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New client? Here are the questions you need to ask.
Picture this: you’ve just onboarded a new client and you’re ready to learn about their business and help them achieve their goals. But to do that you need to ask the right interview questions.
There’s nothing worse than onboarding new clients and having several meetings only to find that when you come to do the work you don’t have the right information. It can look rather unprofessional having to go back to the client to ask multiple follow-up questions.
So, when should you be questioning your client? Well, if it’s a new client you’ll want to ask them before you do anything else and the client comes on board or you pitch for their business. For existing clients, you might want to ask these questions before a new campaign or a change in strategy.
After all, there’s no point onboarding a new client if they’re looking for the kind of services you can’t provide. The right questions will ensure that you get to know prospective clients. But not only that – an in-depth workshop session with the client will reassure them that you know what you’re doing.
Keep scrolling to discover our top social media interview questions for onboarding new clients!
Why Are the Right Interview Questions So Important?
The right social media questions will determine the direction of your client’s social media marketing strategy from the get-go. They’ll ensure that you can develop the best strategy to achieve your client’s social media objectives using the quickest, most cost-efficient methods possible.
Let’s get real. In the world of social media marketing, cost-efficient clients that work with you collaboratively to define their objectives and execute campaigns can bring in the big bucks.
On the other hand, some clients have unreasonable expectations, constantly shifting goals, incorrect assumptions about how social media works and an inability to collaborate.
Any one of these attributes can lead to a poor working relationship, scope creep, and even unsuccessful campaigns. None of those are great for your clients – or your agency!
So, before you even start working with a client, you’ll want to ensure that you have the foundations that can turn into a great relationship. You want to ensure your business shares a similar company culture with the client and can work with them for the long haul. You can do this by having an in-depth chat with your client. It’s almost like a job interview; you’re both trying to find out if you’re the right fit for each other.
Some of these attributes, such as a poor understanding of social and digital marketing, can be built as the relationship grows. After all, a new client probably isn’t going to be a social media expert – that’s why they’re coming to you! But, in that situation, for instance, you’ll need to assess whether the client is open to learning from you.
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Top Social Media Interview Questions
Some social media specialists prefer to start with a discovery call. Others start with a social media questionnaire outlining some basic details about the client. Others do both – the choice is yours! Only you can decide on your process of asking these social media interview questions.
Either way, it’s definitely a good idea to record the client’s responses in some way, whether that’s through a recorded call, a questionnaire, or just notes.
If you’re creating a strategy for a specific campaign, you can use a social media strategy template to assist you or create your own and tweak it as required to suit different clients and their needs.
If you’re working with a new client, it’s important to get all the information you can from the client and ask follow-up questions if necessary. After all, you’ll be the one creating the social media strategy!
Ready to get started? Read on to get our top social media onboarding questions.
1. Understanding Your Client’s Purpose
First of all, it’s good to understand exactly who your client is and what their purpose is. You can ask questions like:
- Describe your business and why you/your founder started your business
- What are your business goals for the next 5 years?
- What are you looking for in terms of social media marketing specifically? What pricing models are you looking for and what is important to you, for instance, flexibility?
- What is your purpose on social media? What will you use it for? This might be brand awareness, lead generation, or even changing the company’s brand perception
- What is your budget for social media marketing?
- What other activity are you currently doing, such as SEO, PPC, or offline activity, and what purpose does this activity solve?
- What would success on social media look like for you? An engaged community? Lots of followers? A curated feed? Traffic to your site?
This is also a good time to establish what the client’s knowledge of social media is like. You can ask the client about their experience with social media and whether they have worked with a marketing agency. But their responses so far should already have given you some clues about their knowledge.
2. Learning About the Brand
This is when you’ll learn all about the brand and what the client wants to achieve. Ask your new clients questions like:
- What is the brand all about?
- What is the brand’s mission and unique selling proposition?
- What is your brand voice and tone on social?
- Do you currently have a social media presence?
- What’s the biggest challenge for your brand?
- What are your brand’s weaknesses?
- Which social media accounts do you admire – and why?
While it’s good to learn about all the positive aspects of a business, it’s important to know its positives. But it’s equally important to understand its perceived weaknesses as well. When it comes time to create the client’s social media strategy, you can do a comprehensive SWOT analysis yourself, but in the meantime, it’s good to understand things from the client’s perspective. What they consider to be a weakness may not be something you have even considered – it might be that an obscure product is missing from their product range.
3. Defining Their Target Audience
Next – define the client’s audience. Some clients will already have a strong idea of who their ideal customer is. Some clients might have multiple target audiences. If so, you’ll need to get the information for each target audience.
Either way, you’ll want to ask questions like:
- Who is your target audience? How old are they? What gender? Location?
- Which social media channels do they use and how do they use them?
- Which topics and themes are important to them?
- What do they spend their time doing?
- Which events and holidays are important to them?
- What problems can you help them to solve?
If your client is a new business just starting out, they might not have all the answers yet, especially when it comes to social media.
If your client has no clue about their audience, you might need to build some time for audience research into their scope of work. If they’re already an established brand, however, they should have some data they can share with you, whether that’s simple audience demographics from sales data or deep marketing insights.
Sometimes clients are quite wrong about their audience. They might assume that their audience is younger, but then it turns out they are older, younger, or just different to what they assumed.
Also, always remember to remind clients that their audience on social media is different to their audience on other channels. Some social media channels tend to be used more frequently by certain demographics. For instance, Instagram skews largely younger and with a fairly even gender split in most countries.
4. Assessing Their Current Social Media Strategy
Your client’s current social media strategy – if they have one – can offer up valuable information about how the client approaches their social media marketing. But it’s also a quick way to help iron out tactics that might not work for the brand.
- Have you attempted any social media strategies yet? If so, what were the results?
- Which social media platforms have been working for you – and which haven’t?
- What are your current key performance indicators, or KPIs? How are you progressing toward these?
- What kind of social media content do you feel would work best for your brand?
- What would you like to try on social media?
- Are you interested in using social media as a key customer service platform?
- Which types of content have you tried so far?
- What would you classify as high-quality content?
- Have you used user-generated content (UGC) yet?
- Do you have a content marketing strategy?
- How does social media fit into your sales funnel?
Don’t assume that just because the client – or another agency – has done something unsuccessfully that it won’t work for the brand.
The same tactics can work far better with a different strategy, at a different time, with a more experienced social media strategist at the helm.
5. Resources and Team
There’s no point hyping your new client up with a whole bunch of exciting new plans only to discover that they don’t have the budget, resources, or staff to execute those plans. Don’t promise anything before the client shares their budget.
Ask your client:
- What resources do you have available for staff? If they don’t have a full-time social media team, perhaps they can utilize staff who are working in content or PR teams to assist.
- Do you have any in-house social media content creation capabilities, such as cameras, a studio, lighting, or props?
- Do you work with any other partners or agencies?
- What is your approvals process and how long might this take?
- What social media experience does your team have – if any?
- What is the nature of your products or services and how often do they change? How does this affect your social media content?
- Do you have a social media scheduling tool?
These are all important questions that can affect your social media pricing. For instance, a restaurant that changes its menu every season will need a new content shoot every few months to ensure its content stays relevant.
If the client doesn’t have any social media management tools, you may have to factor this into their budget as well. Luckily, tools like Sked Social are incredibly cost-effective, especially when you’re managing multiple clients. Sked Social allows you to curate, sort, and schedule your content for multiple social platforms, all in the one place. This makes it super easy to collaborate with clients and schedule content, all with just a few clicks!
6. Measuring Success
Social media reporting might not seem that important to a business owner who is unfamiliar with social, but to experienced social media specialists, it matters a lot!
Not only will reporting prove that what you’re doing is actually working, but it will also help you define how and when to tweak your strategy.
Ask the client:
- How do you intend to measure your social media return on investment (ROI), or how have you done so in the past?
- What reporting requirements do you have? Do you have reporting obligations for upper management, shareholders, or other stakeholders?
- Which metrics are important for you to report on and why?
- Do you have Google Analytics and Meta Business Suite set up? Are tracking pixels set up on your website?
- What social media reporting tools do you currently use/have you used in the past?
Depending on your new client’s requirements, reporting doesn’t have to be an arduous task that takes up hours out of every month. Sked Social has advanced reporting analytics.
Our advanced tool offers a simple reporting format, allowing you to create, view, and export reporting data as often as you like. Get competitor insights, discover the best time to post, and view insights for each post, all in the one place.
7. Setting Expectations
Finally, set your client’s expectations from the beginning! Setting expectations is a key step toward building a good client relationship. It minimizes any mistakes and means that nothing slips through the cracks.
It also means you won’t need to have any awkward conversations or ask the client to increase their budget. Unfortunately, some clients have misguided expectations of how much things should cost or how quickly agencies can set things up for them, especially if they’re totally new to social media marketing.
Ask your client:
- How do you normally work with agencies? How do you prefer to communicate? Some clients use Slack or Microsoft Teams, for instance, whereas others use email.
- What processes do you prefer? For instance, weekly meetings or monthly? Zoomor in-person meetings? How do you like to collaborate?
- What is your feedback process? How many rounds of changes do you normally go through?
- What (in your eyes) is a best-in-class brand on social media?
- How involved would you like to be in the social media process? Or would you prefer an end-to-end social media management solution?
- Do you currently have a community manager? How do you deal with negative comments on social media? Do you have a social media escalation process?
- What tools do you use for project management?
- What are your expectations of quality content? Are you happy to use less polished content, say, on Instagram Stories?
- Would you like to be informed about new social media trends and features?
The Importance of Communication
Your client can have the best social media presence around, but if they can’t communicate with you or won’t take your advice, you’ll never be able to help them in a meaningful way. Asking the right social media marketing interview questions will establish your professionalism and will always ensure that you are aligned with the client’s vision. Communication is key with new clients.
At the same time, your clients need to be able to take a healthy dose of constructive criticism. Of course, you always need to be as tactful as possible, but you want to ensure that any new clients are open to hearing your opinion.
Then, with time, as you establish your relationship, your client will begin to trust you more and more. This means that they will (hopefully!) be more open to trying new tactics and broadening their social media strategy.
Ready to Onboard Your Latest Client?
Before you take on multiple new clients, make sure you’ve got the right tools for the job. How can you schedule posts for multiple clients all at once? Managing social media marketing plans for multiple clients at once and trying to keep on top of content curation, scheduling and reporting can be stressful, to say the least!
We get it. To keep on top of all that social media content, you need to have a high-performance social media scheduling tool like Sked Social. Our social media scheduler allows you to automatically schedule social media posts for Instagram, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, TikTok, Facebook page, and plenty of other social networks, saving you hours each week! It even lets you add location tags, hashtags, and shopping tags on Instagram.