clients:
When you're running a social media marketing agency, client retention is key. That means keeping them happy by showing results. To achieve this balance, you have to u nderstand what your client hopes to achieve on social media - it's essential for crafting a strategy that works for them.
At the beginning stage of your relationship, these questions are designed to tease out their ideas about social media and how it fits into the overall marketing strategy for their business.
Try using these questions to delve into your client’s motivation and purpose:
1. What is your purpose on social media?
2. What is your brand’s objective?
3. What do you hope to achieve using social media? How will you know you’ve achieved it?
4. What’s the biggest barrier to your success on social media?
5. How does social media fit into your growth plan?
The answers your client gives you will tell you how highly they value social media in their marketing plan and will also help you determine what results your client is looking for.
It’s said that whoever talks the audience’s language the best, wins. And to do that, you need to know them well.
Your client should be able to answer these questions about their target audience, which will help you decide how best to use social media content to target them:
6. Describe your target audience. Who are they?
7. What social platforms do they use?
8. What issues matter to them?
9. How does your brand engage them?
10. What social listening have you done? What does your audience say about you?
11. Who else (brands/celebrities/people) does your audience engage with?
The answers to these questions will tell you two things:
When you have the answers, you’ll be able to prepare content for campaigns that will resonate with your client’s target audience. Make sure to regularly refresh yourself on this information as part of a social media health check to stay on target to reach your goals. And in the meantime, feel free to use our audit checklists:
One of the greatest challenges of taking on a new social media client is stepping into their brand and using their voice. The more your client is able to tell you about their brand, the easier it will be to create content that is true to their brand voice and resonates with their audience.
Here are some great questions to ask to learn more about your client’s brand:
12. Describe your brand voice.
13. What tone should social media updates have?
14. What is the main message your brand is trying to communicate?
15. What makes your brand different from others?
16. Why do people choose you over your competitors?
17. What’s your brand vision?
The answers to these questions will guide the type of content you’ll create and the tone you’ll use in response to audience engagement, user-generated content (UGC), and feedback or complaints.
When talking about this with your clients, make sure to underline the importance of creating a community. Outlining a community management strategy that revolves around using a friendly approach, being there for the customers, and creating a safe place to discuss (and promote) the brand's offer has become an essential social media tactic.
Social media is all about content. Finding out what content your client has used in the past, how they’ve used it, and the resources they’ve allocated to it will help you leverage what’s working and identify new opportunities to test in your campaigns.
Ask these questions in your social media client questionnaire to make sure you’ve got all the content information you need:
18. What resources do you have available for content creation?
19. What is your workflow process for content from inception to publication?
20. What sign-offs do you require?
21. How often do you want to publish new content to your profiles?
22. How does social media tie in with your offline campaigns?
23. What type of content does your audience respond to best (if known)?
24. What type of content do you want to create for your audience (images, video, quotes, blog posts, etc.)?
25. What message are you trying to send with your content?
26. How do you use user-generated content in your campaigns?
27. What holidays does your client want to observe?
>>Pro tip>> Celebrating social media holidays on your client's social media channels can be a great way to increase their brand awareness and reach. Consider taking advantage of highly relevant ‘World Days’, for example, if your client sells hotdogs, World Hot Dog Day is in July, and it’d be remiss not to mark the occasion!
If you don’t already have a calendar that you can refer to, our comprehensive social media holiday calendar is a great place to start. It comes in the form of a handy website page that's easy to use and share.
Alternatively, you can access this content directly in Sendible's calendar!
The answers you get to these questions will help you determine the resources you have available to work with on your client’s content and opportunities for growth. It will also help you add the right type of content to your strategy, so that it’s aligned both with your client’s brand and the latest social media trends.
And in today's culture - posting high-quality content tailored to the audience's needs is a must.
