An agency-client relationship is the working partnership between a company and the outside firm it hires for marketing, PR, or creative work, including how the two set goals, share information, and make decisions together. The agency’s half of these business relationships gets most of the attention. The client’s half decides how much the agency can do.

In 14 years of client work at Fractl, the brands that earned the most coverage from us made the same handful of moves. I’ve paired each tip with what our clients said in their reviews on Clutch, where Fractl ranks No. 1 on the Leaders Matrix for content marketing. A good agency can tell you what it needs from you, and this is our answer.

10 Tips To Be a Great Client Partner

These tips follow the order a client-agency relationship runs in, from onboarding through the campaigns after it. The first eight come from what our clients wrote in their reviews, and the last two are specific to digital PR, where the news cycle sets the pace for agencies and clients alike.

Share this with your team before your next campaign: Download all 10 tips as a one-page checklist.

1. Be Clear About Your Goals Up Front

Tell your agency what success looks like before the first campaign is planned: leads, rankings, coverage in specific publications, or visibility in AI answers. Then share the KPIs your leadership team reports on, so the agency’s reports tie to the numbers you already track.

Software Finder’s goal was coverage in the publications software decision-makers read, so its campaigns surveyed software decision-makers instead of the general public, and IT Brew covered the results.

2. Fill Out the Onboarding Questionnaire Thoroughly

Our onboarding questionnaire asks which competitors you watch, which publications you’d most like to appear in, which topics are off-limits, and whether your company holds proprietary data we could analyze. Each answer narrows the campaigns we pitch you, so a skipped question becomes guesswork later.

3. Set Aside Time for Your Part of the Work

A digital PR program needs a few hours a month from you: approving expert quotes, reviewing campaign drafts, and answering a reporter’s follow-up question. Put those reviews on your calendar the way you’d schedule meetings with your own account managers.

4. Give Specific Feedback on the First Round of Ideas

Not every first round of campaign ideas will land, and that’s normal. The fastest way to the right campaign is to say what’s missing: the wrong readers, a topic too far from your brand, or a hook that’s been done. One client noted on Clutch that after their feedback on a first round, our second proposal was already good.

5. Trust the Agency’s Expertise

You hired an agency for what it knows about reporters, data, and timing. When a recommendation feels unfamiliar, ask for the reasoning before overruling it.

Over 16 months of work with Payless Power, the program earned 1,208 press mentions, 450 of them from high-authority publishers, with a 25% increase in organic traffic.

6. Give the Agency Creative and Strategic Latitude

The campaigns that earn the most coverage are often tangential: they cover a topic with broad appeal that ties back to your brand without being about your product. Let the agency’s creative directors and data journalists pitch those angles, and judge them on whether reporters will care.

7. Stay Open to Unfamiliar Ideas

If digital PR is new to your team, some recommendations will feel unusual, like a matchmaking company commenting on layoffs or a lender surveying workers about job anxiety. Test them before you rule them out. For Tawkify, a matchmaking company, we took the year’s layoff headlines into dating, and the campaign earned 462 links, including a CNBC story.

8. Treat the Agency as a Partner, Not a Vendor

A vendor fills orders. A partner knows your business well enough to suggest work you didn’t ask for. Bring your agency into planning meetings, tell it when priorities change, and share results it can’t see on its own, like the leads a campaign drove in your CRM.

That client has worked with us since 2020, and the review notes that the 15 campaigns we’d delivered earned links and mentions from authoritative websites.

9. Line Up a Pre-Approved Expert

Reporters on a breaking story often want a quote within hours. Name a subject matter expert who can approve commentary quickly, and consider blanket approval on topics you’re comfortable with: one couponing client gave us approval to draft and submit quotes on any personal finance topic without a separate review. Our reactive campaigns need an idea approved within 24 hours, and when that happens, the turnaround is fast: Study.com’s ChatGPT survey campaign took three days to produce after New York City schools blocked the tool.

10. Get Your Development Team Ready To Host Pages Fast

A campaign’s landing page has to go live before reporters publish, so ask your development team whether it can host a page within 24 to 48 hours. Turn off pop-ups on that page, since aggressive pop-ups hurt the customer experience and put reporters off, and leave the publish date off so the data stays fresh. If your site allows it, password-protect the page while a reporter has an exclusive.

What You Should Expect From Your Agency in Return

A digital PR agency or digital marketing agency should give you these without being asked, and they’re also what to check for when you vet a digital PR agency before signing:

Reporting tied to your KPIs Regular reports on links, coverage, and traffic, measured against the goals you set at the start, with automation handling the routine numbers.	An account manager who knows your business One point of contact, backed by organized project management, so nothing waits on a handoff.
Meeting notes and a shared knowledge base A record of decisions, approvals, and your brand rules that the whole team works from.	A written scope A clear list of deliverables, so new requests become a conversation about scope creep instead of a surprise invoice.
Proof from past work Case studies with specific numbers in your industry or a close one.

Signs an Agency-Client Relationship Isn’t Working

Watch for these signs on either side:

• Reports arrive, but you can’t connect them to the goals you set.
• Approvals wait for weeks on either side.
• The agency hasn’t proposed anything new in months.
• Requests keep landing outside the written scope, and nobody raises it.

Raise them directly. A reset meeting on goals and a clearer approval process can fix many of them.

Build a Partnership That Earns Coverage

Clear goals, quick approvals, and room for the agency to bring you ideas are what turn a contract into a partnership. Our team works this way with every client, earning coverage that builds visibility across search, social media, and AI answers.

Get in touch to see if Fractl would be a good fit.

FAQ