The marketing market is competitive! And agencies competing for big brands’ business are keenly aware of the challenges they face when winning new engagements. This is why NetBase Certification has become an agency selling point in pitches. It’s an industry standard that says so much about an agency’s social analytics expertise. Let’s explore the story it tells and why it acts as a differentiator for these amazing agencies!
Social Analytics Expertise or Bust!
Being able to “flex our social listening capabilities with everything NetBase provides” is something Derek Kopecky, Data Analyst at Doe-Anderson appreciates. “The certification, in general, is an additional qualification that puts prospective clients at ease. They know our level of knowledge and the tool that we are pitching to them, so having those qualifications [for multiple team members] makes a difference.”
They can demonstrate how to use social listening for pre-planning to sort out where they should be focusing their efforts – and then start the planning from there. Inadequately informed agencies use social analytics at the end of the planning, finding data to match preconceived consumer assumptions. And that is not disingenuous, it’s largely worthless. As Derek explains, “we can find data to match everything, but being able to give them that insight-informed idea as a starting point has been really useful.”
Live Dashboards Make a Difference
They’ve also created a few live dashboards for clients that they absolutely love. And this ability led them to the biggest NetBase differentiator that helps propel their agency to the top of a prospect’s list: “One thing that held us back on some other social listening tools was when clients would ask us, ‘Hey, can I see those tweets?’ [informing a selected piece of insight] And we had to tell them, ‘Well, no, unfortunately this dashboard doesn’t give you the capabilities to be able to click in and see that.’ But, with NetBase, we can actually click on that word cloud and see verbatims, and that’s just eye-opening to them. That’s been very, very useful with the live dashboards.”
And Doe-Anderson, as an agency, is seeking to push social listening beyond traditional analytics silos found in most companies, because it’s that valuable agency-wide. And it’s that valuable enterprise-wide as well. And to communicate that importance to brands, they intend to lead by example.
This expertise is so valuable, in fact, that some agencies offer NetBase’s next generation AI-powered social analytics as a service.
Social Analytics as a Service
There’s so much to offer clients when it comes to social analytics – yet so many businesses struggle with making time to develop requisite skills to perform useful analyses. So, it makes sense for an agency to offer NetBase as a Service to these brands, and Tecnos does precisely that!
When we spoke with Junya Iwata, Solution Engineer at Tecnos, he’d been NetBase Certified for close to six months and was already seeing the value in it. And his team certainly does, as it sells NetBase and provides support, consulting and social media analysis to businesses. And their experience has spanned a range of industries and use cases.
During a recent engagement with a broadcasting company, Junya’s team was tasked with “helping define a social media strategy for TV dramas, to maximize the viewer rate of the program.” The viewer rate matters a lot in the Japanese broadcasting industry. Using NetBase, Tecnos “established that there was a high correlation between the number of offers on Twitter posts and the viewer rate.” And they were able to investigate several TV dramas that were broadcast previously and this correlation was evident there as well. “The insights extracted around those offers helped us determine what worked best to successfully maximize the viewer rate for the client.” And this experience should make them an attractive agency for other media entertainment brands to partner with.
Averting a Crisis with Social Media Intelligence
And when that work isn’t keeping them busy, they can look to the beverage industry. Junya’s manager recently worked with a beverage vendor/producer. And using NetBase to explore this vendor’s social media revealed that their bottle lid design on a specific product was off. It had a sharp edge that was cutting customers. Thanks to this intel, the vendor changed the design to a safer one and averted a widespread crisis. And this kind of crisis aversion expertise is extremely attractive to any brand.
NetBase Certification has enhanced Junya’s comfort level in the platform, helping him recognize the most efficient ways to find and communicate out potentially useful insight. This expertise is critical, as social analytics has really become the language of business. And NetBase has become a foundational element of this language, and pushing it to evolve.
The Language of Business is Analytics
Although they haven’t added it to their formal pitch process yet, Joseph Gudino, Paid Social Manager at JUST Media shares that “whether or not we use NetBase has come up. And the fact that we do has allowed us to work with clients that are also using NetBase, and become their ‘counselors’ on it.” Because even when brands have their own ‘social media person’ in-house, when an agency is well-versed in the tool, the ability to give them tips to help them level-up their analyses is attractive to brands.
And so is the potential for analysis. JUST Media uses it for everything from crisis communications to influencer identification. And NetBase helps them answer those last-minute, one-off questions from clients with immediacy that’s always impressive.
Finding Intel Brands Miss
For example, a brand may want to check in to see consumer sentiment around a particular campaign at a given point in time. That’s quick business to sort out for them. Or, as Joseph shared, “we may notice things that they’re missing, like ‘We realized that the way that you are talking about your product doesn’t actually align with the way that your audience talks about your product.’ And then we can provide insight into that audience to help the brand make necessary changes.”
And when it comes to pitching their agency, they “like to go in armed with the best insight and NetBase is definitely good to have.” Joseph can pull up insights from NetBase that round out the industry picture “and if someone has analytics questions right away, we can answer them right away. And with a level of accuracy that’s always impressive. And many times, when using NetBase, we’ve found other things that are happening at that time that are just as important. It’s neat when this happens and we can show what we know about social analytics.”
So, how does an agency go about adding NetBase’s social analytics into its pitch process?
Working It into Your Pitch Process
Social listening is often a big part of an agency’s pitch process. As Aris Tagle, Group Director of Digital & Social Media Analytics at Team One shares, it’s “especially crucial in the last year. Social listening is really a vital part of our new business process. It’s one of the first requests we get internally from our new business team, as social listening is a quick way for them to get a read on the brands involved in the pitch, as well as their competitors.” But social listening mostly lives behind the scenes, which may seem odd, but makes sense.
Because, although many businesses are tech savvy and expect social analytics to be baked in to any agency’s process, a good number of them aren’t yet tuned in to all it has to offer. And on that front, the challenge is two-fold: Demonstrating the value of social analytics to justify the spend; and, convincing them that your agency is the best guide to handle this nuanced job!
And then some industries are just not fast moving. They like to wait, use all of the available insights to see what everybody else is doing, and the response that they’re getting before they can then make a very calculated move of their own. This is when having powerful, detailed visualizations of relevant consumer conversations and sentiment is a game changer. We often forget how overwhelming it can all seem initially, and a picture is worth a thousand words.
And having those visuals helps ease those somewhat hesitant industries into the social analytics world. “We can show them what folks are saying about a brand, whether they’re actually consumers of their product or not,” says Aris. “And that’s the distinction I always make – that these are people talking about your brand, but are not necessarily your customers, which is a whole other data stream.”
Analytically Advanced Agencies Have an Edge
Agencies are making a push to be more analytically advanced with everything they’re doing, and Team One is leading the charge. “The crosstabs, dashboards and segmentation – it’s all just a more detailed level that shows clients that we have a pretty sophisticated team. And that we’re able to use that insight and turn around pretty detailed analysis in a short amount of time.”
The traditional quarterly business reviews one typically sees shared, detailing a brand’s social standing, are still a great offering. But these agencies are making clients aware of the potential they can offer beyond that, amplified by their NetBase Certification status. And being informed by a best-in-class advanced AI platform is a powerful differentiator for them.
Reach out and we can show you more about why this is, and how you can get your agency or brand NetBase Certified as well!
