Most advice

about the client relationship is addressed to the vendors, because if it gets messed up it’s our money that’s gone.

Things like how to manage difficult clients, set boundaries, protect your time and name and work. This is useful writing; I contribute to this writing.

This one’s different. Today I am addressing the client.

Specifically: here is what the clients I have done my best work with have in common.

Not their personality traits, their work behaviors. Observable, specific things that produced better outcomes than the alternatives.

You learn it — ideally before you’ve burned through a bunch of vendors trying to figure it out empirically.

You Brief me
on a Problem,
Not Your Solution

The worst briefings I have ever had were fully formed. They told me exactly what to write, in what format, with what argument, for what audience. They pre-answered every question the brief intended to help us answer together.

These briefings don’t produce fantastic work. A brief that has answered every question forecloses the possibility of a better answer.

You have substituted a client’s instinct for the creative and strategic process this engagement was supposed to provide.

Good clients come to the briefing with a problem, not a solution: we need to reach this audience, and this is what we know about them; we are trying to accomplish this, and here is what has and has not worked; we need help figuring out the best approach to such and such.

The distinction sounds subtle, maybe! But the outcomes are dramatically different. A client who brings me a problem gives me the room to bring genuine expertise to it. A client who brings me a solution gives me instructions to execute, which is a different kind of work and not the best use of our time, mutually or separately.

You Give Real Feedback.
It Is Addressable.

As we have previously discussed, there is a kind of feedback that sounds like feedback but is not.

“This doesn’t feel right.”
“I’m not sure about the tone.”
“Something is off.”

These are emotional responses, and they are real, and they matter — but they are not actionable. Not in this form.

Good clients translate their (likely valid!) emotional reactions into something I can work with or on or through.

Not “something is off” but “this section assumes the reader already understands [concept], and our audience doesn’t.”

Not “the tone is wrong” but “this reads as more formal than our brand usually is — here’s an example of the register we’re going for.“

This is not a skill that comes naturally to most people.

It requires the client to do some analytical work on their own reaction before they share it. Most clients don’t do this. Not because they are bad clients, or bad people, but because nobody has asked them to.

So I ask. At the start of every engagement, I explain what useful feedback looks like and what I will do with it. I ask clients to distinguish between strategic feedback — this doesn’t serve the goal we established — and stylistic preference — I would have said this differently.

Both are valid. They just require different responses.

clients who internalize this distinction give me feedback I can act on efficiently. The clients who don’t give feedback I have to decode before I can respond or action it. The ensuing difference in revision cycles can be significant.

You Are Available
When the Work
Requires It

Content strategy requires decisions, and decisions require a person with the authority to make them. 

A client who’s difficult to reach — who takes a week to respond to a question that is blocking three deliverables, who is available for the kickoff call and then largely unreachable for the duration — is not a bad person. 

But they are a bottleneck.

Good clients understand availability is part of the engagement. When I need a decision, or information, or approval, to proceed, the speed of your response directly affects the quality and timeliness of the work. The good client treats responsiveness as a professional obligation, not a favor.

This doesn’t mean you need to be constantly available. It just means there is a consistent, reliable pattern of engagement — a cadence of check-ins, a response-time standard they maintain, a clear way to reach them when something is truly urgent.

You Tell Me When
Something Has Changed

The content strategy I build at the beginning of an engagement is based on what I understand about your business, your audience, and your goals at that moment. 

Good clients tell me when this happens.

Not via formal process — just via a little message that says: we’ve shifted our focus away from this thing and toward this other thing, we wanted you to know before you kept building toward the old target.

It seems small but this is a crucial message for our work, and it’s also giving me crucial information about our engagement.

The Bad clients do not do this. Not because they’re concealing anything, but because it doesn’t occur to them that the change is relevant to our content work. They are thinking about the business change in the context of their business. Content is not top of mind.

It doesn’t need to be. this is a very short note I’m asking for.

They are not thinking about how it affects the editorial calendar, the keyword strategy, the messaging architecture we have built together.

I tell clients at every engagement: when something important changes internally, tell me before it becomes obvious in the work. This is not management overhead. It is the thing that keeps the strategy from going stale.

You Trust the Work
Enough to Let It Run

This is the hardest one, and the most important.

Content strategy works on a longer timeline than most clients expect. Organic traffic builds over months, not weeks. Topical authority compounds over a semantic library, not a post. The results of good editorial strategy are real, but they are not immediate and they are not linear.

Good clients understand this, or come to, and they give the work room to prove itself. They do not pivot the strategy after six weeks because traffic hasn’t moved yet. They do not abandon a channel because one campaign underperformed.

The good client holds the strategic view — this is what we are building toward, these are the signals that tell us we are on track — and evaluate the work through that lens, rather than the latest data point.

Which requires trust, which requires a relationship, which requires the client to understand what we‘re building and why.

Good clients have done that work. It shows in every conversation.

Be Tough If You Want,
But Do It Right

Being a good client is absolutely not about being easy. Some, not to say all but probably all, of my best clients are quite demanding. They have high standards, they push back when the work isn’t there yet, they hold me to commitments I have made.

That combination — high standards, genuine engagement — is what produces the best work. It is a skill. You can develop it. Your vendors will notice immediately when you do. For the full picture of what makes content client relationships work — and what strains them — there’s a full guide.

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I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the client relationships that make or break the work.

For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · Book a discovery call