Marketing Outpost

You know the biggest challenge in providing marketing services? It’s not lack of ideas. It’s not lack of talent. It’s not lack of creativity. It’s not lack of money. It’s not lack of a plan. It’s not staffing. It’s not lack of tools. It’s often YOU… and ME. It’s all of us, the people who need to review, provide feedback or give the go ahead. The decision makers or managers are often so busy with meetings and other “priority” work that we’re not able to keep the process moving forward. Our projects often get hung up because we’re waiting on people to provide the approval or review or feedback in order to move to the next step. This can lead to missed opportunities and that’s the biggest problem in marketing - just not getting it done. We pester and nag our clients and yes, each other on our team, to get the answers we need but are there better solutions? Here’s what we do: 1. Set expectations from the beginning. During our onboarding with clients we have this conversation. We let them know what can happen when we don’t hear from them. They’re paying us to get it done and we don’t want them to waste their investment. We let them know we WILL be bugging them. That means yes we may text or call on top of email. We get that they are busy but by hiring us they have made marketing a priority. 2. Systems We have a very easy to use project management system that has a great mobile app. Clients can easily review and respond to social media content, documents, etc from their phones if they are always away from their laptops. We get it. Especially in businesses like real estate, construction, restaurants or retail. Our system can assign tasks and clients can see the status of all their work, contribute or add and of course, provide the important approval or feedback. 3. Regular check ins From the beginning we schedule regular monthly check in meetings. For one client with a very important deadline with many moving parts we actually scheduled one in person meeting per month plus a 2nd video checkin. Sometimes you may need to meet weekly but we choose in person or video based on effectiveness and efficiency. These meetings are great for keeping the project on track and often clients who are very busy are easier to capture during those moments. What do you do if that doesn’t work? Sadly, you got to let them go. How can you achieve the goals the client has assigned and agreed upon if you can’t get their feedback, input or approval? However, we have that discussion first. An honest discussion and then we see how it goes. What do you do to keep your projects on track?