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In November, our team engaged with clients in a variety of ways. The Client Outreach department, consisting of Molly Germer, Dominic Bracco, Suzanne Lindsay, Josip Portner, Ian Crammer, Laura Wontor, Gina Martin, Julie Clement, Denise Florendo, Bryan Sheffield, and Andrew Souders, produced some noteworthy updates.
We added 124 companies and 361 people to our database last month. Additionally we updated 1372 companies, 1821 people, and sent out over 350 emails to producers, art directors, creative directors, marketing managers, and photo editors. Below are some examples of the projects our team has been diligently working on.
Molly was focusing on Publications without any employees, but has switched over to Ad Agencies with the same zero employee number. She noted that she’s “coming across a lot of agencies that employ fewer than 50 people,” so she is “often making that judgment call about whether or not they are still a good prospect for Wonderful Machine or if they are too small.”
Dominic spent most of this month working on new contact information for clients at publications, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, ABC News, Road & Track Magazine, and Penguin Publishing Group. He also updated information for clients that were part of A360 Media’s purchase of U.S. assets, which were once owned by Bauer Media. Their portfolio of publications includes Women’s World, SURFER, Snowboarder Magazine, BIKE Magazine, US Weekly, and Men’s Journal.
Suzanne was in the same role of updating agency people last month, although she is gearing up for some new work with consulting. She finds email verifying websites such as Hunter (and others) to be time and life savers as she is “able to quickly verify an email’s validity prior to attempts at outreach communication.” This decreases the amount of bounce back results and allows more time to devote in the match making process between client and member photographer. She also continued to add images to outreach emails whenever possible.
Josip’s current role is updating data records for all of the Publications we track. He found it “cool to find so many publications that specialize in nutrition and fitness,” since he is “really invested in those topics and seeing so many high quality Publications having new articles every week is refreshing.” This has helped fuel Josip’s desire to make sure Wonderful Machine has the best publications within our database.
Ian’s role is updating companies marked as brands in our database, then figuring out how many people work there and finding a good contact at each company. Some brands are hard to find information on like Paqui, a chip brand that has grown in popularity because of its one-chip challenge. Surprisingly, they only have 132 employees and almost no contact info on LinkedIn. After some digging however, Ian was able to figure out that Amplify Snack Brands is their parent company, and all the blanks started to fill in like location and employee contact information.
Laura is working very hard to continue to find ways to improve our “Oldest Promoted” process. Since many people throughout Wonderful Machine’s team go through our database and recommend member photographers, inevitably some of our photographers get promoted more frequently than others. So Laura works through our list of member photographers by “oldest promoted date” and finds appropriate clients for promotion.
Gina has been in charge of all Out-of-Office Replies received. Wonderful Machine tracks these “OOO” emails because there is important information in there — from mobile phone numbers, company updates, and colleague contacts — that we did not have previously. Gina understands how important it is to have accurate contact information for our clients and companies, and says, “We work a lot with photographers and marketing lists and need to make sure our contact information is up to date and accurate.”
November was Julie’s first full month in a new role called “Delete (Clients)”. This involves evaluating a list of Client People that have been marked for deletion and then trashing the unnecessary records from our database, and/or making updates for both the Client People as well as their respective companies. Now that she’s becoming more comfortable making deletes of records that are no longer useful to us, Julie is finding that it’s much clearer what and who is useful to us as a company and by extension to our members. This is helping Julie shift her perspective more and more from the minutiae of minor updates to the big picture of what we in the Client Outreach department do at Wonderful Machine, which ultimately is about offering high quality potential clients to our members. Also, one other thing she has been doing recently is making sure companies share the same logo and specialty keywords across profiles with multiple locations.
In November Denise updated records of companies under the Personal Care Product industry, including JAFRA Cosmetics International and Stila’s New York office. Also, during a call with Bill she realized that Coty is huge and has two divisions: “Prestige Brands” and “Consumer Brands.” Finally, there were a handful of companies which she added under Dairy Product Manufacturing and Defense Space Manufacturing, such as Ball Aerospace and Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Bryan had a call with the Creative Director at South James, an artist rep agency and production company with offices in NYC and Charlotte, NC. The agency was interested in learning about our client list and marketing services, our photographer/director listings as well as our experience as an art production house. We’re looking forward to hopefully working together on some of their upcoming projects as well as further conversations on how we can be a help with marketing their artists. Some of the other projects we are currently bidding on with clients include a multi-day photo/video production for a skin care client, a 3-day photo/video project for an outdoor brand, and a 2-day lifestyle shoot for a clothing brand.
Andrew’s current role has involved updating and reconnecting with specific clients that we’ve worked with in the past who have done significantly costly/high-end work with us. By evaluating these past clients he is making sure that we are still on those client people’s and/or company’s radars, reminding them of the services we offer, as well as asking if they have any current creative or production needs we can assist with. While some of the people have changed roles, or moved onto other companies entirely, it’s still good for us to reconnect since we have a good relationship with them from past projects.
Have questions about how we promote our photographers? Check out our Membership page. Want to know how you can get the most out of your Wonderful Machine membership? Check out our Jumpstart page or just reach out!