Clients often talk about their customers and I often think, are we talking about where you think they are or where they in fact are e.g. Facebook, Twitter, some vertical social network or Laconica install.
Some questions I often ask to help clients answer this primary question and you should definitely ask your management team when looking for an agency whether its social media or traditional marketing.
- What are your objectives for your company, your marketing and if possible your online strategy too? The more the better for you and your agency.
- Have you commissioned any professional research from a market research company or off the shelf product from a major research organisation like Forrester?
- Do you have a list of identified competitors? If so have you clearly identified their strengths and weaknesses?
- Why do you want to get involved in Social Media?
At West17Media we offer an extensive array of questions for new prospective clients but the above are a few that I often ask in the very first conversation.
Let me explain a little bit about why I ask these questions and how they can relate to you internally and externally.
Answer 1. This one tells me you are serious and not likely to have unrealistic expectations; you take your businesses strategy, direction and efforts seriously. A company that is smaller (SMB) often can’t answer parts of question 1 but if they can answer most of it or all of it, that is really something rare. Working with those SMBs to help grow their organisation can be really exciting.
Answer 2. If you haven’t spent the money on this very important piece of business information then please drop everything (yes stop reading) and run out and get some quality intelligence on your market. This can be in the form of more expensive custom research or at the least off the shelf research from someone like Forrester. I personally always feel sad when I talk to a company that is in this situation. Go go go go…
Answer 3. Look at those guys your sales team talks down or face down on a day to day basis and define what exactly they are good at (because they don’t do everything wrong) and what they do poorly. Don’t stop there; put it in a grid of some kind and compare them against you. If you want to be clever, find out from your customers what services they value the most and the least, then grade each company’s strengths and weaknesses. Often this can give you a rating like a product rating. This is hugely valuable to you and your organisation, but to West17Media we are mostly interested in the basic grid.
Answer 4. Some clients ask us to pitch on vapourware like work. They want us to put a huge amount of effort into a pitch on work that doesn’t really exist. Why? Because they want to learn more about the value of Social Media. The first time this happened we were a little embarrassed because doing a pitch is about selling us, not about convincing you to buy Social Media. Had we known and had that been communicated, we would have recommended you attend one of our Social Media training seminars. It’s low cost, low risk and you walk away with a sound grounding of the basics. You may even be ready to make a decision about whether social media is right for your organisation. Often around 50% of those attending will need more time to consider Social Media and absorb what they learnt, the rest are usually pumped and ready to take the next step. Either is fine with us, I promise.