Contracts for digital marketing?

[envy]

How do you handle writing contracts and setting kpi's for marketing clients?

Landed our first client today, we threw together a shitty cookie cutter contract, but it wouldn't be solid enough for most clients. If it was just SEO it'd be easy, but we're handling SEO, social media and content marketing.

Any ideas?

 

[qwianghomingh]

How big is your client?

 

[Ryuzaki]

You could hire lawyers who specialize in this type of thing to draw up a very broad contract for you, and then guide you on how to make it more specific for each client, ad-lib style maybe. Aaron Kelly has been a go to for a lot of the guys in our industry for a while: http://kellywarnerlaw.com/

 

[turbin3]

Congrats!

I definitely recommend writing in at least a 30 day out clause, if possible (60+ if you can swing it). Might depend on the type/size of clients. Small fry clients are not going to like the sound of that and probably won't do it (and that's fine), but it's been my experience $2-10k+ clients are fairly understanding that they can't just shut things off at the flip of a switch. Just protect yourself so you're not getting overextended or ending up with sudden surprises.

With multi-channel contracts like that, it's a bit dependent on the client and how you feel about the long term prospects with them. In some cases, I've put something like social on a separate contract, if maybe I felt like that side of things wasn't going to last for them, especially if there are some budget concerns. That way it's a bit easier to drop one campaign while keeping the others, versus the client feeling like they have to make an all or nothing decision.

In terms of KPI's, the first and most important thing in my experience; promise nothing. It can only create problems and unrealistic expectations later. For the contract, I would keep KPI's simple, unless maybe it's an incredibly complex client, campaign, or if they're just adamant about it. Stick to high level topics like traffic, conversion, social followers, or whatever their main wants and needs are. You can always include more in actual reporting, but including too much detail in a contract will just make things more difficult on you. I would just think of maybe 1-3 KPI's for each channel and write those in.

 

[turbin3]

Almost forgot. To save yourself a LOT of potential trouble for the future, I would consider associating the proposed budget with an hourly rate, while also being careful not to set yourself up to be haggled. For example, you could say something to the effect of, "Envy, Inc. provides digital marketing services at a rate of $125 per hour, however, hours are not sold on an individual basis. Additional blocks of hours can be purchased at a minimum of $1,000 as necessary." and then give a breakdown of the projected monthly time that would be spent on each campaign. Lets say it was a budget of $5k/mth, with a rate of $125/hr:

• On-Site SEO Services (16 hours)
• Content Marketing (16 hours)
• Social Media Marketing (8 hours)

The idea there being, setting a realistic expectation with the client that YOUR time is money, and if they're going to monopolize on that, either budget needs to increase or they need to buy an additional block of hours (another option you could mention in the contract). The goal being, not dealing with assholes that want to pay you $5k/mth for 40 hours of work, while expecting 300 hours worth of actual work, daily email updates, multiple weekly calls, etc.