Research reports generate more leads than any other content type

Marketers often debate about what types of content are best. In most cases, that which constitutes “the best” content is wholly dependent on your goals, your business, and the current marketing zeitgeist.

If your goal is to attract new users to your Facebook page, images, videos, and short but interesting articles may be the way to go. If your goal is to build brand awareness, webinars or even influencer content may be a good strategy.

But for B2B companies, conversions and leads are almost always the end goals of any content initiative. And if you want to generate leads through content, you need what is often referred to as a “lead magnet.”

Everybody Loves Lead Magnets

In its simplest form, a lead magnet is an incentive you can offer to someone in exchange for their contact information — usually an email address. Undoubtedly, you’ve seen pop-ups across websites offering helpful content if you subscribe to their email newsletter. Some news sites even make you register your email address just so you can read more than the first few sentences of an article.

Anything your buyers might value is a potential lead magnet as long as you’re willing and able to give it away for free. Some companies offer free trials and other more tangible incentives. But content is still the best and most accessible benefit to use as a lead magnet.

Webinars, videos, eBooks, and “how-to” guides are all popular options for lead magnet content. Nonetheless, there is only one type of content that has consistently been cited as the best: research reports.

(Source: Marketing Charts)

Research reports are valuable because they represent true thought leadership. They aren’t something you can produce on the fly like a blog post or even a “how-to” guide.

Research reports are complex to execute, but they also correlate to a great deal of value. Therefore, they have traditionally been quite expensive. As one research professional puts it, “In many cases research which costs in the thousands of dollars informs decisions in which millions of dollars are at stake.  In these instances, high-quality research provides value that far exceeds its cost.”

At rand&rand, our goal is to make original research and fully designed research reports available to everyone. By operating lean and tapping into our own freelancing networks, we’ve managed to eliminate overhead and pass on that savings to our clients.

Creating a Research Report

There are typically four parts to the process of creating a research report: research, writing, designing, and publishing.

Research

The first part of the process is research. You can use third-party data to generate your report, and some marketers have gotten results by going this route, but you’d still be reusing someone else’s study.

Original research is more effective by far because it is new, relevant, and exclusive. Furthermore, most B2B companies don’t do original research. About 74% of B2B buyers consider original research influential in their purchasing decisions, but only 37% of B2B marketers include research in their content marketing.

Our approach to research begins by generating research questions around your value proposition. We work with you directly to draft questions, identify which segments you’d like to target, and build a format for a survey. Then, we hand over the parameters to our research partners who conduct your survey, gathering both quantitative and qualitative data for your report.

Writing

Once the data from your survey is in, we analyze it to come up with a list of the most significant insights from the study. You can use these insights as teaser material for your upcoming report.

Our process for writing your report follows a typical editorial guideline. We have no limit to revisions within your project timeline, and we’ll submit drafts of written material promptly for your approval. All of our written drafts will include instructions for our design partners as well.

Designing

Once a draft of the copy is approved, we’ll send it to our design partner with instructions. Like the writing process, the design process isn’t completed until you are fully satisfied with the appearance of your report.

Publishing

Finally, we’ll deliver your report and its associated assets to you for publication. The report, as well as the original research, belongs to you. If needed, we can create articles based on your research, write email drafts for lead generation, or even help you generate copy for your landing page.

We’d love to talk to you about how an original research report can help you generate more leads. Contact us today to learn more.