Client Personas
Client Services
Company Type
Agency
Department
Client Services
Possible Job Roles
- Account Executive
- Account Manager
- Account Director
- Business Development Executive
- Business Development Manager
What are the key day-to-day tasks of this person?
- Winning and retaining both clients & business for their agency, using research to add credibility to proposals
- Responding to client briefs
- Project design & management
- Data interpretation, reporting and presenting results to clients
What does success look like for this person?
- Winning pitches and impressing clients
- Impressing stakeholders within their business
- Increased brand awareness
What is their single biggest challenge when it comes to research and insight?
- Client services are not research professionals and lack the time & insights required to become an expert in each of their client’s businesses and the challenges they face
- As a result, they need to be confident that they’ve proposed the most appropriate research to suit their proposed solution to the client’s brief, providing useful insight in a credible manner
Behind the Scenes
Company Type
Agency
Department
Behind The Scenes
Possible Job Roles
- Planners
- Strategists
- Analysts
What are the key day-to-day tasks of this person?
- Understanding the client’s business requirements, products, customers and competitors, to research new pitches or plan campaigns
- Writing briefs, that combine market data and product knowledge to help the creative team produce innovative ideas for clients
- Assisting advertising and communications strategies through segmentation, content analysis, understanding brand perception and reputation and campaign-level evaluation
- Branding and advertising at the strategy level
What does success look like for this person?
- Winning pitches
- Successful campaigns with satisfied clients
- Increased brand awareness
What is their single biggest challenge when it comes to research and insight?
- Budgets and investment are limited before the pitch is won
- Achieving a high ROI on media investment and demonstrating to clients that the target market engages with their work
- To create effective advertising, they must develop an understanding of the target audience
- Identify which media reaches which demographic most effectively
- Lack of time and new insight
- Sifting through the data research provides and isolating significant findings, to create a coherent brand/marketing strategy
PR and Comms
Company Type
Agency
Department
PR & Comms
Possible Job Roles
- Planner
- Press Officer
- PR manager
- Communications Director
- Corporate Affairs
What are the key day-to-day tasks of this person?
- Client calls/meetings
- Damage control (e.g. a scandal in the media)
- Creating media content both for themselves & client organisations
- Pitching creative brand campaigns to new business
- Delivering communication strategies & tactical projects to raise client profiles
- Managing and developing PR strategies for their own agency
What does success look like for this person?
- Seeing their work appear positively in the press
- Increased brand awareness through a successful campaign
- Winning new business and pleasing existing client
What is their single biggest challenge when it comes to research and insight?
- Encompassing everything they want within budget. E.g. ensuring a questionnaire reflects what they will end up reporting on, rather than intentional headlines
- Aligning research with the message they want to sell
- Getting a “sexy” story to encourage media pick-up, whilst fighting the MR agency over what can and can’t be said
- Putting questions together to run the research
- They often don’t understand research and will expect it to be conducted both cheap and fast
- Understanding their client’s needs to provide credible, useful insight
- Justifying research spend
Marketing
Company Type
Corporate
Department
Marketing
Possible Job Roles
- Marketing Manager
- Brand Manager
- Communications Manager
- Product Manager
- Campaign Manager
What are the key day-to-day tasks of this person?
- Dealing with supplier agencies
- Product distribution & logistics
- Creating demos and presentations to support the sales team
- Marketing strategy and budgeting
- Delivering compelling product or service communications
- Managing new propositions and generating thought leadership
- Justifying ROI for ad and marketing spend
- Understanding the research need and acting on it
- Measuring campaign effectiveness (whole customer journey from awareness to purchase)
- Overseeing production of external and internal communications materials
- Maintaining the brand identity
- Communicating findings to internal stakeholders & devising future strategy for the brand
What does success look like for this person?
- Increasing brand awareness and positive PR
- Successful marketing campaigns
- Satisfied internal stakeholders
What is their single biggest challenge when it comes to research and insight?
- Balancing the time, budget and quality equation
- Having too many disparate ideas early on, trying to please everyone or pack too much in
- Trying to change behaviours, e.g. trying to acquire new customers from competing brands, or cross selling different products or services to existing customers
- Creating a message that stands out – e.g. ensuring a press release captures the attention of media above the competition
- Does it give them specific, actionable insight that can be used to persuade internal stakeholders?
- Are they prepared to deal with the rapidly changing consumer?
- Selecting a provider that understands the business
Research
Company Type
Corporate
Department
Research
Possible Job Roles
- Planner
- Strategist
- Analyst
What are the key day-to-day tasks of this person?
- Advising on the research needs of the organisation, converting these into briefs and managing agencies to complete the work
- Answering business-specific questions
- Creating and curating stories about the business
- Managing budgets
- Disseminating findings to key decision makers
- Coordinating requests for market and customer information from within the business
- Quality checking projects
- Explaining the knowledge & delivering results to clients
What does success look like for this person?
- Satisfied internal stake holders
- A successful marketing campaign
- Pleasing existing clients and winning new business
What is their single biggest challenge when it comes to research and insight?
- Balancing the time, budget, quality equation
- Delivering high quality insight and research expertise consistently
- Coordinating all projects to make sure they deliver on time
- Reporting research and championing it within the company
- Collating millions of data points in fast moving markets
- Lack of resources, mixed datasets, embedding insights among teams
- Working to extremely tight deadlines
CEO
Company Type
Corporate
Possible Job Roles
- CEO
What are the key day-to-day tasks of this person?
- Developing strategy for the business, driving performance, growth and profitability
- Troubleshooting large problems
- Project management, liaising with stakeholders, communicating with suppliers
- Communications directors are increasingly responsible for sense checking strategy against the social and political context of the business
What does success look like for this person?
- Share price, profit and delivery to stakeholders
- A happy board
- Happy clients
What is their single biggest challenge when it comes to research and insight?
- Ensuring research is delivered to stakeholders’ standards, to budget and on time
- Getting it implicated
- Lack of budget, lack internal buy in to research
- Need hand-holding
- Many stakeholder groups are hard to reach
- CEOs will marginalise the research function if it doesn’t help them
- Understanding where they need to be focusing their attention