Lasting Client Relationships: Guide To Working With Marketing Agencies

Working with a marketing agency can transform your business. You get a dedicated team who knows your brand and understands how to promote it effectively. 

Effective marketing agencies stay current with best practices because it helps their clients succeed. By handing over your marketing to an agency, you benefit from that expertise. They'll handle your marketing so you can focus on running your business.



Hiring a reputable agency with a skilled team is step one. The next step is building a strong relationship. Robust collaboration and communication puts you in the best possible position to promote your brand.

In this article, you'll explore how to build powerful agency-client relationships. You'll discover how those good client relationships benefit your brand in the short and long term — and how you can support the process.

Establishing Standards

Standards are the foundation of all effective business relationships. Both agencies and clients are responsible for communicating their performance standards and expectations as early as possible.

Clarifying Goals

The client's role is to specify goals and provide clear expectations for results. The more specific you can be, the better.

There are many reasons you might run a social campaign for your business. Your agency will design that campaign differently based on your desired outcome. 

For example, is customer retention your primary goal? Or, maybe you'd like more phone inquiries and clicks to your website. Those two goals lead to differently planned and structured campaigns.

Setting Expectations

The agency is responsible for setting realistic expectations about what they can deliver. Agencies must be careful not to oversell their abilities, particularly when it comes to results. 

Consumer behavior is notoriously unpredictable, and agencies must acknowledge that. It's essential for agencies to guarantee only what's under their control.

Maintaining Accountability

Clients and agencies both need to do their part to keep the project moving forward. The agency is the consumer's voice in the market; getting that voice right is important. Clients must provide thorough information on what they want and how they want to present their product or service. The more branding information an agency has, the more on-target their deliverables will be.

Agencies build trust by requesting clarification and sharing updates regularly. These check-ins are among the best ways to build a solid agency-client relationship. Each conversation is an opportunity for agencies to stand behind their work and for clients to clarify expectations.

Cultivating Mutual Understanding

To build good client relationships, both parties must work to understand each other's unique needs and pain points. That means getting to know each other on a personal level, beyond the typical client management orientation process.

Personalizing Services

Marketing professionals understand the importance of consumer personalization. More than 60% of businesses have found better customer retention from personalization efforts, and 69% of business leaders plan to invest more in personalization.

Today’s clients expect solutions tailored to their needs. They want agencies to ask about their marketing goals, processes, and priorities.

For example, most clients want to choose what social media platforms they use. Agencies can use that discussion as a segue to cover overall social media marketing needs and goals.

These conversations improve client trust and confidence. They encourage clients to view the agency as an extended part of their marketing team rather than an unpredictable "outside" entity. 

Understanding Business Model Variations

Clients also play a part in cultivating long-term relationships. Each agency has a unique working style and team structure. Those differences affect how the agency approaches tasks, projects, and communication.

When clients understand how an agency works, they're better prepared to participate in the process. More familiarity leads to more comfort with collaboration, so clients can relax and let the agency work its magic.

These strategies keep clients and agencies working productively, but only if the lines of communication stay open.

The Power of Client Relationships at Optimize

The Optimize Digital Marketing team takes client relationships seriously. Your success is our number one goal — and we want you to tell us what that success entails. 

We believe that knowing what an excellent digital marketing agency looks like means you'll never have to settle for less.

Schedule a free consultation today if you'd like to learn more about Optimize and what our digital marketing services can do for your business. Let's take the first step together!