As a novel start-up in a poorly-researched space, we needed to validate the problems Whirli is solving. Sapio Research were fantastic partners from start to finish – creative in brainstorming angles, careful in designing the questions, and rigorous in analysing the results. The research brought a wealth of insights, backed by hard figures, for our business decision making and for us to talk about publicly in the press.
Success story
Zeta
Digital Solutions in Retail – Customer expectations and disappointments.
https://sapioresearch.com/blog/2020/7/27/how-to-launch-research-projects-that-deliver-results
Recently I had the pleasure of being invited to participate in eClat’s Cyber Beat podcast series. I’m in illustrious company among the Financial Times regular columnists Jane Bird and Stephen Pritchard. They have been keeping their fingers on the pulse on IT security trends for decades and offered some great insights into what grabs the attention of journalists.
One aspect mentioned by Jane Bird is evidence, facts, figures, and infographics on which to build a story. As Sapio is passionate about supporting businesses every step of the way in making informed decisions & extraordinary headlines we happen to have plenty to say in this area.
To keep things snappy for the listeners though we just covered a few tips and chatted about the reasons behind the success of a recent campaign we worked on together.
The Guardum case study is yet to go up on the website, but we identified a good few reasons that led to a brand to picking up the phone to Sapio to ask if we could do the same for them, raising their thought leadership status.
Guardum a great example of a profile building campaign, forming the basis of a webinar which specially led to sales qualified leads. This is why it was successful:
- It was conducted among the most relevant audience Data protection / GDPRs looking to understand issues around Data Subject Access Requests and spot future trends
- Its specificity of issues was its success. It also identified new insights on the topic
- The survey avoided being self-serving
- eClat understood what would be of interest to their client’s target audience
- We worked in collaboration, with the initial questions drafted by eClat and fine-tuned by Sapio
- The project avoided changing objectives mid-way through, and being unclear on the headlines it was trying to achieve
We discussed the differences between good PR and good marketing research, namely:
- Good marketing research is typically objective in nature and takes a more purist approach to sampling the audience, i.e. questions are designed in such a way that one type of response is not more likely than the other, so completely objective.
- PR research, well bad PR research, is potentially biased because respondents might not be given the response options they’d want to choose. So, for it to be done well it needs to have several potential angles in mind when the questions are designed.
- MR research = exploration, PR = validation
We both agreed that designing a good questionnaire that authentically hits the mark with journalist or people you want to influence is more difficult to craft than it might appear.
Tips on specific aspects concerning question design of comms research can be found here.
The podcast is below.
