Preparing a digital marketing pitch and wondering how Social Listening can help your digital agency land a new client? Read on to discover how social listening tools help you one-up your competitors.

What is digital media monitoring / social listening?

Social listening is the process of gathering all online mentions of a brand or a company and mining data for valuable marketing insight.

The source of these mentions may be website articles about your company. They can also be tweets, Instagram posts, or even comments in a Facebook group.

Traditional media monitoring tools monitor press, TV and radio. Digital media monitoring goes beyond that: in addition to media mentions, it finds conversations actual customers are having on social media.  

If you work for a digital marketing agency, data from a social listening tool can reveal tons about how people perceive your clients and campaigns.

In short, if what you do is being mentioned beyond your owned media channels, you need to use social listening.

Applying for an RFP? Don’t forget to do your homework.

Requests for proposals (RFPs) are a common marketing practice, and they usually attract tons of agencies to a pitch for a new client.

Since only a handful of digital marketing agencies are using social listening tools for market research, this is your chance to stand out.

To put this in a real world example, let’s say that a local beer brand is requesting a proposal for services of digital marketing strategy and consulting. Other agencies will deliver a pitch based on how they think the target audience is behaving, how big that audience is or how fierce is the brand’s competition.

You are going to do that as well, but you are also going to use social listening to give significant added value to your pitch.

Best part?

It takes just a couple of hours to get all the data you need.

Start by monitoring keywords in a social listening tool

Social listening tools are usually web-based, which means you can access them via any browser.

Once you register to a tool of your choice (for example: Mediatoolkit), you need to input the name of the brand to start tracking it. Then you can fine-tune your search to a country or a language of your choice, and you’re on your way.

Analyze social listening results

As a part of your social listening research, you should look for following things:

• How many people are currently talking about the product in question?
• Which channels see the most engagement – Twitter, Instagram or website articles?
• How many people are currently being reached by the product in question?
• At what time of the day is the target audience most actively discussing the product?
• How does the beer brand’s popularity stand compared to 3 other local beer brands?
• Is the sentiment towards the brand positive or negative?
• Which words are they using to describe the product?
• Which influencers talk about the product the most?
• What are people saying about the competitors?

Imagine having all of these data in exact numbers before delivering your pitch. You will easily outpace your competitors by showing the future client exact data. And while it may look like you spent weeks researching it, in fact you will have extracted it from Mediatoolkit in 5 minutes.

You can tell them that 150,000 people were reached by their brand in the last month. You can show that beer lovers are most active on Friday and Saturday evenings (okay, this one we knew even without the research). They will want to know that their brand mentions has a 20% share of voice when compared to competitors. They will want to work with you if you can demonstrate that your campaign will improve the negative brand sentiment.  Based on the data, your planned marketing activities will have a firm basis which can only have a positive effect on the decision.

You won the pitch – now what?

After the pitch, you will definitely want to continue doing constant market research. Social listening tools help you justify the “financial means” (a.k.a. money) invested in your idea. Some of the following questions might motivate your doing of research:

• How is the hashtag campaign on Instagram performing?
• How many people is the brand reaching and how much has the number of posts increased since the start?
• Are the websites we had chosen for placing our content generating the desired results or should we find new ones?
• Have we managed to increase the brand’s media presence in comparison to the competitors to 40%?
• Have we managed to improve the sentiment consumers have about our brand?
• If we promised to boost monthly public reach from 150,000 to 250,000 people? If not, where do we stand currently?
• The invitation to the big event we organised on February 2nd was sent out to more than 100 media outlets – how many covered the topic?
• Our plan was to significantly improve consumer engagement on Instagram. It contained only 15% of all brand mentions when compared to other sources (websites, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube). Did we achieve it?

Metrics like these will show the true value of your work to the client. Use a social listening tool to show them that you did a hell of a job. Demonstrate how you increased the brand’s share of voice, boosted reach to 300,000 people and increased site visits by 50% through choosing smart the websites to place your content.

Media monitoring comes in handy for digital marketers in the most understandable and clear aspect – metrics. Even executives without advanced marketing knowledge will be able to understand and visualize the facts easily.

If you are preparing for a pitch or trying to see how are your current campaigns performing, you can always book a demo with Mediatoolkit and we will do our best to help you.

May research begin!

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