5 Ways to Win a Pitch with Consumer Data

Pitching without knowing your client’s audience is risky.

Using consumer data to reveal audience insights they may not have identified will put you in a strong position, increase win-rate, save resource, and spare blushes.

With data, agencies can remove their blindfolds and see the client’s challenges and opportunities with clarity.

It offers a much more impactful and trustworthy pitch that delivers on their client’s requirements, whilst showcasing your ability to support their current state, and be instrumental in the company’s future development.   

This guide outlines how agencies can reinforce their pitches with data, and what goes into creating a deck that exceeds expectations.

1. Present new truths about their audience.

The effect it creates: The ‘wow’ factor. How to achieve it: Develop their existing segmentation.

New truths can be easily extracted from deep consumer data and compared against the client’s existing profiles.

When presented effectively, the right audience segmentation signals your agency’s access to insider knowledge, whilst showcasing the client’s shortfalls and opportunities in the process.

Of course, at pitching stage, you can’t always run a full segmentation analysis using custom research.

Instead, you can do so using subscription-based consumer data through GlobalWebIndex, unearthing subgroups within the client’s existing segments to highlight their need for more detailed insights (which you can provide).

Going one step further, using motivational and attitudinal data to look deeper into the lifestyles and perceptions of each segment, you can easily demonstrate how this can shape a message that resonates.

Top tip: Bringing an untapped segment to the client’s attention and highlighting the best way to reach it positions you as an authority on their audience.

2. Track their audience effectively.

The effect it creates: Intelligent monitoring and effective analysis. How to achieve it: Validate their audience.

Now you’ve established yourself as the go-to source for consumer insight, you can further cement your authoritative position by indicating your ability to propel the clients existing processes forward.

Your access to data and your ability to analyze it quickly and intelligently is attractive to clients, especially those non-digitally native brands who may be dependent on outside help for this.

Audience validation is an excellent way of proving your capability to support through insights-driven strategic planning.

Showcasing your propensity to uncover the accuracy of a client’s campaign delivery based on psychographic, as well as behavioral, sets a new standard for campaign feedback and analysis.

Explain where their consumers are, what they want, and how you will help the client achieve greater visibility amongst them.

Top tip: The audience the client is targeting may not be the right one. Combine analytics with survey data to get a true understanding of the opportunity.

3. Support their plans for innovation and development.

The effect it creates: Dependability. How to achieve it:  Trend analysis.

Bringing new products or concepts to market can be a long and expensive process, often with an element of risk involved.

Supporting their innovation plans shows your agency to be reliable and progressive.

It also proves you’ve taken the time to get to know their long-term plans, rather than just short-term.

Gathering insights into the latest consumer trends enables you to assess the current market and predict uptake with greater accuracy.

Use survey data to:

• Explore what will help generate or develop new ideas.
• See which trends will impact demand and should inform development.
• Generate a forecast of profitability, taking into account market dynamics.

Top tip: Go the extra mile by pitching the idea of running a custom research study with your data partner to test their new concept before launch. This will limit the risk and ensure their spend is focused in the right direction.

4. Have your ear to the ground.

The effect it creates: Finger on the pulse. How to achieve it: Brand data and social listening.

The client will likely be aware of their competition, but the more detail you can provide them with on their place and perception in the marketplace, the more reliant on your services they’ll become.

Present the brand’s overall health through survey data, combining this with data derived from social listening.

The 5 key areas to focus on are awareness, familiarity, consideration and intention to purchase.

Capturing consumer response to your client’s brand and suggesting how it can maintain its competitive edge is relatively straightforward.

More complex is the instinctive response to the brand and the emotional connection. The latter provides next-level actionable insights into:

• Which brand levers are driving decision making.
• Hard-to-reach emotional brand connection points.
• How to disentangle the impact of individual touchpoints on the brand experience.
• How to ascertain which attributes are driving their desired business outcomes.

Providing this level of brand understanding within the pitch itself is impressive to clients, even if just demonstrating your capability to look deeper than their current analysis allows.

5. Tell stories with data.

The effect it creates: A deeper connection.   How to achieve it: Look for the unexpected.

Telling a compelling story is a crucial part of creating a winning pitch. It helps tie in all areas of discussion, whilst providing the all-important context needed to make sense of the data points and concepts examined.

As Devon Zdatny, Founder & CEO, First & First Consulting, explains, “treat data like a journey. Look for the unexpected and interrogate it until it’s interesting.”

Data storytelling is about making connections, using data as the guiding source. Focusing on the implications of the data and applying them to the real world helps the client to realize your vision with clarity.

Here’s how to bring your data to life:

• Case study examples of existing success stories.
• Use case examples identifying the most pragmatic approach.
• Detailed visual personas of target consumers to make them more tangible.

Case Study: First & First win a pitch with consumer insight

The ask

 

First & First Consulting was partnering with an agency who was pitching a CPG company to help them launch a new personal care brand. They were tasked with providing a recommendation on who their target consumers should be and what they care about.

The approach

 

They had little information about the brand beyond the three core pillars the brand was focused on. They leveraged GlobalWebIndex to uncover which consumers would care about these pillars as a means to define the target audience.

The action

 

Firstly, they built an audience that met the criteria associated with all three pillars: eco-friendly ingredients, social-first distribution, healthy lifestyle promotion.

Then they analyzed the audience demographics in order to shape the target profile.

Lastly, they constructed a target audience that balanced scalability with precision centered on four key traits:

• Women aged 18-34.
• College-educated.
• Single/in a relationship with no children.
• Value brands that do social good.

First & First then uncovered key truths about this audience.

They’re 85% more likely than the general population to strongly agree that the’re interested in other cultures and countries. They’re 192% more likely to describe their sexual orientation as “other” and 108% more likely to describe their ethnicity as “other”. They’re 35% more likely to advocate for brands that they have a one-to-one relationship with. They’re 41% more likely to strongly agree that they always strive to achieve more in life, but 32% more likely to disagree that money is the best measure of success.

Using insights to guide strategy

 

By connecting with consumers at their core, First & First needed to:

• Tell its heritage story in an educational and enriching way.
• Represent their target consumer in a non-conforming way.
• Provide the granular details they demand in engaging ways.
• Be a brand that their target consumers feel good about buying from by taking actions they admire.

The outcome

 

The agency won the pitch and as part of the kick off, hired them to conduct a segmentation study, which heavily leveraged GlobalWebIndex data.

First & First took a three-pronged approach to the segmentation:

1. Leveraging social listening data to define its four key segments.
2. Using social audience analysis to identify the demographics of each segment.
3. Leveraging GlobalWebIndex to create mirrors of each of these audiences, diving deeper into their attitudes and perceptions.

Steps to creating a winning pitch deck

• Do your research on the client.
• Know their target audience better than they do.
• Portray your team’s data-driven edge.
• Include the insights they may not have access to.
• Make your research methodology transparent.
• Bring it to life with relevant case studies.

Key takeaways

Data is the foundation of a winning pitch, not least because it demonstrates a depth of analysis driving the strategy, but because it adds fortitude and authority to the overall messaging.

A compelling pitch goes beyond the data to develop a story that sticks. One that wows the client, brings the proposition to life, and has them asking one key question:

‘How did we ever do it without you?’