Your latest pitch was a huge success, and you’ve landed a new client as a result.
After a quick celebration, you start to wonder what’s next. There’s so much information about “getting the client”, but not much about what needs to happen once you’ve sealed the deal.
This blog will cover the seven key steps of a new client onboarding checklist and help you start your workflow.
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!
The first step includes a list of 42 questions to consider for 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:
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.
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:
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 regularly refresh yourself on this information as part of a social media health check to stay on target to reach your goals. And in the meantime, feel free to use our audit checklists:
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.
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 content 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.
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.
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.
Unless your client is new to social media marketing, chances are they’ll have used tools to help them and should have some data on their campaigns' effectiveness.
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 in seeing 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.
Want to know the easiest way to find out what your client wants? Ask them!
We’ve all had demanding clients who don’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 what your clients expect from you helps you ensure that you’re delivering what your clients actually want.
If your client has expectations that are beyond what you’d consider reasonable, knowing that from the beginning enables you to discuss them and agree on the service you provide.
Let’s get the boring but necessary stuff out of the way first.
This part of the client onboarding process happens right at the start and is basically the formal agreement between you and the client.
During this stage, you should consider:
This is another great example of when a client onboarding checklist template would be useful.
Your template could include a basic legal contract or NDA that you can use as your template for this step.
Ironing out the financial aspects of a project before it gets started reduces the risk of miscommunication, scope creep, and overspending.
You and the client must be on the same page regarding costs and invoicing processes.
This helps create a healthy client relationship in the long run and is part of any good client onboarding process.
Source: @ashleyrcummings
Here are some of the things you can include at this stage of the onboarding process:
Setting up a new client in your project timeline is crucial for making sure you hit all the required deadlines and stay on track.
What you include at this stage of the onboarding process will be determined by your pre-existing project management process, but it should include tasks like:
Now everything is set up and ready to go, you can start thinking about what working with this client will look like in the long run.
There’s often a lot of chat at the beginning while you iron things out, but how will you continue to communicate, and what will the project look like in action?
These points are key to client retention.
At this point, think about sharing information like:
You will have already spoken to the client in detail about their wants and needs, but this is the time in the client onboarding process to talk about how things will look moving forward.
Use this call to briefly discuss the different parts of your onboarding process and field any questions they might have before you officially get started.
Consider including these in your kick-off call:
A welcome packet can neatly contain all of the information you’ve gathered from the onboarding questionnaire and the other steps in this process.
This document includes all the relevant information a client needs to know in one handy place.
It also provides a reference for you and your team to reflect on the client’s expectations and any logistics you’ve agreed on during the onboarding process.
Feel free to mix up the medium here: 69% of people say that they feel more video should be used in the onboarding process.
You should include information like:
Sendible has a plethora of features that will make you fall in love with social media management again.
And not just you, but your clients, too!
So let's dive into a select few that we think you'll love:
Client Connect helps you build trust from the start. This handy feature allows your new clients to share social media credentials without making you an admin by adding their social media profiles to your Sendible dashboard for added security.
Empower your clients or junior team members with access to your social media content creation. No need to worry about mishaps—introduce them to Content Library roles.
Not every user needs to access all functionality. With our custom user permission groups, you can decide who gets access to what. For example, you might want to charge your clients more if they want to add more profiles or build custom reports.
Save your and your client's valuable time by sending the approval requests in bulk. While Sendible allows you to assign tasks and send individual approval requests, our Bulk Importer enables you to send them an entire campaign or month's worth of content for approval at once.
Care to learn more about our agency-specific solutions, such as Share Button, Automated Reports, Campaign Management, and more? Then schedule a consultation with one of our experts or test Sendible for free for 14 days!
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