Meltwater B : How to Win More New Business for Your Agency, With Social Listening

New business is the life-blood of any agency. Whether you need to replace churned clients, or you just want to grow your business, a healthy new business pipeline is essential.

A social listening platform is great for providing innovative social media services to your existing clients, but can also be a powerful tool for helping you to find and win new business.

Win More Pitches

Imagine walking into every new business pitch armed with rich insights into the client's brand, being able to tell them things about their customers and competitors that they don't already know. Social listening tools enable you to do exactly that.

• Research what people are saying specifically about the brand.
• Do the same for the company's main competitors.
• Find out who the most influential commentators in their space are.
• Look at broader market trends, discover the key discussion topics relevant to the client.
• Use sentiment analysis to understand people's broad feelings about all of these things.

You can do all of this with most social listening tools, but you'll usually only get a snapshot of what people are saying right now. If you use Meltwater you'll also have access to a 15 month archive of historical social data, which means you can look at how these things trend over time so, for example, you could show the client how sentiment towards them has changed over the past year.

Because Meltwater's social listening platform is integrated with our media intelligence product, you can even show prospective clients how media coverage drives social discussions, and vice-versa.

Find New Opportunities on Social

Social listening can also help you find potential new business. Let's say you've just churned a client; you already understand their market, so it makes sense to look for other brands in that space.

With social listening, you can explore conversations around that industry, look for the brands which are participating in those discussions, and get a feel for the ones that seem like they could most benefit from your help. Alternatively, look for the brands which aren't participating in industry conversations at all, and ask why.

Another tactic is to build a hit-list of brands you might be interested in working with, and run a social media listening program on all of them to gain an understanding of which ones face the biggest communications challenges.

If you can build a compelling case for why a business is performing badly in social media, and how that's impacting the brand's reputation, you're well on your way to getting that crucial first meeting, even if they hadn't been considering hiring an agency.

It's important to understand that, even now, a lot of brands have a very unsophisticated approach to social. In many cases they're ignoring it entirely, or if they're using social at all they're only doing the absolute basics, without any kind of social listening or analytics tools. Agencies which have the right tools and skills to offer actionable insights, and creative campaigns based on those insights, can quickly become indispensable, trusted partners.

To learn more about how to create profitable new revenue streams for your agency by offering social media services, read our eBook.