Learn how and why to use research to write data-driven articles to support your company's marketing, brand, authority and PR efforts.
Regardless of your marget segment, customers crave credible data.
Nothing adds more weight to an article than verified and crdible data—be it a survey of consumer preferences and findings on behavior sumamrized from thousands of email surveys, NIH clicnical reserach papers summaritzed into an easy to read and understand article.
After all, think about your own habits and what you beleive based on the source of the article. Consider which you would believe: “a recent NIH research study showed or a recent Gartner study reports,” vs. “my friend John says…”.
Making your brand a go-to source for legitimate data—whether proprietary or collected or oreviewed and simplified so a reader of any educational level can understand the information — your brand will be reaping rewards for years to come with enhanced credibility, authority, brand recognition, and backlinks.
But how do you go about gathering data, developing a research-based articles and conducting outreach to get exposure for the report?
Gathering Data
Before you begin to collect any data or research studies, you must know what story you’re trying to tell with this information and who your target audiences are.
Without a target audience and plan in place, a research-based artucle could fall short of the goals you set, such as driving backlinks, educating a target audience or generating leads.
Think about the audience: do you know who you want to consume your content?
The answer shouldn't be everyone. You have to know who your target candidates are, and who are your key influencers. Their needs, habits, and interests should drive your strategy.
Have you defined a key messages?
Defining what you want to say is just as important as who you want to reach.
Brands are built on consistency so having a foundation of content clusters is essential. It helps to catalog content to ensure you're focused on a diverse but structured group of content posts both topic clisters and pillar posts. You can cross reference these with your audience, and measure resonance of content.
For example, if you’re target audience is diabetic educators to introduce a new device, lab test or pharmaceutical, it's probably a good idea to create an article that speaks to the market need citing demographics, patient profiles and clinical stduies that support the outcomes of educating patients on the offering. If you lack a clear vision and goal for this article, your final article could flop.
To avoid missteps, stop and ask yourself:
What types of data do I need for this report?
Can you rely on publicly available data? Is it relevant?
Would it be best to dive into proprietary internal data to come up with a compelling story?
Should you commission an opinion survey to obtain the sorts of data you’re seeking?
Coming up with an answer to these questions will help shape your article.
How will the data be gathered?
Do you have the in-house resources and abilities to effectively collect the data and research? If so, can you appoint a lead to tackle the project? If not, you might want to consider outsourcing this work to a freelancer with the skills needed, a content marketing agency or another partner.
And what if you’re contemplating a survey?
Will you do it in a more informal way with a tool like Google Forms?
Will you turn to a more complex survey tool like SurveyMonkey, Typeform or Zoho?
Or will you hire an outside survey company to poll people?
The answers to these questions depend, in large part, on the internal resources you have at your disposal, the time needed to compile the data and analyze it, the size of your existing audience, and how much you have budgeted for research.
Where can I find reliable sources of data?
As noted by HubSpot, too many folks cherry-pick data from “questionable” sources and then cobble together a few statistics that are incomplete or irrelevant. Creating a story from questionable sources of data to build a false narrative.
You want to avoid this at all costs, it will cost you your credibility.
You want to focus your search for data from credible sources, including government agencies, reputable sources inhigh regard and research groups.
So, where can you begin hunting for high-quality data?
Here are ten suggestions: Don’t overlook data from household named brands, either. Companies as varied as Indeed, Zillow, insurance companies and college research labs regularly complete research studies and publish it as their own data — based on surveys and internal data, for instance.
This research can be a valuable addition to the pool of data for your article.
- Data.gov. This website is a massive storehouse of statistics from the federal government.
- BLS.gov. The website for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics posts an array of labor and economic data.
- Census.gov. The U.S. Census Bureau website is a treasure trove of data about myriad subjects, including population, housing, health insurance and small businesses.
- FRED.stlouisfed.org. This site is a goldmine of economic data courtesy of the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
- Medscape. This site offers the latest medical news, clinical trial coverage, drug updates, and journal articles.
- PubMed. Pubmeb comprises more than 33 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
- NCBI. The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information.
- Google Public Data.This database lets you explore datasets about hundreds of topics.
- Google Scholar. Looking for academic data? This is a go-to source.
- Pew Research Center. Pew, a nonprofit organization, represents the gold standard for polling. On its website, you can find survey data about everything from politics to technology.
If you’re generating research from your own audience with a survery,ensure that you’ve developed a consistent set of questions for your survey and that you understand who your audience is so that you can segment them appropriately.
You’ll need to have a large enough sample size for your data to matter, so if you only get 25 respondents to a survey, you’ll need to expand your respondent pool from there (unless your total subject pool is 26 people!). SurveyMonkey has a tool for assessing the sample size you need for achieving statistical significance.
In the end, remember that your reputation rides on the accuracy of the data you use, regardless of whether you’re tapping proprietary data or aggregating data from other sources.
If you’re using proprietary data, comb through it to ensure it’ll stand up to scrutiny from readers.
If you’re aggregating data from other sources, be sure it’s timely and accurate.
Developing the Article
So, now you’ve collected all of this incredible data.
What do you do with it now?
First, examine the data.
When scrutinized as a whole, what story will you be able to put together with the pieces of data?
Will the narrative and story resonate with your target audience?
Is it interesting?
Will it grab the attention of readers, media professionals, social media influencers (every profession has saocail media influencers, includign doctors) and others who’ll be critical to your outreach efforts?
If you’re answered these questions to your satisfaction now think about how you’ll weave the data into a cohesive narrative and how you’ll present the data.
The data can’t stand on its own.
You’ll need to stitch it together with words and images.
The words are the thread that’ll hold the report together.
Data charts, infographics and other visual elements will be a vital part of the fabric of the article; without them, the article will fall short.
Now, think about how you’re going to package the article.
If you’re fortunate to havean internal team that can crunch the data, and then write and design the article, then you’re set. Besure to designate someone to lead the project from start to finish.
If you lack in-house resources, though, don’t wing it.
Instead, outsource compilation of the report to a writer/designer or a content marketing agency.
The last thing you want to do is put out a report that reflects poorly on your brand and fails the minute you hit publlish.
Conducting outreach
Once the report has been compiled, reviewed and proofread, then it’s ready for prime time.
You can’t just publish it and forget it, though.
You’ve got to tell the world that you’ve put together a unique data-rich article.
This is where your outreach work comes into play.
By now, you should have a fairly good idea of where on your website you want to post the report (on the blog, or on its own page, linked to your homepage for example) and how you want to distribute it.
“Your content must be searchable, snackable and shareable in order to reach your audience,” as the Content Marketing Institute says.
One way to share the report is through social media.
To do this effectively, youneed to do this with a strategy in mind.
A key part of this strategy is figuring out where you target audience spends the most time on social media and online.
If it’s a B2C audience, maybe Facebook is a good venue and a promoted poss targeted to your target audience will be enough. Or you add in Native Advertising using Outbrain or Taboola.
If it’s a B2B audience, your social sharing might be more benefficial on LinkedIn, using Linkedin forums and targeted ads. Or maybe its more techincal in nature and Indie Hackers is the better forum.
If your audience is healthcare providers, look fro the forums and similar where they hang otu on line, posting a well researhed, data backed article is a great way to start a dialogue.
Don’t guess at this, do some research to maximize your social shares.
A strong social strategy helps drive traffic to your content and increase your exposure, which is great for your brand and also your link building efforts as it is cited in other articles or linked to as a reference.
As sharable content gets spread around the internet and more people see it, the odds that other websites will link to the page also goes up.
Another component of outreach involves seeking backlinks to your article, map out a backlink strategy.
Reach out to news media outlets that might be interested in reporting on your article and the data contain in it. This could be a local newspaper or TV station, a national cable TV network, a consumer magazine or a trade publication.
Your media outreach strategy will depend on the nature of your data and your target audience.
For instance, a local newspaper might be willing to report on your data if their market is highlighted in some way, but it probably will take a pass if the data is squarely aimed at a B2B audience.
- Determining which backlinks will improve your search rankings and which ones won’t. A site with a high domain authority (the highest is 100) will crank up your search rankings far more than a site with a low domain authority will.
- Identifying sites that link back to your competitors. Ahrefs, MajesticSEO and SEMRush are some of the best-known tools for this research.
- Pursuing guest-blogging opportunities with high-domain-authority sites to highlight your research and article.
- Monitoring mentions and asking for backlinks. If a website cites your report but doesn’t link back to it, contact them to ask for a backlink. Sometimes a site will comply.
If you have an internal team that’s equipped to perform outreach, that’s great.
If those resources aren’t available in house, then you should weigh whether it makes sense to hire a content marketing agency to handle media promotion.
The Rewards of Research
Research-backed articles can be a lot more work to complie, define the narrative and story and write than just writing an article off the top of your head, and you might wonder whether the pain is worth the gain. From my persoanl experience, it is and here are a few useful stats that show the value of data-driven articles:
- 61% of marketers said that their most recent research project had met all or the majority of their expectations (Mantis Research), with successful marketers’ metrics for success including:
-Whether you’re gathering a collection of existing stats for a relevant audience, or developing proprietary research, if you’re able to get your data to the right audience, they’ll soon begin sharing and linking to your stats, helping you gain broader visibility among your target audience.
The increased media mentions will help your credibility climb—enabling you to build your brand authoritya nd reputation as an industry thought leader worth paying attention to.
- Media and influencer mentions (72%)
- Social shares (66%)
- Backlinks to your site (64%)
- Sales leads (58%)
- Subscribers (51%)
- Improved search ranks (51%)
- Invitations to speak or write (39%)
Whether you’re gathering a collection of existing stats for a relevant audience, or developing proprietary research, if you’re able to get your data in front of the right audience, they’ll soon begin sharing and linking to your data, increasing a broader visibility among your target audience.
This enables you to build your reputation as an industry thought leader worth paying attention to.