Your latest pitch was a huge success, and you’ve landed a new client as a result.
After a quick celebration, you start to wonder what’s next. There’s so much information about “getting the client”, but not much about what needs to happen once you’ve sealed the deal.
- What are the next steps?
- How do you actually start working together?
- How do you keep the momentum going?
This blog will cover the seven key steps of a new client onboarding checklist and help you start your workflow.
- [FREE] Client onboarding checklist
- Sort out legal and contractual bits
- Secure any financial processes
- Highlight any important project management information
- Consider your workflow and project process
- Set up an initial kick-off call
- Send a client welcome packet
- How can Sendible help you onboard your new clients
If you're after a complete guide on onboarding new social media clients, check out our video with Agency Owner, Desiree Martinez below! She will take you through setting expectations, contracts and service charges, her take on the client questionnaire, all sorts of other admin and more!
Step 1: [FREE] Client onboarding checklist
The first step includes a list of 42 questions to consider for your social media questionnaire.
This is a long list of questions - do you need to include them all? Not at all.
Feel free to ask as many or as few of these questions as you need to get a clear picture of your client's business needs before you start working with them.
Whether that means you ask five questions, 10, or even all 42, you'll discover over time that the answers to some questions are more valuable to you. You can always tweak your questionnaire to suit your needs and your individual clients:
- Getting to the heart of your client’s purpose
- Who is their audience and where are they?
- What is your brand all about?
- What type of content fills your calendar?
- What social profiles are you maintaining?
- Getting into the tech and analysis
- What are your expectations?
1. Getting to the heart of your client’s purpose
When you're running a social media marketing agency, client retention is key. That means keeping them happy by showing results. To achieve this balance, you have to understand what your client hopes to achieve on social media - it's essential for crafting a strategy that works for them.
At the beginning stage of your relationship, these questions are designed to tease out their ideas about social media and how it fits into the overall marketing strategy for their business.
Try using these questions to delve into your client’s motivation and purpose:
1. What is your purpose on social media?
2. What is your brand’s objective?
3. What do you hope to achieve using social media? How will you know you’ve achieved it?
4. What’s the biggest barrier to your success on social media?
5. How does social media fit into your growth plan?
The answers your client gives you will tell you how highly they value social media in their marketing plan and will also help you determine what results your client is looking for.
2. Who is their audience, and where are they?
It’s said that whoever talks the audience’s language the best, wins. And to do that, you need to know them well.
Your client should be able to answer these questions about their target audience, which will help you decide how best to use social media content to target them:
6. Describe your target audience. Who are they?
7. What social platforms do they use?
8. What issues matter to them?
9. How does your brand engage them?
10. What social listening have you done? What does your audience say about you?
11. Who else (brands/celebrities/people) does your audience engage with?
The answers to these questions will tell you two things:
- How well your client knows their target audience.
- Who their target audience is.
When you have the answers, you’ll be able to prepare content for campaigns that will resonate with your client’s target audience. Make sure to regularly refresh yourself on this information as part of a social media health check to stay on target to reach your goals. And in the meantime, feel free to use our audit checklists:
- Instagram Audit Checklist
- LinkedIn Audit Checklist
- Facebook Audit Checklist
- X (Twitter) Audit Checklist
3. What is your brand all about?
One of the greatest challenges of taking on a new social media client is stepping into their brand and using their voice. The more your client is able to tell you about their brand, the easier it will be to create content that is true to their brand voice and resonates with their audience.
Here are some great questions to ask to learn more about your client’s brand:
12. Describe your brand voice.
13. What tone should social media updates have?
14. What is the main message your brand is trying to communicate?
15. What makes your brand different from others?
16. Why do people choose you over your competitors?
17. What’s your brand vision?
The answers to these questions will guide the type of content you’ll create and the tone you’ll use in response to audience engagement, user-generated content (UGC), and feedback or complaints.
When talking about this with your clients, make sure to underline the importance of creating a community. Outlining a community management strategy that revolves around using a friendly approach, being there for the customers, and creating a safe place to discuss (and promote) the brand's offer has become an essential social media tactic.
4. What type of content fills your calendar?
Social media is all about content. Finding out what content your client has used in the past, how they’ve used it, and the resources they’ve allocated to it will help you leverage what’s working and identify new opportunities to test in your campaigns.
Ask these questions in your social media client questionnaire to make sure you’ve got all the content information you need:
18. What resources do you have available for content creation?
19. What is your workflow process for content from inception to publication?
20. What sign-offs do you require?
21. How often do you want to publish new content to your profiles?
22. How does social media tie in with your offline campaigns?
23. What type of content does your audience respond to best (if known)?
24. What type of content do you want to create for your audience (images, video, quotes, blog posts, etc.)?
25. What message are you trying to send with your content?
26. How do you use user-generated content in your campaigns?
27. What holidays does your client want to observe?
>>Pro tip>> Celebrating social media holidays on your client's social media channels can be a great way to increase their brand awareness and reach. Consider taking advantage of highly relevant ‘World Days’, for example, if your client sells hotdogs, World Hot Dog Day is in July, and it’d be remiss not to mark the occasion!
If you don’t already have a calendar that you can refer to, our comprehensive social media holiday calendar is a great place to start. It comes in the form of a handy website page that's easy to use and share.
Alternatively, you can access this content directly in Sendible's calendar!
The answers you get to these questions will help you determine the resources you have available to work with on your client’s content and opportunities for growth. It will also help you add the right type of content to your strategy, so that it’s aligned both with your client’s brand and the latest social media trends.
And in today's culture - posting high-quality content tailored to the audience's needs is a must.
The Top Social Media Trends That You Need To Pay Attention To
You see, social media platforms are oversaturated with all sorts of content, and the number of competitors gets bigger every day. Users' attention span is decreasing, and according to recent studies, their needs have become quite specific. They value authenticity, personal touch, deeper connections, and above all - content that solves their problems.
Wondering how often should you post on social media? As Jay Bayer said: The best social media publishing frequency is: when it's worthwhile. But we went a bit further down this rabbit hole.
5. What social profiles are you maintaining?
To craft your client’s strategy, you need to know what social media channels they intend to maintain. Find out from them which profiles they currently have, which they want to add, and if they want to stop producing content for any platform.
Add these questions to your questionnaire:
28. What profiles do you have and on which networks?
29. Are you looking to expand onto new networks?
30. Are you looking to narrow your focus to fewer networks?
31. Do you want to provide customer service on social media? If so, on which platform and from which profile?
Not only will these answers tell you where you need to focus your efforts, but they'll also help you uncover new growth opportunities. Are they using TikTok or Instagram Reels? If not, this would be a great way to introduce their potential and existing customers to what's happening behind the scenes. These channels are a great way to create long-lasting, personal bonds with followers and those who are yet to discover the brand.
6. Getting into the tech and analysis
Unless your client is new to social media marketing, chances are they’ll have used tools to help them and should have some data on their campaigns' effectiveness.
You’ll want to find out what tools they’ve been using, how they’ve measured ROI, what they’ve tried in the past, and what is and isn’t working for them.
Learning about their sales funnel and buyer’s journey is also helpful in seeing where social media marketing fits into their overall marketing strategy and sales process.
These questions will help you get the answers you need:
32. What tools have you used to manage your social media profiles until now?
33. How do you intend to measure return on investment?
34. What is working for you (and not working) right now?
35. How does social media fit into your sales funnel or buyer’s journey?
36. What have you tried in the past?
37. Have you got any tracking pixels installed on your site?
Assessing data from previous campaigns will be invaluable to your efforts, as you’ll be able to use past campaigns as a guide that will help you form ideas to improve results in future and set measurable goals for social media campaigns. Furthermore, these valuable insights will help you manage expectations and make data-driven decisions. This brings us to the next point.
7. What are your expectations?
Want to know the easiest way to find out what your client wants? Ask them!
We’ve all had demanding clients who don’t follow the unspoken rules of engagement… But could that relationship have been completely different with a simple discussion of expectations at the beginning?
Here are some questions that will help you open up communication with your client about their expectations:
38. What do you expect from us as your account manager?
39. What reports do you want to see and how often?
40. Who is the person we should contact?
41. How much oversight and control do you want to have?
42. How much input do you want to have into campaigns?
A large part of managing client satisfaction comes from managing client expectations. Finding out what your clients expect from you helps you ensure that you’re delivering what your clients actually want.
If your client has expectations that are beyond what you’d consider reasonable, knowing that from the beginning enables you to discuss them and agree on the service you provide.
[Agency Guide] 5 Proven Tactics to Effectively Deal with Difficult Clients
Step 2: Legal and contractual
Let’s get the boring but necessary stuff out of the way first.
This part of the client onboarding process happens right at the start and is basically the formal agreement between you and the client.
During this stage, you should consider:
- Sending a signed contract
- Sending and signing any necessary NDAs
- Collecting and gathering any relevant tax information
- Sending and signing contractor agreements
This is another great example of when a client onboarding checklist template would be useful.
Your template could include a basic legal contract or NDA that you can use as your template for this step.
Step 3: Secure any financial processes
Ironing out the financial aspects of a project before it gets started reduces the risk of miscommunication, scope creep, and overspending.
You and the client must be on the same page regarding costs and invoicing processes.
This helps create a healthy client relationship in the long run and is part of any good client onboarding process.
Source: @ashleyrcummings
Here are some of the things you can include at this stage of the onboarding process:
- What to include on invoices: including PO numbers, client addresses, and any mandatory tax information
- How your invoicing process works: when will you send invoices? How long does the client have to pay? What is your preferred payment method? What accounting software should your client be comfortable using?
- Costs: is it a one-off cost or will you be working on a monthly retainer?
- Extra costs: what’s the fee for any extra work? What happens if there is scope creep and you need to charge more? How will you work that out and invoice for it?
- Send the first invoice: kick the payment process off by sending your first invoice (this usually seals the deal with the client, too)
Step 4: Highlight any important project management information
Setting up a new client in your project timeline is crucial for making sure you hit all the required deadlines and stay on track.
What you include at this stage of the onboarding process will be determined by your pre-existing project management process, but it should include tasks like:
- Adding the client to your CRM or any tools you use: add their contact details and any important information to accounting tools, communication tools, and planning tools.
- Assigning team members to the account: choose who you want to work on the project and add them to the necessary project planning tools (and check their schedules!). Make sure you are using a tool that allows you to assign tasks to different team members easily.
- Creating accounts for tools: set your new client up on any joint tools you use.
- Sharing file information: let the new client know how you’ll be sharing files and add them to the folder if necessary.
- Assigning initial tasks: kick the project off by assigning the first few tasks to your chosen team members.
Step 5: Consider your workflow and project process
Now everything is set up and ready to go, you can start thinking about what working with this client will look like in the long run.
There’s often a lot of chat at the beginning while you iron things out, but how will you continue to communicate, and what will the project look like in action?
These points are key to client retention.
At this point, think about sharing information like:
- Approval processes: how will clients share their feedback? How often will you need to get client approval and how will you manage that?
- Communication: what will be your communication channels? What about if there’s an emergency?
- Timelines: when will the project end? What will be the key milestones in between and what tasks do you need to do at each milestone?
- Chosen accounts: what social media accounts will you be posting on for your client? Do you have access to them and understand the branding guidelines?
Step 6: Set up an initial kick-off call
You will have already spoken to the client in detail about their wants and needs, but this is the time in the client onboarding process to talk about how things will look moving forward.
Use this call to briefly discuss the different parts of your onboarding process and field any questions they might have before you officially get started.
Consider including these in your kick-off call:
- Tech check: make sure everyone understands what tools you’ll be using and is comfortable with them. Provide demos if necessary and answer any questions the client might have
- Introductions: give everyone on your team the chance to say hi and introduce themselves, before asking your new client to share a bit more information about them
- Project review: go over the project and discuss the end goal you’d all like to achieve.
Ask the client what this might look like for them in reality and walk them through the steps you’re going to take to get them there - What’s next: talk about the first couple of milestones and the tasks you’ll be doing to make sure everyone is on the same page about what happens next
- Question time: your client will probably have a question or two for you, so give them a dedicated space to ask
Step 7: Send a client welcome packet
A welcome packet can neatly contain all of the information you’ve gathered from the onboarding questionnaire and the other steps in this process.
This document includes all the relevant information a client needs to know in one handy place.
It also provides a reference for you and your team to reflect on the client’s expectations and any logistics you’ve agreed on during the onboarding process.
Feel free to mix up the medium here: 69% of people say that they feel more video should be used in the onboarding process.
You should include information like:
- Team details: information about which team members the client will be working with, including their contact information and role
- Summary of project and goals: a quick overview of the project and the key goals you’ll be working towards (this will have been discussed in both the onboarding questionnaire and the kick-off call)
- Summary of your services: a breakdown of the services you’ll be providing and what they include
- Project timeline: the length of the project, as well as key milestones and what needs to be completed at each of those milestones
- Log-in information: a list of the tools you’ll be using and any login information that clients might need
- Expectations of the client: when clients need to provide feedback, what information they need to provide, and any timelines for information they need to get to you
- Financial information: recap your invoicing process, costs, and your preferred payment method
How can Sendible help you onboard new clients?
Sendible has a plethora of features that will make you fall in love with social media management again.
And not just you, but your clients, too!
So let's dive into a select few that we think you'll love:
Onboard your clients securely with Client Connect
Client Connect helps you build trust from the start. This handy feature allows your new clients to share social media credentials without making you an admin by adding their social media profiles to your Sendible dashboard for added security.
Permission management via Content Library
Empower your clients or junior team members with access to your social media content creation. No need to worry about mishaps—introduce them to Content Library roles.
Create access tiers for users
Not every user needs to access all functionality. With our custom user permission groups, you can decide who gets access to what. For example, you might want to charge your clients more if they want to add more profiles or build custom reports.
Send approval requests in bulk
Save your and your client's valuable time by sending the approval requests in bulk. While Sendible allows you to assign tasks and send individual approval requests, our Bulk Importer enables you to send them an entire campaign or month's worth of content for approval at once.
Care to learn more about our agency-specific solutions, such as Share Button, Automated Reports, Campaign Management, and more? Then schedule a consultation with one of our experts or test Sendible for free for 14 days!
