5 Easy Ways to Improve Collaboration Between Agencies and Their Clients

There are obstacles every team has to overcome to be successful in what they do. In case you’re an agency owner, a freelancer, or a marketer that wants to know how to prevent difficulties that can arise, look no further.

Let’s see what are the steps needed to improve the collaboration between agencies and their clients.

1. Store Your Files Together

Social media content plans can get lost in the numerous Excel sheets over time. Even worse, exchanging them from one team member to another would almost certainly modify the intended concept. On top of that, sending the wrong version of the plan to the client not only looks unprofessional but takes time to amend.

Make your life and your team’s life simpler by having your files together in one place. Especially when we’re talking about content plans, where the entire team’s contribution is important. Each member can share their ideas and post suggestions, as well as upload the images for each content piece. To make it more dynamic, enable the option of making updates in real time.

Whether you’re storing the content for later use, waiting for the editor to do their job, or simply want to have it all neatly put together for a client, have the files organized. It will save you from the stress of having to find a certain piece of the 1000-piece puzzle in the least amount of time. What’s more, file exchange between 10 members will become a lot less nerve-racking.

Read on to find the solution to the lost content issue.

2. Communicate More Effectively

Messaging apps and mailboxes are impossible to follow if your team members need to know about the content pieces assigned to them. Each employee should easily communicate the current progress and the next stages in the process. Social media content is particularly sensitive to the possible changes, so it’s crucial to spread the information among the people assigned to a particular task.

If each member can’t have access to their part of the instructions, it wastes everyone’s time and keeps others from moving forward with the task and completing it according to schedule.

As impossible as it sounds, we can combine in-team and client communication, as well as the files in one location. Why? Because the team members could be notified of the changes in the project (that the clients won’t see), while the clients won’t need to search for the files in multiple places.

The instant messaging apps such as Slack or Skype can simplify the communication, but having to go through the files in those programs is like squeezing water from a stone. Moreover, finding exact messages is always a tedious task for any team member. Plus, the message might’ve been deleted after a while and your quest turns out to be useless.

You could use email for general communication – scheduling meetings or sending out an important notice. However, sending out content plans. Imagine trying to find the graphic from your designer from a month ago to pair it with a certain piece.

3. Create a Smooth Task Workflow

We already mentioned Excel sheets as poor mediums for content plans. The main reason is the difficulty to visualize the plan. Placing the content into a calendar will show the exact due date. If you add the post previews, you’ll have the complete picture of how the result should look like.

The changes to the content must appear in real time. Team members should then be able to see the latest version of the piece.

Another considerable advice is to tell the team to add multiple resources to posts and save the adjustments. An approval process needs to be made for a faster revision and to eliminate instant messaging for changes in the files.

If it sounds too complicated, do not despair! Creating an organized posts list, overview and schedule should be the least of your worries but we’ll get back to that later.

For an efficient content plan to work out, you’ll need to add tags to future posts, notably when you need a precise outline of the content balance. If the majority of the posts is a hard sell, you can change the content for social media accordingly.

A smooth task workflow means that each team member will see the tasks, as well as including additional resources like images, GIFs or videos to the content. Furthermore, the option of writing comments and notes in real time becomes quite useful while your client needs a high-quality piece. Before sending it to the client, make sure to seek internal approval.

4. Set Up a Seamless Client Approval Process

Clients more often than not rearrange your pieces as they seem fit. It can be frustrating for the whole team, specifically when they decide to change the schedule out of the blue.

Let them have a little less room for modification. The only thing to ask them is to give you a creative input or a few short guidelines. Their last words will be the reviews and the approvals or disapprovals of the pieces. Only then can your team deliver engaging and useful content for social media.

The clients, on the other hand, should see each change to the post preview before the review, be it on mobile or desktop devices. Enable them to write comments or images so the team could know instantly what to adjust. Again, eliminate emails in the approval process. Otherwise, the client will have issues finding what they need.

Additionally, watch out for the timeframe and the feedback type to improve the post on time and make the approval process fluid.

5. Keep All Versions of Each Work Together

Before a post is ready to be published, there might be a couple of revisions of the same piece. All of the versions should be kept in one place. The first version might come in handy when there’s something missing in the last one and vice versa. After all, that’s how the greatest works of art come into existence.

Naturally, it’s problematic to know what was said in every version but if you keep the posts in a shared platform, more people will remember what was crucial in each one. Also, the client’s feedback (notes or comments) in sequential order will let the team know which reworks are the top priority.

The Tools that Make Your Collaboration Immaculate

If you think the steps we mentioned are impossible to do, here are a few solutions that improve the collaboration between agencies and their clients. Let’s check out some of them.

For those who hate keeping their files scattered through emails, Asana could be a great help. The work management platform will manage your team’s daily and monthly tasks and let you stay on track with the deadlines.

If your team consists of designers, InVision might be the tool for you. The platform offers a simple project design workflow where every team member can contribute with their resources.

For keeping your files in one place, we suggest using Google Drive, file storage, and sharing, software. No more worrying about lost content pieces or images!

Lastly, here’s the all-in-one solution to all of the five steps we went through. Kontentino, a content creation, and planning platform helps you solve the challenges between the people in your team and the clients. With its creation and scheduling features, and the Kontentino app option, the software will tackle any possible collaboration issue that prevents your agency from achieving its goals.

It is always great to have a wonderful partner by your side, who will give you a hand with meeting a perfect agency/client you are looking for.

Author: Lea Kuscer