A guide to communicating with clients

Loud & Clear: A guide to communicating with clients – by Alicia Mitchell, PR and communications assistant, Mo Works, Melbourne

When you’re offering creative services, clients are the glue that holds everything together. They’re important and we love them, but sometimes they stress us out. So in the name of sanity and doing good work, we’ve put together a guide of lessons we’ve learnt at Mo Works that help us avoid set-backs and keep communication flowing smoothly when working with clients.

1. Get Off on the Right Foot

Clients come to you because they can’t solve their problem themselves, so your first step is to use your valuable expertise to help define that problem. For established businesses, this might mean assessing their current website, advertising or design strategy, and auditing what’s working (or not) and why. By discussing their specific concerns, you’ll be able to target your efforts towards these concerns and use your expertise to identify why they’re not seeing their desired results.

For new business, you can think broader. Start by swapping knowledge with your client, their in-sights are invaluable because they have experience in their business that you can’t match. Ask questions, listen to their responses and take notes. What are their customers looking for? How do they usually behave? Where can you find them? Finding out exactly what kind of customers the business attracts will help you deliver work that answers their genuine needs.

2. Align Expectations

To avoid nasty surprises from either end, it’s important for you and your client to clearly understand what’s expected. Clients don’t have the industry experience that you do, but there are ways you can help them better understand your process.

•    Don’t use industry jargon — things get lost in translation when clients have to guess what you mean.

•    Use hand drawings and sketches in the early stages — showing digital mockups with stock pho-tos and filler text too soon may distract your client with details that aren’t relevant at that stage.

•    Focus on overarching ideas — the easiest way to do this is with sketches that distill ideas into the most important elements.

3. Stay in Touch

Clients aren’t just paying for the end product, they’re paying for your process as well. They might want to get involved, so be available! If you’re struggling to decipher back-and-forth emails, pick up the phone and have a chat. Clients appreciate person-to-person contact, especially those not over-ly familiar with the digital sphere. You’re also likely to find that speaking directly is a much quicker way to seek clarification.

4. Sell your stuff

Consider the presentation of your work carefully. It’s a good idea to create documentation that ra-tionalises your solution. What’s the problem, and how have you solved it? When we’re presenting brand names to clients, we break down the potential names into its constituent parts and explain their meanings. This way, the client can pick a name they feel encapsulates their brand message.

It’s vital to be upfront and honest about the decisions you’ve made. If you’ve taken some creative licence and strayed from the brief, show the client what they have asked for and then offer your alternative solution. This demonstrates that you listened, but have used your professional expertise to create an option you believe is more effective. You can collate data from Google Analytics, web tracking, and before and after images into a report to demonstrate the credibility of your solution.

These tips will help you reach a point where your client trusts your process and you have a genu-ine understanding of their goals. With this combination, you’ll be able to deliver work you can both be proud of.

Mo Works’ website: www.moworks.com.au.