Provocateur:

In the uber-competitive agency world, everyone is looking for the secret sauce that can set them apart in a new client pitch. If my time in the performance-marketing world has taught me anything, it’s that a lot of people are looking in the wrong place. To shine in new client pitches these days, you need to focus a lot less on the CVs of your founders and your agency’s list of industry accolades, and a lot more on the deep, specific competitive insights that you can deliver to the brand sitting across the table from you.

That’s where strong consumer data resources come in. Agencies today employ consumer insights in a number of ways when working with clients, from developing personas to executing campaigns. But these insights are also invaluable tools for getting your foot in the door in the first place, particularly in a consumer-centric marketplace.

These days, consumers are in charge—and they know it. Brands need to demonstrate that they understand their customers through personal and relevant communications.

The same is true for brand-agency relationships, and the pitch is where agencies have the chance to demonstrate that they know their “consumer” (i.e., the brand they’re pitching). By being personalized and relevant in the pitch, agencies demonstrate their ability to do that on the client’s behalf.

Leveraging consumer data for personalization can be particularly valuable to independent agencies during the pitch process. These days, Fortune 500 companies assume that major agencies and their holding companies have deep ties to major data players that can be tapped for their needs. But these same needs are shared by small and midsize brands—and the agencies that work with these companies can gain a strong advantage during the pitch process by demonstrating their ability to tap into deep custom insights that can help emerging brands better compete in their space.

New audience insights and opportunities to grow a brand’s business always get the right kind of attention during a new business pitch.

Building insights into the pitch

By having access to an always-on source of consumer insights, agencies can demonstrate their knowledge of a prospective client’s unique industry positioning and audiences while providing a glimpse into the actionable new insights they will leverage once the relationship is formalized. The beauty of tapping into real-world consumer data for new client pitches—versus framing up a pitch based on theoreticals—is that new insights developed during the pitch preparation can translate seamlessly into client deliverables after the business is won.

In leveraging consumer insights to develop a new client pitch, agencies often won’t have access to a customer data file that enables a comprehensive analysis. However, they can leverage what they know about a brand’s target audience to uncover new segments through savvy application of demographic, psychographic, transactional, and other consumer data.

In preparing a new business pitch, agencies can tap into consumer data to:

• Demonstrate a strong and unique understanding of a brand’s target audiences and audience segments
• Enhance a brand’s existing customer files, campaigns, and analytics
• Glean insights about a brand’s competitors and show prospects how they stack up and where untapped opportunities exist
• Help brands plan their product roadmaps based on previously unidentified consumer wants and needs
• Improve messaging and customer experiences based on key demographic, behavioral, and psychographic attributes

Putting consumer data into action to win a pitch might start small, but you’ll find that momentum often builds behind initial insights. For example, in a recent new business pitch to a regional insurance company, a behavioral marketing agency needed to demonstrate they could open the door to valuable new audiences. The agency was able to produce and analyze a prospect file of more than 551,000 consumers who aligned with the insurer’s target audience of individuals over 65 years of age who live in Pennsylvania.

Based on the agency’s demonstrated ability to bolster the insurance company’s prospecting efforts, they won the business. The agency went on to append emails to the prospect file they identified, onboard the list to Facebook and LiveRamp and build custom audiences based on the prospect data. And based on the success of those efforts, the insurer decided to activate media services that were pitched in conjunction with onboarding.

Potential clients want to know that your team has the resources to make their brands smarter and to minimize the risk associated with their media spends. Likewise, if you can uncover new audiences and areas of opportunity for them that demonstrate where they’re leaving money on the table, you’ll often the amount of time between your proposal and a signed contract is dramatically reduced.

About the Author

Walter Chistoni is a 25+ year veteran of the direct marketing industry and vice president, enterprise solutions at Infogroup, where he focuses on the innovative applications of data to drive the scale, performance, and efficiency of client marketing programs. His career has spanned across the media and agency worlds and he’s worked with Fortune 100 brands in the financial services, insurance, CPG and retail sectors. He’s a graduate of Fordham University and a Bronx-born Yankee fan.