As communication efficiency improves, your ability to scale and increase revenue also improves. This is something we’ve learned over the last 10 years of developing reporting software for digital marketers.
Recently we’ve increased our feature set to provide a more holistic marketing agency management software — one that invites collaboration and builds rapport. Our goal is to remove some of the frustrations inherent in onboarding and managing clients, and make it easier for you to scale and increase revenue over time.
The new ReportGarden can help you to:
- Streamline your communication throughout each phase of a client engagement
- Give you the ability to customize data in a way that is distinct for each client
- Create custom reports and proposals in a visually appealing and professional format
- Solidify a stronger agency-client relationship
In this piece, we discuss some of the common pitfalls that exist for agencies engaging in client communication and building a solid client relationship. Then we’ll share examples of how our agency management platform can assist you in creating dynamic proposals, reports, and dashboards.
Want to try out the new ReportGarden? You can sign up today for our free 7 day trial.
The Pitfalls of Agency Client Communication
Fine-tuning your methods of data sharing and communication can help build trust and strengthen partnerships with each of your clients. But without the tools to streamline reporting and proposal generation, you probably find client communication to be difficult and time consuming.
Here, we’ll discuss some of the most frequent difficulties we’ve seen agencies face with client communication and offer insight into how ReportGarden can help minimize them.
Pitfall #1: Time Wasted Creating Manual Reports
Setting up a manual reporting system that takes hours to fulfill every week can lead to wasted time and wasted revenue that eat up your profit and limit your ability to scale.
By centralizing proposal generation and client reporting into one place, you can communicate more efficiently with your prospects and current clients, and have the bandwidth to facilitate better client communication as you grow.
Pitfall #2: Not Creating Dynamic Proposals
Making your client proposal stand out is an important part of making a memorable first impression and securing a contract. But digital marketing agencies often miss the mark with proposals.
With ReportGarden, you have access to pre-designed templates that allow you to create professional and visually appealing proposals that give potential clients a well-rounded view of how your marketing campaign can transform their business.
Pitfall #3: Displaying Different Levels of Specificity for Reporting
The ability to tailor the level of specificity in your reports and dashboards is essential. For example, you might use a dashboard with a high level overview of the most important KPI’s to an executive, while your day to day contact with a client gets a more detailed weekly report. But this often requires a lot of manual effort, jumping between documents and programs.
We took this as instructive when building our new product, and made sure that users can manage all of this easily in one place. Below we’ll provide examples of how agencies are using ReportGarden to alleviate some of these common issues.
Agency Client Communication in the Key Phases of a Client Engagement
Open communication and understanding client needs should stay central in all phases of your client projects. Here we will offer tips on how utilizing ReportGarden can aid communication during each stage of a project’s lifecycle — from proposals, to dashboards, to reporting.
Onboarding and Proposals
Our new proposals feature offers an intuitive tool to create proposals for prospects. You can build proposals from a blank slate right inside our editor, or choose from one of our suite of proposal templates to jump start the process.
In your research phase, you can use our SERP tracking tool to discover opportunities for PPC and SEO prospects (which can be included in your proposal). And once you’ve refined the proposal with your team members, you can easily schedule it to be sent out right from our platform.
When you secure a new client, you can immediately set up your reports and dashboards for your engagement.
Mid-Project Communication with Dashboards and Reporting
ReportGarden allows you to custom-build dashboards that clients can have access to, providing them with a convenient way to stay involved in the details of the project and minimize miscommunication. This is a low touch channel of communication — once the dashboard is set up, it updates in real time and your client can easily track progress without you needing to do any additional work.
There are many different ways to display data points, including (but not limited to):
- Key KPI’s
- Tables
- Stack charts
- Line charts
- Pie charts
You also have the option to keep clients up to date with automatic reports — sent weekly or monthly. These are easily set up by exporting your dashboard and selecting a premade reporting template (you can also build your own):
From here, data from your dashboard can be automatically populated in your report. You can work on filling in the rest of the content. And then you can use our scheduler feature to have it sent out automatically to clients at the cadence of your choice.
Project Wrap-Up
When your campaign is completed, date ranges in your reports can be customized to convey the big picture of your engagement for your clients’ businesses (month over month, year over year, etc). This gives you the opportunity to:
- Demonstrate long-term impact of your project campaigns and marketing efforts
- Display the ways in which business goals were met
- Further solidify a positive working relationship
- And compel them to hire you for further work (or recommend you to the others)
Conclusion
Inefficient agency client communication can severely limit growth and be a detriment to your business. With a unified platform to create and share proposals, reports, and dashboards in one place, you can onboard more clients while maintaining bandwidth to provide even further value.
Ready to improve your agency’s communication efficiency? Try out our 7 day free trial today.
