The secret to satisfied, successful clients

All too often, agencies get bogged down with clients who are frustrated and ready to churn because they’re not seeing the results they wanted. When your clients are happy and successful, your agency business thrives.

To deliver results, coaching needs to provide structure and strategy. In other words, a framework that delivers success.

This kind of coaching allows you to ensure results. The clients know what to do, and you tell them how to do it.

Suddenly there’s less guesswork and finger-pointing — and a lot more traffic, leads, and sales.

You give the clients the tools and knowledge to be successful, and suddenly they start working together, finding the alignment they’ve been missing.

“A lot of our [new] content was huge for our sales prospecting. It took a lot of burden off the sales team so they didn’t have to spend so much time answering the same 30 questions over and over.”

Patrick Morrison

Videographer, Aquila Commercial, IMPACT client

With the right strategy, your clients will build durable, trusted, beloved brands.

“We get customer emails all the time thanking us for marketing to them. We’re providing them with good, helpful, useful content, and they actually take the time to thank us.”

Lee Hopkins

VP of Marketing, La-Z-Boy Southeast, IMPACT client

Clients seek your approval, not the other way around

Inbound agencies everywhere live with the constant worry of pleasing their clients: Are the three articles we promised them going to hit the mark? Are they going to be okay with us outsourcing to a different freelance writer? How are we going to explain the click-through rate drop in last month’s emails?

In the coaching model, it’s the other way around. Rather than seeking approval from clients, clients seek approval from you.

You provide the parameters and the framework for success, they do the work.

Think about it, no one knows a client’s business and industry better than the client themselves. Rather than delivering content that sounds inauthentic and off-target, the clients produce on-target, authentic content themselves.

You instruct them in SEO best practices and strategic direction. They do the rest. There’s less need for back-and-forth fact-checking, editing, or approval because the content is coming directly from the source.

They own their own success

A coaching model completely changes the way clients feel about their marketing efforts and agency engagement. Clients are empowered and in full control of their destiny, rather than relying solely on you to execute and hit deadlines. When the results start coming in, they can feel proud of their successes. They also are more likely to take ownership of their shortcomings, and are fully in-tune and invested in the outcomes of their marketing.

With the traditional agency model, a given company might have bounced between agencies, sometimes several in one year. They don’t stick with any one marketing agency because the results they’re looking for never materialize.

When that same company works with a coaching service, they hire the necessary team to do their marketing internally. We’ve found that this allows them to be more productive, agile, and efficient. This internal marketing team — combined with a coaching framework — brings stability and routine. Their agency coaches help these employees grow, providing valuable education to them.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel

Most business owners started their own businesses because they like being in charge of their own success. Similarly, many are frustrated that they have to pay an agency in perpetuity for their marketing needs.

Coaching offers them ownership over the marketing they crave. Agency experts will help these business leaders get their internal marketing team up and running and give them the playbook for success — but the engagement is finite.

Coaches don’t work with clients forever, just until they learn what they need to and are ready to “graduate.”

At IMPACT, we work with clients for an average of 18 months, after which they are fully autonomous and able to go forward on their own.

We go our separate ways on excellent terms, keeping in touch for potential future engagements.