How to craft successful PR and marketing research – guest post from Sapio Research
By Heloise Proust, Head of Marketing and Communications, SAPIO Research
Today’s world moves fast, so staying relevant to your audience is crucial. Yet, many organisations assume they know what their customers want without ever asking them. This can lead to costly mistakes.
Whether you’re looking to raise brand awareness or enhance your reputation, robust data-backed insights are essential to support your claims and deliver your campaigns with confidence.
Enhancing PR, content and thought leadership with market research
Building trust is particularly crucial in B2B relationships, where decision-makers seek reliable partners. When a company publishes data-backed insights, it positions itself as a thought leader, fostering trust among stakeholders.
Incorporating original research into your marketing and PR strategies offers several benefits:
• Differentiation: unique, targeted insights set your brand apart, providing you with a fresh perspective and narrative to engage your audience
• Media engagement: journalists are more likely to feature stories backed by credible research, amplifying your reach and visibility
That said, research for PR, content and thought leadership isn’t just about adding insights to a press release or creating another whitepaper. These are part of the research outcomes, but market research plays a highly strategic role in shaping your communications strategy for years to come.
What is the value of conducting independent market research?
Because people value evidence-based advice, market research is far more than a simple data-gathering exercise. Conducting independent research via a third party serves as a testament to an organisation’s commitment to transparency and unbiased knowledge.
This can be done through quantitative for statistical insights (e.g. via online surveys), and/or qualitative methods for a deeper understanding (e.g. via interviews or focus groups).
What does it take for market research to drive actual results?
In order to stand up to expert scrutiny, insight-led stories need robust data. Since it’s all about raising awareness and enhancing your reputation, here’s how to make sure your data is fit for purpose:
1. Define a clear route to success
• List your objectives – A successful research project serves a clear purpose. Make it focused, relevant, and aligned with your wider business & marketing goals.
• Decide what comes next – Ask yourself “What comes after the research? What are the outcomes and how are they going to be used?”.
Also consider the longevity of your research and how you’d like to use it in the future (e.g. whether it would be useful to repeat it or track trends and behaviours YoY) as this will have an impact on the questions and recommended research approach.
2. Focus on your audience
Work with a trusted research partner to reach the right people cost-effectively. Research should also be designed with the end audience in mind. This ensures that the findings are applicable and valuable to those you aim to influence. Finally, you’ll want to recruit, engage and reward participants appropriately, according to their profile and level of seniority.
3. Craft the right questions
The quality of data collected highly depends on your questionnaire. Questions should be clear, relevant, unbiased, and tailored to extract meaningful insights that meet your objectives. To avoid questionnaire fatigue and maintain maximum engagement make sure it doesn’t include more than 25 questions.
4. Be mindful of data quality
It’s 100% your research provider’s responsibility to ensure data quality and integrity so you are confident in your next steps, especially in the age of AI.
High quality data helps deliver excellent ROI, however, poor data has the power to ‘break’ your research, making it flat or even unusable.
Common misconceptions surrounding market research
Despite its strategic importance, market research is often misunderstood as:
• Expensive – in reality, your investment will help you optimise future resources and ROI, preventing costly mistakes.
• Time consuming – it will save you more time by eliminating guesswork and obstacles, aligning your strategy with market needs, or helping you get your stakeholders’ buy-in.
• Unnecessary, or overwhelming – the right research partner provides insights that challenge assumptions, uncover blind spots and highlight a clear roadmap to success, supporting creativity and decision-making.
Avoiding common traps
One of them is that research is often seen as a small part of what could be a year-long campaign. Be mindful of these common challenges:
• Narrow targeting:
“My client operates in X space, therefore, this is who we want to speak to”
Our advice is to include diverse perspectives. Ultimately, your products/services impact a much wider audience and their perspective should also be captured (in addition to the ‘decision-makers’ consider the ‘choosers’ and the ‘users’).
• Chasing new headlines:
“In order to get into key media, I need to be coming up with original material”
Not always – you can also design for the future. Year-on-year tracker studies provide unique points of differentiation or ‘newness’ that attract media attention.
• Single question focus:
“I am looking for X headline from this question”
A single question doesn’t need to lead to a single headline. Optimise question types and avoid those requiring a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. That way, you can gain at least two pieces of information from every question.
Even small-scale studies can yield incredibly valuable results!
With the right market research partner and strategic planning, you can achieve a lot more than you think.