Account Director (Digital / Agency)

Min Experience: Senior Manager/Supervisor

Summary of Role

To manage your accounts through strong interpersonal skills, planning and organizational abilities, critical thinking and innovation. You will be instrumental in creating and maintaining a culture of thinking, challenging and innovation, both on your accounts and within the agency as a whole. You should be professional, challenging, inspirational, supportive and motivational to your collegues, the agency, and your clients in accordance with the company’s values.

Summary of primary duties and responsibilities

You must strive to:

• Understand clients’ businesses, their brands and their customers and ensure your team does too.

• Monitor and understand your clients’ markets and their environments. You should have views on market issues and be up-to-date with competitive activity and potential new entrants.

• Know your clients’ objectives and business results, both macro and micro. You should be aware of corporate issues, as well as knowing the campaign results inside out. You should understand and have a view on what drives profitability and other key success criteria, and be able to talk confidently to senior clients about these subjects.

• Understand the best ways to reach your audience, what motivates them, and how to target the best prospects. You need the ability to guide your clients with the agency’s new innovative thinking on targeted media and other digital techniques.

• Be up-to-date on best industry practice and regulations.

• Display a passion for creativity and innovation, and always strive to produce ground-breaking work, finding ways to produce the most inspiring briefs.

• Educate your clients and the team that the brief is the most important stage in any digital campaign development, ensuring defined SLA procedure is followed.

• Drive yourself and your team to be one step ahead of your clients, generating a culture of pro-activity and a feeling that the agency is a centre of excellence, filled with specialists in our respective fields.

• Help the company to grow through developing your clients’ businesses.

• Be able to sell innovative ideas to clients in a confident and convincing manner.

• Get involved with and present at new business pitches.

• Drive digital performance across channels in the agency, predominantly Search.

  Client Servicing

  Two key elements of the role are building relationships with clients and service delivery. As an Account Director, you are responsible for ensuring that you and the team really understand your clients’ needs and deliver a market leading service.

• Create a ‘partnership’ relationship with your clients at all levels.

• Manage the SLA and third party procedures and create systems with your clients to keep them up-to-date and ensure that communication flows effectively; each client is different and you and your team need to be able to adapt to their requirements.

• Develop/maintain excellent presentation standards in your group – an “it’ll do” mentality won’t do. You should check all documents before they go to the client, ensuring all correspondence, documents, client correspondence, Digital plans, creative briefs and contact reports, estimates, and scope documents are professional and accurate.

• Regularly report on performance to clients and the internal team, record and maintain performance results which you will be expected to promote and share with the wider agency.

• Ensure creative and technical briefs are written and are signed off by clients.

• Keep a central file of essential client information, including brand guidelines, key presentations/documents, registered details, key contacts and addresses etc.

• Make sure you take full responsibility for the executional detail of each job, especially status/contact reports, proof reading, testing, legal etc. approval and client sign off.

• Organise monthly and quarterly reviews with clients – these should be an opportunity to assess results against targets, as well as a forum for the agency to demonstrate innovative thinking.

• Build a social relationship with your clients.

• Surprise and delight your clients, as well as listening to them at all times.

  Financial management

  It is your responsibility to manage the finances on your accounts, from driving profitability through to ensuring that invoices are paid on time:

• Ensure that campaigns run to agreed client budgets and that clients approve all expenditure before it happens, especially unexpected expenditure.

• Produce annual and monthly forecasts of income and report these to the Client Services Director.

• Meet your monthly and yearly income targets and drive growth of the account.

• Ensure that your account is maximizing its profitability potential.

• Ensure all billing is done on time. Maintain a tidy WIP – no debts.

• Make sure your team understand the importance of healthy cash flow.

• Work with Finance to ensure invoices are paid on time.

• Work with Client Services Director and Heads of Service to prepare client fee recommendations and reconciliation.

• Keep up to date with timesheets and expenses claims.