The pitching of newsmaker surveys is becoming more competitive, with PR professionals improving the comprehensiveness of their campaigns. To keep up, consider the following—
- Embrace timeliness to outdo the competition. Only 25% of newsmaker releases are published within a month of completing the survey. Turn to automation to analyze survey results to find key insights and publish faster.
- Generate leads to demonstrate an ROI. Only 38% of newsmaker-survey releases provide a lead-generation form. Provide a link behind a form so that a prospect can download a PowerPoint deck or white paper summarizing the survey while your client can capture their contact info.
- Bundle small-sample business surveys with consumer research. The median size of a B2C survey is around 1,000 respondents vs. just over 500 respondents for B2B, with many surveys of business leaders having only 100 to 250 respondents. While journalists recognize that surveys of businesspeople are smaller than surveys of consumers, consider including 5 questions on related subjects to get the perspective of 1,000 consumers and be able to take a number like 1,100 or 1,250 to journalists.
- Make it easy for journalists to write about your results. Give them the basics they expect. For instance, 18% of news releases forget to mention the country or countries where the survey was conducted, and 23% forgot to discuss when the survey was fielded. Review every news release to ensure that it provides journalists the information they expect.
- Give bloggers more of what they need. In an era where much coverage comes from blogs, newsmaker releases often fail to provide ready resources for bloggers. For instance, only about a third (36%) included charts or infographics. Bloggers are used to linking to sources, yet many news releases don’t provide a survey center on a website to link to; bloggers often copy news releases wholesale but don’t want to reveal that by linking to the release itself. Blogs provide a great way to get your message across in your own words, provided you give bloggers additional resources.
- Think like a content marketer. Add your client’s logo and website to a PowerPoint template and export the slides for each question to use individually as social-media posts. Look at the crosstabs to compare and contrast attitudes and usage across key demographics. Rewrite a white paper as a series of topical blog posts.
Our white paper Best Practices for Newsmaker Surveys has all the details that you need to differentiate your newsmaker surveys from the competition.
Author Notes:
Jeffrey Henning
