Over the years, Meyocks has advised clients to use original, proprietary opinion research to advance their content marketing efforts. For example, we’ve worked with Delta Dental Plans Association on consumer research related to the oral health of adults and children, and Farm Credit Services of America on a survey of young and beginning farmers to understand their particular needs. Both clients were successful merchandising results from that research in content marketing efforts.
We recently took our own advice and used original consumer research for our content marketing effort. The Thanksgiving holiday ties well with Meyocks’ focus in the food, agriculture and health categories. We saw it as a topic that could yield timely, compelling information of interest to media and other Meyocks stakeholders. Here are three steps in our efforts to use propriety consumer research in our content marketing.
1) Find a strategic underdeveloped topic
Start by identifying an opportunity, niche or content area consistent with your strategic objectives and is underserved or unserved by others.
Our experience and expertise in the food, agriculture and health categories pointed us toward Thanksgiving as a topic that had content opportunities beyond typical meal cost and distance travelled data. We saw the chance to create a fresh take on Thanksgiving by looking at the traditions of the holiday meal.
2) Create several hypotheses and see if they are supported by the data
Once you’ve established a topic, create hypotheses based on your experience and expertise. Then, select the ones you feel will make the most compelling stories and test them through research. Whether you test one or multiple hypotheses depends on your budget and how you choose to conduct the research.
For our “Meyocksgiving” content marketing effort, we conducted quantitative consumer research on Thanksgiving, touching on topics ranging from pre-meal prayer to preferred side dishes to the presence of a kid’s table. Once the results were in, we determined the findings around Thanksgiving table talk would be the most attractive to the media and consumers, especially given the divisive environment following last year’s election. We saw the political story as a compelling, unique angle and made it the focal point of our story.
3) Tell and show the story in a compelling way
Catering to the multimedia needs of increasingly graphic-heavy print and digital media is important to the success of any content marketing effort.
Once we selected the story based on our original research, we used a crisp, concise news release combined with a series of downloadable, eye-catching infographics to show the highlights of our research – with a focus on political discussions at the Thanksgiving dinner table. As a result, our story was included in content that yielded more than 140 million impressions in media outlets like CNN, CNBC and newspaper websites in large metropolitan areas around the nation.