What do clients want?

Hi, my name is Faith Boone, and I'm the founder of Boone Logic. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about what clients want. That may seem like an easy question, but the truth is that there is a difference between what clients want upfront, what clients want to hear when they first meet you, and what clients want from you when you're their marketing company and you're coming to them with ideas. All of these components are necessary, and today I am going to walk you through all three so you can confidently understand how to decipher what your client wants and be able to deliver it to them.

What clients want upfront

First, your client wants to tell their story. Typically, in my experience talking with clients, not only do they want to tell the story about their business, but they want to share who they are. They want to share why they created their business, what it's going to do for other people, and how it's going to make a difference.

I think that my background in journalism makes me more interested in asking these questions upfront when I'm meeting new clients. In our initial discussions, I’ll ask them what they really want to convey in the messages they're putting out on their website, social media, email and whatever other channels they use to reach their audience.

What clients want when they meet you

The next question is what do clients want when they first meet you. And the answer simply is that they want to know you. If you actually update your LinkedIn, which a lot of people don’t, they will already know what your work experience is, what your educational background is, where you volunteer, and stuff like that. With a quick Google search clients can easily find anything they want to know about your business as a whole but the same can’t be said for knowing you as a person.

Several times I’ve seen that during our initial meetings, clients want to hear about my personal background experience. So, why do I do what I do? I talk to them about my journalism background. I talk to them about the fact that I've been writing since I was a kid and started a newsletter when I was 14. I give them the details about why I'm interested in creating content, and why I'm passionate about it. I tell them that I do like writing poems and fiction and whatnot but I also like to write short-form and long-form content, for business-to-business, and for business-to-consumer.

What clients want from you as their marketing professional

The third thing I'm going to talk about is changes that the client can expect. It’s important to understand, once you’re officially their marketing professional, what your client expects from you and what success looks like to them.

Not every client is looking for you to up their follower account. Even if they have a low amount of followers, hopefully, your client understands that quality engagement trumps a large number of followers who don’t interact. So yes, the follower count is there. But the real numbers you want to look at is who's engaging with your content, those numbers could be way higher than who likes your Facebook page or your Instagram account.

Your clients will expect some sort of results from you that show significant growth, but you're going to have to give them some detail on that and you can do that in a variety of ways. Whether it's offering them Analytics reports, or regular meetings to update them on where they're at in their marketing strategy. Whichever update avenue you chose, your client is definitely going to want to know what progress is being made and be reassured of that in some tangible, data-driven way.

Final thoughts

Getting to know a little bit about each other is really going to help the relationship that you have with your client. The more you know about them and what they do, and the more they know about you and what you do is really going to create a connection that will help you both be able to communicate better with each other. When you’re able to effectively communicate with your client, it will help you both feel more comfortable about being able to effectively understand and share the message your client is trying to convey to their audience.

If you want to learn more, go to boonelogic.com and check out our blog.