Nothing beats meeting a client face-to-face.
The experience of exchanging a handshake or business card establishes a level of mutual respect rarely possible over the phone. Small talk can have a big impact, enabling both sides to recognize each other as multi-faceted individuals.
These “IRL” interactions may require more time and effort to arrange, but they prove invaluable in the long-run, serving to improve and strengthen the relationship.
As the Taboola APAC team and I have traveled across Southeast Asia, meeting clients in over eight countries, there are a few steps we’ve realized are most important to ensure a friendly and productive conversation, whether it takes place in Bangkok or Beijing, Singapore or Seoul. Below are five tips we recommend following to make your next Asia-Pacific business meeting the best one yet.
Present data that is both original and actionable.
One of the basic rules of account management is to position yourself as a trusted advisor to your clients. Even if our APAC team meets with a client, shakes their hands, exchanges small talk, and shares a kit of trendy SWAG items, that meeting is not yet a success until we deliver some kind of tangible business value.
Our in-person meetings always feature some kind of new data about user behavior specific to the client’s region, showing how online content consumption varies by device type, time of day, referral source, and other relevant filters.
For example, did you know Japan sees its mobile traffic peak during lunch time, while other countries usually peak at night when people are relaxing at home? These insights often prove to be game-changers for our client partners, who may be trying to reach those couch-surfers in the evenings but are accidentally depleting their budgets by mid-afternoon.
Following our playbook at Taboola, consider what kinds of industry or product data your company may have that clients likely haven’t seen or heard about elsewhere. These insights are another way to make sure your meetings stand out amongst the competition and reinforce the notion that you are continually thinking about your client’s most pressing needs and challenges.
Assemble the right team for each country, culture, and industry.
Business etiquette not only varies significantly across borders but also within the same region or industry. Company cultures can be formal or informal, and cultural personas may surface as confrontational or deferential.
Before we meet with any of our clients for an in-person meeting, we consider the overall makeup of our client-facing team, ensuring the mix of people, talent, and seniority is best matched for the given situation. We also apply the same critical lens towards the kind of content we present during that meeting.
It’s fascinating to observe the variety of ways that different cultures conduct business. For example, we’ve found that meetings in Australia or Israel are often more casual in demeanor, though still professional in content and conversation.
Alternatively, meetings in Japan or Korea tend to be much more formal, so we make sure there are appropriate levels of seniority for a particular topic, and that we consistently understand how to pay respect to the highest ranking employee in the room.
Match your “special forces” with local expertise.
As you probably know, Taboola has a special task force called the Content Strategy team that travels the globe, meeting with marketing partners to advise on any and all things content-related.
These specialists take any goal or KPI a client is trying to achieve and then reverse-engineer the most effective content strategy, using growth tactics such as headline or thumbnail variations, A/B tests on landing page design, or new content ideation.
Many companies have some kind of “special forces” team based in one region that could potentially provide value to clients in other parts of the world, and these collaborative efforts are always worth exploring. They can both strengthen your relationships, while also differentiating your brand from competitors.
Over the past month alone, Taboola’s content strategists have joined forces with the APAC team for client meetings across China, Singapore, Australia, Thailand, Korea, Japan, and Israel. By combining our proprietary knowledge with the local expertise of our account management teams, these in-person meetings are some of the most high-value events for our clients. Rarely do they end without uncovering some new, game-changing insight on how to optimize a new or existing campaign.
Delight your clients with surprise SWAG, treats, or anything else they may like.
It may sound like a splurge, but our APAC account management team continually finds that bringing SWAG to meetings is a huge value-add to clients—old and new.
These gestures are highly appreciated by our clients, and when pictures of the SWAG surface on social media, it signals to other industry players that we are a company who values our relationships. On average, we try to bring two to three items of Taboola SWAG for each of the attendees. Some of our go-to items include t-shirts, hats, sunglasses, fidget spinners, and most recently, Taboola cupcakes.
Summarizing and following up on meetings.
Lastly, our APAC team always aims to articulate a mutually agreed upon set of goals as well as next steps by the end of a meeting. If there is additional work or information requested by the client, we follow up with the necessary materials within 24 hours.
Being able to succinctly summarize each conversation, and consistently respond to requests on-time, can make a world of difference in “walking the walk,” showing clients that we are dedicated, professional, and capable of making things happen.
This approach favors over-delivering, even if expectations vary by culture. For example, we’ve found that Australian clients tend to be more relaxed and understanding about delays, while those in China often expect same-day responses and follow-up. Sometimes this can be a heavy lift to achieve in such a narrow timeframe, but such “fire drills” are crucial to conveying a sense of commitment to your clients.
At the end of the day, every company is in the business of client satisfaction, and we make it a top priority to service our partners in-person whenever possible. Every stakeholder wants to feel valued and respected, and the best way to learn the nuances of how they prefer to conduct business is to meet them where they are—emotionally, but just as importantly, geographically.
Taboola is the world’s leading content discovery platform, serving 360B recommendations to over 1B unique visitors each month on the web’s most innovative publisher sites. To find out how we can support your content strategy, contact us or start your campaign now.
