Marketing agency processes, from winning work to renewal

What processes does a marketing agency run?

A marketing agency runs a handful of core processes end to end: winning work, onboarding a client, delivering the work, reporting on it and renewing. Each one starts where the last one stops.

1. Winning work. How a lead turns into a client: the first talk, the scope you agree on, the price and the yes.
2. Onboarding. How a new client gets set up: their goals, logins, files and the people you'll talk to.
3. Delivery. How the work gets planned, made, checked and sent.
4. Reporting. How the client hears what got done and what it did for them.
5. Renewal. How you agree on the next stretch of work, or close the account cleanly.

You don't have to build all five at once. One approach is to build them in order: first how you get new customers, then how you onboard them, then how you run the work. In that view, building them out of order slows a business down.

Each process is made of smaller jobs that move through the same steps. For one job from brief to delivery, see how a marketing agency workflow runs.

What does a marketing agency process flow look like?

A process flow lists each process in order and shows what passes from one to the next, so a missing step stands out. It's a numbered list on one page, not a fancy chart.

Here's what moves between the five processes:

1. Winning work to onboarding. Whoever sold the work passes on the client's goals, the agreed scope and the start date.
2. Onboarding to delivery. The client's details, logins, files and contacts go to the people doing the work.
3. Delivery to reporting. Finished work, with dates and results, goes to whoever writes the report.
4. Reporting to renewal. The reports and the client's feedback go to whoever talks about the next term.
5. Renewal back to delivery. New goals from a renewed client go back to the start of delivery.

Everything after onboarding runs on what you learn there, so it's worth getting right. For the questions to ask a new client, see the onboarding questionnaire.

To find a gap, walk each line of the flow and ask three questions:

• Who starts this step, by name or by role?
• What exactly moves on to the next person, and where is it kept?
• Who checks that it arrived and is complete?

If nobody can answer one of these, that's your gap. Fix it by writing the step down. SOP is short for standard operating procedure: the steps for one task, written down in order. Steps for writing your first SOPs are on Which systems, processes and tools let my agency run without me?

You don't have to write every process up yourself. DeskTeam360's team takes process documentation as one task on a long list: it can write up a process and plan how to automate it. You can send that task as a doc, a recorded video or a voice note, and what you do with the result is up to you.