Your marketing clients are just like you.

As a marketing consultant or agency owner, you want to see:

1. More traffic
2. More engagement
3. More subscribers
4. More customers
5. Higher customer lifetime value

These metrics are the foundations of a successful business (whether it’s a marketing agency or an ecommerce drop shipping business). If you don’t have traffic, you won’t have customers. And if you don’t focus on your customer lifetime value, you won’t have a sustainable business model.

This is exactly why these are the metrics your marketing clients want to see. They want to know you’re increasing their brand awareness and marketing to their customers after the first sale. Because that’s how you build a long-term relationship with the brands you work with and create a marketing consultancy that makes people ask, “How the heck did you pull that off?!”

And it all starts with focusing on these 5 metrics and sharing them with your clients.

#1: Traffic

Every marketing client wants to look at their Google Analytics dashboard and see that beautiful up and to the right line that signifies they’re getting more traffic than ever before. Traffic is a huge part of marketing because it leads to the first stage of the Customer Value Journey, Awareness. 

People can’t buy your client’s products if they don’t know their products exist! With increased traffic, more people see their brand. The more people that see their brand, the more people can buy their products.

Just like 1+1 = 2, more traffic leads to more customers. Well, as long as you’re making sure to attract the right kind of traffic. Not only can you show your clients their increased traffic to social media (impressions) or their website (through Google Analytics), but you can also show them the demographics behind this traffic. This shows that these aren’t random people who *might* be interested in buying their products. These visitors are their customer avatar, which means they can quickly turn into customers with the right funnel. 

Here are a few traffic metrics to share with your clients:

• Impressions on social media
• Demographics on social media
• Traffic on Google Analytics
• Demographics on Google Analytics

#2: Engagement

Engagement is the number of likes, comments, shares, and interactions people have with your content. For example, if someone comments on your Instagram post—that’s engagement. If they read your blog post—that’s engagement. If they reply like your tweet—that’s engagement.

And that’s the start of turning a viewer into a customer. Like the Customer Value Journey outlines, the first step in the customer journey is awareness. It’s the moment someone finds out your brand and products exist. It’s a crucial moment, but what’s even more important is what comes afterward… 

…the first time someone actively engages with your brand. 

Engage is the second stage of the Customer Value Journey. It’s so important because it’s like this person just raised their hand and said, “You have products that help me solve one of my problems!” 

Your marketing clients want to see engagement because that tells them you’re doing your job as a marketer. You’re increasing brand awareness to the right people, who are now engaging with their brand so they can move to the next steps of the Customer Value Journey, Subscription, Conversion, Excitement, Ascension, Promotor, and Ambassador.

Here are a few engagement metrics to share with your clients:

• Increased social media engagement per post and on average
• Decreased bounce rate
• Longer time spent on page
• Heat maps of sales and product pages

#3: Subscribers

With traffic and engagement comes subscribers (if you’ve properly built out your marketing funnel!). Your goal as a marketer is to turn traffic into subscribers, building a deeper relationship between brand and customer avatar. You never want to house your audience on someone else’s platform, like Facebook or Google. You want to take your social media or website visitors and add them to your email list as soon as you can.

This is stage 3 of the Customer Value Journey and usually comes alongside a lead magnet freebie that people opt-in for. For example, you could give away a free webinar or a discount on commerce products. 

Your clients want to see that traffic and engagement have a predictable ROI. That predictable ROI comes from knowing, for example, 1% of their subscribers convert. Based on the average number of people subscribing per day, you can predict how many customers and how much revenue they’ll make.

Just like you want your marketing consultancy or agency to have a predictable income, your clients want the same thing, too.

Here are a few subscriber metrics to share with your clients:

• The average number of subscribers per day/week/month
• The average percentage of subscribers becoming customers
• Open rate
• Click-through rate

#4: Customers

This is the metric you probably didn’t need us to tell you about. Of course, your marketing clients want to see more customers! More customers mean they’re getting an ROI from your services. Understandably, this is really important for your clients. They want to see the numbers that prove their money is in good hands.

As a marketing consultant or agency, transparency around these numbers is a huge part of having a healthy, long-term relationship with your clients. Putting together SOPs that help your employees and contractors keep clients in “the know” is worth your time.

And remember—your clients are business owners (or executives). They’ve put their heart, soul, blood, sweat, AND tears into this business. They’ve dedicated late nights and early mornings. They’ve probably missed some pretty important events in their friend’s and family’s lives. This business means a lot to them, and getting to see more customers buying is special.

Make it a special moment for them by creating milestones to celebrate. For example, when they reach 1,000 customers, send them a gift or make sure to take the time to acknowledge it. Or, you can send gifts at certain revenue goals, like their first $500,000. 

Here are a few customer metrics to share with your clients:

• The average number of customers per day/week/month
• The percent increase in customers since you started working with them
• The daily/weekly/monthly revenue 
• Specific milestones (number of customers or revenue generated)

#5: Customer lifetime value

After someone becomes a customer, the marketing doesn’t stop. Conversion isn’t the last stage of the Customer Value Journey for a reason. There are FOUR more stages after it! Conversion is the halfway point of the Customer Value Journey, and there’s a lot that happens afterward.

When someone purchases a product, it’s time to get them excited (stage 5 of the Customer Value Journey). This excitement stage isn’t about upsells. It’s about showing them that they made the right decision by buying from you. This can be an unexpected free training, discount code, or stickers inside their ecommerce package.

Excitement leads to ascension (stage 6 of the Customer Value Journey). In ascension, your customer goes from buying your low-tier or middle-tier package to your highest (or one of your higher) tier packages. At DigitalMarketer, this is when someone goes from being a Lab member to becoming a Certified Partner or buying a ticket to Traffic & Conversion Summit. 

Think of ascension as the ladder that takes your revenue from “Awesome!” to “Holy crap!” This is where you increase customer lifetime value and turn your client’s brand into a long-term, sustainable business. When the funnels are in place to turn first-time customers into multiple-purchasing customers (and eventually raving fans of your brand and products), you’re in the magic zone.

Here are a few customer lifetime metrics to share with your clients:

• The average customer lifetime value (LTV)
• The LTV before and after you started working with this client
• The percentage increase in LTV

How To Get Rehired Again, and Again, and Again

Clients are happy to outsource their marketing to your consultancy or agency. Marketing is a lot of work (you know this as a business owner!), and it’s monumentally easier to have somebody else do it for you. It’s even easier to have the person who’s already doing your marketing…keep doing it.

That’s why you want to show your marketing clients these 5 metrics:

1. Traffic
2. Engagement
3. Subscribers
4. Customers
5. Customer lifetime value

These are the metrics telling your clients that you’re increasing their brand awareness, qualifying leads, and ensuring they don’t build their business on someone else’s platform. They show an ROI when you turn those subscribers into customers and increase their customer lifetime value.

Wouldn’t you want to keep working with the marketer who did this for your company?

The answer is a big, obvious YES.

And with these metrics, that marketer can be you.

The post The 5 Metrics Every Marketing Client Wants to See appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

We’re here to nip that right in the bud. We’ll show you how to avoid disappointing clients by maintaining healthy marketing relationships. These relationships are key to retaining clients and growing your marketing business. 

→ Your clients won’t stick around if they have a bad relationship with you.

→ And they certainly won’t refer their friends if they don’t feel confident in your business.

Let’s break down how you can maintain healthy marketing client relationships, so you can avoid the dreaded ping of disappointment. 

#1: Take Your Communication Skills Seriously

Communication is key in every relationship in your life. When it comes to your client relationships, it’s crucial because people are trusting you with their time and money. Those are two valuable resources that they can’t get back if you mess up. You wouldn’t want to spend 6 months on a subpar strategy just to realize you set the money on fire and have to start with a brand new strategy. Neither do your clients.

That’s where communication comes in. Each client wants to feel like they fully understand what’s going on with their campaigns—even if they don’t know every tiny detail. Communication is the difference between clients feeling frustrated with you and clients tweeting about how much they love working with you as a freelancer or agency. 

Communicate regularly with your clients so they feel confident that they’re spending their time and money wisely.

#2: Set Expectations Ahead of Time

This is where things can get awkward, fast. If you don’t set expectations at the start of your relationship, your clients will be wondering where their traffic is and questioning if they made a good choice by hiring you. This is the type of mess-up that leads to emails like, “What’s going on with this strategy, it’s not working,” and “We need to talk before I pay my next invoice.”

Neither of these are emails you should ever receive. That’s where expectations come into play. Be overly clear about what clients can expect from working with you and write it down in your contract and send them an email reminding them of how long to expect to see results, what you require from them, and what your relationship will look like. This is a great time to add in your working hours and any retainer terms like a 30-day notice before leaving their contract.

Setting expectations ahead of time saves you awkward conversations down the line.

#3: Keep Them Updated on Any/All Progress

People want to know what’s going on with their business—and they deserve to know. If your agency takes a week to respond to client messages, expect to create an unhealthy client relationship. That client will lose their trust in working with you, realizing that you don’t prioritize responding to them (even if it’s just to let them know you’ll need a few days to put together a response).

Instead of keeping them on read or in the dark about what’s going on, send them weekly updates about their strategy. Tell them what work your team did on their content, Facebook Ad Manager, or customer avatar research if you don’t have statistics to show them. It’s the small things that can add up to a healthy client relationship, and keeping clients updated is one of them.

Keep your clients updated with their onboarding progress, what your team is working on, and what results you’ve gotten weekly.

#4: Create a Monthly Check-In to Meet Over Video Chat

Touching base with your clients can change the game. Sending emails or Slack messages back-and-forth works for the day-to-day operations, but every month you need to meet with them face-to-face (or Zoom-to-Zoom). These calls will run on a schedule like: Update on what your agency has been working on, answering questions from the client, action items from each party of what’s needed to move forward.

Monthly check-ins will take time, but they’ll be worth it. Meeting your clients face-to-face reassures them that you’re more than just minions getting them views and conversions. You’re real people working hard on their business. They’ll appreciate you more for what you do and you’ll build a better relationship with them (leading to long-term contracts and referrals!).

Every client wants a monthly check-in to know that their time and money was spent wisely.

#5: Celebrate Their Wins with Them

Clients hired you to get them results. As marketers, it’s our job to drive traffic and conversions. We’re lucky to have a tangible result to point our efforts towards…and an exciting one! When the traffic roles in and the conversions start to add up, send an exciting email to your client. Celebrate with them!

This is your chance to show them that you’re just as excited about their sales as they are. With this excitement, you prove that this is more than a monetary relationship. It’s a relationship based on wanting the best for them, which we can confidently say leads to loyalty and LTV. Your clients are people who want to feel supported and excited when they win. Be the people they get to celebrate those exciting moments with.

Celebrate your client wins to show them it’s not just about the money. You genuinely care about their long-term business success.

Clients Are Just People Looking to Fulfill Their Aspirations

It’s easy to get caught up in the business side of marketing. They give you money. You make them more money. The reality is that your clients are people who have a dream. They dream of being their own boss, building a successful business, and having something to pass down to their kids one day.

And with these aspirations come basic human needs that you can fulfill as a freelancer or agency. Maintain healthy client relationships by being aware of:

#1: The client’s need to regularly hear from you or your team

#2: The client knowing what to expect from their investment in you and your team

#3: The client finding comfort in staying up-to-date with their investment

#4: The client wanting to see the people behind the Slack messages

#5: The client’s desire to celebrate the wins they once dreamt of

Maintaining healthy client relationships has been templated by the many marketers who have made the mistakes you get to avoid. Inside of DigitalMarketer Lab, you’ll get access to The Perfect Client Proposal Template, Client Intake Form, and Fulfilling Your Client’s Needs from your Agency Insider Training that will help you seamlessly build great relationships with your clients.

The post How to Maintain Healthy Marketing Client Relationships appeared first on DigitalMarketer.