As any communications professional knows, having the right day-to-day account contact is vital. Hopefully he or she has some comms experience, understands the objectives of the engagement and has the authority to make decisions when necessary to keep things moving.
You also want someone who will let others inside the company know about the success of the engagement. It’s not about taking credit. My teams always make the client look good, not ourselves. But the more people inside the client who can see the work being done, the better it is for the health and longevity of the relationship.
Here’s a great example. This is an internal email from a client contact that effectively communicates success to date, acknowledges Strategic’s role and gives internal subject matter experts (SMEs) clear direction for content development.
Hello Team,
I am proud to say that over the past 6 months our efforts have given us the following results (based on Google Analytics):
- 160% increase in visits
- 132% increase in unique visits
- 180% increase in pageviews
- Bounce rate has lowered by close to 7%
- Bounce rate determines how many visitors read one blog post and exit immediately
I could not have asked for better metrics and am proud to have you as part of the XXXX blog team. Without your time and effort in writing unique and interesting posts, we would not have had the type of success we are seeing. In addition to increased visitors, we have also seen an increase in Fortune 1,000 companies routinely visiting XXXX. This not only shows the quality of our posts, but that we are ultimately helping Sales by increasing our brand awareness and showing we are thought leaders on both technical and non-technical topics.
When I first began working with Strategic Communication earlier this year to broaden the blog’s reach to high-level decision makers, and to continue delivering top-notch technical posts, our main objective was to separate content into various channels and maintain a healthy pipeline of content organized by an editorial calendar. By observing key metrics, the next natural step is having key high-level themes each month. This by no means is saying you cannot write about different topics each month. It is only meant as inspiration. All post ideas are always welcome, however, bonus points if it matches that month’s theme.
Nice! This is a healthy relationship destined for even more success moving forward.