With more organisations than ever before vying for attention in the increasingly crowded media landscape, there are a few top tips on how you can utilise quality research techniques to help separate your campaign from the crowd.
If your project or story is led by best-in-class research, it will always get featured over stories that are just based on a hunch. This is because publishers can see that the story is from a trusted source that has completed the necessary background work to fully understand a topic. 2,000 respondents is widely acknowledged within the market research industry as the sample size required for nationally representative research, and this provides a big boost when crafting news. Less than 2,000 would introduce the potential of significant error and make it impossible to report on the opinions of specific subsets of people such as parents or 18 to 24 year-olds, accurately. Top tier news don't just want credible stories but stats from proven research authorities that enable them to speak confidently to a national audience.
If you’re looking to get a sample in a niche demographic, ensure that your research partner has ample audience to match your requirement. Niche samples can often unearth powerful insights that tell as interesting a story as projects with vast audiences. It may be beneficial to consider using a sampling method such as cluster sampling to conduct specialist niche research but respondent numbers of 80 to 100 are usually sufficient for most niche research projects.
Another benefit of incorporating best-in-class data into your story is that the results lend themselves to genuine and attention-grabbing headlines. Relatable stats are hard for the consumer public to ignore, especially when it reaches them at a highly relevant time in the calendar.
In order to achieve international coverage, you should consider a variety of things; is your topic relevant to all the target countries and demographics? Will gaining international data tie-in nicely with your original campaign strategy? Do you have a proper mechanism for translating questions and results? It’s important to ensure that international markets are a key consideration at the start of the creative process, and not just a bolt-on after any idea has already been established.
Our recent research campaign with Eye PR and Mute secured coverage not only in top titles in the UK but also across the English speaking world, including titles such as the New York Post and News.com Australia.
Quality data lends itself to a wide variety of content platforms and outlets, meaning that you can open different avenues to get your message out to the market. Animations, quizzes, and infographics are all examples of multimedia assets that benefit from being grounded in research and data. Our in-house design team Oath Studio specialise in developing digital assets that are fit-for-purpose for national media outlets, and their data visualisation projects are highly effective in conveying brand messages.
Video is also a great storytelling tool to help bring data to life. Some survey responses can act as conversation starters, and vox-pop/interview style content is always a big hit with the nationals.
Digitally diverse content has never been more important as we move away from click-bait to more genuinely compelling stories that must engage readers efficiently and effectively.
As company partners of the Market Research Society, and corporate members of ESOMAR, OnePoll's experts are highly-trained in providing the quality research media solutions that help you to reach the national media. Add this to our journalistic heritage as part of the SWNS Media Group, and we are perfectly placed to advise you on the research angles you should take to inform your campaign.
According to data from Signal AI, OnePoll received over 48,000 media mentions between May 2021 and 2022. This ranks us second and shows just how much the combination of our quality research and creative expertise punches above it's weight.
Discover more about our research for PR here.