Managing expectations

From time to time, the team at Novus can feel like they’re trying to walk through treacle. A new year can prove to be a busy period, filled with lots of website creations, tweaks and refreshes, but things can sometimes come to a full stop. Not because we’ve downed tools, but because we’re waiting on content and/or direction from our clients.

We get it. We know that the majority of the people we work with would love us to climb inside their heads and extract all the necessary information needed for the site. Or to take the text from their existing site and make it better, more accurate and up to date.

We don’t work in our clients’ businesses, however. We don’t know what’s new, what’s old hat, what plans you have, who you’re looking to engage. We can create a masterpiece based on this information, but we can’t magic it up from nowhere. Even if you were to employ our copywriter, they would still need to interrogate the required content out of you.

It’s much easier all round if you consider the content of your site before you approach a marketing agency—or, at the very least, when you begin to engage with them. If you know that, one way or another, the content and direction of your new website will have to come from you, we can manage your expectations. What we can’t do (something we reiterate over and over after asking clients multiple times for information to populate the design we’ve created) is create the content ourselves. We realise it would make your life easier (it would also allow us to move on), but it would be doing your site and your business a disservice. No one knows your enterprise, your consumers or your business plans as well as you do.

We also find clients’ expectations can waver towards the end of a design project. Everything is explained to those we work with during an initial brief session, including which package and service(s) they’re paying for. Despite this, the lines can become a little blurred further down the line. We’re good guys, so we incorporate a little bit of leeway, but there’s comes a tipping point—such as when yet another request for ‘a small tweak, which won’t take you two minutes’ appears, after the paid-for rounds of changes have long been exhausted. If you didn’t notice that urgent, glaring error when you initially sat down and evaluated your fledgling site, that’s not something we can be responsible for. Please take the required time to review and feed back. Take the project as seriously as we will—we’re not interrupting your busy schedule for our benefit, we assure you.

Also, as with any business, it’s difficult to rectify something if we don’t know about it. If there is an issue with anything we’ve produced, just let us know and we will move heaven and Earth to try and resolve the issue. We don’t want to be ghosted or have clients think we’re sub-standard; sometimes, miscommunication occurs. That’s life. That’s business. We don’t go through the motions at Novus, we really care that we do a good job. We want to exceed clients’ expectations. Work with us, not against us…which includes playing your part in your project and getting things to us in time.

If you’re looking for a new website or branding, video creation, marketing strategy, podcasting or social media support, talk to us. Call 07983 575934 for more information.