Numbers and statistics are powerful. You may regularly link to statistics and studies in your website content to strengthen your argument, but have you created your own original research? Research directly from your company can showcase the real benefits of your products/services as well as address the unique needs and pain points of your target audience.
You can easily create original research for your company simply by talking to your customers and your target audience. But, if you want your original research to be strong and have the ability to turn window shoppers into customers, there are a few things you need to consider.
Check out these 4 tips for creating original research to boost your brand.
Choose the topic and goal.
Before you start collecting and creating original research for your brand, you need to choose the research topic and goal. Of course, the main goal of your research is to provide valuable insights to your target audience and customers. But, you also want to decide exactly what you want to discover through the research and how you want to use that information. For instance, do you want to find out the common pain points of your target audience or do you want to find out the results they’re getting from your product/service?
You don’t want to overwhelm people by asking them too many questions, so by choosing a topic and a goal, you’ll keep the research questions more focused and succinct. Therefore, the content you create from your research will be more focused as well.
Decide how to collect information.
Next, you need to decide how to collect information for your research and who you’ll collect it from. Luckily, you probably already have a great list of people to survey; your customers and your email list. Now, you need to choose a way to collect that information that works best for them.
One option is to create an email survey. An email survey is particularly effective if you want to get insights from a specific group of people. For instance, if you want to survey your customers who purchased a certain product, with an email marketing service you can easily segment your email list. Or, to get insights from a more broad range of people, you can create an online survey for your website.
Don’t forget that you probably already have some valuable data you can incorporate into your original research such as your website analytics and data from your live chat conversations for instance.
Add a story to your data.
Many people aren’t interested in reading data, so instead of just offering up the numbers, add a story to your data. Adding a story to your data will help your audience better connect with the information and allow them to picture how they can benefit from your findings as well. A great way to add a story to your data is by creating case studies.
A case study shares the problems of one of your customers and shows proven results of how your product or service helped them solve that problem. For instance, in the example below, the OptinMonster case study shows how Biddyco tripled their email signups in 30 days.
So, reach out to some of your star customers that have gotten fantastic results from your product/service and create a case study about them. Share your case studies on your blog and you’ll be able to demonstrate your expertise and increase conversions through this valuable form of social proof.
Create the content.
Aside from creating case studies, you should also use your original research to create other content. After all, you don’t want to put in all that work only to mention your results and data here and there within website copy. First, consider creating an in-depth blog post to share your research results. There are a number of other types of content you can create with your data as well, including:
- White papers/eBooks
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Slideshows
- Webinars
- Infographics
Research content such as blog posts and infographics are especially effective because other blogs will link back to your research in their own posts and infographics are one of the most shared forms of content online. In fact, infographics can increase web traffic by 12%.
Over to you.
With these 4 tips for creating original research, you’ll be able to wow your audience with cold, hard facts. Remember though, your original research is not just for you to use to sell your products. If you create it with only that in mind, your audience will be able to see right through it. Create original research that is helpful to your audience and you’ll see your conversions start to rise naturally.