In October, our team engaged with clients in a variety of ways. The Client Outreach department, consisting of Josip Portner, Dominic Bracco, Molly Germer, Ian Crammer, Suzanne Lindsay, Laura Wontor, Gina Martin, Julie Clement, Denise Florendo, Andrew Souders, Bryan Sheffield, and Craig Oppenheimer, produced some noteworthy updates.
We added 123 companies and 250 people to our database last month. Additionally, we updated 1551 companies, 1548 people, and sent out over 200 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.
Josip is relatively new to the Client Outreach team, and he’s been enjoying learning about the various client types we track. Currently, his role is updating publications, and he remarked, “it’s interesting to explore and see that there are so many kinds of publications doing so many things, from fashion and products, to parenting and how to take care of babies.”
Dominic has also been working on updating publications. He had a couple interesting cases when updating editors who have moved into new positions at other companies. A few of them have made the move to commercial brands like Under Armour, or Scholastic Publishing. We have found that tracking these movements from one company to another is a great way to organically grow our client list.
Molly is in a similar boat as Josip, being new to the Client Outreach team, although she has recently graduated to agencies. This is helping her learn all of the different client types we track in our database.
At the beginning of the month, Ian Crammer was working on agencies, and he had the pleasure of updating all 24 of the Grey Group profiles that we track from around the world. Grey has recently gone through some reorganization, so some offices no longer existed and many of their links were broken. With all of that sorted out, we now have 22 Grey group locations in over 20 different countries.
Suzanne continued in the role of updating people who work for agencies. In this process, she has been seeing a lot of profiles lately where people have retired or left the industry. Specifically, her category of profiles to update include the keyword “fix email,” which are clients that have previously been reached out to via email, resulting in a bounced response. The clients who can be traced to new roles/agencies, and are still in a position making them a viable prospect, are matched up with an appropriate member photographer in a promoted outreach email. Suzanne started adding images in these emails to help create a stronger connection between the client and our member photographers.
Laura just switched back to the Oldest Promoted role and she has been experimenting with attaching images to emails in an effort to get peoples’ attention. Of course, email attachments can be more eye-catching, but they also have a greater chance of getting caught in spam filters. Laura received a number of positive replies from this new approach, including from a photo editor with Habitat for Humanity International saying, “Hi Laura, Thanks for reaching out…I’m familiar with Audra Melton’s work. She is indeed an excellent photographer.”
Gina continues to work on our Out-of-Office replies since there is frequently important information in the automated emails we get when we send out our Mailchimp email campaigns, ranging from cell phone numbers, colleague contacts and whether someone left a company and started a new role somewhere else. Gina commented about how “it’s important to have accurate contact information for our clients and companies,” so that we can more effectively promote our photographers.
Julie is now in the Delete (Clients) role which is responsible for reviewing data records that our other staff members have marked for deltion. She says, “it’s interesting in that I’m calling upon a great deal of knowledge that I’ve gained in my time at Wonderful Machine, so it’s no surprise that this role also has the point-person component to it.” This role involves evaluating people and companies, adding people, and adding companies, in addition to a number of other things, like sleuthing email addresses, LinkedIn profiles, etc.
Denise has been updating and adding brands by industry type. This includes updating records of companies in the Manufacturing Industry in LinkedIn. Some of these organizations are small from an employee standpoint, but have caught our attention because of their large Instagram following (such as EOS Products, Skip Hop, S’well, and Stasher). She also added quite a few companies under the Wholesale Building Materials industry (such as Heidelberg Materials, USG Corporation, White Cap, CRH, Aliaxis, STARK Group, and ASSA ABLOY).
Andrew (and a couple of other staff members) had a call with the senior visual producer and a video producer at Kern. They are a direct marketing agency based in Los Angeles that has recently grown into a full-service ad agency, and they discussed our production capabilities and how we can help with their projects of varying sizes. Andrew has also been researching and connecting with clients who we identify as good prospects for our shoot production services, such as those with the title of executive producer, head of production, director of production, etc., to promote our photographers and share our production capabilities.
Bryan had a capabilities call with a senior producer at Wunderman Thompson, where he learned about their upcoming photo/video needs (including that they’re seeking female photographers and photographers of color for a project for the US Marines). He also coordinated an eBay shoot for Edelman, hiring one of our New York photographers. Our client loved the results, saying, “You are incredible! Thank you!”
Craig produced a shoot for AmerisourceBergen with photographer Justin Clemons. He also bid on a pharmaceutical project, and recommended photographers for Weber Shandwick, and connected with Edelman to discuss a headshot project for their employees.
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!