At an agency you know you need to be able to deliver fast, flexible, and compelling pitches at the drop of a hat. Having these pitch tools in your back pocket can keep you delivering – again and again.
Using intelligence from online data is our bread-and-butter. But to understand and best serve our agency clients and partners, we needed to hear and learn from them.
We’ve spoken to over a dozen marketing and research agency experts with years of experience, and learned just how important social insights are to crafting the most successful pitches.
During our conversations and research, four main pain points regarding the pitch process kept surfacing:
- Speed
- Flexibility
- Cost efficiency
- Narrative
Social intelligence offers great solutions to these challenges, solutions that are strong enough to be repurposed, but flexible enough to tell a personalized, compelling story, pitch after pitch.
Focusing on quick-win analytics, we will provide examples on how to overcome these pain points, enabling you to identify game-changing social insights, create compelling narratives, and win new business.
Speed
Why time is vital during pitch process
Essentially, all the work done during the client acquisition process is free. As anyone in an agency knows, striking the balance between providing thoughtful insights and not wasting too much time stuck in the data is always challenging.
At this point, your prospect controls the delivery schedule and typically there are aggressive timelines to meet during the pitch process. From the moment you receive the request for proposal, you know the race is on against your competitors.
How do you showcase your understanding of the prospect’s needs and the value you can add without wasting time or giving away too much that the brand could use for free?
That is when speed to insight is required.
"As an agency accustomed to a strong demand for information in a short period of time, we have the responsibility to standardize our work processes to achieve the most efficient performance."
When resource and time sheets are maxed, it’s often a case of asking the team to go above and beyond their day-to-day tasks to deliver the pitch on time.
However, utilizing tools, technologies, and templates that do the heavy lifting of the proposal for you can take some of the pressure off, and ensure your time goes to crafting the pitch.
Tools you need to create a pitch, quickly
When presenting social media data in your pitches, use tools that will quickly surface the key insights and rely on repurposing research methods and templates to save time.
"The key is to work well and refine your methods and, in terms of social listening, craft good rules and queries."
Below are some examples of instant social insights that require minimal customization or manipulation.
The following visualizations were customized using topic clouds which auto-categorize entities like places, people and organizations.
In the first image, you can tell which hashtags were most used in conversations around Burger King, automatically colored by the sentiment of the mentions.
Additionally, by looking at the trending emojis you can dive in with a click, and examine the most interesting subsets of the conversation.
"Since the turnaround time for pitches is much quicker than anything else, I tell my clients to utilize features like our query wizard, Benchmark analysis, and our topic clouds."
No one at an agency has any time to spare. Using tools to quickly surface insights saves you time that you can reinvest in creating compelling stories.
Which leads to the next important facet of a killer pitch.
Flexibility
Why flexibility is key during the pitch process
The ability to be agile, adaptable and customizable is paramount to success during the pitch process. Building reusable templates can save you time but personalization is essential in helping you win pitch after pitch.
And since the end goal is always to create a proposal that speaks the language your potential client needs, a good pitch has the ability to pivot constantly, as you understand your prospects better.
"It's always best to engage in an honest and open conversation with the potential client to understand the challenges and solutions that can best benefit the project. That always implies things in the proposal will need changing, but you'll deliver greater value and design a better initiative."
"If there is one thing we value about Brandwatch, and that is key for us, is its great flexibility to cross variables and configure and adapt the dashboards to the needs of each study."
To help with flexibility, tools that allow you to segment the data quickly can help you find the insights that fit your prospect’s needs and use cases.
Tools like Explore are perfect for this; Explore uses expertly-built filters that automatically analyze any data to surface insights for many common use cases, like monitoring negative press, measuring influencer engagement, or identifying Instagram trends.
Social intelligence tools with easy-to-use filters are your best friend in pitches. When segmentation is simple and quick, an in-depth and customized research project can be a ten minute task.
"Segmentation is key. For example, if an agency is pitching a university, they'll want to show the volume of conversation around the school football team versus hockey team. Or if the prospective client is a CPG brand, the agency will need tools to drill into individual products' performances over time."
Cost
Saving money to make money
Again, time is money, and no one has time or money to waste. Cost efficiencies are key during the pitch and proposal stage of acquiring clients.
A common theme from our conversations with agency experts was knowing when to lean on chosen vendors for support. Successful vendors should feel like partners during your pitches, so it’s important to have a relationship in place which allows your team to quickly scale up when you need to.
Tools to showcase your agency, with as little overhead as possible
Capitalize on the documentation, time, and services that your vendors are already providing. If you can make the most out of their time or if they are willing to help with the pitch, they can be your best resource.
In addition to leaning on partners and vendors, it’s important to choose the right data to showcase your possibilities in order to keep overhead down.
The beauty of social intelligence and online research is the speed of answers you can get, typically much cheaper than traditional research methods like focus groups and surveys.
For instance, a quick demographic snapshot of McDonalds’ audience could augment or supplant more expensive survey-based consumer research when pitching the fast-food giant.
This one-click demographic analysis in Brandwatch Consumer Research easily summarized the kinds of people interacting with McDonalds’ social pages, showcasing the efficiency of creating customer profiles or marketing personas with online data.
So if your agency’s offering includes market or industry research using several different methodologies, save the expensive traditional methods for once you’ve won the business.
Narrative
Why it’s vital to tell a story
There are endless ways you can shape your pitch, and no one way is right.
You can center your pitch around a use case, presenting your offering as an integral part of your prospect’s ‘job-to-be-done’.
Or you can start with a business problem that resonates with your audience, and present the data offering as a solution to that problem.
However you craft it, your pitch needs to have that “WOW” factor that turns your data into a story that connects with your prospect on an empathetic level.
"Finding a WOW milestone is key to connecting with the client and showing them that we are aware of the current situation, that we know them, and we offer them a perspective on the value that we could bring in those specific moments."
Your proposal needs to be doing two things at once: telling the story of the data you choose to highlight in the pitch, and hinting at the world of possible additional insights that your agency can provide if they were your client.
Numbers and data points without the context and the narrative can’t do that.
"In the preliminary phase we delve into a knowledge of the sector, the brand, its positioning in the market with respect to the competition and in its customers and their perception of the brand. This knowledge is the basis for our strategy adapted to the needs of each brand."
Empathy is vital in a well-crafted pitch, so put the data together in a way that appeals to the human tendencies of your future clients.
Be honest, address their needs, tell a story, and bundle it in a creative way that leaves a lasting impression.
Tools to not just build a pitch, but tell a story
Again, using technologies that surface the insights for you not only saves time, but can help you figure out what story you can and should tell with the data.
For instance, the following Benchmark analysis shows that the home improvement store Kingfisher saw overall volume of mentions decline month over month. More interestingly, their online negative mentions increased by over 100%.
Using this analysis instantly opens up a really interesting opportunity for an agency to tell the story of why negative mentions have gone up (and of course, how their agency can help Kingfisher solve it).
Once you have the valuable insights and a compelling story, how you tell the story and the emotions you elicit from presenting the pitch itself are just as important.
According to agency experts, moving beyond Powerpoints and using a data visualization tool is an essential differentiator from your competitors.
Not only do data visualization tools, such as Vizia, integrate all of your key data sources in one place, but they bring it to life and illuminate it in a way that static charts and figures could not do.
"I've found that Vizia helps tell a cohesive story, and it's visually stunning which is great in pitches."
Putting it together
The ultimate deciding factor for whether a pitch is successful will always be whether your services are the right fit for a company’s needs and budget. But too many opportunities are lost because of extenuating circumstances, like time constraints and overhead costs.
With these tools, you’ll be able to craft pitches quickly, easily, flexibly, and with a story that will give a “WOW” factor to set you apart.