“Pitching is a priority”, baseball team owner Tom Hicks once said. What holds true for sports is equally true for agencies – successful pitches are key to winning new clients and succeeding in the major league of business. For a successful pitch, there are four important steps to follow, and social media analytics can help agencies to prepare each of them. Here is how it works.
1) Know the Playing Field
Each field has its different characteristics, and so does each industry. For agencies serving a wide array of companies from various industries, knowing the specific environment of each one of them is key to delivering a good pitch. This means understanding the challenges their prospects face in each industry. Social media analytics can help agencies to understand which topics are most important for an industry at any given time.
Top Themes for FMCG/food-related conversations over the past 30 days
In the example above, mentions for the FMCG industry, specifically food brands, show food safety among the top mentions. Insights like these enable agencies to gauge the situation before pitching to a new prospect and avoid coming up with an approach that could result in negative attention for the client.
To fully understand an industry, agencies need an all-encompassing approach, including its recent history. Historical data and knowledge is a valuable tool for designing pitches that prospects will love. For this purpose, Talkwalker allows access to historical data of the past 2 years, enabling agencies to develop a deeper understanding of what their prospects want to see in a great pitch.
With access to historical data, agencies can also quickly understand which type of content or strategy works best for their client’s industry by comparing competitors’ campaigns; the comparison allows agencies to see which types of content created the most engagement across an industry or in different geographical regions and base their pitch on those insights.
2) Understand the Player
Much like in baseball, each industry player has preferences and experiences to fall back on when they see a pitch. In order to pitch successfully, agencies need to understand what is driving a particular player. That means analysing a company’s purpose and targets, but also understanding their current online, PR, and/or social media activities. Social media analytics helps agencies to gain an overview of a prospect’s current activities and see what they focus on across different platforms.
Sentiment and theme cloud for T-Mobile from late October to late November
A breakdown of mentions for T-Mobile, created using Talkwalker’s Brand Listening IQ App, shows that T-Mobile’s Un-leashed campaign and cooperation with MTV’s American Music Awards generated a lot of attention, with the hashtag #AMAs drawing more than 500,000 mentions. At the same time, the security breach at a credit agency used by T-Mobile in October still affects the mobile provider’s online reputation.
With a comprehensive overview of a prospect’s reputation from a variety of sources – online, print, broadcast - agencies can adapt their pitches according to those needs, increasing the chances of a successful pitch.
3) Throw a Great Pitch
After careful planning, the moment of truth means delivering the actual pitch. For agencies, that means coming up with campaigns or strategies which are not only appealing to their prospects, but also promise the biggest impact. This means the pitch idea needs to be something that can reach a wide audience and generate a lot of attention for the client.
For a solid pitch, hard numbers are a great way to prove the value of a strategy or campaign plan. A thorough campaign analysis gives agencies the means to set reasonable goals and prevents them from overselling to prospects.
Some key metrics for Geico insurance since the beginning of November
The metrics to measure campaign success can be confusing for those unfamiliar with them. Visualizing these metrics helps agencies to make the key metrics more understandable for clients. A better understanding of which metrics are important to campaign success also makes it easier for clients and prospects to understand their impact.
To develop a campaign that a prospect – and their customers – will love, agencies can rely on Talkwalker’s Campaign Monitoring IQ App to help them discover topics and keywords that will draw customers’ attention.
4) Keeping Score
Once the deal is closed and the campaign started, the agency needs to ensure the best customer service for their client by regularly informing him on the results. With the huge amounts of data coming in, staying on top of campaign results can be challenging. Integrating data from social analytics with other business platforms makes it much easier for agencies to monitor campaign success and deliver insightful reports to their clients.
But clients also want regular updates on a campaign’s progress during its course. For this purpose, automated reports are a great tool. Agencies can for example create a newsletter with the most important campaign metrics, which is then delivered to the client at regular intervals. For an easy comparison, agencies can set up dashboards with all relevant metrics. Newsletters dispatched from these dashboards are an easy way for agencies and customers alike to monitor a campaign’s success at a single glance.
Since different clients often also have different preferences when it comes to campaign reports, agencies can export all the data they need in a variety of different formats. With all important data being available in a number of formats, agencies can deliver various reports or formats without having to spend hours to rework them.
These different ways of preparing reports allow both client and agency to access high-quality campaign information with very little time investment, but still be able to have all necessary data in the format that works best for them.
Agencies need to plan and prepare each pitch very carefully to make it successful. By using social media analytics to plan ahead and understand customer needs, agencies can make sure they don’t strikeout and knock their pitches out of the park.
