While producing original research can be quite an undertaking, the long-term benefits are worth the effort. By gathering data that is unique and valuable to your audience you will set your company apart from the competition and position your firm as an asset to the community. 

When we say original research we are talking about projects that collect data from primary sources which is unavailable elsewhere. 

With cold hard data, you can make claims that can be backed up with facts. Greater authority in the market enables you to make a much greater impact and influence how people are thinking about current problems or future trends. Original research can also provide short-term gains with increased web traffic. If the community sees value in the work that you have done, they will use the data to support their own content and link back to your site. Case in point, If you are doing any research on thought leadership you will find that many authors writing about the subject are linking to this Edelman Linkedin report that clearly lays out the value and challenges presented by good and bad thought leadership. 

The opportunity to spawn a variety of different types of content from original research is also a great way to generate even more value from your project. Leverage data and insights to produce blogs, industry articles, and content for trade shows and conferences. 

Pick the topic

Picking the right topic is the hardest and most important part of the process. It is helpful to think about research projects as products in themselves. Some topics will have lots of interest but may have already been covered multiple times, limiting the value that you can add. Other topics may not have much coverage but may be too niche and irrelevant to your broader audience. The trick is to find holes in the current coverage or identify an emerging trend the others are just beginning to think about. Are there emerging trends in the industry that you are beginning to see that may not be currently covered with a body of research? 

You also want to collect data that will be valuable to your audience. Collecting data that may be obvious, high level, or unimportant in drive decision-making will limit the value you can provide. 

Balancing the relevance of your research to address current problems or issues with the shelf life, or long term value your work can provide is also an important issue to consider. For example, a state of the industry report in a fast-moving industry will need to be updated regularly where research on strategies to overcome problems may be just as valuable today as in the future. Timing is another important factor. Valuable thought leadership content is no different than a product, it needs to solve a problem for your customers before your competitors do. 

The best way to start a research project is with some preliminary research that surveys your audience and stakeholders asking what issues are most relevant or what questions they might like answered. To get started thinking about about approaches and topics you may want to ask yourself some of the questions on the list below.

  • Are there trends that are overhyped? Can a survey bring the industry greater clarity?
  • Are there terms or ideas that are not well understood in the industry? 
  • How are executives thinking about the future of the industry? 
  • Benchmarking studies – how quickly are changes happening or how quickly are organizations adopting new technologies or strategies?
  • Can you test your vision of the future of your industry?
  • How are companies dealing with certain problems in the industry?
  • What are the different ways that companies are deploying common strategies in the industry? 
  • What results is the industry seeing from a technology or strategy?

Executing the research

Once you have defined the topic you need to figure out how to get people to respond to your survey. You can simply send an email to your existing community or email list or you can engage a research service provider to survey their panel of respondents. 

Surveying your community is a much less expensive way to go but you are not going to get a representative sampling of the industry. You will only reach people that have already engaged with you, limiting your reach and credibility. By working with a survey panel provider you get a quality sample and you can define what segments of the market you want to target. In some cases, you can target decision-makers in a specific industry enabling you to provide much more valuable data.

After all the work that you have done to find the right topic and deployed the resources to put together a panel of respondents, you need to make sure you ask the right questions in the right way. This is often harder than you think. 

The questionnaire you create must be easy to understand and quick to complete. Questionnaires that are confusing and complicated lead to bad data and poor response rates. 

Asking questions the right way also leads to much clearer and cleaner data. A common mistake is asking double-barrel questions. These are questions where you ask two things in a single question. For example, you may ask, “ Are you using X technology and Y service?” If the respondent is using X but not Y they may not know how to answer or may provide an inaccurate response. The desire to get the most data from your survey makes it tempting to go down this path. You may think that you can get more insight from a single question but in the end, you don’t get great data. Don’t do it, you will be sorry when you go to analyze the results.

Tell the story

Data is a great asset in decision making but it is useless without the right context. Positioning the data you collect so it tells a story is key to getting the most out of your research. Just presenting the results of the study will not get the outcome you desire. By leveraging industry expertise combined with analytical skills, a narrative can be created that uses data to support and quantify an emerging idea or trend. This is how your research will resonate across the industry and get people talking about what you have uncovered. 

Promote and leverage

Now that you have valuable insights to share you can build a content campaign around it. You may want to gate the actual report but you can include various data points in blogs and ebooks or create an infographic. You can then link this content to the actual report.  You can also do a webinar to present the findings or discuss your findings at a session at an industry conference.

Now you become part of the conversation and a trusted source of information and have a pile of new leads.