7 Tips For Digital Marketing Account Managers

What is a Digital Marketing Account Manager’s role? Their key roles include planning campaigns, analysing metrics, and identifying trends in the different clients’ industries in order to boost their client’s web presence and meet their client’s digital marketing goals. They are also in charge of cultivating and maintaining relationships with both current and potential clients. Not to forget, acting as the main point of contact between key clients and internal teams and also managing the account teams that were assigned to each client.

It can be a lot if you have just started out the role of being a Digital Marketing Account Manager. But here are 7 tips to help you succeed in this industry and deliver your team and clients the best service possible.

Tip #1 – TRUST

The core of all relationships begins with trust. As a digital marketing account manager or maybe as an owner of an agency, this trust will help you get through difficult times. For instance, if there is a problem, your ability to resolve the issue and maintain the client relationship depends entirely on their trust in you. Your working relationships will last longer if your clients trust you, and you might even earn some referrals from them. Not to mention, you will also have the freedom to market more creatively and venture outside of your client’s comfort zones. Great work is fueled by great relationships. And trust is the foundation of a strong relationship.

The key to managing an enjoyable yet successful social media account is trust. So, spend some time and effort today developing trust with your clients. How do you build trust? You must have a common purpose with your client and also build on your own competence. Talk to your clients and understand what their goals are and align yourself with them.

Tip #2 – LIVING & BREATHING THE CLIENT’S BRAND

It’s crucial to dive deep and learn about the heart of your client’s business or brand. Find out all you can about their business, including what motivated them to start it, the brand’s mission and core values, culture and history, and many other things. You must become familiar with their language. Know as much as they do or even more about their industry, their competitors, the projections, risks, challenges, and business opportunities. 

Be an expert. Desk research will prepare you for success in a lot of ways. You will want to proactively show the client you possess more competency and willingness than any of your competitors, making you the best person for them to go to and solve their problem or promote their brand even further. Therefore, set aside additional time to do research about your new clients, or even existing clients. Be updated with their goals and align yourself with them. This will help boost your clients’ assurance and trust in you as their digital marketing account manager.

Tip #3 – STAND BY WHAT YOU SAY WITH DATA

Be it proposing strategies or concepts to your different clients, do your due diligence on the data, insights, research, examples, facts or theories to support your recommendations. You have to let your clients know the rationale behind the proposed strategies or concepts or you run the danger of losing their confidence in your capabilities and jeopardising your credibility.

Set aside time to create presentation slides on which you may summarise all of your research and your desired outcomes. It is important for you to put yourself in your client’s position. They would be interested in knowing if their account manager’s recommendations have any merit. A great way to create good and concise presentation slides would be a Pecha Kucha.

Nobody likes to sit through wordy and lengthy slides. The rule for a Pecha Kucha presentation is simple: the overall presentation duration must be six minutes and forty seconds, with exactly 20 slides that are shown for exactly 20 seconds each. With this, you can better manage your own time as well as your client’s.

Tip #4 – MONTHLY MEETINGS

Setup monthly face-to-face meetings if possible. Since our industry is built upon relationships, great work wins business – great relationships keep it. It is important for you to meet your clients in person as it offers a sense of human interaction, which can help develop trust and facilitate the growth of deeper connections.

Being seen and addressed makes you more familiar, and they will be able to feel more at ease around you. It can be reasons like, campaign debriefs or the start of every month’s content planning. By meeting them, you can easily pick up cues from body posture, hand gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice, all of which you will never be able to pick up from an email or even a virtual meeting.

Tip #5 – PROVIDING OPTIONS

Always present your clients with more than one option when proposing to them. To avoid confusion, have more than one option but no more than five. In general, three options are the ideal number to bring to the table. It is sufficient to give the client a meaningful choice of options, yet small enough to drive your agency to present only the absolute best ideas.

Before presenting to the client, always agree among yourselves what the consensus option is. Choose a speaker for the presentation, and they should be confident enough to bring the ideas across.

Tip #6 – COMMUNICATE INTERNALLY

In light of the point mentioned above, it is crucial to communicate with the internal team as well. Without discussing with your colleagues, a commitment made to the client disregards the collaborative nature of agencies. A successful digital marketing account should be able to interact both internally and externally.

Before making promises to a client, you must respect the people you work with and lean on them for their thoughts, views, recommendations, and advice. Unavoidably, there may be some differences with your team, and it is critical to first come to an understanding of their perspective before passing any judgement. You owe one another an honest opinion of each other’s work as colleagues in an agency – everyone is on the same team at the end of the day.

An account’s primary goal should not be to establish that they are right, but rather to act in the team’s best interests in order to work together to make a client’s brand successful.

Tip #7 – ONCE A CLIENT, ALWAYS A CLIENT

That’s how we would like it to be, right? Even when a client moves their business or changes employment, continue fostering the relationship. By adopting this mindset, you will be able to establish enduring business connections that serve as a reliable source for referrals, testimonials, and perhaps even new business opportunities. 

In conclusion, with time, comes experience, and with failure, comes success. It is okay to make mistakes as long as you know how to learn from them and improve on them so that the same mistake will not be made again. So use these tips to provide the best work and client service and success will come sooner rather than later.