If you run an agency, your life revolves around talking to potential clients and creating strong relationships with the current ones. To run a successful agency and have a strong base of clients, you need to focus on getting to know the clients first.
You need to know their hows and whys so you can create better products, sets of services, and user experience for them.
5 fundamental principles
that can help you truly understand your clients:
Research your client’s business.
If you want to build the best products for your client, you need to learn as much as you can about each client. Read as many relevant articles about your client’s business as possible. Understand your client’s industry and how they’ve positioned themselves.
Forums and social media are great platforms to conduct your research – they can help you understand the overall brand identity and sentiment.
Identify your client’s products and/or services.
Go through each page of your client’s website and spend as much time as needed talking to your client about their products/services. It’s critical that you understand the pain point or problem that your client’s products and/or services are trying to solve.
Research your client’s competition and customers.
Identifying your client’s top competitors and understanding how your client has positioned its company is key.
Remember that sometimes you will come across clients with a large advantage over their competition, sometimes you won’t – not all your clients will be industry leaders. That’s why you need to dig deeper and define your client’s UVP (unique value proposition), as well as their competitors’ UVPs.