How To Handle Clients Who Want Guaranteed Audience Growth in Addition to Audio/Video Production Services?
A podcast producer friend of mine offers social media video creation in addition to his regular podcast production services. Recently a potential client asked him specifically about “concrete deliverables” in terms of how many new subscribers the clients’ podcast can expect to gain due to these social media videos. Basically, the potential client wanted to know what his return on investment (ROI) would be — a perfectly fair question!
My friend asked me how I deal with this question from potential clients and I responded:
“Ahhh, …unfortunately this is the major difficulty when dealing with marketing and ROI, which is why I’ve always avoided it — I only ever offer audio production.
“I know how marketing companies usually handle this — they never guarantee anything and they convey that clearly to the prospect, because they simply can’t guarantee any specific results. Every time I’ve tried to hire a marketing company, this is the part that always confused me as well (mostly because small companies like mine can’t afford to invest in marketing and then get little or nothing in return because that would literally put me out of business).
“If you speak with a marketing expert they would probably be able to explain this conundrum in more detail and give you more clarity and options.
“In general, you could:
- Explain that you can’t guarantee anything, and that no marketing company can ever guarantee anything, and that you understand completely if they don’t want to move forward with the marketing aspects of the agreement. You could sign him up as a client for audio/video production only and then recommend several marketing companies for him to contact.
- You could estimate the expected amount of growth in subscribers (in raw numbers or percentage), but not “guarantee” results. And plan on reviewing the actual results of the campaign with your client after 6 months to decide whether or not to continue the campaign.
- Some combination of the above.”
How do YOU handle this situation? Comment below!
"if you could measure anything what would you measure? Not Clicks and views that's for sure, it would be trust."
Everyone is lying about the numbers, the social medias have made up how long someone is exposed before it counts (hint, it's a couple of seconds). There's click farms, bots and new ones which are tried to "pay to play" online games and you either pay or have to consume something that, you guessed it, inflates the numbers.
People who want guarantees are either entitled or afraid. Can Hollywood guarantee a hit? How bout a superstar artist having a song released? A book? The best and the brightest can't make it work all the time so how could anyone? The reframing is "how much is trust in you worth it to you?" Most of our work is in service of attention so people gives the message a chance and if the message finds it's mark you build the start of trust. Do that enough times with generosity, knowledge and bravery and you can reach the goal.
Never even give possible numbers if you aren't controlling the content 100% or if they are brave, patient, teachable and knowledgeable. There is no substitute for thinking deeply for a long time about the thing that matters.
"Your can have it your way, or we can maybe have a hit, but we can't have both."
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