How to Stand Out with Data Reports
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
By: Jeremy Frank
2020 is turning out to be an incredibly challenging year for brands to stand out and tell their stories. While the last few years have been defined by a head-spinning news cycle, today we are faced with world-changing crises that are dominating all communication channels—not to mention, election coverage has barely even begun.
It’s a difficult situation, but all is not lost. In order to break through the noise, companies need to add to the conversations that are out there. Data reports offer the unique opportunity to both craft a narrative and back it up with credible and original data.
Done well, these reports provide insights that only your company has access to and that you are uniquely qualified to share. That helps companies stand out not only to media looking to move stories forward, but also to prospects and customers seeking guidance in times of change.
Media-Driven Reports
What’s good for media is good for marketing, so having a media strategy is an essential part of developing a data report. Below are three important strategies along with examples of reports we have created for clients to illustrate each approach
1. Tell a story that fits a media narrative. By staying in tune with your industry’s key publications and writers, you will be able to find gaps and unanswered questions that are a part of the bigger stories being told.
Gladly Customer Expectations Report
Customer service is a broad and well-covered topic, so Gladly focused on a data-backed story about how an improved customer experience leads to increases in revenue. This more specific narrative led to coverage that included WWD and Forbes.
2. Find data and insights that are unique to your company. The best option is proprietary data from your product, like the example below. Next best is survey data, administered by a third party researcher.
Concentric “Future of Streaming Video” Report
Featured the Concentric’s forecasting platform to create data-driven insights about the future of cord-cutting. The result was an original, credible data story picked up widely by media-focused publications.
3. Address a much broader audience than your product’s target. If the media is going to be interested—beyond trade publications—your data needs to be interesting to a wide audience.
Jobvite Job Seeker Nation Report
Using data based on usage of Jobvite’s platform, this report appealed to media focused broadly on the state of job searching, while their customers were mostly HR leaders.
Marketing-Driven Reports
While media is good for marketing, sometimes it makes more sense to build a report with the main goal of creating a powerful asset for your marketing machine that’s more focused and specifically addresses your buyer audience. While a media-driven report can have powerful results, you have more control over the marketing outcomes of a marketing-driven report.
1.Focus on a more targeted audience. Instead of appealing to a broad audience for media’s sake, focus on your buyer. A broader media-driven report can also be repurposed into smaller, more focused reports and even get granular enough to fit an ABM strategy.
Gladly Customer Expectations Report: Channel Use and Preferences
We created multiple targeted reports based on the data from the larger Gladly Customer Expectations Report to target their buyer audience. These included mini-reports about channel use, personalized service, and customer experience.
2. Include survey data from your customers about their results from usage of your product. This works especially well in industries where there has never really been any good technology before.
ServiceMax Customer Impact Report
In an industry where ServiceMax’s competitor is often an analog status quo, they wanted to show buyers the impact field service cloud technology has on their customers, using a third-party research company for credibility.
3. Provide actionable expertise to prospects and customers on how to turn insights into action. This is the type of editorial that buyer’s will appreciate but that the media is less interested in.
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