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The Problem
An enterprise IT software company going through a turnaround needed to get back on the radar of relevant PR outlets and prospective customers.
To jumpstart their inbound marketing activities, they wanted to develop and publish original research that would help showcase their thought leadership, give them an “excuse” to reach out to PR outlets, and jumpstart their content marketing efforts.
The Approach
We developed a survey-based approach to build a thought leadership report that would be compelling to both journalists and professionals in our client’s industry.
Develop The Survey
Out of the gate, we knew we needed to build a survey to capture interesting data points and help our client tell a compelling story about trends in their category. We worked closely with them to understand their unique space and the evolutions they were seeing across the category and among their end customers. This provided the foundational intel we needed to build a survey that could validate and expand upon this internal POV.
Collect Data From Quality Respondents
With our survey ready to go, it was time to collect data. We recruited respondents from our client’s niche IT Operations category, ensuring that they were responsible for directly overseeing or influencing day-to-day operations activities. We captured respondents’ professional credentials to validate that they did, in fact, match the desired professional background.
Looking For Interesting Findings
When it comes to thought leadership research, we are always looking to uncover an underlying story in the data. We of course want interesting individual data points for compelling charts and graphs. But we also want to see the forest from the trees to tell a broader story about the category, and our client’s role within it.
Given our client’s unique IT Operations category, we looked for trends dealing with automation, data proliferation, and cybersecurity to help them build a cohesive story about these areas and, implicitly, how they addressed them.
The Results
Our client reaped several short- and long-term benefits from the development and publication of thought leadership research…
Press Coverage
Our client received 8 articles in speciality industry publications within the first week of publishing their findings report. Additionally, they received invitations to submit original articles to relevant online publications.
Inbound Link Growth
Within three months of publication, the website’s inbound link volume grew by 40% and they earned top-3 organic search rankings for relevant category keywords
Content Production
The original report served as a rich data source for subsequent eBooks, blog posts, and other content marketing materials.
Did You Know...
Publishing original research is a great way to improve your ranking on search engines like Bing. These search engines like to see a lot of links to your website and content, something people will do when citing your report. As link volume grows, search engines will recognize your website’s strength and credibility. This will, over time, lead them to rank you higher and higher.
