In between celebrating Thanksgiving (with way too much turkey) and hosting an in-office pajama day, the team was hard at work doing research and outreach this month!
Our researcher, Sankha kicked off the month working on a Philly brands project for executive producers Craig and Jess. The goal was to promote our production services and member photographers to brands in our immediate vicinity. In addition, Sankha has been hard at work searching the social media accounts of advertising agencies to see if they can yield additional prospects. The hashtags used by the agencies then led us to find advertising and marketing awards festivals that we can routinely scrape for new brand and agency prospects.
Sankha continued his routine set of tasks as well, finding 165 new companies for us to reach out to (45 agencies, 75 brands, 15 publications, 30 production resources) and 423 new contacts. 181 of the new contacts were for new companies, and 242 were added to update existing companies in our database. He has also been looking at web tools and services we can use to make our email lists as accurate and up-to-date as possible.
As the head of our research & outreach team, Julia continued agency and brand outreach for November with a total of 288 outreach attempts and 24 connections. Her focus on outreach is to connect with clients, make them aware of the Wonderful Machine photographer directory, and talk about how we can help with any upcoming projects.
Julia had a production capabilities call with Jerrod McMillin, the executive producer at the Marcus Thomas agency in Cleveland, Ohio. The call was great and Jerrod thoroughly explained the types of clients the agency manages and the types of photography they typically look for. Julia also had a positive call with Victoria Weinreb, creative director at the University of Massachusetts, to speak about member photographers local to the Boston area. After a productive month, Julia is ready to dive into December managing brand outreach.
When Claire wasn’t hard at work training staff members on publications outreach, designing emailers, and finishing up consulting projects, she was making great connections with clients. She added 14 new contacts and 6 new companies to our database, making 72 phone calls to publications and agencies. These calls were followed up by 95 emails resulting in 14 connections. After speaking to Kevin Hayes, the deputy photo editor at Sunday Times, he responded saying:
You know the great thing about your site, and what makes it so brilliant, is that you can just drop right in and find a photographer!
Throughout November, Matt focused his efforts on running portfolio events and getting our portfolio inventory organized and updated. Aside from working on portfolio events, he also was away in the Dominican Republic working on a shoot for a big-name client! Way to go, Matt!
Need help researching clients? Email our project managers.
Have feedback about the clients we’re promoting to? Email Bill.