Client List Build: Inspired Storytellers

Back in the summer, I built a targeted prospect list build for New Orleans portraiture and documentary photographer Bryan Tarnowski. This list centered around national publications that publish in-depth picture stories in an effort to help spread the greater good.

Bryan has a second business, Inspired Storytellers, a photo and video production house that creates brand stories for companies with social responsibility divisions and corporate sustainability initiatives. His partner, Cara Shih, reached out to me for a new prospect list build after Bryan was satisfied with the one featuring editorial clients.

I was surprised at how many orgs and foundations you came back to me with the list you built recently. I’m wondering if you would be able to help build out a much more extensive list that would include more non-profits and organizations, foundations, and perhaps agencies that tend to work in the social enterprise/do-good world?

You got it!

For this prospect list, Cara and Bryan wanted to focus again on clients with social responsibility and sustainability programs, however, instead of publications, they were in the market for regional brands and agencies. This makes sense because Inspired Storytellers produces beautiful, gripping video documentaries. 

Now came the challenge, Cara wanted to see clients from New York City, New Orleans and the Carolinas. NYC was a piece of cake since there are a lot of smaller boutique agencies there, however, researching non-profits, foundations, and social enterprise type businesses in specific areas of New Orleans and North/South Carolina were more difficult to come by. This required an extensive amount of organic research using LinkedIn, Redbooks, and an NPO database. For a lot of the smaller brands, ones who don’t have many employees on LinkedIn, I had to call and ask for the correct contacts or actually send test emails to make sure those were the correct email addresses. A lot of trial and error came into play here.

As the research moved on, I noticed that many types of the agencies and brands that Inspired Storytellers wanted to target were concentrated in the DC area which makes sense since there are so many NGO’s and government sanctioned programs there. I asked Cara if including DC clients would be okay, and she was completely on board.

The list took nearly a month to turn out 200 targeted prospects and Cara was pleased upon delivery.

Thank you so much for this list! I was able to skim it over and it looks like a lot of great contacts for us.

To get a list of clients tailored to your work, shoot us an email or take a look at our marketing consulting page!