Jeremy Balius: Hi, welcome to Go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode, we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives and industry playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market, as well as growing them within market.

Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to-market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program, or partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work. I’m your host, Jeremy Bayless. Today’s theme is B2B content strategy. I am very excited because I’m joined by Becky Lawler from RedPoint Content, an original research and content marketing agency. She has over a decade of experience helping B2B Tech brands create thought leading content that elevates their market presence and brand recognition.

She’s worked with brands like Adobe IBS, Zapier, and many, many others. This is such a fascinating conversation because she’s using original research to create content marketing strategies that are highly, highly effective, she is enabling brands to advance their message using data that they are either pulling from research that they’re gathering from, prospective customers, from customers or just general audiences, or research that is sourced internally, within the organization to tell meaningful stories.

It’s creating incredible outcomes. Let’s get straight into it.

Hey Becky, thanks so much for coming on the show today,

Becky Lawlor: Jeremy. I’m really excited to be here.

Jeremy Balius: I’ve been really been looking forward to this conversation. I think, uh, what you’re doing, what you’re focusing on, what you’ve been putting out to market, I think is so fantastic and relevant to, to tech executives and founders and leaders. Before we get into all things, , content strategy, could you tell me a little bit about, where you’ve come from and how you’ve gotten to where you are today?

Becky Lawlor: Sure. Um, I started out as a freelance writer. I’ve always been, um, focused on thought leadership, like longer form content, and part of my journey there, um, and I’m in the B2B tech space specifically, um, was any freelancer who probably works in a niche knows that sometimes it gets hard to, for all your different clients, you start to feel like.

They’re still all kind of circling the same industry trends or topics. How do I differentiate this content? So. Honestly, so I, as a writer, am not bored as well as the audience I’m sending it out to. Um, and I think one of the first chances I had to work on, um, an original research type of content was, was working with Adobe.

And everybody probably knows Adobe does a ton of, um, their own original research. And so they gave me a data set and I just like instantly fell in love, um, with that type of content. I was, I found it interesting. I. I was excited that here I was gonna write a piece and nobody else would have, um, this unique information, this data.

I, you know, I really enjoyed kind of doing the data storytelling with it. So that’s what kind of set me on the course to eventually, um, figure out how to do this myself, um, to, because I wanted to be able to shape, um, I didn’t wanna just get the data. ’cause one, one thing I’ve found over time is sometimes you get data.

And honestly, sometimes if it’s not done right, you don’t have great data to work with. You just have some miscellaneous data points or you don’t have interesting data. Um, so I really wanted to be, uh, in the. Started the project where I could help straight, uh, shape the research strategy and the, the narrative that we were gonna tell from the data.

So I actually worked with a mentor who used to run, um, content marketing institute’s, um, annual benchmark report. She’s no longer there, but she did that for years and I kind of just did a one-on-one with her to really train in how to do all these pieces. Um, I, I learned every step, but I’ve brought on like data analysts and survey programmers and things like that to work with me because I feel like it’s important to have people that are.

Really specialized, um, in, in different areas of the, the process, but work closely together about kind of, um, how to bring out the topics and angles from the data with my analysts. So, um, that’s kind of how I got to where I am. So I’ve been running, um, more of the. What I call micro agency RedPoint for about, um, four to five years where I’ve been doing this kind of research for clients, um, specifically.

Jeremy Balius: I think that’s a awesome segue because I. You’re, uh, really enabling organizations to tell narratives and how they are themselves going to market, and advancing, either their brand story or their engagement, but they’re using narratives that are structured from data and feedback.

You in your own research you found that original research published by brands has the biggest impact with B2B buyers. Why do you think that is? What’s, what’s that data telling you?

Becky Lawlor: I think it’s a couple things. One thing is, again, kind of going back to my own origination story, you know, there’s only so much other research out there, so if you’re not doing your own research as a brand, you likely get in this pa, stuck in this where you have to, um.

You’re using the data, the same data and insights as everybody else. So your content isn’t actually differentiated. Your competitors are citing the same stats you are. Um, or sometimes they’ve even seen you’re stuck citing competitors stats because that’s the only one out there and you need it to validate, you know, the same way they, they need it.

So, um, so that’s one piece of it is that. You just simply aren’t offering something differentiated enough for people to care about unless you’re actually doing your own research and really delivering something new to them. But the other thing, um, about that is I think, you know, people wanna know what their peers are doing.

They wanna know, like benchmarking. They wanna know how they’re stacking up, where they’re falling behind, where they might be ahead. I mean, that’s just like a human curiosity thing, right? Like. We’re always comparing ourselves, whether, whether it’s a good or bad thing. I think that’s just innately a human trait.

And I think the other piece is when brands invest in research in their industry, it actually builds, um, a lot of trust. And that was another stat that came out of this, is that, um, I. It builds trust from buyers. They see you as an expert and an authority, uh, in a way that they don’t see brands that aren’t investing.

I think partially like they appreciate that somebody’s, you know, um, doing the research for their industry where that data may not exist, where that knowledge may not be there unless somebody does the research. So that, that is another piece of it as well.

Jeremy Balius: That’s really interesting. I’m gonna focus on that last part first.

The. Eliciting of trust or building trust with your audiences through publishing original, um, data and research, do you think that the audiences recognize that this is original research specifically, are they associating. A tech brand with the data that they’re publishing? Or is it the constant, uh, access to relevant and meaningful data that elicits the trust because they’re engaging with that brand more often on socials and wherever else they’re consuming that data?

Or is it maybe a combination of all of that?

Becky Lawlor: I think it’s a combination of both, but I do think your first point, the answer is actually a strong yes. I mean if you think about like brands like Salesforce, I think they’re a perfect example. You know, they do like their annual state of marketing report or whatever, you know, I think people associate actually the brand Salesforce with investing in that industry research.

Um, and that’s. Part of how they really built that trust, um, in the marketplace is, is through doing that research. And if you think about most companies that have a strong trust in their industry, in their market space, most of them, if you really look at it, are probably doing, um, their own research.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Interesting. And

Becky Lawlor: I, I wanna hit on one quick point there, if you don’t mind, is also, yeah, I think it’s important to say their own research because one of the things that I looked at, and mainly ’cause I was a myth that I believe was out there and I wanted to see whether or not my hypothesis was true or not, is um, I think a lot of brands think that they have to have third.

Party research that it has to come from an analyst firm, a consulting firm, maybe a big academic institution. Um, and I think it’s also a barrier. People, some brands think, well that’s just, you know, those are hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don’t have that kind of budget for that kind of research.

Jeremy Balius: Right.

Becky Lawlor: But actually, um, so one of the questions I asked in my own research of B2B buyers was, you know, how important is it, um, that it comes, that your research comes from a third party or from. A brand like that, it’s brand owned and um, the response was about equal 50%. Just didn’t care one way or the other who did it, but of that other 50%.

A higher percent said they trusted brand owned research, actually more than third party research. And I did have a follow up question to that, just an open-ended one, because I was curious if people did say one or the other. Why. And what I found, which actually makes sense, is, you know, one. Everybody knows that, uh, you know, your buyers aren’t dumb.

They know that you’re, if you’re doing a third party research, they actually know you’re still paying that third party for the research. So they, the folks that said they didn’t trust third parties, they said, well, you know, they’re just getting paid to do what the brand says. And those that. Trusted the brand more said, you know, the, their reputation is on the line here because they’re gonna own the research.

So they felt like they would need to have more credibility. They also felt like the brand themselves actually would know the space, um, better to be able to do better research. Um, so it turned out, um, in the end that if you’re gonna, you know, you can certainly go with a third party. It’s not. Terrible. But I just wanted to break the myth that you have to have a third party.

And I think there’s a ton of advantages actually to, to doing it brand owned and just stamping your brand on it. Um, and, you know, becoming a brand that your audience looks for to do. An annual, you know, kind of big report or even quarterly. That was another thing we saw in the data is that, um, most people actually wanted brands to be publishing original research, quarterly versus, um, annually.

They wanted more, not less

Jeremy Balius: That’s really surprising to me, particularly because I would think, as you mentioned, that a lot of leaders are trying to dispel any sense of bias by bringing in that research firm. It’s really surprising for me to hear that the audiences actually don’t really care, but also at the same time would assume that the biases is the direct result of the commercial terms of that relationship.

Do you see organizations publishing the totality of the research as a supporting measure to, to take that on? Or is it the analysis alone is. Sufficient to, for the reader to, to just dispel any sense of bias at all?

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, I mean, I don’t see a lot of, I don’t really know of any brands that are publishing the research and the totality. One, because it’s a little challenging to do that. Um, in terms of a publication now, for example, I actually had a few people reach out to me privately and say, I’d love to see, you know, the data.

They were just more curious and I was like, you know what? I’ve published the report. I, you know, it’s out there and I’m happy to share the raw data and you can, you know, if you wanted to look at your own industry so you could kind of sort it like that. Essentially cross tab. So I shared, um, that out to a few folks that reached out to me and that allows them to, um.

Not only validate that the data that I said is correct, but also to look at it from their very own unique angle. And one of the things I’ve looked into but haven’t yet done with the client, but I think I’m hoping the right opportunity and the right. Um. Tool becomes available is, I think with ai we’re seeing more of these kind of chat bots where you could actually upload your whole data set into the chat bot and then people can query it.

Um, so similarly, like when you go to publisher report, you can’t, there’s just no way you could share. I mean, when I, when I do the data analysis for clients and I’m calling the cross tabs that I’ve done internally. I’m still often sharing 80, 80 to a hundred, um, PowerPoint slides with them. And then we still have to shape the narrative from there.

And you have to, you, you know, pick and choose what you’re gonna share. But I think it would be, um, great as, um, with especially a, as a tool to do this if it could really, um, serve it up in a very kind of easy way if it could create charts that people can easily understand. And allow them to go in and say like, okay, I have this whole data set, but I am in the healthcare industry and I just wanna know what the data was for just folks that were in the healthcare industry versus broadly.

Or I’m, um, you know, I’m in this role and I wanna know how people in my role responded versus all the other roles that we’re surveyed or whatever it is. Um. So that I think is a really cool possibility. Um, that’s out there. I, like I said, I’ve looked at a few tools, um, but I haven’t actually done that piece with a client yet, and I haven’t really found a tool that I felt was like, was perfect for that yet, but I continue to kind keep an eye on that,

Jeremy Balius: so, yeah.

Yeah. But, with data sets like that, we’re not talking about. Simple little multiple of choice surveys that take someone a couple of minutes. Right. You’re, you’re doing something much more expansive and extensive in these, research pieces. Could you tell me a little bit about the breadth of what the research might seek to undertake?

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, it actually does depend. I do do pulse surveys with folks which are really more like just one to two minute surveys, like 10, 10 ish questions. Um, one, just because. It’s a great way, like if you don’t have a lot of budget and you’re, or you’re just trying to get buy-in for the first time in your organization for this, um, it’s great.

You get to dip your toe in at like a lower cost, lower price point, and you can also get the, the other piece of it is it’s a pulse survey, so if you’re also trying to hit a trend that’s just, is like popped up and you want it quickly. Obviously you could do that kind of survey. Every piece of it’s just a little bit less effort and work so you can move faster and, and get the data back faster and get to market faster.

Um, but most of the research I do is more in depth. It’s typically about 30 questions. They still are only like five to seven minute surveys, and the reason for that is. If you go beyond that, you’re gonna actually, your data quality is gonna suffer even if people complete the survey like a longer one. Um, the human tendency is to start getting really bored with it.

It’s to start like, wanting to be done with it, to start just clicking answers versus carefully, thoughtfully reading and responding. So, um. I feel like five to seven is the right length. Occasionally we might go a little bit longer if there’s a real compelling reason to add a few more questions, but I’d say, you know, if you think you have a 20 minute survey, what you really have is two surveys that need to be run like shorter.

Um, and I think it’s also important as part of this process to really think about, this goes back to understanding your goals, understanding, um, having a story that you’re trying to tell instead of trying to just. The process can get, you know, where you get too many clicks in the kitchen. Everybody’s like, oh, I wanna know this and I wanna know this, and this stakeholder wants to know this.

And you have to step back and say, okay, one, that’s all internal knowledge. What are we doing this for? What does our audience care about? Um, and what questions do we, you know, really you need to put those constraints on you so you get the strongest, most interesting data too.

Jeremy Balius: I like how you phrase that as constraints because, I think maybe there’s a misperception , in content like this, or the pursuit of content like this that we will let the data guide us to, understand what the narrative will be. But you’re really creating a framework. To work within, to understand what the data will say as opposed to, it, it just being more broad, right?

You’re needing to have parameters or guardrails, on what it is you’re researching rather than just keeping it all open-ended.

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, absolutely. Because I have seen actually several times, um, people have come to me after they’ve run the re run their survey and they have their data and they’re like, help me.

And I have to say sometimes, I’m sorry, it’s actually too late to help you at this point because you didn’t start out thinking about the narrative. Um, and I see this a lot of times you need to. If you’re doing it in-house or with a partner, if you’re doing it with a partner. I’ve seen a lot of people turn to like market research firms, which are great at market research, but what we’re doing here is for content marketing.

And so you really, and a content piece is a story, right? It’s a narrative. So obviously you don’t know what the data is gonna say, for sure you have hypothesis, but I always, um, before we. As part of like, designing the survey and before we filled the survey, I create what’s called like a storyline narrative.

So based on what we know about the space, and you know, as, as a brand, you should know your customers in the industry, you should have some, you know, hypothesis that you feel pretty confident about. There may be some, like, you know, when I asked that question about brand owned versus third party, I really didn’t know what the re um.

What the outcome was gonna be. I had a hypothesis myself that this was a myth, but I didn’t know for sure. And so it’s, I think it’s great to put some of those questions in where you’re like, I really don’t know if, which side of the coin this is gonna fall on, but I’m really curious. Um, and it would make a good story, uh, if it falls this way.

Um, if it doesn’t, then I’ll own that and accept that, you know? Um, so I think. You know, you’re thinking about all of that, but you also have to think like, okay, if, if our hypothesis don’t go the way we plan, if we are surprised by something, what’s that narrative? You know, you need to be asking all these questions right at the beginning so that when the data comes back, you do have still a compelling narrative, whether it, um, comes out the way you really hoped it would, or if it comes out totally opposite of what you thought it would.

Jeremy Balius: That’s so insightful, for me what I really picked up on there is the, the true purpose is content marketing. The, the vehicle that content marketing presents is, is brand engagement, trust, eliciting, uh, as, as well as nurturing potential prospects and, um, and a whole other sales enablement type activities.

It’s not really to. Glean information so as to shape our product strategy or to shape our culture strategy or, uh, or to get an understanding of something else that isn’t directly related towards advancing the brand. That’s, that’s really poignant the way that you’ve articulated that.

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, I, I just wanna emphasize, ’cause I see it over and over that it’s really important for, um, marketers that are gonna do this with, if the goal is content, then you really need to make sure that either how you approach it or how your partner, if you’re using a research partner, um, approaches it is from a content marketing perspective because.

Again, how you write those survey questions also matters. Um, people often think that the survey is the easy part, is actually the most crucial and the most difficult part. Um, but again, if you, you know, you have to, you have to think about how to not bias the questions, but you also wanna think about what’s gonna make an interesting headline.

What is gonna be an interesting message? Asking somebody to rate something on a scale of one to five. I had one. Um, they were just a content client I’d had forever, and I don’t know who, somebody else in the organization had some firm do this research. And then they came, the marketer came to me and said, I just got this spreadsheet, this Excel spreadsheet I, and my, I’m tasked to like make content from it.

Can you help me? And I went and looked at the survey that had been run and the spreadsheet and. I was like, and I had my analyst. I was like, look, just do this for free. This is an old client of mine. I’ve had ’em forever, but I don’t, I’m not seeing anything. Can you just run a few of these and see if I’m right here?

And she did. And like every single question was on a scale of one to five. That was it. There was no in-depth kind of responses to elicit more insights, and I was like, you know what? Honestly, everybody answered four or five on your scale. You have no trends. You have no patterns, you have no story. I, you know, I said I, I’m not, I, I can’t, I’m sorry.

You’re kind of in a bad bind. You’re gonna have to go back to your CMO and say, there’s, you paid for all this research and there’s not really anything you can do with it. There’s no way to craft a story out of the way the survey was written. There’s just not really an insight at all in there.

Jeremy Balius: You’re putting words to scenarios that I’ve experienced as well in my past.

So I’m, I’m, uh, grateful for the comradery in this. Um, do, do you also experience scenarios where sales gets involved and wants direct? Questioning that might lead to, uh, conversations, in a sales sense. The reason why I ask is the more stakeholders that get involved in marketing activities to drive.

Direct lead gen or, or to use as an opportunity for outreach.

Is that something that you have to push up against as well to keep the data relevant and meaningful for a content marketing strategy as opposed to direct sales outcomes?

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, I haven’t had sales so much get involved in it, although I, it’s not that, um, I, I actually think that the marketing team needs to be thinking about sales enablement content from it.

So I think they should be having some conversations with sales. I’ve actually seen more often it’s product marketing that, um, maybe starts asking like they want more insights for product. Development. Um, okay. But the way that I set up and work with clients is right from the get go, the one of the first questions I’m asking are like, what, what are your goals with this?

Research, and again, I’m coming from a content, so we’re always working from content, but is it pr, is it lead gen? Is it SEO? Is it all of these equally? You know, um, how are we gonna balance this out? If it’s pr we really wanna think about what headlines, what publications do you really wanna get it in? What do they care about?

What are they. Publishing on what topics, you know, if it’s lead gen, then let’s think about your target audience, what would be most appealing to them, and let’s focus the research. So, so that’s the very first discussion. And then that helps me hold the line and helps me with my point of contact, hold the line with the stakeholders when they start kind of tossing in, well, I wanna know this and I wanna know this.

And I can say, in a 30, like if we’re doing a more in depth one, like a 30 question survey. I can say, yeah, we can, we can give ’em one or two questions. Maybe that’s just internal knowledge. We can, you know, have a few in there just for you guys internally. But we wanna make sure that overall what we’re doing here is achieving our goal and that we’ve got the right questions to achieve the outcomes that we set out.

I’m very outcome and result focused. I, um, you know, I wanna make sure that the clients are getting, are hitting the KPIs that they wanna hit with this. And so, um, but I think when you set those outcomes. At the beginning, it makes it much easier to then go to stakeholders and say, remember, PR is our outcome goal.

So asking about, you know, this product market fit media doesn’t care about that. You know, so you can have one question or two questions if you want, but the other 27 are gonna go, you know, um, to the story we’re building. So it makes it much easier to have those conversations. But again, you might ask sales like, you know.

What I’ll say is like, if you could have one or two dream stats, what would your dream stat be like, what would really help you sell this product? And again, I don’t know for sure that we’re gonna get that dream stat, but then I’m happy again to have one or two questions that push towards their dream stats and we see what happens.

Um, and. If they get it. So.

Jeremy Balius: Mm. Speaking of, uh, content marketing strategy, one of the shifts that we’ve seen, particularly in social media platforms is that. There is a, ever reducing importance to the like and increasing importance to shareability, you know, people resharing content, reposting it, or even moving it into, you know, what some people are calling dark social and sharing content in community forums and um, or direct to dms.

That seems to be holding the most weight right now. Uh, in, in, in organic performance for content. In what ways are people more compelled to share original research?

Becky Lawlor: Um, yeah, it just goes back to, it really is more engaging.

And I did ask this question in my, um, in my own survey of B2B buyers. I asked. I had a whole bunch of different types of content, including like case studies, how to educational, um, type of content versus content that included, you know, some form of original research, whether that was peer insights or, um, survey based.

Um, and, and a bunch of different things. So, and. Overall, anything that included any types of the content that included original research were 2.5 times more likely, um, to be shared according to the respondents that they, they were 2.5 times more likely to share it than other types of content, and they were two times more likely to share their personal data for that type of content than any other type of content.

Jeremy Balius: fascinating. Yeah, I think 2.5 x is, is a pretty meaningful stat to, to pursue original research in your own content marketing. Um, particularly with where things are going. I mean, if shareability is so critical, that seems to be very effective.

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, and there’s just, um, I mean, we haven’t really dug into it, but there’s just so many levels. I, I believe of ROI from one, one piece of research and one project that you can get out of it. Um, it really, to me, and this is part of the reason I went into it, because I just believed in it being, um, such a strong piece of content that could really deliver results from my clients.

Um. Across the board, it helps with SEO and backlinks. Uh, we’ve already talked about like lead gen if you’re trying to get emails. In my opinion, it’s probably about the only type of content, um, these days that people are willing to actually hand over their email address for, um, you know, pr it does the best, it typically does the best out of the different types of contents that you could try to get.

Um. Media interest in. Um, but it’s also great for, like we discussed, like, um, fueling your content strategy for a year. You get so many different topics and angles and now, um, you have the data and the stats to kind of dig into those angles. Um, it’s also great. I’ve had a lot of clients have success of giving the data to like their executive teams and they’ve been able to get pres prestigious, like speaking engagements at.

Top trade shows or events or conferences in their industry that they actually couldn’t get, um, without having original research. Um, so that’s been another kind of place I think a lot of people don’t think about value, but there’s value even on, on the speaking circuit for your executives.

Jeremy Balius: So that’s incredible.

There’s, there’s a sort of. Centralized hero piece of content, the reports, the analysis that, but the wider benefit across all of those channels that you discussed, as well as I would assume in the way that you just described it, a year’s worth of content. It, it, it’s itself gets. I would imagine broken up into bite-sized pieces of communication that can be dripped out over a long periods of time, I assume.

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, and it does well, like, you know, most of my clients will say one, um, if they’ve, if you’ve done research, most, most marketers you’ll talk to will say that yes, it was one of their highest performing assets, if not their highest performing asset. They’ll say that, um, you know, when you break it up, webinars or taking the data and having a webinar, um.

Every client I’ve had has, has, uh, a lot of success with that. Um, they’ve seen really, um, high attendance and response rates to their webinars. Um, and then again, like the social post engagement and all of that tends to be higher when you’re sharing, um, original research in it.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, that’s so compelling. Um, want to ask you, the hottest topic that anybody’s talking about right now is ai, and it would be a shortcoming to not bring it up here.

Um, but your research actually, and we’ll link to your research, uh, in the show notes, but your own research is indicating that. People don’t mind AI generated content. That’s a huge surprise to me. I would’ve specifically thought that if they were asked that overtly that there would be a different response.

But what do you think is driving this responses that your research elicited That it’s not really that big of a deal.

Becky Lawlor: Um, I’ll also admit that I actually totally expected this one to go the other way. So this is a example of where you think one thing and you get surprised by, by the results. And if I had to do it over, I would’ve had an open-ended why question?

Um, on this one, I, I think I was so confident that they would say they didn’t like ai, that I, uh, didn’t think about that. And that’s. Part of doing it, you always learn like, okay, next year or next time, this is what I would do differently. Um, there’s always learnings, but um, when I thought about it based on everything else, um, that my data is showing, what I think that they’re really saying is they just don’t care, essentially how the sausage gets made.

It’s not that they are looking for generic AI content, what they’re saying, because all the other data says. We want in-depth analysis. We, we will, we do wanna see like case studies embedded in the content. We do want, um, original research and we want brands to invest in it a lot, but we don’t really care how you get us quality content.

And this is something like, I’ve seen, there’s a ton of debates, like on LinkedIn, like, oh, you know. And I’ve had, um, subcontractors say to me, well, what ai, you know, play tool are you using to detect ai? And I say like, I don’t really care about that, and none of those are accurate anyway. What I wanna know if I’m hiring you to help write content for me and my clients is can you write quality content?

Is it interesting? Have you put in unique insights? You know, is it very readable? Is it engaging? Like. And I think at the end of the day, that’s what, um, B2B buyers are saying is they just don’t care who’s how you get there. But it still has to be good content. It has to be relevant to them. It has to offer them some insight they didn’t have already.

Um, and I did have another open ended question about, you know, what type of content stands out like. Um, have you had, it was kind of like, have you had content that stands out to you and 50% said yes and 50% said no. And of the 50% that said yes, I said like, what made it stand out? And this was an open-ended question, but essentially came down to like, I had a solution, I had a problem, and this.

Piece of content actually had a solution that worked, or, you know, they had unique insights for my industry or, uh, you know, this case study was exactly solving the same thing I have. So it was very much about relevancy and new insights that they didn’t have. And I, and I think that’s at the end of the day and how it gets written up, whether that’s AI helping you write it or you’re writing it human only, I don’t think that the audience cares about.

Jeremy Balius: I’m so surprised that that’s the outcome. But, uh, here we are. It’s, it’s a new, new era. I think, if I’m a leader looking to elevate our content marketing into either driving more effectiveness or achieve other outcomes, in what ways are you advising them to start thinking about research in, uh, in terms of relevance, in terms of practicality, in terms of opportunity?

Where do you start that conversation?

Becky Lawlor: Um, yeah, I think if I understand the question correctly, I mean, I start the conversation that if they’re, if they haven’t done it ever, um, if they’ve done it, they probably have know that it’s effective. But then I think I. For a lot of people. Um, I think the elephant in the room is like, oh, but it’s expensive.

I don’t have the budget. I think there’s a lot of marketers say like, I know research works and I, you know, I’d like to invest in it, but I don’t have the budget. And to that, I would say there’s a lot of different ways to do research. We, we’ve been talking about survey-based research here, but it’s not the only way to get original insights.

Um, if you have internal data, like, um. I have a client who’s in call tracking, so they have internal call tracking data and we’ve anonymized that. Or I have a cybersecurity client. They are collecting kind of, um, data around cybersecurity threats. They can then turn that around anonymized and share. And again, that comes back to like the benchmarking.

They can share, um, different benchmarks that. Companies in their industry can look at and say like, okay, this is where, um, like if you were on the call tracking, if you’re a legal firm, you can say, okay, this is what they just shared. All the industry stats for legal firms, like they’re missing X percent of calls.

How many calls, what percentage am my calls? Am I missing, am I missing more? Am I missing less? Do I need to improve on that metric? You know, um, so. Or like how much are they investing in, you know, if you know different things, like how much are they investing in SEO or something? All of those things can be really insightful, anonymized.

So I think looking at your own data and whether or not it can be. Um, externalized in some way is a great way, um, to do that. Um, it does still require some data analysis and there is some heavy lift, but if you have some kind of, um, data science team, they can typically help you with that. Or again, you could get an outside vendor.

You can also go out and do your own kind of taking a third party data set. Like I know an agency that they monitor 250 SaaS websites and then they put out an annual report of what they’re seeing, um, in terms of rankings on different. Kind of metrics they’re looking at. Like, um, in that report this year, there was one about original research.

The, and looking at which brands on their websites had published original research and then where they were ranking on, um, Google search and that those that actually had original research were ranking higher than those that didn’t. And they had a whole bunch of other metrics too. That’s the one that obviously I remember the most.

But, um, so there are a lot of different ways to kind of. Go at this that don’t have to be, um, you know, expensive. Um, and I, and I would also argue that there’s a lot of different, again, if you’re not using a big research firm, there are, um, a lot of other ways to do this. A lot less expensive. It doesn’t have to cost, you know, even 50,000 or 30,000 or whatever you think it costs.

So.

[00:37:04] Jeremy Balius: Ultimately the, the ROI and the outcomes are just phenomenal. It just compounds, throughout the year it sounds like.

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, I mean that’s what, um, I’ve seen and that’s what my clients have seen is, like I said, most of them have seen, um, significant, um, engagement from this type of content. And, and the other piece is, it also just helps you understand it does, even when you’re doing this type of content, even when it’s not the goal, you do understand you are asking about challenges and pain points to your target audience.

So you do have some idea of what is gonna be relevant to them and can then. Create other content, even if it’s not research based, that will be a little bit more on point and relevant. ’cause you just asked what they really are struggling with.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Interesting. That’s given me so much to reflect on. Becky, this has been so awesome and so enlightening.

I’m gonna, encourage that listeners download your B2B buyer’s report. It’s got so much data that we didn’t even cover in this conversation. I’ve taken so much away from that report. Thanks for coming on the show and, digging deep on the value of original research with us.

Becky Lawlor: Yeah, thanks for having me.

It was fun.

Jeremy Balius: Awesome.