How to Educate Clients on What Matters Most In Local Marketing

Updated: 7/9/2019 with a variety of client pain points, digital marketing agency service offerings, and more!

Is there a way to automatically focus your client's attention on the details that matter most in local search marketing? Where should their attention be focused? More importantly, how do you focus their attention?

Where do you start?

Should you focus your client's attention on local business listings, reviews, or leads? What about content, social media, and call tracking - how much attention do they dedicate there?

It's a tough question to answer.

When you can answer these difficult questions for your clients, you'll start to see a general uplift in client retention.

Experts recommend a variety of different tactics.

"Focus on your local listings. No, no, no, you should be investing in Facebook Ads. If you're focused on content marketing and SEO, you'll have lots of free traffic."

The suggestions from the experts are typically very broad, incredibly vague, and focused on the wrong things. In fact, 9 times out of 10, the advice from these "experts" misses the mark. This leads to a tangent of unfocused ideas that suck up a client's time and budget, but fails to produce results.

Why?

Your clients are listening to the wrong people.

There's a problem here.

What is bad advice? Where does bad advice come from?

A better question would be to ask where great advice comes from. The answer is simple and obvious. It comes from your client and their customers. This is the key to customer retention.

Does this mean they're experts?

No.

It means your clients and their customers understand their pain points. Both of these groups have their own set of desires, goals, fears and frustrations. This is how you determine what matters most for your local marketing campaigns.

Does that work though?

Customers are often the least knowledgeable group you can draw data from. Why would asking them for advice work?

Your clients and their customers - they know what hurts. Speak to these pain points and you improve client retention rates automatically.

Your clients have pain points.

Their business has specific challenges that keep them from achieving the results they desperately need. Challenges your agency is uniquely equipped to handle.

See what I mean?

They don't have to be experts on local search marketing to understand their problems. They just need to know/understand (a.) their pain points and (b.) that you have a solution to solve those pain points. This means you have an understanding of three types of pain points.

1. Pre-client pain points

2. Active client pain points

3. Post client pain points

Let's take a closer look at these.

The agency/client relationship is just beginning. It's typically motivated by fear and frustration. A client comes to your agency in a panic. They're afraid and/or frustrated with the results (or lack thereof) of their campaign.

At this point in the relationship, it's likely that clients haven't connected these problems to their reviews. Most clients do their best to fix the problem, but it's really more of the same. When they arrive at your agency it's because...

If your client has already made the connection between their pain points and their online review portfolio, your work gets easier. You'll be able to jump right in and get to work.

Clients have finally signed on the dotted line. It's now time to get to work. It's common for active clients in this stage to experience anxiety and loss. They're in the process of adjusting their desires, goals and expectations or they're dealing with fear, anxiety, and loss.

How agencies handle these pre-client and active client pain points determine whether they'll retain clients in the long term. If these expectations are managed well, clients are far more likely to stay.

What if they're not?

What if agencies do their part but clients are unwilling to push through?

It's unavoidable.

Your clients will, at some point in the future, leave you. These pain points aren't necessarily about a failure on your part. Sometimes it's simply about the inability to justify or quantify the results you've already achieved.

Here's the real problem.

Managing expectations. Clients arrive with fuzzy, implicit, and unrealistic expectations. As we've seen, they have specific pre-client problems that demand attention.

If you're an agency, it's important that you run the show.

Here's why.

Clients typically don't tell you about their fuzzy, implicit, and unrealistic expectations. They simply assume you already know about them. If you want to keep your clients, you'll need to flush these expectations out ahead of time.

These expectations create a significant amount of fallout. Want to avoid that with future clients?

Find them.

Identify the expectations you're dealing with specifically. They come from one of four places (1.) word-of-mouth (2.) past experiences (3.) marketing content and (4.) personal desires/needs.

Who are they?

This is the most important step in the process. Why? Your local search marketing is based on the desires, goals, fears and frustrations of your client's ideal customers. These are the customers who are both willing and able to buy.

This isn't everyone with money.

These are the people your clients want to retain as long term customers. These customers display the right behavior set and outcome markers. Your job as an agency or consultant is to learn everything you can about their customers. Then, once you have this data, work it into your campaigns.

This means you know...

1. Their customer's pain points (e.g. desires, goals, fears and frustrations).

2. Their demographics and psychographics.

3. Where to find customers who match the demographics and psychographics above.

4. You know what they read or watch, the brands they buy/follow, etc.

5. Their fears - in the form of risks, frustrations, problems, and objections.

6. What they want to see in reviews, testimonials and social proof.

7. Their buying process - their goals, what they want, what they look for, where they go to find answers, etc.

8. The authority figures they trust, follow or listen to.

9. The specific ways you need to present your product or service to attract and retain customers.

Are these details that important?

Absolutely.

The success of your marketing campaigns depends on this first step. Get it wrong and your marketing campaigns fail to perform. If your agency works with small businesses (and medium-sized businesses) understand that they may not don't have this data.

Many don't.

Most of the time, your clients believe they already know the answers to these questions. A few of your clients are able to rattle off comprehensive details about their customers.

But, are they right?

Most of the time no. Their data falls apart under close scrutiny. It's common for your clients to rely exclusively on customer personas which are themselves based on a combination of assumptions, imaginary or non-existent data.

How do we know?

Research from CB Insights found that most small businesses failed due to "the lack of a market need for their product." This is the number one reason, cited by 42% of the startups in their study, for business failure.

That's sobering and all, but I thought this was about local marketing. How does this apply to local businesses?

Local businesses are in the same boat. Most of your clients don't have a deep understanding of their customers. They don't know what their customers want, so they're likely to get everything else - market need for their product, pricing and even marketing - wrong.

What does this mean?

It means the answers they've rattled off about their customer's desires, goals, fears and frustrations aren't in-line with what customers actually want. A quick look at their customer retention rates, average order values and repeat sales will all but confirm this.

How do you get this data from your client's customers?

It's simple, you ask.

In an interview with Business Week, Steve Jobs made this statement.

"Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'"

People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."

Here's the problem.

This statement is often misunderstood. Many people assumed this meant Jobs simply read the tea leaves and came up with a miraculous solution.

That's not what this means.

Here's what it means. You ask your client's customers about their desires, goals, fears and frustrations. But you rely on your experience and your client's experience, to create and implement a solution that solves their customer pain points.

See the difference?

When you learn more about your client's customers you have the data you need to:

Here's the tl;dr version.

Learn everything you can about your client's customers. Feed it back to them via your local search, review management, search and display marketing campaigns. Continue feeding it back to them and you'll increase retention rates.

It's fairly straightforward, right?

Sure, you know you're telling the truth, but they don't know that. You could be the helpful agency that's looking out for them or the greedy agency trying to pad your pockets.

The truth is that they need to listen to you.

The information you get from listening to their customers, that's the data they need to determine (with a reasonable degree of certainty) what matters most, in local marketing, for them. It's also how you improve customer retention rates which, if you haven't noticed, is how you retain your clients.

The vast majority of local marketing priorities can be broken down by:

1. Process, e.g. the research, analysis, development and promotion phases of a campaign. Each phase of the campaign gives you a clear indication of the resources and platforms you'll need to focus your attention on.

2. Purpose refers to the specific goals of a client's campaign.

Process is, for the most part, fairly straightforward. It's the systems and procedures you use in your agency to get the job done.

What about purpose?

Purpose is a bit more complicated. With local marketing, you may be focused on more than one goal (e.g. customer feedback, driving traffic, generating leads, etc.). It's important to focus your attention on the strategies and tactics that matter most.

Did you notice a theme?

There's a lot of overlap with these strategies and tactics. Reviews, for example, can be used to attract customer attention, convert customers on the fence, defuse objections and more.

Build this into your services.

If you're a digital (or full service) agency you'll want to show clients how each of your services impacts their bottom line. Let's look at a few services to get an idea of the financial impact.

Many, many agencies get this wrong. They treat website design/development as an art project. They bill clients a large amount of money to create brochureware which, as it turns out, is exactly what inexperienced clients want.

Because they don't know any better.

See your client's website, landing pages, micro sites and content for what they are. A chance to optimize customer thought sequences. If you've done the work above, you're fully aware of the things your client's customers think about and when.

Web design/development that's optimized around customer thought sequences...

While most agencies push for large redesign projects, slow and steady conversion rate optimization is where the true value lies. With a CRO driven approach agencies are able to (a.) produce immediate value for clients (b.) provide consistent monthly income/revenue for themselves.

The same drivers that impact web design/development are at play here. Inexperienced agencies struggle to produce the response rates they need. Segmentation is key to email marketing success.

Focused email marketing campaigns that are segmented and optimized in a systematic fashion perform best.

Follow these strategies to produce above average clicks, opens, and conversions for your agency clients. Work to provide their customers with value by following these simple guidelines. You can use your client's website + email marketing to 2x, 4x or 10x their revenue, on-demand.

Your clients have a lot on their plate. They're typically not as focused on their listings as they should be. This means their listings are far more likely to be inaccurate, outdated or conflicting.

Which produces revenue leakage.

For this service, you'll want to...

Focusing on these money drivers enables agencies to...

Research shows reviews can increase conversion rates by a whopping 270%! Here's the problem. The vast majority of small to medium-sized businesses have a poor or top-heavy review portfolio. No reviews, a few reviews, or lots of reviews on a few platforms.

What does this mean?

The vast majority of small to medium-sized businesses need review management for a variety of reasons.

With review management, your clients are able to compensate for weak offers, poor pricing, and other client deficiencies. Clients are stating, via reviews, that you're worth it. Review management buys you time, provides a strong marketing lift, and produces revenue.

A strong review portfolio also provides you with the protection you need to defend yourself against fake review attacks from competitors, trolls, and predatory customers.

Content marketing forms the basis of your marketing efforts. Samuel Scott states it best when he says, "All marketing is content marketing because all marketing uses content."

Which is precisely why I dislike the term "content marketing."

Content marketing is really just marketing. To quote Scott again...

"Marketing has always been the creation of a message, the insertion of that message into a piece of content and the transmission of that content over a channel to an audience in an effort to build brands, increase demand and move people down sales funnels."

What does this mean then?

It means "a rising tide lifts all boats." Your outstanding blog posts, advertising, video, search, display and publicity content impact the performance of your marketing across all channels. Creating laser focused, high-quality content in one channel boosts the performance of content in another channel.

This is why content is so powerful.

Here's why the bottom line impact matters so much. Your clients and their customers decide what's most important to them.

Your clients won't be able to get the results they're looking for unless they:

1. Understand their goals (e.g. lead gen, education, closing sales, etc.)

2. Understand their customers wants and needs (desires, goals, fears, frustrations, problems, objections, etc.)

Understanding is the key to a successful local marketing campaign. The more you and your clients know about their customers and their business, the easier it is to educate your clients on what truly matters in local marketing.

This is the secret to high client retention rates.

Your clients (a.) See that you care about their customers and their wants/needs. (b.) Your client's customers see that your client cares about their wants/needs. It's not so much a secret as it is an obvious truth.

Are your clients confused about local marketing? If so, it's a good indication that they're missing an important piece of the puzzle.

Most clients are confused.

They're not really sure where they should focus their attention. Your clients don't have to deal with confusion. With the right strategy and tactics, they'll know which parts of their local marketing campaign matters most.

Take the time to guide them.

Focus on your clients and their customers. Tie your education to their desires, goals, fears, frustrations and problems. Do this and you'll find your clients are fixated on the details that matter most in their local marketing campaigns.