If you work in a marketing or communications agency, then you’re probably familiar with the late nights and weekends spent working on pitches... on top of your day-to-day tasks. Pitches are tremendously taxing on teams – who are required to come up with new and innovative ideas to showcase a new product or a company in a limited period of time.
While pitching is part and parcel of agency life, only 26% of advertisers say they are very satisfied with this crucial process. Increased stress levels, number of hours worked, and lack of research were some of the points of dissatisfaction cited by advertisers about pitching.
This blog will discuss three ways you can use social intelligence to improve your agency’s pitching processes so you can win more pitches with less time, while boosting team morale during pitches.
Over the past year talk about ‘data-driven agencies’ has mushroomed. It’s no surprise as data empowers agencies to make better choices faster and reduces the amount of guesswork involved.
"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." – John Wanamaker
With thousands of conversations happening on the internet daily, it would be a waste not to harvest all this data and consumer insights to drive revenue for your agency and clients. Leveraging this knowledge can help strengthen proposals, win new customers, and identify opportunities for upselling.
The foundation of a winning proposal is in-depth research about the company, competitors, and target audience. Without this knowledge, you’ll be taking a strike blindfolded.
While social media is just one of the many ways we can conduct market research, it is one of the most efficient and cost-effective methods. Past and real-time consumer conversations online can give you clues about trends, or help you understand your prospect’s economic environment, including opportunities, threats, and disruptions, better.
Agency business is highly competitive, with high price elasticity. This means brands need to avoid the trap of reducing prices to beat competition and instead offer truly differentiated services to stand out.
Social media listening gives your agency a competitive advantage by allowing you to offer more than just creative services. Other value-added services a social listening tool can offer are social media KPI and ROI reporting, competitive analysis, and crisis management.
Furthermore having consumer data allows agencies to curate data-driven creatives to personalize ad campaigns and offerings. This could be in the form of customizing ad visuals to show clothing items that match the gender of the user, or even to display different thumbnails based on past viewing behaviour, like Netflix does.
"Winning a pitch is the ability of the agency team to offer a compelling solution based on deep insights about consumers and the market.” Kelly Clark, CEO of GroupM.
To create a winning pitch, it's necessary to understand the status quo. Running an analysis on your prospect’s competitors, brand sentiment, brand perception and past marketing campaigns can provide valuable insight into what has worked in the past and what is needed to achieve future goals.
These insights can act as guidelines for strategic development, pitch design, and operational efficiency. Furthermore, with access to conversation trends across longer time-periods, you’ll be able to get the big picture of what is actually happening, as opposed to analyzing a trend in itself.
For example: Strategic Planners can get information on demographics, which channels consumers use, pain points, and influencer networks to profile consumers. Knowing this allows your creative team to develop unique, well-informed proposals that address the consumer’s behaviour, needs and wants.
One of the main reasons pitches are stressful is because of the amount of time given to develop them. Therefore every hour saved counts. A powerful social media search engine can save you time and effort by giving you instant access to data and charts on online conversation trends across the internet, all without the hassle of platform setup and waiting for data to come in!
There are multiple advantages for agencies to employ an insight-driven strategy, including:
But the real gem that makes social intelligence a welcome addition to any agency is its ability to improve pitching processes, so you can win more pitches with less time. Download the Agency’s Guide to the Perfect Pitch to for tips and case studies on how you can use social intelligence to data-drive your agency pitches!