Step #1 to Moving Clients to Retainer Relationships | Digital ... - Optify

The Conversation of Business Goals

If you read our blog enough you will see that we talk about how to move clients from project to retainer all the time. Why? Because we get asked for advise on this topic by our agency partners all the time. Quite frankly, we love this question. It leads to greater revenue for our agency partners.

In order to start more retainer relationships one of the very first things that an agency needs to adjust are the conversations they are having with prospective clients. The business goals, not the ?want?, should be front and center.

What Your Clients Really Want

The ?want? is what the client calls you about. ?I want to increase my social media presence.? Social media is the rage now so most agencies jump at this like I jump at Reese?s Peanut Butter Cups. (I?m a big guy, and love my peanut butter cups.) We also get this ?want? quite often. However, this is not a business goal. Businesses only care about ?likes? and ?followers? because they think it has an effect on the bottom line. And that right there is the goal, REVENUE.

Client: ?I want to increase my social media presence.?

Agency: ?That is great and one of the things we focus on is our engagements. What is your goal/reason for increasing your social media presence??

Client: ?Well, we have tried Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Google + and? but haven?t had much success?

Agency: What has been your measurement of success??

This goes back and forth until you get to the business goal, REVENUE. You could come outright and tell them that this is the goal, and sometimes you will need to, but it is always better for them to tell you. Most people will get there quickly.

Unless you also provide sales services to your clients then the closest a Marketing agency can come to REVENUE is a LEAD. (Unless you are working with an e-commerce focused business, then you can directly affect REVENUE. Optify works best in a LEAD driven environment)

So you need to focus your conversations as close to revenue as possible, on LEADS. All your existing projects, SEO (?increase my rank?), Social (?increase my following?), PPC (?increase my visits?) are really about ?INCREASE MY LEADS!?

Moving Clients to Retainer Relationships

Lets say someone is currently in a SEO project with you and you want to move them to retainer. How do you do this?

1. Use Optify for your SEO work (it happens to be great at SEO) to show them the number of LEADS generated by your SEO work
2. Since you are focusing on LEADS you need to also work on their pillar pages
3. Since you are going to focus on pillar pages you can also offer to work on content
4. Since you are creating some great content and want people to find it online, you can also offer to promote it via social channels and email
5. Since you want to know how each of those channels help with driving traffic to the landing pages and how many leads each of them generated, you can offer a way to track all these campaigns and sources
6. Since you are tracking a lot of campaigns and channels, you can offer to manage more integrated campaigns
7. Since you are managing several integrated campaigns, you can offer to measure and optimize their marketing and sales process?I think you get the point.

Focusing on the actual business goals during your conversations will open up more doors and expose your entire service offering.

Good luck and let us know if you are interested in seeing how Optify can help you talk about LEADS.

Source: http://www.optify.net/digital-marketing-agency/step-1-to-moving-clients-to-retainer-relationships

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