By Celine de Courson, EVP, Moss Networks
“Build your brand’s authority” is common–and good–advice for companies seeking to raise their profile and expand their reach. But when you and all your competitors seem to be following the same brand-building playbook, how can you become the clearest voice amidst a sea full of competition? One of the most effective ways to build solid and lasting authority is to conduct original research that’s relevant to your field and share the results with the media and your audience.
Investing in original research is one of the few ways to both create owned media that you can use in marketing and promotions and generate a huge amount of earned media coverage. That can give your brand a clear differentiator against competitors who aren’t conducting their own research–and help your brand experts become the go-to resources for media outlets and event producers looking for insights on your topics.
Plan the research with your customers’ needs in mind
Unlike the kind of internal market research that companies conduct to understand their customers, this research campaign works best if it answers the questions your customers have about their industry. By taking this approach, your company becomes a resource to help your audience succeed, even if they’re not yet doing business with you.
For example, ecommerce fraud prevention enterprise ClearSale regularly surveys online shoppers about their experiences and their attitudes toward different facets of ecommerce, including CX and fraud. The data that it collects is useful to their audience of online retailers, to help them improve their CX and strengthen customer relationships.
Your PR and marketing partner can help you draft the right questions to get clear answers to your customers’ most important questions. Your survey planning checklist should include:
Who are we trying to help with this research? Try to get as specific as possible. For example, are you trying to connect with all ecommerce retailers or a narrower group like US ecommerce retailers in the pet space.
What are the questions this audience needs answered to help their business thrive? Make sure you are focusing on your sector so that you aren’t steering too far away from your wheelhouse.
Who are the target customers of your audience? These are the people you’ll want to target with your survey. Make sure you segment them by demographic, location, position, etc. to reach the right participants.
What tools will be used to conduct the survey and compile the results? There are many tools available – from full programming and analysis to list purchasing. Understanding your needs are important to conducting research and finding the right partner(s).
What’s your timeline for analyzing the data and creating the report? Your timeline will help you determine the promotion plan and campaign.
Your PR partner can help you choose the right survey tools and the most helpful dashboards for visualizing your completed survey data. They can also design the promotional plan that would best suit the timeline, the goals, and serve to maximize the ROI of the campaign as a whole.
Package the original survey results
After you analyze your data and identify the findings that will be most helpful to your audience, it’s time to present that data in a way that’s easy for your customers and the media to use–and in a way that generates excitement and makes the report release feel like an event. A written report with graphics usually serves as the core content for this kind of campaign. A report makes it easy to share all your most relevant findings and methodology with journalists, podcasters, industry groups, and the press. You can also use it to help build your email list and qualify customers by sharing it in exchange for their contact information.
Before promoting your report, package it to generate the most interest possible. Instead of a static landing page and a gated PDF version of your report, you might opt for an interactive pillar page like monthly financing and BNPL provider Klarna’s Shopping Pulse report. Either way, a well-designed, visually exciting PDF version of your report can become a cornerstone of your marketing, pitching, and sales activities related to your research.
Your report package can also include specific CTA language and carousel images for social posts promoting the report and prompting discussions related to its topics. Slides and infographics that visualize your key findings work well for social media. You can also share those visuals with media outlets when you send out your press release about the report, and with journalists who are interviewing your leaders for stories on the topic.
Leverage the findings for your content
Your content team can mine your report and the source data to create blog posts and thought leadership articles focused on specific data points. This approach allows you to extend the value you get from your market survey and to create more authority-building touchpoints with your audience. Granular topics can also form the core of pitches to outlets and event producers for speaking and interview opportunities aimed at specific segments of your audience.
Consider the Workplace Relevance Report from AI services provider Coveo. By surveying employees across age groups about their expectations for digital work versus their actual experience, the company created a dataset that can provide insights for audiences in recruiting and HR, process management, IT, corporate finance, and even compliance. That gives Coveo’s PR team a wide range of outlets to pitch with narrowly focused topics related to the report.
Your research findings may also work as podcast episodes, slide decks, audio notes, themes for live social events, and more. In depth webinars on the report in full or diving into a particular niche of the data results gives your owned media a whole new repurposed life. The more ways you can share your findings, the more options you have for connecting with your audience.
Localize survey results for key markets, audiences, and more
If your business operates in more than one market or plans to expand into new markets, those areas should be part of your survey, so you can establish credibility in each of those countries. You can break out results by country to create unique content in the local language in each of those markets, like the report ClearSale created for the Mexican ecommerce market. This kind of asset can also be a great resource to share with local media outlets and event producers to build relationships and identify interview opportunities.
You can also localize your results to address the needs of specific industries, demographics, or audiences. For example, Verizon’s yearly Data Breach Investigations Report gathers global data into one comprehensive report, and Verizon also creates shorter, more focused reports for retail, manufacturing, energy, finance, and healthcare.
Consistently conduct and leverage new research
One original research report can help your brand gain traction in a new market. Regular research will help your brand capitalize on the momentum you gain from sharing updates and reporting changes that your audience needs to know about. For example, ClearSale asks some of the same questions in every consumer attitude survey, so they can compare the results year-to-year and identify emerging trends.
The ability to find and discuss trends is an asset for reinforcing thought leadership and authority in your space. It can also, over time, turn the release of new reports from your business into an event. If you establish good relationships with members of the media, they’ll look forward to getting updates from you when you have new data to share and perhaps plan coverage around those updates. Over time, this approach can help your brand dominate the share of voice in your space, earn more media coverage, and become a trusted resource for data related to your field and your customers’ needs.
Want to learn more about how market research can help you build brand authority with your customers and the media? Contact us today.