Generative AI tools like ChatGPT have leveled the playing field when it comes to creating content. Brands of all shapes and sizes now have the ability to generate assets like blog posts, marketing materials, and eBooks faster than ever before – even without an in-house content team. It’s leading to an overabundance of content that can be hard for the average reader to sift through.
But content saturation is not a new phenomenon.
Long before “ChatGPT” became a household name, the digital landscape was crowded with thought leadership and market research reports alike. Generative AI has only made it harder to stand out from the noise, especially given concerns about plagiarism and unethical data sourcing.
If you use ChatGPT to draft up a post for your website’s blog, for example, how can you be certain that it’s not pulling information from materials authored by your competitors? How can you confirm that the outputs it’s giving you are based on accurate information?
You can’t.
In an era defined by derivative content, brands that put their own unique stamp on the materials they create will be poised to win.
Enter: Original Research
Original research is an effective strategy for building your brand’s credibility. Whether you’re generating data-backed, industry-specific thought leadership or digging into the day-to-day challenges faced by your ICP, original research demonstrates a commitment to understanding your audience.
While traditional market research focuses primarily on your product, its reputation, and the experience of your users compared to your competitors’, original thought leadership research helps connect the dots between the bigger picture and the niche problems that you solve.
Prospects and customers alike want to see that you’re meaningfully contributing to the conversations they care about and that your brand is invested in solving their problems. So show them!
Original research helps you cut through content saturation by putting your brand’s unique spin on a trend. You’ve created an entirely new and proprietary data set that didn’t exist before – and if competitors want to use it, they have to direct people back to your assets.
By keeping your audience interacting with your content, within your sphere of influence, and engaging with your brand, you can better position your business as a leader in your space.
Use Cases
Original research can serve a number of purposes across the entire sales funnel, including (but certainly not limited to):
Media relations: Do you want to catch the attention of target publications? Do you want to increase your brand’s share of voice within the outlets your audience reads? Supplying the media with proprietary statistics can help differentiate your commentary from that of competitors, add color to the stories reporters are working on, and create top-of-funnel brand awareness.
Improving SEO: Materials that associate your brand with the keywords you care about can improve your website’s search rankings and drive more traffic to your pages.
Brand awareness: Many potential customers may not even know there’s a better way to do things until they’ve come face-to-face with your brand. Original research can shed light on common inefficiencies and introduce your audience to solutions they never knew existed.
Odds are, you’re probably already using content for these purposes. If you’ve dedicated time and resources to creating content for your brand, original research can add significant value to future assets.
Before Investing
You’ll need to do your due diligence before making an investment. If original research is in the cards, be sure you’ve accomplished the following:
1. Know your end goal. Are you trying to support thought leadership efforts? Product development? No one survey can accomplish everything, so make sure you’ve honed in on exactly what this study aims to achieve.
2. Establish measurable KPIs. Examples include media mentions, number of leads generated, amount of downloads, etc.
3. Assess your content creation bandwidth. Original research can be expensive, so don’t approach it as a one-off report. How can you repurpose the findings across multiple channels to maximize your investment? Your team should be turning the findings into eBooks, social media content, whitepapers, videos, blog posts, and more. If you need outside assistance to create this content, confirm this early on so you can outsource drafting as soon as the data comes back. Create a workback plan so you can visualize in one place what needs to get done, by whom, and against what deadline.
4. Identify a realistic survey audience. To produce the most compelling findings, especially for media relations, you’ll often want multiple viewpoints. Everyone thinks they want to survey the c-suite, but doing so can swallow up your project budget and may produce a two-dimensional data set (if you’re able to obtain a meaningful number of respondents in the first place). To determine your respondent profile, think about the broadest audience you can target to get accurate and interesting data. If you need to highlight the voice of a specific respondent profile, you can always segment responses in analysis.
5. Look at your budget and time commitment. Balancing your upfront costs with the long-term benefits is all about timing. Reports do best when they’re pitched outside of the media frenzy, so give yourself enough lead time to hit the right media cycle. If you’re conducting a holiday shopping report, for example, you’ll want it finished before the holiday season begins. And don’t underestimate the amount of work that goes into analyzing and designing these reports – production time will vary depending on specific team resources, but a good rule of thumb is to start at least two months in advance of your launch date.
6. Look at what’s already been done. Has one of your competitors conducted a similar study? Does this data exist somewhere else? The research still might be worth investing in – if you want to stand up against a competitor’s report, having your own version of the data can still work to your advantage. But if media attention is your end goal, do your homework ahead of time. Make sure these topics haven’t already been extensively covered to ensure you aren’t investing in old news.
Don’t Go It Alone
Are you ready to invest in original research? Kickstand’s digital services team has you covered. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you get your first report – and all the content that comes with it – off the ground.
