One of the companies I work with was asked to create a marketing plan for a small start up business. We had an initial meeting with the client to brainstorm and learn more about the company. The meeting went very well, and we came up with some really solid ideas for marketing their company.

Back at our office, we had some more internal meetings and conversations centering around methods we would use to market a company on a budget. We developed a marketing plan that was outlined in a four page document. The plan included specific ideas we had as well as recommended other businesses with similar clients that they could partner with. Some of the ideas were ones we came up with during the brainstorming meeting with the client, while others were developed internally post-meeting, without the client’s direct, immediate input.

An issue arose when we emailed our plan over to the client. We assumed that the client would understand the document, and we could have a phone conversation later to talk about changes that they would like to see. Instead of our simple phone call, we received an email back form one of the contact people, who was concerned by the fact that some of the items discussed in the document were “repeats” of things we had talked about in the meeting. Since they were paying for the marketing plan, they believed that our plan should touch on things not covered during that original conversation.

We are hoping to have a face-to-face meeting soon to further explain our plan. The challenge we are dealing with is that our team did come up with ideas during the original brainstorming meeting with the client, ideas which we expanded upon, and we also developed other ideas and strategies; all of the concepts and suggestions were included within the plan we emailed to the client. Hindsight can add clarity to a situation, and the next time we develop a marketing plan we will present it in a meeting with that client rather than through email. During a face-to-face presentation, we would be able to better outline our recommendations, expand on the logic behind our plans, as well as address concerns the client could have.

In summary, though email is a great tool for a business, things can get lost in translation when creative people are left to interpret things without full explanation. Did we screw up in this situation? Sure. We will learn from this challenge and do things differently in the future. An in-person presentation meeting could have gone a long way to clear up the confusion and put the project on the right track. Instead, we are having a “damage control” meeting after the fact, and learning a lesson for the future.