Most social media agencies accept difficult clients as part of their job. If you are lucky, you may be able to spot red flags and decide not to work with difficult clients. Even the most dependable clients can have moments when they expect impossible results or make unreasonable demands at the very last moment.
How can you manage people who are inconsistent in their communication, demand too much or micromanage your tasks as a social media manager?
Let’s take a look at how to effectively deal with difficult clients. This includes taking the necessary steps before you work together and adopting tools that will help you navigate through tough situations more efficiently.
1. Clarify the Scope
Have you ever been asked by a client to perform extra work or manage tasks you haven’t discussed before? Scope creep is a problem that many clients have. It is basically when clients ask for work beyond what your agreement allows.
Before you begin working together, be clear about what your social media services are to avoid scope creep.
Please be as specific as you can, such as the content you will produce and how fast you will respond to engagements.
Allow clients to ask for more so that you can increase the scope and get paid. From the beginning. Your agreement should clearly state which tasks fall under the responsibility of your clients.
Regardless of how clear your explanations are, there will always be resistance. Sometimes clients can be trusted. Clients may forget the terms of your agreement. Some may not be familiar with working with agencies.
In some cases, clients want more than they are paying you. Clients may be able to push the boundaries of your agreement once or repeatedly.
It’s helpful to reply the same in both cases. Be polite and professional, but firm.
Explain to clients briefly why their request is different from your agreement.
Do they expect too many posts per week? Are they asking for you to manage another social channel?
If you are able to provide the service they require, be ready to give them a quote and send them an updated agreement. If you are unable to provide the service they need, let them know and recommend another agency or marketer if possible.
2. Set Clear Expectations
Remember that clients may have different communication styles or workflows than your agency when you begin working with them. At the beginning of your relationship, take time to explain your agency’s working methods and what clients can expect.
Here are some tips to help you set expectations with your clients
It is helpful to clarify:
How do you communicate? Are you able to set up different Slack channels for each client. Do you prefer to receive texts or calls? Are you only able to contact your team via email? Do not leave them guessing. How quickly they usually respond. Are clients able to expect a response within 24 hours? What is your reply time policy? When clients can expect to get materials from you. Are you able to plan each social media campaign at least one month in advance? Are you able to send weekly publishing schedules each week on a specific day? If you need feedback or responses. Give clients a deadline if you need their input or approval in order to complete your job. To avoid problems if they miss it often, plan further ahead.
If you work with difficult clients, it is possible to expect communication problems and difficulties in completing everyday tasks. Are you looking for another verification code to log into Instagram? Is it necessary to have a client give access to Facebook Page to a new member of your team? It’s possible that you are still waiting.
Instead of relying on clients for administrative tasks, you can use a social media platform to manage all your accounts. Agorapulse allows you to add up to 40 social media profiles on one dashboard.
This allows you to manage multiple client Instagrams, Facebooks, Twitters, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Business Profiles, and Twitters simultaneously with one tool. You don’t need to sign in and log out multiple times, so you don’t have to worry constantly about activating security codes.
Agorapulse makes it easy to grant access to client accounts to another member of your team. Invite your colleague to create an Agorapulse account for them and set their access level individually.
Agorapulse allows you to set permissions that range from read-only to admin. This means that you can grant permission to team members to view client’s social profiles and post engagements. You can also adjust their permissions at anytime.
How to Ace Social Media Collaborations
4. Your clients will appreciate you being more organized than them
Your agency might be expected to manage all aspects of creative and campaign planning if your clients are most difficult. If your team doesn’t have a system for organizing, sharing and organizing social media content, it can be difficult to meet this expectation.
Create an Asset Library
Agorapulse’s social media Asset Library is built in and makes it easy to organize images, photos and videos regardless of how many clients you have. The Asset Library supports four levels of subfolders so you can keep client media separate and then organize it by campaign, social media channel, or any other criteria.
Once you have decided on an organization system, it’s time to upload and tag media. You might consider creating a labeling system to distinguish between approved media and those still being considered.
Your team can add internal notes and labels to help ensure everyone is on the right page. It’s not necessary to give permission to team members to access or use media from your Asset Library. Uploading an image or video to your Asset Library allows everyone in your team to access it. This can help streamline your workflow.
Is your agency creating social media content for clients? Agorapulse’s Asset Library integrates with Canva. This integration allows you to create creatives in Canva, and then import them into the Asset Library to organize your work.
All you need to do to add an asset to a post on social media is to click the Publish This Image button. The history tab can be opened in any asset to keep track of usage. This can help you avoid repeating the same images.
Labels published by Leverage
Agorapulse allows you to keep your clients and team organized beyond the Asset Library. Every post that you create can be given custom publishing labels. This allows you to tag:
Social media campaignsContent topics & sourcesInfluencers and user-generated Content (UGC). Posts you want to boost
These labels can be viewed by clients and your team in Agorapulse’s Publishing Composer. These labels can be viewed in social media reports. This allows you to see which campaigns and content types are most successful.
Clients often want to see social media content that you have created before they publish it to their accounts. For some clients, however, it is not enough to see content mockups in Excel or read the copy in a shared file. Clients want to see previews of posts in order to understand how they will look once the content is live.
This request is easy to make when you use Agorapulse for social media management. Agorapulse automatically creates a preview of the content before you post it. You can choose multiple channels to see how your content will appear on each channel if you intend to cross-post across platforms.
These previews don’t need to be kept private. Clients don’t even have to have access to their Agorapulse accounts to view them. Agorapulse’s Shared Calendar allows you to share them with clients.
Create a Shared Calendar for each client in your organization’s settings and add the relevant social profiles. You can then enter contact information for all members of your client’s teams to ensure that everyone has access.
Your clients will be able to see all content that you have published, scheduled or drafted for them by clicking the Save button. This will allow them to see exactly what you have done and what is coming up.
6. Establish Content Approval Workflows
Some clients don’t like the idea of seeing previews for scheduled content. Clients may have to approve and review content before it goes live.
It’s easy to forget about content approvals if you do it via email, chat or on a shared file. It may be difficult to keep track what has been approved and what is outstanding. Your records may not match those of your clients.
Scheduled content that you’ve already created for social media may be published before you can confirm your approval. This can quickly turn a client who is difficult into a frustrated ex-client.
Agorapulse allows you to set up a social media approval process. This allows you to organize creative assets and draft content in one place. You can also confirm approval.
After you have created a Shared calendar for your clients you will be able to assign content. Instead of scheduling a post, click on the Assign button. Select any decision-maker from the dropdown menu and then add a message to give context. Click the Assign button.
Any post that you give to clients can be approved or rejected by them. You can also give them internal notes such as edit requests and other context. They can also add internal notes such as edit requests or other context. The content will not be published until they approve it.
The requests of demanding clients may go beyond publishing and approvals. Clients may want more information about how your team handles engagement, or how quickly you respond to direct messages (DMs) from comments.
Before you begin working with clients, it is important to have agreements in place and establish expectations. If you feel that clients are micromanaging this part of your work, it might be worth giving them more control or increasing your response rate. Agorapulse is a great tool to help you in several ways.
Moderate engagement automatically
Are your clients getting a fair amount spammy engagement on their social media profiles? You could waste a lot of time if you manually go through it all.
Instead, you can use Agorapulse’s Social Inbox rules for automatic moderation of comments and DMs.
You can, for example, set up rules that:
You can review generic comments such as “Great post!” to ensure they don’t clutter your inbox.
Save your replies and create a bank
Are your clients interested in having more control over how you respond to comments or DMs? A list of questions and problems that are most common can be prepared. Ask your clients to respond with short responses.
These responses can be added to your Agorapulse saved replies list. You can select a saved reply in the dropdown menu to modify or respond to an item in your inbox. This allows you to respond quickly in the brand voice of your clients.
Write Replies that Don’t Sound like a Robot Written Them
Response times of the Track Team
Your clients have asked you to respond faster to their engagements. You can track both the quantity and timing of your responses with Agorapulse reports
Open the Reports panel in your dashboard. Click on the Community Management tab and choose a social media account. The number of replies you have received from your team, the number and average time it took to respond can all be viewed. Scroll down for a daily breakdown as well as a report on team performance.
8. Demonstrate the value of your agency
Your most difficult clients might seem overwhelmed, even if your team does exceptional work. Your agency may not be fully understood by your clients, and they might consider terminating your agreement.
It is possible that your team will be pleased to see clients leave. Other relationships may be worth saving.
Clients who aren’t happy with the services of your agency can be convinced to leave. Clients can make better decisions about their marketing budget and activities by reporting on the agency’s activities.
Calculate the return on investment (ROI).
Your clients deserve to know if the agency is generating a return on investment that is profitable for them. It’s easy to find this information.
Agorapulse calculates ROI for Facebook pages automatically using custom values from your clients. Simply input the value that your client assigns to link clicks and impressions as well as engaged fans.
The same formula can be used to calculate ROI for other channels. It can be communicated in your report insights, or manually added to client reports in PowerPoint.
Report on brand awareness
While ROI is important, it’s not the only measure that communicates value. You can show how your efforts have influenced conversations about the brands of your clients by reporting on brand awareness.
Agorapulse generates brand awareness reports on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn automatically so that you can track client mentions, shares, and shares. Clients can also get better insight into the impact of your efforts by including branded hashtags and selected campaign hashtags in their Instagram brand awareness reports.
Create custom campaign reports
It is simple to create social media reports for certain channels. What if clients need to assess the impact of a campaign?
Agorapulse’s Custom Reports allows you to easily report campaign activity. To make it easy to identify campaign content, first add publishing labels to your posts. Next, go to your Reports panel to create a custom Label Report.
Add all social media channels you are interested in and select the data that you wish to include. You can schedule automatic weekly or monthly reports for ongoing campaigns. This will ensure that even the most difficult clients have the information they need to make informed decisions.
In conclusion
You will encounter some difficult clients, regardless of whether you are an experienced agency owner or a newbie to social media management. It is crucial to be able to handle difficult clients when working for a social media marketing company. These tips will help you manage difficult clients and still enjoy your job, from setting the tone for a positive working relationship to acquiring the right tools, to managing your time effectively.
Start saving time and energy with your social media management. Get a free trial of Agorapulse, which will help you plan, track, measure, and measure your social media efforts.
