Christopher is the co-founder, head strategist and CEO of The Go! Agency, a full-service digital marketing agency.
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For the first several years of my agency’s existence, our clients were largely healthcare-related. My co-owner is a registered nurse and has extensive experience in healthcare and medical sales. So to capitalize on that, our team and I became healthcare marketing experts. As time went on, however, our client base organically expanded and evolved.
With an expansion in clients naturally comes an expansion in the kinds of businesses that you’re going to be working with. It’s common sense that you can’t market a client who is selling an educational development tool the same way you would market a senior living facility, but that common sense won’t help answer your most important question: How do you strategically create a campaign for a business you’ve never worked with before?
In my experience, the key to successfully marketing a client in a new industry is making sure that you and your team are dedicating the proper amount of research to your client’s industry as a whole as well as their closest competitors. The account manager for the client should be surveying both how similar businesses are posting and advertising and how the audience is interacting, and taking note of what’s working and what’s not. Your creative team should be taking notes on what keywords or image styles successfully hook your target audience. Don’t copy others, but definitely take inspiration from them, especially for the kick-off of the campaign. It’s also extremely important to clearly know what nuances set your specific client apart from even their closest competitors.
One of our recent clients has created a training program aimed at first responders, specifically firefighters and emergency medical technicians. While this client does incorporate exercise and custom workouts as part of their services, their closest analog wouldn’t be a gym but something like physical therapy. If we marketed the client like a gym and focused on strength training and bodybuilding, we’d lose the audience — because the purpose of the client isn’t the workouts; it’s improving the lives of the first responders using the workouts.
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Historically, marketing for gyms and training centers has largely been shame-based. How subtly said shaming tactics are used can vary, but the core message of most exercise programs is usually very aggressive and guilt-centric. That approach works for reliably getting sign-ups around the beginning of the year, but if I had copied it for my client, it would have driven people away. Just because both my client and membership-based gyms are exercise-related businesses does not mean that the motivator behind exercising is the same.
My clients’ clientele, first responders, typically aren’t lazy or unmotivated. They don’t need to be bullied into getting in shape — they need to understand that their bodies require both physical and mental maintenance if they want to keep doing their jobs. So even though this client is ostensibly marketing a workout program, the nuances are what needed to be focused on for a successful marketing strategy.
Now for the other side of the coin. Just as you may be new to marketing a certain kind of business or industry, your client could very well be new to marketing. This may lead to substantial friction between you and the client, because — let’s face it — it’s pretty rare to get a client who understands marketing and has done as much research about you as you have about them.
My agency recently let go of a client who was disagreeable to nearly every element we presented them with throughout the length of their campaign. They thought they knew who the predominant audience for their product was, and they weren’t interested in venturing outside of the very narrow (and very off-point) buyer persona they had constructed. This company didn’t want marketing; what they wanted was public relations. They just didn’t know the difference. They weren’t interested in broadening their audience, although they easily could have, and I tried to show them how several times. They wanted good press to appeal to the audience they already had.
I think this makes it pretty clear why you should study up on new industries and the businesses themselves before deciding to work with them. If the aforementioned company had known what marketing could do for them, they would have understood my advice and they’d probably still be working with me. And if I had known what they actually wanted before inking the contract, I probably would have passed on the campaign.
No amount of researching the client could have helped me avoid this — I would have had to meet with them extensively before inking the contract. That might sound like a lot of work to put in for a business that’s still only a potential client, but a few hours spent during the pre-contract process would have saved me six months of frustration in the long run.
What I recommend is holding an interview session with clients who look like they’re going to be serious, the same way that an employer holds interviews as the final round before determining a new hire. I’ve been holding what I call “wants and goals” interviews with a few clients, including the fitness client I mentioned previously, and they are a great way to determine whether the business’s goals align with yours. If I had done this with the disagreeable client I talked about, I’d have realized right away that what my agency does and what they want aren’t compatible.
Time is a precious commodity when you run an agency, but it’s better to invest a little of it upfront to make sure you don’t onboard a client who will fight you for the entire length of their contract and ultimately leave dissatisfied.
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
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Author: Christopher Tompkins, Forbes Councils Member
