Marketing Client Onboarding Process

Congratulations, you’ve landed the client!

Now it’s time to start onboarding them. It’s important to make sure you’re organized in your approach and have an idea of what the marketing campaign consists of. Before starting the onboarding process, make sure you have lined out any upcoming tasks and due dates for the campaign to help stay on track and give your client a timeline for the process. Once that is done, it’s time to start onboarding with these four steps.

Brand Discovery

The contract is signed, and it’s time to start digging in deep to what makes this client who they are. You already know what they do. This is where you get to the why and the how. What makes them tick? What are their values? How do they see their own brand? Who are their competitors? Send a calendar invite to everyone involved on the project (your team and the client’s team), and set up an hour or so to spend on the brand discovery. Take this time to ask any and all the questions you have. This will help you become ingrained with the brand, and it will help the client find questions and answers they’ve never even thought of before.

Internal Review

It’s always a good idea to have a quick internal team meeting after your brand discovery. Gather all of your notes, and see what points stood out to each team member. This is the beginning of your marketing and creative strategy. Look at the keywords from your discussion and start forming a vision of where this campaign could go. You might find that some things that stood out to you didn’t stand out to your teammates and vice versa. After this internal review, your team should be on the same page and excited to work on the next steps.

Brand Survey

You’ve had your brand discovery, and you probably realized in your internal review that a lot was said about different aspects of the brand. Now that the client has their wheels turning, it’s a great idea to send your client a brand survey. This survey is typically around 15 questions honing in on the things discussed in the brand discovery. Think of some key points the client said in the brand discovery and dig deeper into it. Do they see their brand as more masculine or feminine? Who do they want their target audience to be? Who is their actual target audience? What are some words that come to mind when they think of their brand? etc.

Next Steps

You have all the brand survey answers back, and now the work begins. Set up another internal meeting with your team to go over the results, and make sure you have the next steps ironed out before the meeting ends. The next steps could vary depending on what the campaign is. Typically this is when creative will start on some branding concepts with the information provided from the discovery call, survey, and internal calls. This is also when the marketing strategist will begin working on the marketing plan. This plan is an in-depth look at all of the things discovered during the conversations leading up to this point. It’s the who, what, when, where, how of the campaign and what you will use to build the entire campaign strategy around.