Convincing Your Clients to Go Dark During a Crisis

After the US Capitol was seized last week we sent a clear message to our team at Digital Natives Group: you come first. Stop working, cancel your meetings, and do whatever you need to take care of you, your loved ones, and your mental health. As an agency committed to living our values, we knew we couldn’t expect our people to wade into the minutia of social media analytics or social ad copywriting while the fate of our democracy hung in the balance.

However, as an agency, our values often brush up against our client goals. We do our best to maintain a roster of clients who we believe we have alignment with, but we certainly can’t predict how every possible scenario will play out. Even if, as Stephen Colbert so perfectly put it, last week’s scenario was “the most shocking, most tragic, least surprising thing” we’ve ever seen.

We knew our clients needed to pull the plug — on email, on social, on paid. This was not the time for our updates. We want to let people get as close to the news and to reliable sources of updates as possible. Our recipes, our inspo, our lives are not what people are waiting on, or need to consume.

It’s one thing for us to know that, it’s another for our clients. Fortunately, after nine years, we’ve curated a list of clients and collaborators who either understand this or trust our judgement.

But this didn’t happen overnight. We’ve had our battles with clients who didn’t agree or who didn’t want to push a campaign timeline. Each time we’ve persistently dug in and stood up for our values. More often than not, our clients are persuaded. Those who are not learn a valuable lesson: we are not the right fit for you, and it is perhaps time to move on.

If you’re an agency owner who faced this challenge last week, or is still facing it today, here are some of the tactics we’ve used to have these conversations.

Show Them Proof

As we on the internet are fond of saying, screenshots last forever. We all saw last week’s Morning Brew tweets on 1/6, and can think of countless other examples of brands being raked over the coals for chiming into the conversation with the wrong content, at the wrong time.

(Source: https://twitter.com/jsstansel/status/1346937860985909250)

Egos, and bottom lines, are fragile. Showing our clients evidence of the harm this content can do to either often provides the proof we need to talk them back from the ledge.

Hit Them With The Stats

You likely manage a lot of social media accounts, and it’s likely this isn’t the first time an issue like this has come up. We keep handy a few data points on ratios, follower loss, or negative comments when clients have chosen to post at previous moments similar to a crisis we may be in. When gut instinct may not be enough, this is our way to quantify our recommendations.

Ask Them to Consider Their Audience

At some stage you’ve probably gone over audience personas with your clients. They know there is a target customer or audience member, and are on-board with your attempts to create content for this group. If your recommendation is that this group doesn’t want content right now, shouldn’t they be onboard with this?

We ask our clients to have a bit of empathy and consider what their target audience is doing today. Are they thinking of the safety of their family? The security of their job? And if they are considering these, or other, questions, do they really want to hear from you?

Ask Them to Consider Themselves

When empathy doesn’t work (a red flag you should go back to after this discussion), ask the client to consider themselves. What kind of content are THEY consuming right now. Are they taking a social diet? Just reading the news? Are they actively seeking out brand and thought leader updates?

We often find this to be one of the best tactics, as quickly the client realizes that they themselves aren’t even seeking out this content, or seeing it in their own feeds.

Reiterate Your Values

Last, but not least, we restate our values to the client. Our final hope is to persuade them with heart. It’s admittedly a last-ditch effort, but if desperation is what is required, we are not above going there to defend our beliefs. More often than not, we are able to bring our clients around to the idea that their voice is not one needed in the conversation right now.

Now, if these methods don’t work, I offer you one final piece of advice: tell them it’s time to walk away. It’s never easy to fire a client, but it is damn empowering. We will never compromise on our values, our employees’ values, or the quality of our work in times of crisis. No client is worth that.

Best of luck, and if you have any other ideas, let’s start a conversation.

(For more reading on this topic, might I suggest Jayde Powell’s stellar op-ed in Adweek)