You’ve just taken on a new client and you’re ready to craft a social media strategy that proves your worth and delivers a major return on investment.
So, how do you make sure you’ve got all the details you need to create a solid social media strategy, without having to go back and forth with your client for more information?
Use an onboarding questionnaire for your new clients.
We've compiled a list of 42 questions to consider for your social media questionnaire. They cover all the important areas, including:
- Your client's purpose on social media and where it fits into their overall strategy
- Your client's target audience
- Your client's brand
- Your client's content types and range
- Your client's current social media presence
- What tech and analytics your client uses and has access to
- What your client's expectations are
Keep reading to find out everything you need to know to build social media questionnaire for clients:
- Why is a social media questionnaire so important for onboarding new clients?
- How do you decide which questions to include on your social media questionnaire?
- The end result of using a social media questionnaire for your clients
If you're after a complete guide on onboarding new social media clients, check out our video with Agency Owner, Desiree Martinez below! She will take you through setting expectations, contracts and service charges, her take on the client questionnaire, all sorts of other admin and more!
Why is a social media questionnaire so important for onboarding new clients?
When you're running a social media agency, time is a precious commodity. So, you need to do anything you can to maximise efficiency while minimising the resources you use.
Sending a questionnaire to your new clients allows you to get all the answers you need in one swoop, enabling you to spend more time planning out your client’s strategy and less time following up with your client.
So if you want to impress your brand new clients right from the get-go and build lasting relationships with them, a social media questionnaire is a great starting point!
How do you decide which questions to include on your social media questionnaire?
This is a long list of questions - do you need to include them all? Not at all.
Feel free to ask as many or as few of these questions as you need to get a clear picture of your client's business needs before you start working with them.
Whether that means you ask five questions, 10, or even all 42, you'll discover over time that the answers to some questions are more valuable to you. You can always tweak your questionnaire to suit your needs and your individual clients:
- Getting to the heart of your client’s purpose
- Who is their audience and where are they?
- What is your brand all about?
- What type of content fills your calendar?
- What social profiles are you maintaining?
- Getting into the tech and analysis
- What are your expectations?
1. Getting to the heart of your client’s purpose
When you're running a social media marketing agency, client retention is key. That means keeping them happy by showing results. To achieve this balance, you have to understand what your client hopes to achieve on social media - it's essential for crafting a strategy that works for them.
At the beginning stage of your relationship, these questions are designed to tease out their ideas about social media and how it fits into the overall marketing strategy for their business.
Try using these questions to delve into your client’s motivation and purpose:
1. What is your purpose on social media?
2. What is your brand’s objective?
3. What do you hope to achieve using social media? How will you know you’ve achieved it?
4. What’s the biggest barrier to your success on social media?
5. How does social media fit into your growth plan?
The answers your client gives you will tell you how highly they value social media in their marketing plan and will also help you determine what results your client is looking for.
2. Who is their audience, and where are they?
It’s said that whoever talks the audience’s language the best, wins. And to do that, you need to know them well.
Your client should be able to answer these questions about their target audience, which will help you decide how best to use social media content to target them:
6. Describe your target audience. Who are they?
7. What social platforms do they use?
8. What issues matter to them?
9. How does your brand engage them?
10. What social listening have you done? What does your audience say about you?
11. Who else (brands/celebrities/people) does your audience engage with?
The answers to these questions will tell you two things:
- How well your client knows their target audience.
- Who their target audience is.
When you have the answers, you’ll be able to prepare content for campaigns that will resonate with your client’s target audience. Make sure to refresh yourself on this information regularly as part of a social media health check in order to stay on target to reach your goals. And in the meantime, feel free to use our audit checklists:
- Instagram Audit Checklist
- LinkedIn Audit Checklist
- Facebook Audit Checklist
- X (Twitter) Audit Checklist
What is your brand all about?
One of the greatest challenges of taking on a new social media client is stepping into their brand and using their voice. The more your client is able to tell you about their brand, the easier it will be to create content that is true to their brand voice and resonates with their audience.
Here are some great questions to ask to learn more about your client’s brand:
12. Describe your brand voice.
13. What tone should social media updates have?
14. What is the main message your brand is trying to communicate?
15. What makes your brand different from others?
16. Why do people choose you over your competitors?
17. What’s your brand vision?
The answers to these questions will guide the type of content you’ll create and the tone you’ll use in response to audience engagement, user-generated content (UGC), and feedback or complaints.
When talking about this with your clients, make sure to underline the importance of creating a community. Outlining a community management strategy that revolves around using a friendly approach, being there for the customers, and creating a safe place to discuss (and promote) the brand's offer has become an essential social media tactic.
What type of content fills your calendar?
Social media is all about content. Finding out what content your client has used in the past, how they’ve used it, and the resources they’ve allocated to it will help you leverage what’s working and identify new opportunities to test in your campaigns.
Ask these questions in your social media client questionnaire to make sure you’ve got all the content information you need:
18. What resources do you have available for content creation?
19. What is your workflow process for content from inception to publication?
20. What sign-offs do you require?
21. How often do you want to publish new content to your profiles?
22. How does social media tie in with your offline campaigns?
23. What type of content does your audience respond to best (if known)?
24. What type of content do you want to create for your audience (images, video, quotes, blog posts, etc.)?
25. What message are you trying to send with your content?
26. How do you use user-generated content in your campaigns?
27. What holidays does your client want to observe?
>>Pro tip>> Celebrating social media holidays on your client's social media channels can be a great way to increase their brand awareness and reach. Consider taking advantage of highly relevant ‘World Days’, for example, if your client sells hotdogs, World Hot Dog Day is in July, and it’d be remiss not to mark the occasion!
If you don’t already have a calendar that you can refer to, our comprehensive social media holiday calendar is a great place to start. It comes in the form of a handy website page that's easy to use and share.
Alternatively, you can access this calendar directly in Sendible's calendar!
The answers you get to these questions will help you determine the resources you have available to work with on your client’s content and opportunities for growth. It will also help you add the right type of content to your strategy, so that it’s aligned both with your client’s brand and the latest social media trends.
And in today's culture - posting high-quality content tailored to the audience's needs is a must.
The Top Social Media Trends That You Need To Pay Attention To
You see, social media platforms are oversaturated with all sorts of content, and the number of competitors gets bigger every day. Users' attention span is decreasing, and according to recent studies, their needs have become quite specific. They value authenticity, personal touch, deeper connections, and above all - content that solves their problems.
Wondering how often should you post on social media? As Jay Bayer said: The best social media publishing frequency is: when it's worthwhile. But we went a bit further down this rabbit hole.
What social profiles are you maintaining?
To craft your client’s strategy, you need to know what social media channels they intend to maintain. Find out from them which profiles they currently have, which they want to add, and if they want to stop producing content for any platform.
Add these questions to your questionnaire:
28. What profiles do you have and on which networks?
29. Are you looking to expand onto new networks?
30. Are you looking to narrow your focus to fewer networks?
31. Do you want to provide customer service on social media? If so, on which platform and from which profile?
Not only will these answers tell you where you need to focus your efforts, but they'll also help you uncover new growth opportunities. Are they using TikTok or Instagram Reels? If not, this would be a great way to introduce their potential and existing customers to what's happening behind the scenes. These channels are a great way to create long-lasting, personal bonds with followers and those who are yet to discover the brand.
Getting into the tech and analysis
Unless your client is brand new to social media marketing, chances are they’ll have used tools to help them and should have some data on how effective their campaigns have been.
You’ll want to find out what tools they’ve been using, how they’ve measured ROI, what they’ve tried in the past, and what is and isn’t working for them.
Learning about their sales funnel and buyer’s journey is also helpful to see where social media marketing fits into their overall marketing strategy and sales process.
These questions will help you get the answers you need:
32. What tools have you used to manage your social media profiles until now?
33. How do you intend to measure return on investment?
34. What is working for you (and not working) right now?
35. How does social media fit into your sales funnel or buyer’s journey?
36. What have you tried in the past?
37. Have you got any tracking pixels installed on your site?
Assessing data from previous campaigns will be invaluable to your efforts, as you’ll be able to use past campaigns as a guide that will help you form ideas to improve results in future and set measurable goals for social media campaigns. Furthermore, these valuable insights will help you manage expectations and make data-driven decisions. This brings us to the next point.
What are your expectations?
Want to know the easiest way to find out what your client wants? Ask them!
We’ve all had a demanding client that doesn’t follow the unspoken ‘rules’ of engagement… but could that relationship have been completely different with a simple discussion of expectations at the beginning?
Here are some questions that will help you open up communication with your client about their expectations:
38. What do you expect from us as your account manager?
39. What reports do you want to see and how often?
40. Who is the person we should contact?
41. How much oversight and control do you want to have?
42. How much input do you want to have into campaigns?
A large part of managing client satisfaction comes from managing client expectations. Finding out from your client what they expect from you helps you to make sure you’re delivering what your client actually wants.
If your client has expectations that are beyond what you’d consider reasonable, knowing that from the beginning enables you to discuss it with them and come to an agreement about the service you provide.
[Agency Guide] 5 Proven Tactics to Effectively Deal with Difficult Clients
The end result of using a social media questionnaire for your clients
Using a social media questionnaire for your clients will help you be a more efficient social media marketer, as you’ll start planning your strategy with all the information you need.
These questions are designed to help you get all the information required to work with your client’s social media strategy. Using these questions, you’ll get insights into your client’s purpose, brand, audience, content style, reach, past efforts, and expectations of your management.
If you haven’t started using an intake questionnaire for clients, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much easier it is to have all the key information you need to start working on your client’s strategy in one hit.
