When you onboard a client, you need enough market context to recommend work that fits their customers and business. You have taken on a client in a market you do not know. Here is a first week that ends with something you can put in front of them.
Day one: write the campaign definition
Do this before you run anything else. Every report selects its results against this text, so a vague definition goes vague everywhere at once.
You need a business description of ten to fifty words, three personas besides the neutral one with ten to fifty words each, and the client's brand and site.
Get it out of a twenty-minute call. What do they sell, who buys it, which competitors take the deals they lose. Ask them to describe their best customer. Ask who won the last deal they lost. Ask which questions prospects raise that they hate answering.
Locking is permanent. The campaign description and the persona descriptions go read-only, and a campaign that needs different core text has to be copied. Organizations stay editable, so competitors can be added later. Write the rest as though you will never touch it again.
Day two: start the collection
Build a small prompt set out of the client's real buyer questions and let it run. It takes days to mean anything, so start it now and read it on Friday.
Writing the questions is worth the hour on its own. It forces you to say what the client's buyers are deciding, and the client will correct your first attempt. That correction is the useful part.
Day two, later: read the market's coverage
Search the news, blog and podcast index by meaning, not by keyword, describing the problems the client solves in the words a writer would reach for.
You want three things out of it. Which publications cover this subject. Which questions keep coming up. Who gets quoted as an expert. An hour here gives you more of the market's vocabulary than a day spent reading competitors' websites.
Day three: find what the market expects
Run a link gap against three or four direct competitors of similar size. Not the biggest names, whose placements came from brand recognition your client cannot ask for.
Read the result for patterns, not as a task list. The directories everyone is in. The publications that cover all of them. The associations they all joined. Those patterns tell you what this market expects of anyone credible, and a new client needs to hear that in week one.
Where three competitors sit on one page, something qualified all three. Finding that condition is worth more than any individual row.
Day four: find what nobody has taken
A link gap only ever finds placements competitors already hold. Search the prospect index by opportunity type for what nobody in this market has done: podcasts on the subject, award programs, speaking submissions, expert roundups.
An opportunity none of the competitors took is easier to win and does more to separate your client. No competitor-derived analysis will ever surface one.
Day five: check the client's own pages
Take their two or three most commercially important pages. Compare each against the audience category you would have picked for it.
On a new account you will usually find pages written from the supplier's side and not the buyer's. It is demonstrable, it is fixable, and it gives you something to say in the first review that is not a generic audit observation.
What you can present on Friday
- What the market's answers currently say about the client and their named competitors.
- The publications and placements this market expects, and which ones the client is missing from.
- Two or three opportunities nobody in the market has taken.
- A demonstrated problem with one of their existing pages.
Every item names a page, a publication or a question. A general audit names none of those, and the client notices the difference.
What not to do in week one
Do not present a few days of tracking data as a baseline. Answers vary run to run and a short series is noise. Tell them collection has started and the trend arrives in a month.
Do not promise visibility outcomes. Nobody controls the services being measured.
At the first client review, use the research to explain your proposed priorities. Confirm the assumptions with the client before turning them into assignments.
See campaigns, the context a campaign needs, or reviewing campaign progress.