Unlocking PR-able B2B Research

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time, welcome. If you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to hear a Bonus Huddle where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to our B2B CMO community, CMO Huddles. The experts at this Huddle are Curtis Sparrerr of Bospar PR and Becky Lawlor of Redpoint, who share how to make primary research your not-so-secret B2B marketing weapon. We cover everything from aligning research topics with current media trends to targeting the right audience and to conducting high-quality surveys. By the way, Curtis and Becky both came to our Super Huddle in Palo Alto and would you believe it? Michael Nuñez joined Curtis on stage to share how B2B marketers can earn more buzz on VentureBeat. Insights on that conversation coming soon. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alrighty, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers! Fielding primary research has long been a not-so-secret weapon of savvy B2B marketers. You may even find a lot about it in my book. These studies generate favorable press, provide persuasive content for websites, and help salespeople open doors or close deals. During my agency days, we conducted at least 15 such studies, generating millions of favorable PR impressions for a wide range of B2B clients. Given their effectiveness, it’s not surprising that the performance bar is getting higher. Crafting a study that moves the needle today takes serious expertise, which is why we have two experts with us today. Both were instrumental in helping CMO Huddles field and publicize our recent research study on the hidden B2B recession. So first up, I’m excited to introduce you to Becky Lawlor of Redpoint, a boutique marketing firm. Hello, Becky.

Becky: Hello everyone. Nice to be here.

Drew: Where are you this fine day?

Becky: I’m in Salt Lake City, and it is actually a fine day. We had some rain to cool it down.

Drew: Awesome, awesome. And just so you know, we do have another guest, but Becky focuses on and her firm focuses on actually conducting the studies. So in case our audience has to leave early, or we need to persuade them to stick around, can you provide three common mistakes when crafting PR-able research?

Becky: I think the three biggest mistakes that I’ve seen out there is one, not aligning your research topic with media trends and interests when you’re focused on PR. You need to, of course, make sure that it’s something the media has interest in picking up. The second one would be not being careful with your audience targeting. By this, I mean making sure that the people who are answering and responding to your survey are actually the people that could truly answer the questions that you’re asking. I see a lot of sloppiness around, especially with B2B audiences. You can’t just go to SurveyMonkey or Pollfish and expect to find the right people, so you need to be really careful with that. And the third one, which is probably really one of the biggest ones, is a poorly written survey. If your survey is poorly written on a number of different levels, there’s a number of different ways to look at this, but if it’s a poorly written survey, it will result in poor quality or boring data, and it will also probably make it more difficult for you to even get responses in the first place.

Drew: I love it, and all three of those I’ve experienced. So I want to go through each of them one by one. Not aligning your research topic with current media trends and interests – I know if you were a PR firm, you would be thinking about that all the time, but you’re a researcher, so how do you sort of make sure this is tracking with current media trends and interests?

Becky: So I think it’s important when I work with clients, that we understand what their goals are and what types of publications they want to get into if PR is their main goal with this research. Then you need to look at those publications and see what kinds of things they’re publishing or what trends are in their industry. A lot of times, in the B2B space, you may not be looking to get into mainstream media, but you’re looking more to get into your trade pubs and industry pubs, and you need to know what would be of interest to those.

Drew: It’s tricky because if they’re writing a lot about it, they may be interested, or they say, “No, we’ve covered it.” There’s some nuance here, which, of course, is why often you involve a PR firm.

Becky: If they have a PR person, I always welcome that PR firm or their PR team internally to be part of the initial conversations and to provide some input there.

Drew: Let’s talk about the second one – audience targeting. You mentioned specifically that Pollfish is problematic for B2B. Maybe you can go into that a little bit. We have found panels for some of our clients through other providers who do have B2B ones, so I don’t want to diss all panel providers. What’s the problem with Pollfish, for example, or that type of broad-based consumer panel?

Becky: Typically, Pollfish or even SurveyMonkey are really pulling from the consumer-based audience. Now they may be telling you that they can get a B2B audience, but the way that they’re doing that is they are actually asking consumers, “Do you happen to be a marketer?” So you could answer this because you want to survey marketers, or “Do you happen to work in IT?” But typically, and I have experimented once myself with this, and I was trying to get a pretty low number, but if you try to add on any kind of size of company or requirements that they have to be doing certain jobs, because you really want to make sure that they use the type of technology you want to ask about, or whatever it is you want to ask, you will find that they can’t actually find those people. I don’t want to say it’s fraudulent, but the bar isn’t high enough, so people answering aren’t really qualified to answer. That just also goes around how you structure your survey. Even in a B2B panel, which there are good B2B panels out there that Drew you and I both use, you do need to still qualify and make sure that you are asking questions that guarantee you’re getting the right people.

Drew: And one of the things that we always did is make sure you include a verbatim or two, because sometimes you find that the verbatims are really very sloppy, or their English is really poor. And you realize those have to be rejected. So if you are using a panel, you need to be sure that you’ve set yourself up so you can discover the ones that aren’t. And just in defense of Pollfish, we did a global study with them for cell phone users. That was fine because that’s the world, right? Everybody has a cell phone, and everybody has considered trading in a cell phone. So it was a very good way of doing it.

Okay, so we’ve got, getting the audience right because in B2B, you’re trying to say this group of people have experienced this and are feeling this or feeling something different than you would expect, and they’re in your target audience. So it is really important that you get the audience right. And then the third thing that you mentioned is a poorly written survey, and one of my favorites, because again, I got deeply involved in a lot of these studies, is when we’ve seen questions that come back from the client that are like three questions in one, and you have to only ask one question at a time because otherwise, you won’t be able to interpret the results. But talk about other mistakes that folks can make in a poorly written survey. What does that look like?

Becky: I just took one that I saw a whole bunch, and it was a frustrating experience for me. One is just way too many open-ended questions. People think, “Oh, I just want to get their opinions and their ideas.” But you know what? That’s a cognitive load on the survey takers, and they won’t do it. First of all, they’ll probably just put in some short, brief answer, or they’ll just drop out of the survey. So you can ask open-ended questions, but you need to be really careful and thoughtful about when you ask them, why you’re asking them, and limiting those to just a couple. Also making sure that you have a way – and this kind of goes back to qualifying and audience segmentation – like in this one, they were surveying in-house marketers, agencies, freelancers, and then they were asking questions afterwards that didn’t apply. Like I’m an agency – it didn’t apply to me to ask a question around an in-house marketer, but they had no way of branching those so that once I had identified who I was, I wasn’t getting questions that made no sense for me to answer. And the other problem with that is, if you don’t give people options like “none of the above” – I mean in certain cases that doesn’t apply, but there’s a lot of questions where you need to give them an out if it really doesn’t apply or they don’t have an answer.

Drew: Right, you just have to skip those things. When you program them, you program them so if they don’t answer the question, they can’t move forward. If you don’t give them an out – and it’s funny about the open-ended questions, I want to just make sure people are clear on that. I do believe you need them, often leading them to the end, right, so that you’re not, as you called it, cognitive load, which is really important, because there is such a thing as survey fatigue, and as this thing goes on and on, you’re just getting people answering questions just to get through it, no matter if they started with the best intentions. We haven’t talked about length at all. What’s your sort of go-to length these days for B2B surveys?

Becky: I try to keep it in the four to six-minute range. I really don’t like to go above that because the longer the survey goes, the higher the drop-off. And you can still get a lot of data, especially if you’re smart about using your demographics and cross-analyzing – you get way more than the 20 or 30 questions that can fit in that four to six minutes. And I definitely wouldn’t go over 10 minutes. You’re just going to find that even if they’re still in there because of the incentive and answering, likely they’re fatigued and they’re not really answering well towards the end. So I would feel like I couldn’t trust the data at the end, that people weren’t just clicking through.

Drew: Yeah, and these are general surveys. If you’re targeting executives, and first one in my experience, if you’re targeting CMOs – if you don’t hit a number like $250 per thing, they’re not going to participate. And if you ask for more than five minutes of their time, they’ll probably give you the money back. You really have to be respectful of their time. This gets back to the quality of the questions. If they’re stupid questions and you’re going after a sophisticated audience, they’re gonna say, “This is stupid, this is poorly written,” and they’re gonna just exit. Fortunately, I’ve never actually seen that happen in any survey that we did, but I’ve heard that could happen. One of the things that you qualified this for PR-able surveys – we know that these surveys can have multiple values, and I would just want to remind folks of one thing: we often encourage in any of these research to sneak in an aided and an unaided awareness question. So you ask them, “What companies can you name in this category?” Right? So you get the unaided, and then, “Have you heard of any of these companies?” It’s just a great way. And if you’re lucky enough to hit on a survey that you do want to do every year because it adds value, then you can sort of sneak that in. Alright. Becky, last thoughts on the usage of these surveys beyond PR.

Becky: PR is just one point for it, and even in the content realm, I mean, they’re great for lead gen, outside of PR and brand awareness. So I would definitely use them for that. They’re actually great for SEO. Backlinks is another thing. Sales enablement – sales teams can get a lot of value from these and your internal subject matter experts. I’ve had a lot of clients have a lot of success passing the data on to their VPs and executives that then go to trade shows and speaking events and present the data, and it’s worked really well and has been another kind of lead gen pipeline filler for them.

Drew: That’s a great point about using this research both at webinars and at speeches because you’re showing fresh information. Alright. Well, Curtis Sparrer has been waiting patiently. So let’s bring in Curtis, who is self-described as the politely pushy tech and pharma PR agency, or that’s the agency, not you individually. So hello, Curtis. Where are we catching you today?

Curtis: You’re catching me in the bowels of the Chrysler Building. I’m right now in some anonymous corporate park because it’s just charmless and boring and empty. That’s why Bospar has always been a remote-first agency since our founding nearly 10 years ago. But I’m here on a media tour. In fact, right after this, I’m going to have lunch with Michael Nunez at VentureBeat, and we’re going to be talking about a lot of the trends we’re talking about here. And I do want to put up a little bit of controversy in our discussion. I know, just a little bit of controversy, just a touch. So I’m a former journalist. I would get pitches all the time about, “Hey, I did research with 100 to 200 C-levels, blah, blah, blah. You know, this is really exciting research. Why don’t you do a story?” And usually, I would say no, because the big headlines that a lot of people want to get aren’t “Here’s a bunch of knowledge workers, and here’s what they think about any given subject.” Rather, they want to be able to say “Americans feel this way about this” or “Americans are going to do something about that.” They don’t want to just have a very niche audience. And so when you are thinking about research, there is research that is useful as intelligence, and then there is research that is useful for journalists. And whereas a teeny tiny subset of reporters and beats will, of course, go for the kind of niche audiences, overwhelmingly, reporters prefer to be able to say “Americans are going to do this because of that.” And you’ll notice in my structure of talking, I am giving you a sense that they are wanting research that shows something is going to happen, and that is consultative as well. And so I think when CMOs are thinking about PR-able research, they need to have this moment where they think, are you trying to get smart on something, or are you trying to tell a story that’s going to get people excited? Because those are different priorities.

Drew: Got it. I think. Okay, so those are two things. So basically, size matters in some of these cases – the bigger the media that you want to cover, the bigger your study probably should be. So let’s go back to things that folks typically get wrong. And it sounds like one is niche surveys, but give us three other things that you think that B2B marketers tend to get wrong when they’re developing PR-able research.

Curtis: Drew, let me ask you, how family-friendly are we? Because I have two ways of putting my first tip, and one is not family-friendly at all, and one is kind of PG version that I would tell at Sunday school.

Drew: We are all grown-ups – knock yourself out.

Curtis: Alright. Here’s an old expression that my grandmother gave me from deep in Texas where she said, “No one applauds when you masturbate.” But seriously, if you do a research study that validates your space, your company, your vector, no one’s going to care. The PG version, by the way, is “No one’s going to give you a hug if you’re too busy hugging yourself.” So I have had companies resign themselves to the witness protection program when they do a very, very obvious survey about how awesome they are, how awesome the space is. And so no journalist worth his or her salt is going to do that.

Drew: Even though this is supposed to serve the company, if it’s too self-serving and it’s so obvious that everybody sees it, forget it. Okay, that’s one. What’s the next one?

Curtis: You know, the next one is going to be about laddering up to the news of the day. So we did a research study, for example, about the CrowdStrike exploit moment, if you will. And we secured over 1000 stories because it was timely, it was hot, and it was about a story that everyone was writing about. And I think that just goes to show that if you do research about what people are talking about, like the Olympics or about the election, there’s going to be a lot more excitement from the media than if you’re doing a study about something that really no one’s talking about. And there are ways to make something that no one’s talking about talkable, and we could get into that in a bit. But generally, when you’re doing one of these surveys, one of these studies, you need to be thinking about, “Hey, this piece of information, this stat, it may not land, it may not be hot. What are my second and third choices?” Designing a good survey is almost like going and applying to college – you have to have a few safeties back in your quiver. So if the first thing doesn’t work, the second and third might.

Drew: Interesting. So let’s go through that a little bit more. So what I heard was, if you don’t have something that’s newsworthy, don’t expect it to be covered. Which is fair. It’s a fair assessment. It’s often tricky when you’re constructing these studies unless you’re doing something where you’re sort of newsjacking  and you’re hopping on something that is happening in the real world, and you suddenly feel a quick study on top of it. It’s hard to do that, right?

Curtis: I would push back on that because, first of all, we are all in the business of making money – everyone here – and so there is some aspect that you tie into that is newsworthy and is going to meet the journalist dictum of “follow the money.” So we all, for example, probably can tie in to an Apple storyline that’s greater than us. One time for Bospar, one of the things that I got a lot of coverage for my own little agency was about Earth Day. And the point is that we did research about working from home, since we are a remote-first agency, and we were able to get a ton of coverage because we put out the research during Earth Day, and there were a lot of journalists who wanted to cover it. And so you could really think programmatically, much like an editor would, about what stories will be hot. And so right now we’re in August – we’re very much in a back-to-school vibe. That’s going to be topical. You could think about October and Halloween. You could think about holiday travel in November. You could think of Christmas. You could think of all those things. And there are also B2B components for each and every one of these things, like Salesforce Dreamforce – all these things have a big activation that a lot of journalists are going to be writing about and thinking about, and so you can really be creative about the news angle and then ladder it back to your value proposition. Notice I’m walking back to show laddering back so that people can get a real sense of why you need to ladder back to the bigger narratives of the day. It’s very, very, very rarely that a journalist is just going to do a feature story on your research itself. So you have to think about how your research is going to be relevant to other conversations people are having.

Drew: Love that. Great way to think about it. Lots of ways to prepare because you’re trying to fit, as you said, just fit into other conversations of that moment. Not every study does that. Talk a little bit – one more point, I think, on where folks go wrong.

Curtis: Oh gosh, you know, I think the biggest thing I have seen, it’s almost kind of a follow-up to my first bit of guidance. You need to have some killer stats. You need to have some killer information. You need to have things that are bold and brave, that are exciting, and not too cowardly. I have seen so many marketers find their inner Cowardly Lion instead of something exciting and meaningful. And I know one of the things that I was taught when I was a news producer by the people at Fox News, by the way – long story, won’t go into it – but their writing test is basically, you’re telling a story at a bar to someone else. That’s good news writing. And so the idea is, what would you tell someone about? I have called that the killer stat. I have actually written for that in Fortune – take a look at that. The point being is that the more that you can talk about the killer stat – by the way, that’s Fast Company, not Fortune, inspirational thinking there. But the point is, the more you could think of a killer stat, the better it works. I’ve talked to Eric Chemi, who was the former CNBC data reporter, and he said to me that a lot of the times, the killer stat was the thing that you almost knew but didn’t quite have the data to prove. So it wasn’t crazy, it wasn’t out there, out there, but it was definitely something you’ve always wanted to land on. And much like you know, the Supreme Court ruling about porn, where it’s like, “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it,” the killer stat is a bit like that. But I promise you, as you interrogate your survey, you’re going to find opportunities for bravery and things that might scare you just a touch. And I would say that those things are the places of media greatness.

Drew: Like with so much of marketing, if you want to cut through, you’ve got to take some risks or have some courage to ask some questions that are going to generate a newsworthy nugget, as you call it, a killer stat, and that’s not necessarily by being safe. I really appreciate that perspective. 

Drew [AD Break]: This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to B2B greatness, and that donates 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society. Why? Well, it turns out that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot in common. Both are highly curious and remarkable problem solvers. Both prevail in harsh environments by working together with peers, and both are remarkably mediagenic. And just as a group of penguins is called a Huddle, our community of over 300 B2B marketing leaders huddle together to gain confidence, colleagues, and coverage. If you’re a B2B CMO, why not dive into CMO Huddles by registering for our free starter program on CMOhuddles.com? Hope to see you in a Huddle soon.

And I want to get into some specifics, so let’s bring Becky back into the conversation, and let’s start with this notion. And this is interesting – your job, Curtis, is to get really good quality press in the right places. And Becky, you focus on getting good quality research. They’re not always the same, and you could be across purposes, right? Because the PR person wants the research to confess, the research person wants it to be accurate. Talk about how you walk this fine line when we’re developing studies with the intent of getting PR, and I’m gonna start with you, Becky.

Becky: I think that — I mean, Curtis brought up a good point — that you need to have more than one arrow in your quiver, so to speak. You need to have, and I do try to look at what those killer stats might be. And one, like Curtis said: What is a myth in your industry or something that you could bust? You sort of feel like your experience out there has told you that it’s a myth, right? Like everybody believes this, but what you’re seeing on the ground tells you that it’s probably not actually true. And I mean, in B2B, maybe that’s not sex and drugs and exciting things like that, maybe, but it might be like — I had one that was in a DevOps space, and they were pretty sure that people weren’t actually using SaaS tools to do this certain thing. And that actually was a big myth for their audience, and it turned out that was true — that less than 50% were using SaaS tools. And I think it was like almost 40% weren’t even allowed to use SaaS tools for this specific DevOps piece. So, in their industry, that was actually a big stat. But you have to, as a researcher — I’m not willing to compromise and fudge the research either by what I talked about: not having a quality target audience. So then your data is bad because you just have people randomly answering that aren’t really qualified to answer. And the other part of it is being careful not to bias the way you ask the questions because I want real, truthful data. But the backup is having discussed several kinds of dream stats that you would like to have that would be PR-able, and hoping that one of those, or two, or hopefully all three pan out. But having those backup options and being willing to pivot your narrative if you need to — sometimes the data comes back in surprising ways, and maybe the story is not what you thought, but there usually is a story if you’ve done a good job of asking the questions in a way that elicits in-depth responses. And this goes back to the poorly written survey. I’ve seen ones where they just ask on a scale of one to five throughout a whole survey. That gives you nothing because you just got a scale of one to five. But if you’re really asking the questions with thoughtful responses, and you have ways to think about that narrative differently, sometimes you do have to sit back and look at the data and think of a new narrative.

Drew: So Curtis, let’s get that research to confess.

Curtis: First of all, I wanted to hit on a point Becky mentioned about one to five. I mean, when you think about it as a headline — “Americans say they feel five about banking,” for example — no one feels five about anything. That could be a Quentin Tarantino monologue. So I think one of the things that I recommend is to reverse engineer and think, what are the headlines that you do want? Because at least you know where you’re going to land. And I think not enough people do that. And I think the thing is that there is this temptation to think, “Oh, well, the journalist won’t see the actual research. We’ll just give them the press release, and that’s that.” Well, that does not work in top tier. If a journalist at Business Insider is going to do a story, they’re going to say, “Hey, I want to see the raw results.” So you’re going to need to make sure that your research doesn’t look like you’re really leading the witness too much because otherwise that story is going to be dead on arrival. So the points that Becky made about it having to have some efficacy to it, it has to pass a sniff test, is so crucial in making sure that you’re getting the top-tier media that you want.

Drew: One of the things that we’ve always done, and I encourage you all to do the same — there are folks that actually have PhDs in research design and clarity and so forth, who can sniff out the way to do it. And we always would run ours by this individual, just to make sure. Because sometimes someone would say, “You really need to ask the question this way,” and so forth. And we’d say, “Yeah, but that feels really biased and leading the witness,” and we want to check that with legitimate research because you’re right. At minimum, they’re going to look at the questionnaire. They’re going to want to see how you phrase the questions because how you phrase the question matters.

Curtis: They’re gonna look under the hood. And if you are acting all shady about it and saying, “Oh, we can’t possibly give you our raw data,” they’re just gonna walk on by. They are getting 100 to 200 stories a day. So the moment you make them think that you’re not legitimate, they are gonna walk.

Drew: So we’re making sure that the research is crafted in a legitimate, research-worthy way. I know there’s a word for this, Becky, in the science of research design. I’m just blanking on what it is — something metrics anyway. So I wanted to talk about — so we passed the sniff test, and then Becky, you made a really interesting point. And I’ve seen this happen, where the results came back in a very different way, but they were still interesting results. We just had to sort of go, “Oh, okay, so it’s completely opposite of what we thought going in.” However, the research is still really enlightening, and the target audience will find it valuable. And so part of the thing here is, and this is really tricky, but I want to sort of get this out in the open — one of the ways to rationalize a comprehensive study is to recognize that there are multiple ways of using it. Right? We know that we want to get PR, so we know we need to have some questions in there that are sort of compelling and courageous, and so forth. We know that there may be usage of this in a sales presentation. We know that we can probably get value out of it through just a very basic awareness tracking, which also is a really good idea for B2B marketers because if you find out your competitors have 10 times the awareness that you do, you’ve got a problem. Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there so the pressure isn’t on 100%, you know, for Curtis to get a million stories placed on every study that you do. So think about the multiple values of it. And I’m just wondering, as I set that up, am I dooming everybody to failure because you’re trying to get too much out of it? Where I mean, you know, like Curtis, you really only care about the PR value of this thing. If we try to get more value out of it, are we risking that we won’t get the PR?

Curtis: You know, not necessarily. I think if we were to be really thoughtful about this, we would think, “Okay, what’s going to make this research project great?” The super, super tight insight, or the fact that we can say, “Hey, as reported in Business Insider and Fortune and Forbes, these stats that I’m going to now drill down to in my business presentation.” I mean, that will add a lot more validation to whatever you’re doing.

Drew: Interesting, yeah. So you would also mention this notion of, you know, if you have 100 people in your study, don’t expect a lot of coverage. What is a good number?

Curtis: My feeling is most journalists are going to accept slightly over 1,000 for most consumer studies. I would say that they’ll ask you, “Was this study done online or on phone?” There are three outlets that I definitely know don’t take surveys unless they’re done by phone, and that is CNN, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. And granted, there is a lot of scholarship about this, because people would say, “Well, nowadays a phone intercept is rather old-fashioned, is just going to skew old,” and I agree with that, but for the time being, that’s how it shakes out. There are thousands of outlets that will take your research, in terms of those numbers. When I’m doing a consumer-facing study, I prefer over 2,000 just because it is really kind of the industry standard. But you can get by with 1,000. If you’re going to dial it back to just search and titles and stuff, a lot of outlets will tell me they would like 1,000 but they’ll settle for 500 to even 300. The higher up you go in the tier, the less respondents you need. And so if you’re talking about the C-level, you can probably even do two, but I think the overall acceptance is a lot higher these days, considering there are so many surveys. And again, the thing that I would reiterate over and over again is most journalists want to say “Americans feel X.” If you are wanting to do a study where you hit on the C-levels, my recommendation, or a certain title, is first go with Americans, and then contrast that with a smaller group of the executives that you want to highlight, and that way, you’ll have the best of both worlds.

Drew: Interesting. Okay, so Jeff, let’s see. We got a question on thoughts on publishing anonymized benchmark statistics collected from customers as a research study. I mean, you could publish it, but you won’t get — if it’s anonymized, you probably wouldn’t get PR for it unless I’m missing something.

Becky: I think you could use it in some of the other ways that we’ve talked about, but I’ll let Curtis respond to whether or not it would actually be PR-able.

Curtis: So when we’re talking about these surveys and studies, I would say that — and maybe a lack of me not understanding the full thrust of the question — when you’re doing something that is like through a provider like Reputation Leaders, they’re not going to be able to give you the actual respondents. They usually have a panel, and so that part, of course, is already anonymous to the PR people like me who are pitching this story. If, however, there is a situation where it’s impossible for the survey vendor to validate certain aspects of who’s being surveyed and how then it becomes more difficult.

Drew: Right, right. If you can’t say who the people are.

Curtis: To Jeff Morgan’s point, like, yeah, you could survey a group of customers and that will be fine. In fact, one thing I did for ON24 was we surveyed ON24’s customer base about what would be the worst city to hold a trade show or convention because we wanted to promote ON24’s virtual trade shows as a viable solution, and the city that was considered the worst amongst their anonymized customer base was Houston, Texas. And that survey got huge amounts of coverage, especially because the best city was San Francisco. So that’s just an example.

Drew: Right, right. And it’s a really interesting example of a B2B company taking advantage of sort of a broader story of trade shows. And what you’re doing in these research studies is you’re really manufacturing news on top of other news, right? I mean, in an ideal world — was the point that, restating what Curtis said earlier — I’m wondering if each of you could share a quick story of research that you’ve done, and maybe what the killer stat was, or something that really helped push you over the edge. And Curtis, since you came on second, we’ll let you start, but just an example of a research study that you did, and why you think it was so effective.

Curtis: Oh, I adore this study so much. Okay, so I was working for this company that came to me and said, “Hey, we had this press release about us doing a partnership with Hallmark. Let’s get the Wall Street Journal to report on it.” And I said, “That is witness protection program stuff. No one’s going to care about your partnership with Hallmark. Why are you even working with Hallmark?” And they said, “Well, it’s for their e-cards,” and I’m like, “How? Why? What are we doing?” They didn’t know. So I convinced them to find out with a research project, and we did some attitude checks on the e-card industry, and we discovered this lovely, exciting fact that equal percentages of Americans expect dinner and/or sex if they send you an e-card. Anyone get any card this week? You might be up for more than you bargained for. But the point is that was a bold, sexy, funny stat, and we packaged this up as a release, and we got such tremendous coverage that Glamour magazine covered it. Glamour was not on a media list for this client. They never came to us and said, “Well, we really want Glamour magazine. We think Glamour is a huge vertical for us.” But Glamour loved it too. Everyone loved it. And what happened is my client got a deal with Maybelline because of the Glamour placement. And that shows that when you get that killer stat, you get that moment of virality, you get that moment where everyone’s talking about you, and it’s super exciting and super fun. We did a follow-up study, and we went total Freudian here. You know, the first was sex, so we had to go with death. And with death, we discovered that New Yorkers are more likely to shop on their phones during a funeral than anyone else. And that study also got galactic coverage and positioned our client as an expert in the online retail space on a back-end, B2B level. And so I’m not saying you channel your inner fifth grader or channel Freud, but I am saying that there’s sometimes some lightness and kismet in a survey that’s important to getting interesting stats that you didn’t see coming. We certainly didn’t see that coming. And the other thing that I think was interesting, which kind of points to something that Becky mentioned about in terms of results, is if we had just said, “X percentages of Americans expected sex if they sent an e-card” — okay, that’s fine, but because we were able to compare that with another thing, like dinner, we made that so much more relatable and easy to grasp. And so that’s when you’re thinking about the survey responses. And so that’s to this day, still tickles me when I think of it, and all the sort of success we saw from it.

Drew: On behalf of New Yorkers, I’m really not certain I’ve ever actually seen anybody shopping during a funeral. However, I suspect it’s because they’re so discreet. So okay, amazing. Becky, want to share a quick case?

Becky: For me, I have a client who’s in the manufacturing space. Not very sexy – they do testing and equipment for testing and quality assurance. But what we did is we looked at sustainable packaging. There’s a ton of consumer research out there, and this is again where the B2B piece, which is not as sexy, but their goal was really the industry trade publications and places where their target customers would be, rather than that broad mainstream media. When we looked at the industry as a whole, there just wasn’t a lot of internal information about what manufacturers were actually doing with sustainable packaging versus how consumers viewed it and what they wanted. And so we did an in-depth study really about what types of materials they were using, what were the challenges with these new materials, what were the challenges with getting it to pass quality and testing insurance so it aligned with their brand, but it also aligned with the industry, and it had a really great response. They got over 80 media mentions, they got 10-plus long-form editorials, and that was using their internal subject matter expert to take that data and offer different story angles from it. They got in front of essentially 2.5 million readers with that press coverage, and they estimated that was equivalent to them spending about $255,000 on advertising if they had had to pay to reach that many people. And I think as a final kind of icing on the cake for them was within a year, I think about nine months after we published that, Gartner actually cited the research in one of their blogs, showing again that there was a research gap in that industry and they had filled it, and even Gartner had noticed that and alluded to it. So I think there are real opportunities – mine is much less sexy than Curtis’s, but there are real opportunities in non-sexy ways to still make PR work really well for you.

Drew: I just quickly want to note these things don’t have to be that expensive. I mean, I know you can certainly when you’re getting into the thousands, they can get pretty expensive, but they don’t have to be. And I know if some of you are thinking about doing a study, check in with Becky on the cost of doing them – they’re really quite reasonable. A second thing I sort of wanted to mention is your new CMO salespeople are saying, “This is what the customer thinks.” Your customer success people are saying what the customer thinks. It’s quite possible they’re making assumptions that are five years old. You don’t know. And so a wonderful thing to be able to do is to sort of do some quick quantitative research along with qual that will help you get perhaps a new story or at least a PR-able story. So don’t think about this just as a thing that you do in a moment in time, as a tentpole piece of content, which, by the way, it can very well be, but it can also be part of your discovery process early on to get you some fresh thinking on the business.

Okay, we’re running out of time. I wanted to do a couple of things. One, I want to just thank Curtis and Becky. One, for joining us. But two, we worked together on the underground recession story. Most of you have seen that study. Certainly, it’s up on cmohuddles.com. The story we kind of did many of the things that we talked about here. Our study was a little small. We only had 121 CMOs. We learned a lot as a result of it. The good news is, just one placement in one publication resulted in a couple of folks signing up for CMO Huddles. So again, given the cost of that study and given the amount of energy that we put against it, that was a huge return for us – one really good placement. So again, you don’t necessarily have to think about this like Curtis with 1,000 placements. Sometimes one good one can be enough. So thank you both for helping us with that research. Finally, let’s wrap up with – and Curtis, you can start – two do’s and one don’t when it comes to crafting and pitching PR-able research studies.

Curtis: I would say the first do is give yourself time. You’ll be surprised about how many great ideas will come to you in the shower the next day as you talk to your relatives, spouses, friends. So time is of the essence. And so a don’t is don’t rush it. Rushing it is going to be the way that you destroy this. And finally, on one do, and it kind of touches on my point about lightness, is think about some fun that you can have. Because I find that even though it sounds dippy and Pollyanna, when you add an aspect of fun, you are tapping into a viral instinct that all of us have to tell fun and interesting stories, and so do give yourself that permission to have that moment. I’ve seen so many surveys that have had no fun in them, no life in them, and they usually get no coverage too.

Drew: It’s such a good point. I’ve seen that along, and that’s one of the things that we always tried to do – get some fun in. And it could be just a goofy question that you can end up cross-tabbing against. It’s like, you know, people who like spaghetti and don’t like spaghetti. I mean, it could be something completely random, and you could find a fun correlation when you cut the data. The second thing about time, I just want to reinforce that whatever you think it takes to craft a survey and then revise the survey – one of the things we always try to do is test it a couple of times. You find out in the results of running it, particularly if you’re doing a massive study, you need to test it to see if you get some preliminary results, like with 100 people, and go, “Oh, okay.” Because you don’t want to field the study with 5,000 people and then find out you didn’t ask the right questions. So really think about it. One of the things that we would do is encourage all the department heads to take the study before you ask your target to take it because inevitably, your head of sales is going to come in and say, “Why didn’t you ask me about this? I need a question here.” And of course, that’s a different challenge that you have to manage, but it’s worth it. So amen to taking your time and getting a lot of people involved. Okay, Becky, two do’s and one don’t when it comes to crafting PR-able research.

Becky: Yeah, so I would say again, do look at the industry and trade pubs, because if you’re in the B2B space and your target audience is reading those, there is, I think, an easier opportunity to get into those and still reach your target audience. And they also will typically – I do have a lot of surveys where there are 150 to 250 responses because I do think you have to balance sometimes that budget and the number of responses. And I have found, at least at the trade pub level, a lot of journals will take a lower response sample rate, given that it is harder to reach these people than a consumer audience. But to Curtis’s point, if you have the money and you could do it, the bigger the sample, the better. And do make sure you’re surveying that targeted B2B audience. So, as Curtis says, so you pass the sniff test, it feels like you’ve got the right people. But also because I think if you’re going to spend the money and the time doing this, and you’re going to use it for multiple purposes, I just wouldn’t – I mean, I guess it’s like, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to make sure you were getting quality data and talking to the right people. And then finally, mine is, don’t just whip out a survey. Get the help you need if you don’t have survey design expertise, hire that out, even if you’re going to do the other pieces yourself. Find somebody to do it. And as Drew said, test it. We bring in, in addition to my own data analyst and survey designer and programmer and myself, I actually bring in three or four other outside people that review the survey that I know have survey design experience and are just kind of outside people that can look at the questions and say, “Hey, this doesn’t make sense to me,” or “I would want to know why isn’t there an option here to say none of the above” – anything you’ve missed that way. I also have my clients test it and have a couple of their internal folks test it, and then we also do that kind of soft launch of like 10% of responses, we look at it, we make sure. So a lot of testing, and a lot of questions in there, like we have a speed check test question. Sometimes we’ll have a subject matter expert question in there and a couple other ways to check the data quality. So if you don’t know how to do all of that and you don’t have experience with writing a high-quality survey, I highly recommend, if nothing else, that piece you get help with.

Drew: I love it. I’ve got a couple of other things just to add to this. One is we have seen with some of the back-in-the-agency days where we client-fielded a study year one, field it again year two, field it again year three, and each time added a question or two, but was able to show the changes that had happened over time, and that made the story fresh again, and that became a thing. And if you ever just listen to the radio during the holiday season, you will hear PNC Bank, who has been doing the same survey on what it would cost to buy all of the things in “Five Golden Rings” in that song. And they use that as like an inflation index. They’ve been doing that forever, and they continue to get press out of it for the bank. So try to, if you can hit on something that’s important to your industry – that’s one, do it again. Secondly, think about if you can have a subset of your customers. Because if you have that, then you can compare the responses of your customers to the responses of non-customers. You might end up with a story just there alone, both in terms of, obviously, awareness, but in terms of satisfaction or interest or issues. So alright, that’s a lot. We threw a tremendous amount at you both. Thank you, Becky and Curtis. Becky, how can listeners engage with you?

Becky: I’m on LinkedIn, Becky Lawlor, and also my website, RedpointContent.com.

Drew: And Curtis?

Curtis: Hey, find me at curtis@bospar.com. Find me on LinkedIn. Find me at the Bospar website, bospar.com. I’m instantly responsive. I get itchy if I don’t hear back, if I don’t respond to someone in about five or 10 minutes. So I’m quick that way.

Drew: I love it well. And thank you both. And I know Curtis, you are late for lunch with Michael Nuñez, and hopefully, maybe he’ll want to join us for the Super Huddle, right?

Curtis: Stranger things have happened.

Drew: Yes indeed. Alright, thank you both, and thank you Huddlers for staying with us. 

If you’re a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at CMOhuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!