What does onboarding a new agency client involve?
Onboarding a new client means learning their business well enough to do good work for them, quickly. In the first week, you need to know what they sell and to whom, how they talk, who they compete with, what they've already tried, and who has to approve what. Without that, the first deliverables come back covered in corrections, and the relationship starts on the wrong foot.
Most agencies collect this through a kickoff call, an intake form, and a stream of follow-up emails. The facts end up scattered across call notes, a shared drive, and the account manager's memory. When someone new picks up the account, they start over.
The usual onboarding steps look like this:
- research the client's business and market
- run a kickoff interview
- gather their brand guide, past campaigns, and account access
- write everything down where the whole team can find it
- agree on the first piece of work
An AI marketer can handle most of this work. It can research a company in depth before anyone gets on a call, turn the gaps into a focused set of questions, read the documents and recordings the client sends over, and turn it all into a plan. Your time goes into what only you can bring: the relationship with the client and the context they share in conversation.
Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Agencies use it to run that same research and strategy work for each of their clients.
How Kite onboards a new agency client
Kite starts the way a good account lead does, by doing its homework. You create a team for the client and point Kite at their website. Kite researches the business, their market, and their competitors, and writes up what it found in a growth report.
From that research, Kite knows what it still doesn't know. It writes an onboarding interview that skips anything public and asks only what the client has to tell you. You can send it as a questionnaire before the kickoff call or use it as the agenda for the call itself.
After the interview, Kite reads the answers, the call recording, and the documents the client shared. It files each fact in the client's knowledge base, flags anything that contradicts its research, and proposes the first piece of work. From then on, every draft it writes for that client starts from what the client told you.
- Give each client their own Kite team
- Research the client before the kickoff call
- Write the onboarding interview around what only the client knows
- Collect what the client already has
- Record everything in the client's knowledge base
- Start the first week's work from what you learned
Give each client their own Kite team
Kite keeps each client's knowledge separate by giving each client its own team. One person can belong to several Kite teams and switch between them, and each team keeps its own research, knowledge base, and settings. When you're working in a client's team, Kite only draws on that client's brand, customers, and competitors.
That separation pays off where agency work most often goes wrong. A social post written for a dental practice shouldn't borrow the tone of the gym down the street. A benchmark you share with one software client shouldn't include another client's numbers. Separate teams make that kind of mix-up structurally hard, rather than relying on someone to be careful.
You can invite people from the client's side to their team. Everyone on a team can see the team's conversations with Kite, so the client can watch the work take shape and answer questions directly.
Research the client before the kickoff call
Kite researches a new client before you ever ask them a question, so the interview doesn't waste their time on facts their own website already states. It reads the client's site and uses its built-in sources to see how the client reaches customers. That covers:
- their positioning, products, and pricing, as the website presents them
- their competitors, and how each one positions itself
- their search rankings and whether they show up in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude
- the ads they're running and the social accounts they post from
- their website's speed and technical quality
- their logo, colors, and fonts
Kite can also compare archived versions of the client's website, which shows how their positioning or products have changed over the past few years. That's useful context for a question like "Why did you stop leading with the enterprise plan?"
The research comes back as a growth report with sources, a confidence level for each finding, and a clear line between what Kite found and what it inferred. Read it before the kickoff call and you'll walk in knowing more about the client's market than most new account teams know after a month.
Write the onboarding interview around what only the client knows
Kite writes the onboarding interview around the questions its research couldn't answer. Public facts, such as what the client sells and who their competitors are, become things to confirm rather than things to ask. The interview time goes to what lives only in the client's head.
A typical interview Kite writes for a new client covers these areas:
- Customers. "Who are your three best customers, and what do they have in common?" "Who buys from you but shouldn't?" "What usually makes someone decide to buy?"
- Positioning. "When you win against a competitor, what's the reason?" "Our research shows your site leads with price. Is that still how you want to compete?"
- Voice. "Which of your past emails or posts sounds most like you?" "Are there words you never want to see in your marketing?"
- History. "What have you tried that didn't work, and why do you think it failed?" "Which campaign are you proudest of?"
- Boundaries. "Which topics, claims, or competitors should we never mention?" "Are there facts we can't publish yet, such as an upcoming launch?"
- Approvals. "Who needs to sign off on what?" "How quickly do they usually respond?"
- Tools and access. "Where do your customer records, analytics, and email lists live?" "Who can give us access?"
- Goals. "What would make the next 90 days a success?" "Is anything coming up that the work needs to fit around, such as a launch or an event?"
Kite tailors these questions to the client. For a local restaurant, the interview asks about hours, seasonal menus, and where the photos come from. For a software company, it asks about the buyer versus the user, the sales cycle, and which plans matter most.
Kite can write the interview as a Google Doc or a Notion page you share with the client, so they can fill it in before the call. Or you can keep it as your own agenda and run the conversation live.
Collect what the client already has
Most clients already have more written down than they realize. Kite reads the material they send over and pulls the useful facts out of it, so the interview doesn't have to cover it again.
You can upload brand guides, sales decks, and past campaign reports straight into the conversation in the Kite web app as images, PDFs, or videos. If the client shares a Google Drive folder or a Notion workspace, connect it and Kite reads the documents there directly. When the client has a brand guide, Kite can adopt it as the team's standard instead of building one from scratch.
If you record the kickoff call in Fathom, Kite reads the transcript. It can tell what the client said apart from what your team said, so it records the client's own words. A line like "honestly, we're the ones people call after the cheap option falls through" is more useful than any positioning statement, and Kite keeps it with the call it came from.
Record everything in the client's knowledge base
Kite files what it learns in the client's knowledge base, the shared record every later piece of work draws on. Each fact goes where it belongs, rather than into one long onboarding document nobody opens again:
- positioning, products, and pricing
- ideal customers and what triggers a purchase
- brand voice, with examples of writing the client likes
- competitors, as the client sees them and as Kite's research found them
- which tool holds which data, such as the CRM, the analytics, and the email platform
- standing instructions, such as "never mention pricing on social" or "the CEO approves every LinkedIn post," along with who said them
When the client's answers disagree with Kite's research, Kite doesn't quietly pick one. Say the client names two competitors, but the companies showing up next to them in search results and AI answers are three others. Kite records the question as open and brings it to you, because the answer changes which comparison pages and ads are worth making.
Start the first week's work from what you learned
Kite turns the onboarding into a plan you can act on in the first week. It proposes a strategy based on the client's goals and what the research found, defines what success looks like, and suggests the first piece of work, such as fixing the homepage headline, writing a comparison page against the competitor the client loses to most, or drafting the first month of social posts.
Because the knowledge base already holds the client's voice and boundaries, the first drafts sound like the client and steer clear of what they said to avoid. Kite asks before it publishes, sends, or posts anything, so you and the client can review the early work before any of it goes out.
Onboarding keeps paying off after the first week. When you correct a draft, Kite records the correction as a proposed rule for that client, and once its nightly review confirms the rule, it guides every later draft. You can also ask Kite to run a strategy refresh each quarter, or to check whether the client's marketing has drifted from their brand after you hand work over to their team.
What you get
A separate team for each client
Each one holds that client's research, knowledge base, and settings, with no overlap between clients.
A growth report before the kickoff
It covers the client's positioning, competitors, search and AI visibility, ads, website, and brand assets, with sources.
An onboarding interview written for this client
It confirms what Kite found and asks only what the client has to tell you, as a shareable questionnaire or a call agenda.
An organized knowledge base
The client's customers, voice, competitors, history, boundaries, approvals, and tools, each in its place, with open questions flagged.
A first-week plan
A proposed strategy and a first piece of work, drafted in the client's voice for your review.
How to get started
Create a new team in Kite for the client and give Kite their website. You might ask, "We just signed Harbor Dental. Research them and write the onboarding interview for Thursday's kickoff call."
Kite researches the client, sends you the growth report, and drafts the interview. Change or add questions, then share it with the client or use it on the call. Afterward, send Kite the client's answers, the documents they shared, or the Fathom recording, and it fills in the knowledge base and proposes the first piece of work.
You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. The research and the interview need nothing connected. Connect Fathom, Google Drive, Google Docs, or Notion when the client's material lives there or when you want the questionnaire written somewhere the client can edit it.
Integrations used for client onboarding
Kite runs the research with its own built-in sources. Connections come in when the client's calls and documents live in tools your agency already uses, or when you want to share the interview in a format the client can fill in.
Read the kickoff call
Read the client's existing documents
Common questions
Is there a client onboarding questionnaire template for marketing agencies?
The questions above work as a starting template, and they cover customers, positioning, voice, history, boundaries, approvals, tools, and goals. A fixed template has a weakness, though: it asks every client the same thing, including facts their website already answers. Kite starts from the template but rewrites it for each client after researching them, so a restaurant and a software company each get questions that fit their business. For more examples of intake forms agencies use, see Client intake form template for marketing agencies, with real examples Coming soon .
How do I get up to speed on a new client's brand in the first week?
Do the research before the kickoff call, not after it. Ask Kite to research the client as soon as the contract is signed, read the growth report, and use the interview to confirm what it found and fill the gaps. Once Kite has the answers, it fills in the knowledge base and proposes the first piece of work in the same conversation, so the client sees work in their own voice within the first week instead of a list of follow-up questions.
Does each client need its own Kite plan?
Each team has its own plan and credits, so each client team is billed on its own. Kite's pricing is per team rather than per seat, which means inviting more people from your agency or the client's side doesn't change the price. The free plan includes some usage, and the Growth plan costs $100 a month with $50 in AI credits included.
Can the client see what Kite is doing?
Yes, if you invite them to their team. Everyone on a team can see the team's conversations with Kite, so the client can answer Kite's questions directly and follow the work as it happens. If you'd rather keep the client's view to finished work, leave them off the team and share Kite's reports through their links instead.
What happens when the client changes direction after onboarding?
Tell Kite what changed, and it updates the client's knowledge base rather than adding a contradictory note on top. If the new direction conflicts with something the client said earlier, Kite asks which one stands and records the answer. A quarterly strategy refresh is a good habit too, because it catches changes in the client's market that nobody mentioned.