What is an Agency Pitch?
An agency pitch is the advancing of marketing ideas to prospective clients or a new business. An ad agency spearheads this pitching. The marketing propositions are for a service, brand, or product, with the pitch duly representing the marketing strategy of the advertising agency.
The objective is to impress the potential client with new business pitches, creatively showing how to deliver the brand’s message and accomplish the client’s goals. To reliably win high-quality clients, the spiel must grant an excellent first impression. A marketing agency must show they are a perfect fit for the job by speaking confidently, sharing ideas, and authoritatively presenting its services to new clients.
A good pitch takes less time to convey what an ad agency is offering and convincing enough to dissuade the potential client from looking at the competition. Preparation is vital to get a powerful opening statement, establishing an agency’s caliber from the first meeting. A marketing agency must indicate its understanding of the client’s business in the pitch by proposing how it intends to solve the pain points and bettering the existing processes.
How to Create a Pitch Deck for your Agency
A pitch deck is a presentation briefly given to new businesses and prospective clients or investors. An advertising agency provides an overview of its services, products, plan, and growth traction. The marketing agency must explicitly communicate its marketing strategies to their audience, composed of potential financiers, in an exciting way to hook them in and invest in the business. Usually, a PowerPoint form or similar presentation introducing an ad agency to new clients pitching its services while proving its prowess as the best fit agency for their needs.
Purpose to know your potential clients before they become a client
Agencies need to conduct prior research about the target audience to prepare a proper new business pitch. Find out who they are, when they commenced operation, their products and services, and the leaders and head of departments. Agency leaders must put the agency services and costs at the back banner first since it is critical first to understand the new client.
The preliminary research helps in personalizing the agency pitch deck into a big idea, having understood the client business.
Agencies should hold discovery sessions before drawing up a pitch deck to gather as much relevant information as possible about the potential new business. Tailor making agency pitch to the researched information works magic in avoiding many questions about the presentation.
Customize your pitch deck utilizing the collected information.
Prepare a customized pitch for the potential client by relying on the collected data and information. Pitch personalization assures purchase due to client identification with the presented solutions. A good example is avoiding presentations on what they are good at doing. Instead, gear the pitch towards making the process better. For instance, persuade clients prominent in the social media spaces like LinkedIn on how to better it for excellent results and at low cost.
Part of the research is finding out how the clients break down their activity costs to help in recommending low-cost activities as alternatives.
The prospective clients will get a clear picture and rough idea of what they should consider for investment. The pitching agency stands a chance of sealing the deal by presenting acquired solutions from the preliminary research that permitted pitch personalization.
Introduce the marketing agency team members.
During the pitch process, agencies should acknowledge that the potential clients are human, even if they are corporate businesses. Every individual craves a personal touch or relationship; these two elements are the foundations of most sales. Agencies should use the two factors to their advantage in their pitching deck.
Introduce the team you are working with to the new clients as they need to put faces to people who will handle their business on a day-to-day basis.
Since all employees may not physically attend the pitching session, use creative means to introduce the team. Give a short story of the agency beginning while sharing personal experiences of the journey. Insert photos, names, fun facts, and roles of team members in the pitch deck. Introduce account managers and marketers as they are first-line contact people.
Plainly describe the ad agency’s marketing strategy.
Understanding what the client wants and the business model is immensely critical to pitching as it guides PR agencies when drafting its marketing strategy for the new business. You must avoid overloading information but focus only on requisite stuff. You may lose the business from information overload, especially when there is no attention to the global crisis and economic uncertainties. These elements lead to tighter business budgets and less spending.
The agency should present short-term plans with a client’s understanding of your deliverables. Drill the client on how they will spend their money and the reasons for its cost-effectiveness.
Focus on the services you intend to deliver, how and what you’ll measure, and the frequency of reporting results. Differentiate yourself from the competition by providing thought leadership to the decision-makers and relevant stakeholders. Generate creative budget-worthy ideas meant to blow the client’s mind and confirm your knowledge of strutting your stuff. Mention business success-related statements like commitment to delivering on Return on Investment. Such words light up prospective clients since that is what they are seeking from agency partners.
Use your previous work’s case studies.
An experienced PR agency prides itself on having previous case studies and success stories for convincing a prospective client in its pitch deck. Just as you researched the new business, the potential client also seeks to know you. The onus is on you to prove your mettle and trustworthiness by providing case studies in your presentation. Clients look to create agency partners who can handle sensitive information and manage their money wisely.
You stand to generate for your agency new business when you can affirm your trust with money and sensitive information through the existing case studies.
A partner trusted for business development. Reach out to your current clients with success stories to secure permission to use them, their strategies, and results to drive your point home. Back up your point with these case studies, especially from relevant industry examples.
Summarize while permitting client questioning.
A pitch is incomplete if there is no room for questioning or recapping of all matters just covered. You may have convinced your target audience with your catchy presentation. You must remember to give room for questions should there be any.
New business pitches are not full proof, and client thoughts are necessary through questioning to gauge their understanding and anything missed. If the pitching is going on remotely, be creative and send links with your social media profiles like LinkedIn to strengthen your position and get a quick and easy yes from the client.
Institute a follow-up process.
Most PR agencies without marketers allow new businesses to slip through their fingers due to a lack of a proper follow-up system. Agencies should stick to their prospective clients after burning their message to their minds through the pitch deck. The same client receives many pitches from competition in subsequent days.
Ad agencies should station marketers to them with their permission for your message to resonate with them. Share your presentation with the client and sustain sending an email to follow up where necessary. You can also engage the client for a referral as a form of locking them in where their friends are agency partners.
3 ways to Differentiate Your Agency Pitch
The marketing and advertising sector has a penchant for a messy reputation. The creatives work as late as deep in the night and shorten work delivery timelines. Clients conduct agency searches to weed out such digital agencies in the first place. As an astute digital marketing team, you need to differentiate yourself from such retrogressive behaviors. Having a well-designed pitch deck does not reliably win high-quality clients for an agency. Instead, making a great first impression with your pitch does. There is a lot of competition with competitors bettering their game every day. Avoiding generic data and business pitches works wonders in winning your agency new business as it eliminates monotony and elicits interest. There are many unique ways of differentiating agency pitches to beat the competition, customize the message, and win more business.
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Offer your client a real transparency
Real transparency is policy implementation that permits clients and brands access to the agency processes and software. Some inspiration arises from these accesses as clients get to understand the company operations and participate in the behind the scene production.
An agency should be confident in its quality work and methods to offer the new businesses a chance of vetting the same.
Through the pitch, strive to create a bond with the potential clients by giving a free leeway to gauging the agency’s hard work policy, procurement processes, employed metrics, and much more. Clients seldom vet these elements due to unplaced fears by the agencies.
Your pitch should visibly grant access to your work ethics on overtime, empathy generation, collaboration, and guarantees delivered work excellence. Real transparency portrayed in the pitch should address and mitigate any doubt and uncertainty in the prospective client’s mind.
In your pitch, explain the horizons of the functionality of your solutions to the client. Show openly how the advanced solutions will help the client manage their teams better. Open your kitchen doors to the clients to observe what you are cooking, how you are cooking, and allow them to cook, as well with you.
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Create collaborative communication channels
Differentiate your agency pitch by focusing on and emphasizing effective communication. Every business needs effective communication as a non-negotiable factor of operation. Indicate, through your pitch, how you will help the business transform claims and complaints to opportunities through effective communication. Address existing fears that come with time tracking in workflows by advancing software solutions hinged on excellent communication. Agencies should propose the adoption of operating systems that communicate actions and events clearly and provide timely reports. The installed metrics should relay timely reports on completed tasks, backed data, deliverables, and availability of team members.
Agencies should indicate in their pitch how centralized communication will help clients and collaborators open up new business possibilities.
Agencies should permit participation and access of decision-makers in the collaborative communication channels. Pitching that doesn’t allow direct questioning opens avenues for communication misinterpretation. A request for proposal points out that clients seek to re-invent their brands and recapture the market. Decision-makers should, therefore, have unhindered communication channels to articulate this need. There is a need for all stakeholders to own the RFP for clear criteria evaluation and business development. Restrict your pitch to specificities and avoid being over-ambitious, ambiguous, and broad. Focus on the core business issue to be solved progressively.
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Offer them a platform that guarantees operational excellence
All businesses seek to have excellent operational platforms to seamlessly attain their goals. These platforms also help in advancing client relationships with the business without any hiccups. Beat competition by offering operational excellence with a software equipped to explain processes. Pitch a clear and transparent structure adept at stating the invested time and the amount of work for the pitch. Offer optimizations with your platform to the client, such as team modification, team relocation, and proper talent utilization.
You can get the agency new business by engaging CMOs on the needed operating systems meant to enhance client relationships.
A sound digital agency will pitch an all-in-one solution that carries various functions centralized in the system to eliminate a lot of back and forth. Most agencies will come with generic pitches that bear no solutions. You must research and study the system gap of your prospective client and internalize the system operations. Elaborate via your pitch the functionality of the platform, caring to break down the templates in the simplest understandable way possible. Getting a referral from such a client is a simple task, provided they attain the operational excellence that made them look for the agency.
COR improves operational excellence through the automation of various tasks and events. Besides, the running of the company becomes cost-effective in the long ran through the attained operational efficiency. If you are interested in how you can offer your clients a tool that guarantees operational excellence, schedule a call with us.
