If your readers, customers and prospects are anything like ours, they love research. Who isn’t interested in the latest statistics to help keep up with important trends, prepare a business plan or hone a marketing strategy? Unfortunately, bloggers and presenters too often don’t do a good job of using research. We see many posts that quote research, but don’t identify the source, provide information about the methodology, and even misrepresent the results.
Your community relies on your content.
Make it easy to trust.
Marissa McNaughton covers social media statistics for The Realtime Report, our web site focused on social media business best practices, and she’s constantly searching for content that will be of real value to our readers. Marissa’s shared these simple tips for making it easy for your community to trust and rely on the research you quote:
- Cite the source (who commissioned the study, conducted the survey and analyzed the data?) and provide a link to the original study
- Include the study date — data gets old quickly in many industries
- Provide information on the sample that was surveyed
- Be sure to fact-check if you are quoting from a secondary source — they may not have meant to be sloppy, but…
Research presentations:
Make them easy to read & understand.
Modern Media often conducts market research for clients, working with a research house to field larger studies or conducting smaller surveys and polls ourselves. The results are often summarized in a slide deck presentation, whitepaper or both, and become valuable tools for our clients’ marketing and sales teams. We see too many research presentations that don’t include the labeling or information an audience needs to understand the data — follow these tips to make your next presentation one that is easy to read and trust:
- Include full information about the research team, methodology, sample size and source, fielding dates, margin of error, etc. in the deck. These slides can go in the introduction or be included as an appendix
- Include the wording of the question and the number of respondents on each slide that reports data
- Make sure that all data and chart axes are properly labeled
- The slide title and the chart title are not the same: the slide title should give the audience the key take-away; the chart title tells the audience what data the chart is showing
- Tell a story: don’t just present your slides in the same order as the questionnaire; think about the story you’re trying to tell and how to best tell it
- Get a second look: ask your team for feedback — if something looks “off” or simply is not clear to them, they’ll let you know
We’d love to hear from you: How often do you use research in your content marketing? Are there any tips you’d add?
