Your company just published a major report. It took hours of preparation, research, analysis, writing, editing, and formatting. On the day it’s released, a few major media sources report on it—big win! And then…crickets.
Your work deserves a longer life, and while major media coverage is important and exciting, what about all of the people that didn’t read that particular publication on that particular day?
Big reports contain a lot of valuable first-party data, and while most people aren’t likely to comb through a long report, they are likely to be interested in the highlights.
You can extend the life of your report and reach a wider audience, therefore increasing the return on investment (ROI) of the project, by repurposing the content in the report in various ways.
What do you want to achieve?
At the outset of any major report, you ask yourself: what do you want to achieve?
It’s much easier to determine your ROI if you’ve clearly defined what the return looks like. This will also help you decide where to repurpose your content.
For instance, many of our clients plan to use custom PR survey data for various marketing materials such as website copy, webinar content, videos, blogs, and downloadable reports.
By first understanding your objectives and the end initiatives of the market research you'll be able to design a survey that should provide the data needed to accomplish these goals.
💡 The Key Takeaway: The best market research studies are those that start with clear objectives. These will help create the framework of your projects such as survey design, fieldwork, and reporting.
What do you mean by repurposing content?
There are many different media, online and offline, serving many different audiences.
Repurposing content, or formatting it for different media, can help you reach a much wider audience.
For example, a highlighted set of statistics from your market research report will be interesting to other marketers and business owners.
Creating an infographic, a set of graphics, or even a video outlining the statistics can be shared on your blog, on social media sites these audiences visit, and can also be used at in-person or online presentations to summarize your findings.
Find out ways that you can break your content into sections, topics, or themes, and reformat that content for different media.
For example, one survey can be repurposed into various blog posts. In fact, each survey finding could be the theme of its own blog post.
A real-world example of publishing research as content
In a real-world example, our client Flock Freight used survey data to create many different deliverables to create a comprehensive marketing campaign.
One of our favorite pieces was their report revealing new data and actionable insights to help shippers overcome their most pressing challenges.
Site visitors must provide their name, email, phone number, and company name to access the report – providing Flock Feight with a stream of valuable leads.
Additionally, Freight’s Senior VP of Business Development, VP of Operations and Analytics, along with Drive Research’s Project Manager Emily Taylor, presented notable findings from the study during a webinar with hundreds of attendees.
The webinar now lives on their website as gated content – serving as another lead-generating resource.
Lastly, the final deliverables from our content survey included an animated infographic, where our marketing manager partnered with the Flock Freight design team to help bring the data to life.
The interactive visual has become some of the most shared content on social media as opposed to a single image.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Think beyond writing one blog post recapping the results of an online survey. Instead, utilize each survey question to create a full-fledged marketing campaign.
Tell a story
Before you set out to share different pieces of your report on several media channels, ensure that your repurposed content tells a story. Statistics themselves perform very well in terms of engagement on social media, but if readers or viewers don’t understand the context and how the information is relevant to them, it becomes a missed opportunity.
Pick out what’s most important in your report, and tell a story about these main points. What problems do they solve, or what insights do they provide that would be interesting to your audience?
Some content ideas to increase the ROI of market research
Your options are seemingly limitless for repurposing content, especially when it comes to online media. Here’s a breakdown of some different ways you can repurpose your report.
Infographics
We humans are largely visual creatures. We can process visual information much faster and retain that information easier, than text or speech.
In fact, people remember 80% of what they see and do, compared to only 20% of what they read. This is why infographics are so powerful.
They help us understand complex data through the use of imagery and clear navigation (storytelling!).
Develop an infographic from your report that includes the report’s most important data.
Use this to share on social media, in whitepapers or other summaries or shorter reports, on your blog, send it to your email subscribers, and even pitch the story, including the infographic, to other media sites or trade publications in your field.
SlideShare
SlideShare is an online presentation tool, owned by LinkedIn. You can break down your infographic, or repurpose key findings, into a PowerPoint presentation, and then upload that presentation to SlideShare. Slideshare is one of the top 100 sites visited in the world and gives you the opportunity to reach millions of people.
Blogging
A 200-page report contains many topics that be broken out for blog content. Choose chapters, or important topics in the report, and write a series of blogs that you can further share with your audience through social media and email. Include a link to the report with a call-to-action at the end of the article. You can also pitch ideas to other blogs to increase your reach to their audiences.
Whitepapers
If your team has been discussing how to increase your email subscribers, consider writing a whitepaper highlighting key data from your report.
Whitepapers work well as a “lead magnet” (a valuable piece of information that people are willing to exchange their email address for), because when done well, they are valuable sources of information.
Include visual information, such as your infographic, or a set of infographics, in your whitepaper, to help readers skim through for highlights and important information.
💡 The Key Takeaway: There are endless pieces of content brands can use with their research to increase their ROI. A few examples include blogs, downloadable reports, webinars, infographics, and animated infographics.
Develop a content marketing plan for your report
Work with your team to create a plan for how you will repurpose the content from your report. This way, you can roll out pieces of the report on different media channels over time, increasing its lifespan.
Do this in the planning phases, before the report is published, so that your marketing and creative teams are involved from the get-go.
You put a lot of effort into long reports, and they deserve a long life.
Extend the reach and audience engagement of your report by breaking out pieces and repurposing highlights on different media. Get noticed and you could be surprised by the additional opportunities that come your way.
💡 The Key Takeaway: Creating a marketing plan will assure your team is on the same page for how to effectively grow brand awareness with your market research data.
Contact Our Content Marketing Research Firm
Drive Research is a full-service market research company that believes data should be repurposed in more than one way. To improve the ROI of your research it can be extremely beneficial to repurpose it into marketing and sales materials.
Our team of research and marketing professionals can help provide lead-generating data and transform it into a visually appealing deliverable.
Learn more about our services by contacting us today.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
About the Author
This was written by our guest blogger Michael Brown, Founder of nDash.com. The nDash platform crowdsources content ideation and gives brands all the tools they need to recruit, on-board, manage and pay their team of freelance writers.
