At our recent Client Service Summit in Palma, Mallorca we covered a lot around cultivating our culture and staying ahead of the curve in order to service our clients. One of the challenges a client service member in any ‘integrated agency’ has, is knowing a lot about the full marketing landscape, and understanding that next big thing coming down the line. And perhaps more importantly, whether that next big thing is a potential solution to your clients challenges.
As Client Service Director I very much challenge my teams to get to know their clients businesses properly, to be an extension of the clients team and to get under the skin of what’s happening in their world. Which means that we inevitably, and happily(!), get to work on some great creative and digital delivery projects. But where we can offer the most value is by being a strategic partner to our clients.
Put simply, we love to deal with our clients business problems. Which means we need to offer solutions. And the more solutions we have, the more neutral and agnostic our strategies become… because a PR company will only offer you a PR-led solution. Even a digital agency is limited to just online solutions, so our integrated nature makes us real problem solvers.
It’s also important to have specialists when we get to delivery. Trust me, you don’t want me delivering your SEO campaign! You want someone who does that all day, every day. Equally, you don’t want to be paying for the wrong specialist when we’re talking about positioning your brand! Sometimes solutions come up so much that we have to consider productising them or offering them as a service.
So it made absolute sense we covered many of them at our Client Service Summit in Palma:
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UP for DIGITAL - ahh, the world of digital, what’s not to love about this piece of heaven for all marketers?! Well, maybe, the fact that it changes every day, there is sooo much to it. It can be complicated, it can be daunting and also it can be mis-sold. So it’s really important that we in Client Service keep abreast of all that’s happening in the digital world so we can offer it as a potential solution for our clients. It's great when a client knows they need a new website, but in reality the conversation is more like “….on which platform? What is its main purpose? Selling, content, brochure? Is it mobile-first? Do you need a CMS? What back-end do you have? What won’t IT let us use…” you get the picture! So with all the digital world offers having our UP for DIGITAL team take us through the latest, greatest, and not so great insights and developments in web, content, social, SEM, SEO, SEA and good old digital advertising and beyond was invaluable. Check out all they offer here.
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UP LAB - we can’t answer our clients biggest business challenges without insight and knowledge and being able to offer research as an internal skill is a massive win for my Client Service team and not one that is offered by many agencies. So, learning all about the ins and outs of what our UP LAB team can do was very, well, insightful! It all boils down to understanding your audience, your market, your customers, your clients, your product, yourselves, and even your staff. And if a client can’t answer the ‘why’ behind a brief, then I will always encourage making sure we are asking the right questions and bringing in the right specialists to unpick what reality looks like. See what UP LAB offers here.
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AI - now here’s a hot topic at the moment and one that just had to be on the Palma agenda. As a relatively new space, AI is both complicated and scary for many, therefore it was important that the Client Service team understand what UP’s position is on how we can use AI, and how it could benefit our clients. Our position is both embracing and ethical; and was something that was discussed constantly during the summit, read more about our #AlwaysAddHuman approach to AI and code of ethics here.
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ScaleUP - a great new offering for our smaller clients, the scale-ups, who sometimes can’t get the backing from a bigger marketing agency. ScaleUP is a ‘marketing essentials for companies moving from StartUP's to ScaleUP’s’. An ingenious but simple product that is already tried and tested and launched very well to the Client Service team in Palma, it will have its own launch but you can beat the queue here.
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Media offering - normally, integrated agencies and a media offering don’t go hand in hand. And if an agency offers the service, it's probably some poor account executive hidden away in the back room who’s learning as they go! So it was very important that we discussed what UP brings to the table with great partners such as The Hybrid House who are ‘specialists in helping businesses to know, grow and monetise their audience through paid media and partnerships’. Having real specialists on hand to talk around the real useful, interesting, and complicated really helps, and the takeaways for the Client Service team will only help with their problem-solving for our clients.
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UP Motion - a brand new offering that has been percolating in the UP kitchen for some time. We have always offered film, animation, sound and moving image services whether original, live or on-demand, but due to the importance of visual movement in the marketing world we are bringing it all together in a stronger proposition for the Client Service team and more importantly our clients! Watch out for more on this soon, but for now, you can see our skills here.
Our meetUP in Palma really invigorated the team, and I particularly enjoyed reviewing and adding to our collective arsenal when talking to our clients about their business problems. More is always good, as long as the quality is there, so it's always exciting when we have new offerings coming through. Here’s to staying neutral and integrated and solving your challenges. Cheers!
