Creating solid and productive client relationships is a foundation of CPL’s content marketing, says senior content strategist Martin Bewick
In a galaxy far, far away there is a world where the customer is always right.
It’s a world founded on a basic transactional model. In simple terms, what the customer wants, they get. If they desire something, a business provides it, and both are satisfied. Easy.
Of course, in the real world – and on Planet Content Marketing – things are more complex.
For starters, with content marketing you need to know who is the real customer. Is it the client who hired you to create fresh communications, publications and campaigns? Or is it their own customers – the people who buy their products and services, or the members of their organisations?
To succeed on Planet Content Marketing, one of the missions must be to connect these two types of customers, helping them to engage, interact and communicate with each other in mutually beneficial ways.
To achieve that requires a content marketing agency to understand the needs of both of these audiences, as well as how to communicate successfully with each of them in turn.
That could be viewed as something of a balancing act, so let’s take a step back.
To demonstrate any creative expertise in engaging paying customers (whether that’s consumers or an organisation’s membership base) you must first gain permission to do so. That means winning your client’s (or potential client’s) trust. Logically, then, your client always remains your priority customer.
Yes, you may have built a reputation for producing insightful and agenda-setting magazines and long-form editorial content, on-point digital solutions, or award-winning marketing campaigns. But if you don’t first sit down and listen to your client’s particular needs and respond to each of them as a bespoke project, then your moonshot of creative ideas is unlikely to reach the launch pad.
That’s why, at CPL, the mantra that ‘there is no one-size-fits-all solution’ truly underpins how we work. It means that we always seek to recognise and respect each individual client’s expertise, experience and understanding, as well as their ambitions and requirements of the particular challenges they face, before we apply our creative minds to formulating our strategic response.
The client-customer always comes first. But does this mean our client-customers are always right? Well, let’s not see that as needing a yes or no answer. And let’s also be bold enough to say that a client-customer often knows exactly what they want, but not always, and not always completely, and not always with full conviction. That’s only natural, and if they always knew exactly what they wanted, the wider knowledge and experience of content marketing agencies such as CPL would be of much less value.
In reality, a client-customer is sometimes unsure of which content solution will work best, or how to develop or implement it, or how best to move it forward, or simply be all out of fresh ideas. Sometimes they simply haven’t the in-house resources to do the job, or don’t quite know where their marketing or comms budget would be best allocated.
None of that is about being right or wrong, but it often means they might appreciate a trusted partner to see something they might have missed, and help them make a crucial step forward. And that’s where CPL comes in to listen, learn, and then deliver against their mission in a solid and productive partnership.
On Planet Content Marketing, the client always comes first.
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