How to Onboard Clients for Your SMMA / Social Media Marketing Agency
Alright everybody. Welcome back to the channel, and in this video we're talking about how to onboard clients for your smma. Hey everybody. David Schlais back here again with Two Guys build a Biz on YouTube, the best place on YouTube for anything related to starting, growing, or scaling your business online. Those topics are relevant to you, why not subscribe to the channel? And don't forget to hit bell notifications to be notified. The next time that we post a free piece of content, just like this one, we do have one request, and that is that if you find this video valuable, why not hit the like button? It really helps out the channel and it also helps your fellow agency owners discover pieces of valuable content just like this one.
That way they can get the same value out of it that you did. So in this video, we're gonna talk about one of the most important parts of running an agency, but one of. Overlooked parts of running an agency. Yep. We're talking about onboarding clients for your SMMA. The reality is that most people get so excited about closing a client that they don't focus on the most important part, which is the experience that that client has when they first start doing business with your agency. That is the definition of onboarding. Onboarding is taking a client from a signed contract and a signed deal into doing business and becoming a part of your client base. It's also the first impress. That your clients are gonna have with your agency and it can really make or break the engagement. If a client feels that they are just a number or they signed up for something and aren't really being shown the love, if you will, it can be a really disheartening experience.
Think about it, if you were to make a great big investment in something and, and as soon as you signed up for it, or as soon as you gave somebody your money, you felt like you were being neglected or. It's very easy to do with smma. If you're familiar with our course, the SMMA Blueprint, you've been watching the YouTube channel for a while, you know that we really put client service at the forefront of everything that we do to date. Most of our clients now come from referrals from past clients who had an amazing experience working with our agency, and that really begins with our onboarding experience. When somebody signs a contract with vtl, our agency, we wanna rally the energy around them and we want them to feel like they're becoming a part of our family.
So in this video, I wanna share a little bit of what we've learned from onboard. So many clients into our business and really what's made the difference when it comes to providing a great onboarding experience that makes them wanna stick around for the long haul. So let's go ahead and jump into my computer and we'll cover the basics of onboarding for your SMMA. All right, so let's run through the quick agenda of what I've got for you guys. So first of all, we're gonna review the importance of onboarding. Then we're gonna talk about the different steps, legal setting, expectations, taking payment access, and onboarding in as well as communication.
Every single one of these steps is important, and when execut. Can provide an amazing client experience that your clients get super excited about. So let's first discuss the importance of onboarding. Onboarding is the first impression that your clients are gonna have when doing business with your agency, and it's in your best interest to make sure that that is a good first impression. Most agency owners and most gurus on YouTube talk about. Sales. They talk about getting clients, they talk about closing clients that pay you the most per month.
But when you do the math, the most valuable client to your agency is the client that stays with you The longest I've seen so many agency owners turn out, because all they do is focus on closing clients at $10,000 per month or more, and they don't actually focus on keeping those clients around. And it all begins with onboarding. You can have a client that is gonna be your number one client who's amazingly excited about doing business with your agency, but if you fumble onboard, You don't make it seem like you know what you're doing or that you care about them.
They can be the first out the door. So onboarding really sets the expectation of what they can expect in the coming months of doing business with you. Think about this for a second. Major tech companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, even Loom Apple, all focus on onboarding. Think about when you buy a new Apple product and you unbox it. That's onboarding you into the Apple E. When you think about you starting up your Mac for the first time, if you are a Mac user and there's an interface that begins and it's fun, it's playful, it's inviting, and it walks you through setting up your computer or your new desktop that's onboarding and it's getting you excited about that large investment that you just made it in some new technology.
We wanna replicate that when it comes to our agency. We want our clients to feel like they're becoming a part of something, like they're buying into something and like they made the right choice. It's not. But most agency owners overlook it. So again, I can't stress enough the importance of onboarding and the importance of getting this right. So what does the process look like from start to finish? When it comes to our agency, our onboarding process begins as soon as the contract is signed. There's a whole automation sequence that kicks off, questionnaires that go out, emails and operations people that reach out to them in team members who begin doing the work. At this point, as our agency's grown to multi six figures per month, but in the beginning it was very, As soon as the client signed the agreement, Derek and myself would immediately and as quickly as we could, send them an onboarding welcome email, welcoming them into our agency. This rallies the excitement and it rallies and confirms the trust that they gave us by signing that contract moments ago.
So the sooner you're able to do that, the better. If you don't know how to send over an agreement, there's a lot of easy ways to do it, but it can be done via DocuSign, Hello Sign, or even signed in person, and copied and sent out to the different parties. Your. And the client who sign it. The next thing that you wanna do is immediately set expectations. So for us, as soon as that contract is signed, we send out an onboarding email that's mostly templatized, but customized, specific to the client, welcoming them in and setting expectations on what is gonna come next. This means scheduling our onboarding call. This goes over what the process is gonna look like and the access that we're gonna need to begin getting access and begin doing work for their business. It goes over our communication channels, like we're gonna be setting up a Slack channel, or we'll be communicating with.
Email or on our weekly calls and setting up those times, and most importantly, it sets expectations on when they can expect us to begin doing work for their business. As soon as that expectation email is sent and the agreement is signed, we then send over an invoice. We send it over through Stripe or bill.com according to the payment terms that we have in the agreement. If you have questions on how to send an invoice or anything like that, I'll link another video on our channel down below that talks about getting paid for your s. The next step is what we call access and onboarding. So the next thing that we'll do is we'll set up a kickoff call, and on that kickoff call, we'll go over permissions, we'll go over access, we'll go over getting their business manager at account, all that good stuff set up.
Now there are a lot of gurus out there that will argue that you can handle all of this with a templatized form if you just send them over a questionnaire that can provide all of this access and you'll be good. Now, to be honest with you, we don't really subscribe to that. While we do have questionnaires and we do have onboarding documents that we send over that we ask for them to begin filling out, we find that the onboarding is best handled hand to hand. This way we can answer any questions that they have, get over any hurdles, and the client doesn't end up getting frustrated and working with hundreds of clients. At this point, we've noticed that the onboarding and the provision of access to different ad accounts, funnels, social, It can actually be kind of a frustrating point for clients.
So what we've realized is if we do this over a quick 30 minute call, it saves them a ton of time. Oftentimes, it'll take them several hours to get us access if they do it on their own. And it's a great way for us to build trust and build authority by us showing them that we know what we're doing. So they give us all this over a 30 minute call, and we're off to the races and we can begin doing the work that we need to do. The reality is that your clients are trying to outsource this to you. They hire to you for a. And by you sending them a long checklist of steps to do makes it feel like them doing your job for you. So by doing this over a quick 30 minute call, it's a great way to build trust and for them to feel like they're already getting value outta the engagement before you even really get started. Now, as soon as you have access to everything, the next thing that you wanna do is set up your communication channels.
We're big users of Slack. Most of our clients are on Slack at this point. If you aren't familiar with Slack, it's basically just a group chat where you all the stakeholders for your clients, as well as all of your team members can all chat in one group area. It saves a lot of email threads and back and forth. It can really become a major time savings. However, not every client is gonna be text savvy enough or be on Slack. In those cases, it's best that you just use email, text, or phone calls. We like to set up a weekly chat with our clients where we can quickly review the progress, what's been done, and answer any questions that they have, as well as strategize on new. This also gives us a quick 15 to 30 minute chat each.
To have FaceTime with the client, continue enjoying a great relationship together, and show them all the great work that we're doing for their business. We're big fans of talking with our clients as frequently as we can. They are our clients. After all, they pay our bills, and we like to provide a premium level of service for them. So after all that's done, you can go about setting up your ads. You can go about fulfilling the services if you have questions on taking it from here. Great place to look is the S of M a blueprint. I'll link it down below and all that. So that's really all that there is too. When it comes to providing an amazing experience, when onboarding, I recommend creating a checklist that goes over those things so that you can make sure that you don't miss any steps. There's nothing that makes you fumble onboarding more than missing something that you could have just had as a check on a checklist.
List. You'll be glad that you did. So I'm always curious. Tons of you guys have been jumping in the comments lately asking all sorts of amazing questions, and it's been awesome to get to know more of you better. How's your onboarding process for your agency work today? Do you feel like you got it nailed? Do you feel like you could need some improvement? Let's discuss in the comments down below, and we're always here to answer any questions that you guys have. A lot of these videos lately, you've been coming from questions that you guys have been asking us in the comments, so if you have more questions, be sure to let us know down below. Finally, friendly reminder, if you find this video valuable, hit the like button. It really helps out the channel a lot so we can continue making awesome videos like this for you guys. That's it for now. We'll see you in the next video..