Marketing Client Onboarding: The Ultimate Guide

Bagging a new client is just half the battle. The other half is doing a good job at marketing client onboarding, so you can be sure you’ve maximised their success.

While your advertising might be top-tier, a subpar onboarding experience could send those new clients packing before you get a chance to showcase your services.

This guide will explain what marketing client onboarding is, its importance, and the benefits of improving client onboarding from start to finish. We’ll also explore some best practices and strategies for it, plus discuss software and templates you can use to streamline and optimize your processes. Let’s get started!

What is marketing client onboarding?

Marketing client onboarding is the process of bringing new marketing clients into your agency/organization. It usually involves:

• Recording the new client and their details, such as order requirements, marketing needs, etc.
• Importing the client’s information and profile to your business software for project management/personnel assignment purposes.
• Giving the client access to agency resources and materials as necessary.

More generally, client onboarding is the first impression your brand provides to a new client. It’s the opportunity to address client concerns, start projects on the right foot, and build relationships with each new client you bring into your agency.

Why is marketing client onboarding important?

If marketing client onboarding is the first real impression a client gets of your agency, that highlights its chief importance. You only have one chance to make a first impression, and a good onboarding experience can make your agency seem experienced, personalized, and responsive to each new client’s needs.

Of course, the reverse is also true. A subpar client onboarding experience will cause each new client to have doubts about your abilities and may cause them to cancel their contract before they can take full advantage of your services.

Benefits of marketing client onboarding

Good marketing client onboarding may provide your brand with several major benefits, including:

• Better relationships with each of your clients. Through a streamlined yet comprehensive onboarding process, you’ll learn more about your client’s preferences, workflows, and needs. This can inform and tailor how you work together and how you’ll provide them with your marketing services.
• Improved efficiency. With good onboarding, you’ll see where each client is in the onboarding process and be able to keep growing your business without overtaxing your limited resources.
• Reduced churn. Clients are much more likely to leave within the first 90 days with a bad onboarding experience.
• Ensured compliance. When you have a citable, recorded onboarding process, you can ensure that any legal aspects of signing on a new client are taken care of, minimizing legal issues in the future.

Challenges of onboarding new managers

That all said, marketing client onboarding does come with several notable challenges. For instance, onboarding a new client often requires extra care and attention, particularly if you sign on multiple very different clients in a relatively short time.

Furthermore, client onboarding requires you to invest in new software and practices. This can sometimes strain your business’s budget, even if you secure a credit line with net 30 payment terms to pay for those software products later.

You may also need to assign each new client a dedicated team member as part of your onboarding process, which may strain your personnel distribution.

Even with these challenges, good client onboarding is much better to pursue than leaving your onboarding to flounder.

Best practices for new manager hire onboarding

You can leverage multiple best practices to improve your client onboarding.

For example, share an onboarding questionnaire with each new client you take on. The questionnaire should include questions about any information you didn’t gather during earlier steps, such as client preferences, budget limitations, etc. You should be very specific during this phase, asking the client who their target audience is, what sets the brand apart from near competitors, etc.

You should also try to familiarize your new clients with the tools that your agency uses, such as estimating and invoicing software that enables you to determine client costs and expenses. Include this information in a welcome package that introduces assigned team members, the tools you use (and tutorials for them so your clients can use those tools), as well as any passwords and other necessary login information and credentials.

It’s also wise to assign a dedicated team member to each new client, at least in the short term. Not only does this make each client feel personally tended to, but it enables you to learn more about the client individually. The assigned team member can bring that information back to the team for further analysis.

Examples of marketing client onboarding

Need an example? Say that you have onboarded a new client that needs a robust, comprehensive digital marketing campaign. During onboarding, you ask them questions like:

• Who is their target audience?
• What kinds of ads do they want to use?
• What resources do they already have for marketing (e.g., social media, Instagram, etc.)?

You also provide the client with a breakdown of your resources and software tools. After assigning a team member to the new client, you learn that they are particularly interested in a social media marketing campaign, so you whip up resources to start creating content for different platforms, aiming to post once per week for the next five weeks.

This is just one example of how a smooth onboarding process can make your job as a marketing agency much easier and more profitable.

Tools & software to help onboard new managers

The best onboarding processes rely heavily on top-tier software, providing the infrastructure framework and tools necessary to bring clients into the fold.

Out of all available software choices, Process Street is the best by far. This comprehensive software platform is a one-stop shop for all of your client onboarding needs, offering features such as:

• Knowledge retention, letting you store important customer information in templates
• Increased agility so you can edit your onboarding processes in just seconds
• Consistency tools, enabling you to standardize your onboarding approaches through templates
• Extensive app integration, letting you combine your software with other onboarding tools or software solutions, etc.

If you want your marketing client onboarding to be as smooth and streamlined as possible, you’ll want to try Process Street ASAP.

Free templates for new hire & leadership onboarding

As noted above, your client onboarding will be much more streamlined and efficient if you use templates. Process Street allows you to utilize client onboarding templates to standardize your processes through information-gathering forms, tutorials, etc.

Make heavy use of client onboarding templates to speed up the process without making your client feel rushed or confused.

Check out our huge template library for custom-built new hire, manager, preboarding, orientation, exit interview processes & more.

As a HR manager, you owe it to yourself to make your life easier by automating & streamlining the onboarding process.

Marketing client onboarding optimization

You’ll also want to make sure you know how to use automation tools such as Process Street to their full potential. For example, Process Street helps you save energy, time, and money by automating repetitive onboarding tasks. In this way, your team can focus on other aspects of your business, like nurturing new customer relationships.

Marketing client onboarding optimization

Good optimization is also key to maximizing your onboarding processes. Continuous improvement, such as by optimizing client preferences, informational forms, and other aspects, is key to keeping your organization agile and evolving over time, not stagnating in the face of heavy competition. Process Street is an excellent solution if you want to revitalize and reinvent your client onboarding processes.

The future of marketing client onboarding

Ultimately, marketing client onboarding will remain vitally important for marketing agencies of all sizes. Without good onboarding, your clients won’t stick around long enough to see the value your brand offers. Don’t make the mistake of giving your new clients a bad first impression; use the right software and onboarding practices to maximize that first impression instead.