Research for a Client Pitch

Look around! Count the number of brands that you can find. You will probably end up losing the count.

This is exactly the world we are living in today. We are encircled by innumerable brands around us each competing neck to neck to eat each other’s market share. While advertising and marketing helps in grabbing the eyeballs of the target audience, it is Public Relations which helps majorly in retaining them. Hence, brands these days are hiring consultancies to handle their reputation management. Reputation management helps in creating a positive perception for a brand and that is what the audience will remember in the longer run.

While the brands looking for a right consultancy to handle the reputation management for them, so are these consultancies competing against each other to win a significant account. For this to be achieved, the pitch has to be correct, impressive and up to the mark. Along with this, it has to be backed up by facts that win over the confidence of the potential client. The 5 types of crucial research that a consultancy does before pitching for a brand are enlisted below.

1. Basic Research: The process of a pitch begins with the initial secondary research about a brand. Getting every single detail, big or small, available about the brand is paramount. This information can be extracted from the brand website and articles that it has been mentioned in. Gauge the tonality of the articles, if it is positive or negative. This provides the base of your brand research.
2. Media dipstick: Before pitching for a brand, you need to know what the brand is all about. You might already have an existing perception built around it. Therefore, it is necessary that you seek an expert opinion. Who better than the media who covers the beat that the brand belongs to? It knows the brand and its industry in and out. Conducting dipsticks with the right media convinces the potential client that you have indulged in the right kind of a research.
3. Consumer dipstick: While media is one of the best sources to churn out details about the brand and the industry that it falls in, consumer dipstick serves a different purpose altogether. It enlightens you about the current positioning that it holds in the minds of its target customer. It also helps in the ideation, that is, what you can offer the brand to make it even better. This also helps you at large in suggesting the ideas that would help it expand its audience base
4. Social media analysis: The advent of social media today has opened platforms for the users to keep their honest opinion about a brand or a company. Every word they post on the digital platform about any brand is directly or indirectly a kind of a review. Social media will prove to be a vital aid in analyzing what the actual users or the spectators are talking about the brand. This is the information which wasn’t available so openly few years back. Therefore, make the most use of it.
5. Analyzing the brand’s official social media accounts: Consumers are using the internet like never before today. The enormous amount of data provided by the consumers at cheaper rates has been a cherry on the top of a cake. In times like these, when the digital platform is proliferating in every possible direction, it is imperative for a brand to have its official social media pages. Almost all the brands have these pages now. Cull out inferences about how the brand communicates with its consumers on these pages. Gauge if the messages are reaching the right audience. This will help you understand what is it exactly trying to communicate and if it is working at the moment.

The brand wants to see if your consultancy can offer them a it a value the consultancies cannot. Hence, the more inferences you seek, the more ideas you can keep forward. To which, research is the key!