As we dive deeper into an era of innovation, new products and services support customer engagement and experience like never before. To cut through the noise, agencies must fully understand the customer’s ever-changing wants and needs in order to attract, win, and attain new business.
Social media data—or social data—plays an important role throughout the agency lifecycle.
The agency lifecycle and social data
Before jumping ahead, let’s review the agency lifecycle. It begins with sourcing, pitching, and winning new business. This requires an intimate knowledge and understanding of the client, the brand, the customers, the competitors, the industry, the campaign history, and the challenges they face.
Once you’ve secured a client, the next step is campaign and solution ideation, planning, and execution. Measuring and refining those campaigns based on preliminary results is the next step and is key attaining the client. This ensures that your campaign’s on-track to meeting the client’s objectives and key performance indicators. And finally reporting on success gives the agency a chance to impress the client with real business results—and improves chances of getting positive referrals.
To see social data in action, we connected with a national agency that uses uberVU via Hootsuite to pitch and win new business.
The importance of social data in winning new business
Based in New York, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh, Agency of Trillions (AoT) is a new type of agency that’s focused on driving innovation among forward-thinking coders and entrepreneurs (also known as the Maker Movement).
AoT uses social data from uberVU via Hootsuite to research and understand a potential client’s brand, campaign history, social audience, and their industry and competitive landscape, in order to win new business and stand out among fierce competition.
They also use this social data to work better with clients in creating new campaigns, improving and optimizing those campaigns, and measuring and refining them over time.
Recently, AoT used social data to support one of their largest clients in the engineering and manufacturing industry—Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow, or LIFT. Based in Detroit, LIFT is a membership-based research institute that improves lightweight materials for commercial and military defense aircrafts, trains, automobiles, and ships.
AoT used social data to help LIFT:
- Launch and promote its new 100,000 square-foot Innovation Acceleration Center in Detroit
- Announce the brand refresh to LIFT from its original program name, the American Lightweight Materials Manufacturing Innovation Institute (ALMMII)
AoT started working with LIFT leading up to the ceremony and rebrand. Using uberVU via Hootsuite, they looked at social data to understand the industry and the audience’s engagement and awareness levels. By tracking the institute’s former name via #ALMMII hashtag and mentions, as well as by following geo-targeted social messages to target stakeholders and attendees live-tweeting at the event, they could pinpoint the exact moment when the new branding started to stick.
“We unveiled the new brand at the exact same moment at the ribbon-cutting event as on social media—and then we waited,” says Aadam Soorma, the Project Manager at AoT. “By tracking social data, we could visualize the instant that the new name caught on online and measure the sentiment and influence around those who were talking.”
Using uberVU via Hootsuite, AoT tracked large spikes in conversations around the unveiling event. With the help of brand advocates, they could then reach back to engage their audience and media pick-up directly and promote the new official social media handle, @NewsfromLIFT.
Using social data to track campaign success—and win future business
On January 15, 2015, LIFT saw a spike in number of actual mentions from zero to 52 mentions among their specialized audience of buyers and media influencers. They also experienced a huge spike in number of original tweets around the rebrand and event with 150 tweets in one day.
Most importantly, all of the social messages and media impressions recognized the brand name change and used the new official handle and name. Beyond that, LIFT saw engagement from industry influencers, partners, agencies, and competitors, such as the Detroit Chamber of Commerce, Materion Corporation, Add Manufacturing, OSU Engineering, Nano Steel Co., and UT Knoxville.
Aadam and the team behind AoT use uberVU via Hootsuite to create data-driven marketing strategies for clients. In the case of LIFT, they used social data to understand the industry and conversations taking place around ALMMII, measure and optimize the brand overhaul campaign’s performance, and report on real success.