How to Communicate Your Progress to Clients and/or Stakeholders?

Maintaining transparency and truthfulness is the true sign of professionalism as a digital marketer. Therefore, it’s important to keep your clients updated on your projects and also mention the expected outcomes. Besides, it helps to boost your relationships with clients, thus bringing in more business for you in the upcoming days, both through word-of-mouth referrals and returning customers.

Business stakeholders are the vital assets of a company, and therefore, try making more efforts in boosting your company’s success trajectory. To achieve that, you can provide valuable insights and resources to address your issues better, especially when you are keeping your stakeholders in the loop.

Furthermore, by keeping your stakeholders updated about what’s going on in your eCommerce advertising strategies, you can get more help or suggestions from your clients. In other words, apart from maintaining transparency, your clients or stakeholders can approach your truthfulness and professional approaches. In this way, you can also ensure that your stakeholders and digital marketing clients can stay more involved in the ongoing projects.

Defining Your Stakeholders

First, you need to define your stakeholder and/or clients to maintain effective communications. Ensure your stakeholders are interested in your digital marketing brand or your interests in your organization. While identifying your stakeholders, keep in mind the following types -

• Internal team players

• External partners and managers

• Inventors

• Clients and customers

After successfully identifying and defining your potential clients or stakeholders, it’s time to assess their needs and project requirements thoroughly. Also, try to gain knowledge about the short- and long-term goals and objectives, to make better campaigns and online marketing strategies.

Creating Healthier Relationships with Stakeholders

Now that you are aware of your stakeholders’ or clients’ goals and project objectives, it’s time to build stronger relationships with them. By building trust, you can build rapport and loyalty, allowing them to be more comfortable with you while discussing their goals and project requirements. By listening carefully to their concerns and problem areas, you build trust and reliability among them.

So, you need to remember that communicating with digital marketing clients or stakeholders is a two-way process. While you are expecting open communications from them for better project and task planning and understanding, your clients and stakeholders are also expecting you to be a good listener and be more honest about your progress. However, there are different methods of handling different stakeholders, such as internal and external.

• Internal team players − Since you already know your internet team members and other employees, they are easy to access as you have already built a good relationship and credibility among them. Besides, your team members already have a good understanding of your company goals and projects, thus being more honest and open with them. It helps your team players make better decisions from the beginning.

• External managers/partners or investors − You may find it more challenging to communicate with them, as you may not share any preexisting relationship or rapport with your external partners or investors. You need to put in some extra effort to build strong relationships with your external stakeholders. You can start by showing your professional side, such as by providing them with regular project updates on its progress.

  Apart from a company’s partners or investors, your customers or clients can also be categorized as external stakeholders. In the initial relationship-building stages, you may need to be extra responsive to their requirements and concerns. Moreover, keeping them updated about your project progress on a regular basis helps to build stronger client relationships.

6 Surefire Ways to Boost Your Stakeholder Communications

Congratulations, you have learned how to identify your stakeholder or clients, and the effective ways to communicate with your internal and external stakeholders. Now, let’s talk about the six best methods and approaches to communicating with your stakeholders.

1. Create an Efficient Communication Plan

In your communication plan, include all the details and project information you may need to communicate with your stakeholders. Also, write down the best methods of sharing all this information with your clients, team players, or other external stakeholders. Moreover, a well-written and well-thought communication plan can clear all misunderstandings and bring everybody on the same page. Your communication plan ensures that no client, partner, investor, and team member is left in the dark regarding any aspect of a project.

2. Generate and Send Status or Progress Reports

Status reports can keep your stakeholders well-informed about your project's progress. You can send these progress reports through email or share them during your stakeholder/client meetings.

3. Conduct Regular Meetings with Stakeholders/Clients

Stakeholder/Client meetings help both parties to gain better visibility about digital marketing projects and their various strategies. Besides, you can also receive valuable feedback about your project performance, which you can use to fine-tune or optimize your marketing campaigns. Try to schedule these meetings weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, to stay on track.

4. Create Stakeholder Surveys

At times, it is necessary to get real-time feedback from clients. And creating and conducting stakeholder surveys from time to time is an excellent tool to hear from the client about what’s going right (or wrong).

5. Allow Portal or Project Website Access

Another great approach to sharing project status information with stakeholders is by allowing them access to your portal or project domain. Apart from tracking progress, giving them website access also helps to provide your stakeholders with project updates and share other necessary documents they may need.

6. Keep Room for Q&A

Allocate some time for conducting Q&A sessions with your stakeholders, either at the end of each meeting you are conducting with them or dedicating a separate session for it. It helps your team to understand project requirements and client goals better.

Key Takeaways

In a nutshell, it’s necessary to establish strong relationships with your stakeholders - be it internal teams or clients, investors, or business partners. Effective communications and improved stakeholder relationships can boost project outcomes, help in better decision-making, increase transparency and clarity between you and your clients, hasten issue resolution processes, and enhance higher stakeholder management.

Therefore, never hesitate to keep your stakeholders updated regarding project performance and status reports, as it builds your brand’s credibility, thus developing a good market image. So, focus on building more client engagement and satisfaction by allowing them to stay well-informed!