Insight for indies: how to prove you’re the experts on your audience

With the likes of Amazon presenting their bespoke ad platform, independent agencies are now not only competing with their larger full service counterparts, but with some of the biggest brands in the world.

This, combined with consumers now expecting fully personalized marketing from the brands they interact with, has created new challenges for smaller advertising agencies looking to catch the attention of clients and consumers alike.

So what does it take to make your agency compete?

When it comes to capturing attention, it’s all about how much you know. That’s why leading creative and branding agencies are investing in more granular data than ever before, going far past the what and where to understand the why behind consumer behaviors to ultimately improve the agency’s work. The modern creative agency and creative teams are also applying hard data to their work and the marketing services they offer.

With this information at hand, it’s easy to prove you’re the experts on your audience. Here’s how.

Stand out from the crowd.

The industry shift towards project-based contracts, rather than retained, ongoing partnerships, offers up potential difficulties, but also fantastic opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t be available for the smaller ad agency. This holds true for the digital marketing agency and more traditional design agency alike.

With brands perhaps less likely to stay with the same agency long-term, you have the chance to catch their eye and land that all-important pitch.

And in the highly competitive agency world, standing out from the crowd is everything.

In a crowded market you can do this by using granular consumer insight to create pitches and proposals that will not only resonate with your clients, but shape a solid strategy that’s built on universal truths you can trust.

Make planning easy as pie.

Everything from campaign and strategy to media planning is simple when you know exactly what audiences want and expect from the brand in question.

Once upon a time, agencies had to form educated guesses based on the data they had, but this is no longer the case.

You can now track the real footprints of your target consumers, enabling you to create detailed consumer journey maps that tell you everything you need to know.

This way, the old guesswork is taken out of the equation and replaced with data-driven knowledge that will drive results.

Get the data to back up your creative talent.

An idea can be everything, but knowing it will resonate among your target audience is worth its weight in gold.

When you have true insight into your target consumers, you already know which ideas will cut through and which won’t, enabling you to streamline your spend.

Here are just some of the things you can create using deep survey data to support and generate ideas.

• Tailored consumer insights: Re-contact your target consumers using a single source of extensive survey data to cut to the chase and uncover insights that are tailored to your brief and objectives.
• Detailed consumer journey maps: Consumer journey maps provide a detailed overview of the customer experience and the path to purchase. With granular data, you can create highly usable maps that will resonate with clients and strengthen campaigns.
• Personalized campaigns: Today’s consumers expect personalization – and so do your clients. Use insight that translates a consumer’s behaviors, interests, attitudes and perceptions to tailor your campaigns to the right people, and make your programmatic advertising work as hard as it can.

Squeeze the most out of your time and budget.

Budget limitations can put a strain on any great idea. But when you’re able to get insight into the kind of content strategy and digital experience your consumers like to consume, the channels they interact with most, the interests they share, social media channels they use and the influencers they follow you can put your spend where you know it will work, and cut the wasted resource.

With custom research, this is now not only possible – it’s easy.

By testing your marketing strategy and ideas before going to market, you can make sure the concept you’re developing will have the impact you want. Use it to try out your creative ideas among your target consumers, optimize your positioning and identify any barriers to conversion.

Compete with the world’s top agencies.

When you have the right tools, size doesn’t matter.

Show clients, both potential and existing, that your pitches and ideas aren’t based on assumption, but solid data they can trust, and you’ll be able to stand up against agencies of any size or reputation.

Because when you’re creating great work, it deserves to be recognized.

Brilliant Noise is one indie agency that’s proving the value of data-driven strategies and pitches.

 

Case Study: Brilliant Noise The challenge Getting to the revealing insight. For every agency, the ability to profile a client’s target audiences effectively is essential in acquiring valuable insights. But for David Preece and Nick Siantonas, both Senior Strategists at Brilliant Noise, consumer profiling plays a much more important role across their business. “This data plays an integral part in our customer planning work”, says David. “We chose GlobalWebIndex as it provides the attitudinal and behavioral data we need to backup our ideas. We can then combine it with live social data, conversational data and website analytics.” The action Backing creative ideas with behavioral data. This capability gives the agency the quantitative proof behind their work and allows them to make the case for strategic and creative solutions for prospective clients. “We’ve used this data in several pitches – one recently, for example, where GlobalWebIndex acted as the proof point and core of the pitch,” says Nick. The result Winning new business with data-driven solutions. Using consumer data that went beyond what they were used to, Brilliant Noise: Won new business with unique insight they couldn’t find elsewhere. Saved time and resource with ready access to robust research. Improved targeting with revealing consumer data. Having instant access to unique insight that made them stand out from the crowd meant they could improve their confidence and show off their individuality. “I would definitely recommend GlobalWebIndex to other professionals, it’s really powerful and easy to use”, says David. Download the full case study here.