On some days, running a digital agency is harder than silently sneaking across a roof-top wearing last year’s Halloween costume.
Dealing in the art of the intangible online hype machine doesn’t always lend itself to communicating your business value to clients.
Results and metrics matter, of course, but for ongoing relationships with multiple-stakeholders on the client side, you need to find ways to unmistakably demonstrate both the creative and strategic sides of your work.
Social efforts need to be seen, presented, and shared in a way the client can grasp onto, without weeks of intensive system training.
Graphicmachine is a digital, search, and marketing agency who work with professional service firms, healthcare providers and companies, and non-profit organizations.
They face this exact problem.
To help their clients in all aspects of their marketing and business development, they embed themselves within the organization and become part of the team for a period of time, building on their social media and digital momentum.
But if one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, then how can clients understand the value of their work? How can they adopt best practices going forward if they don’t understand the platforms they are using?
Graphicmachine knew that to promote good social practices, they shouldn’t be acting like secret agents, and offering transparency by directly involving clients with their ongoing work only serves to create stronger relationships.
Finding a Dashing Dashboard for Not-So-Secret Agencies
Graphicmachine co-owner, Brian Jones, explained the issues they’d been having involving their clients with other social platforms.
“With the social media management tools we were using before, we had issues with reliability―items marked as posted weren’t actually posted, times were different than what was scheduled―managing posts across multiple channels, and issues that were created when post dates or times were changed. Some of our clients are actively involved in managing their social, and they were frustrated and felt that it needed to be more streamlined.”
The complex interfaces they were using, along with these scheduling issues were not conducive to their client partnerships, so something needed to change.
“We had been using Loomly and Buffer. I looked at Crunchbase for competitors to Hootsuite. We tried out a number of tools and Agorapulse was the only one with an interface that was straightforward and easy for our clients to understand.”
Shaking Up Social, Without Leaving Clients Feeling Stirred
Graphicmachine wanted a tool that made their work simpler. Not just for them, but for their clients who were going to use it as well.
“Agorapulse has this intangible quality of credibility―we have confidence using it. Other systems looked like they were in a pre-launch, beta mode, but Agorapulse is really refined.”
What impressed us about Agorapulse is the app closely mirrors the desktop, which makes it easy to keep track on the go. It’s really reliable and the customer support is great.” Brian told us.
Not just a pretty face, Agorapulse assisted with gathering content from the client teams they worked with.
“Agorapulse was also the first platform to allow Instagram posting from within the app, which has also reduced both work time and client stress.”
The Final Report: Mission Success
Beyond just building confidence and cohesion with their clients, Graphicmachine saw an overall lift in their social media efficiency.
“The biggest issue we ran into with other systems was content rescheduling across multiple channels. Agorapulse is set up completely differently, which helps encourage better practices.
Using Agorapulse has easily cut our time working on social media management to 25% of what it was previously, both for prepping and scheduling posts.”
So, just remember that name…
Pulse. Agorapulse.
