Content Marketing Today

Why You Should Use Low Cost Research as a Killer Content Marketing Weapon

First, use it to understand your buyers and their needs. Then use the results to prove your credibility in the market.

Content marketers realize that understanding what is most important to your current and prospective customers is vital to your success as an organization.  You cannot possibly connect with your customers without that understanding.

Just 10 to 20 years ago, the research necessary to develop that understanding was difficult, complex, time-consuming, and expensive to conduct and to share. All those reasons may well have provided small to medium-size companies with an understandable excuse to avoid their own primary research.

Today, there are no more excuses.  It is fast, easy, and inexpensive to conduct high-quality research and to share it with the world.

Here are some basics to get you started:

Conducting the Research

• You should almost certainly conduct your research online using one of the many excellent and inexpensive research tools available.  I happen to like Zoomerang but there are a number of other first-rate products, including those from Constant Contact and SurveyMonkey.
• All of the major providers offer excellent tutorials to get you started and explain the ins and outs of effective research methodology. Although you may want to hire a consultant, you may be able to do all or most of the work yourself.
• All of the tabulation is automatic and can be exported to spreadsheets if necessary. You no longer need programming or design skills to crank out professional reports.
• If you are surveying your own clients and prospects, from whom you have e-mail addresses, you should not have to spend more than a few hundred dollars to survey as many as several thousand prospects.
• If you need to research a broader universe where you have no e-mail contact information, Zoomerang, for example, has a great service that will give you a guaranteed number of responses for a fixed price. For example, you might expect to pay just $2-$3000 for a return of 200 qualified responses.  That’s a big enough response rate to give you actionable research.
• You can expect to have 90% of your responses completed within a week of the survey.  This compares to a snail mail timeframe of three to four weeks or more.
• All of the major research tools provide easy and automatic reporting tools so that even a novice can generate filters and crosstabs that permit an in-depth understanding of your results.

Sharing the research with the world

• Because you have conducted research that will uncover vital issues among your customers, and perhaps among a much larger universe of business executives or consumers, you have a ready-made news hook.
• A perfect example is the research that Joe Pulizzi recently completed about projected marketing expenditures in 2009. He surprised himself and discovered that content marketing and social media were expected to increase while other forms of marketing would decrease.  Of course, this was important information for Joe in guiding the work that he does with his clients, but it is also compelling information for the broader business universe.  Joe’s research was vital for marketers around the world in understanding what their peers were planning to do in the coming year. As a result, Joe’s press release on the research got phenomenal coverage among bloggers and the business press.
• You can do exactly the same.  Think about what important findings or trends you have uncovered and build a news campaign around them.  At a minimum, you will want to share your results with your prospects to demonstrate how knowledgeable you are about the vital issues that concern them. You can certainly also find one or more news hooks that would interest bloggers and business writers in your field to further reinforce your expertise.
• Well-publicized research will generate a marketing return on investment many times greater than you could expect from traditional advertising– and at a fraction of the cost.

The bottom line: Research is both easier and more powerful than you may have thought. Now you can use it to understand your customers and to let them and the world appreciate your knowledge and understanding of vital issues.

Also, be sure to check out Joe Pulizzi’s complete research study by clicking here.