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Email marketing is a powerful tool for B2B and B2C businesses that can help generate more leads and sales. 59% of B2B marketers name email as their top channel for revenue generation and 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention (Source:optinmonster.com).

Ryan Phelan is an email marketing expert who has created and led innovative marketing strategies for high-growth SaaS and Fortune 250 companies for the past two decades. Some of those companies include Canadian Tire, Capital One, Skype, Sprint, and FedEx. His experience in marketing has shaped his approach in creating innovative orchestrations of data technology and customer activations for Adestra, Acxiom, Responsys, and more. Ryan has also been named one of the top 30 digital strategists in the United States and has built a library of leadership through blogs, white papers, and presentations.

In today’s episode, we’ll discuss how to use email marketing to generate sales. 

The Road to Email Marketing

Ryan worked as a DJ in a nightclub for six years before starting his career in email marketing. As he worked with vendors, agencies, clients, and customers, he found that his years of playing music for a crowd of people taught him lessons he could apply to his marketing career. 

As a DJ, Ryan had to entertain 600 people in the club for four and a half hours. He had to constantly be creative and read his audience in order to keep his customers, just as an email marketer needs to with their leads. “Most people don't know this, but there's a science behind [being a DJ]. We had a formula that we actually perfected in a nightclub that worked like a charm,” Ryan said. 

4 Key Principles of Email Marketing

From his experience as a DJ, Ryan learned four key principles of email marketing we should use to generate sales. 

• Know Your Audience 

To market effectively, we have to know our audience. 

As a DJ, Ryan had to focus on the tempo and genre of a song, but more importantly, he had to pay attention to his audience. He had to determine who his audience was, what type of music they liked, and what mood they were in. By gauging his audience’s preferences, he could successfully choose the right songs that would lead people to the dance floor or the bar. 

He would watch his audience to determine their favorite songs so that he would know what songs to play when he wanted to bring people to the dance floor. He also learned what songs people didn’t like so he could drive them to the bar. He used his knowledge of his customers to drive more sales. By knowing his customers, he could keep constant traffic to the bar to generate more income, while also attracting customers to the dance floor to increase their satisfaction.

Our goal in email marketing and e-commerce is to recognize a consumer or cohort of consumers and get them to do what we want by providing them with the right information or product. In email marketing, this is called segmentation. 

Ryan believes marketing is all about segmentation. The reason he was able to play the right song set was that he knew who his customers were. He knew who was in his crowd. He could look out and read people very well. “[I knew] who was wanting to date somebody else, who was wanting to hit on somebody else, who was just there to have a good time with their friends, [and] who was really wanting to dance,” Ryan said. It was all about knowing his audience. 

The same goes for email marketing. We need to know our audience if we want to have any success in directing them towards our products or services. If we want to do email marketing right, we should look at the audience and recognize the different cohort groups. These are groups of people that are similar in type and characteristic. When we know what group a customer falls into, it is easier to send them a tailored message. Our customers will be more likely to resonate with our message and we will be more likely to make a sale. 

• Determine the Right Channels

In order for our marketing strategies to be successful, we need to make sure we are sending information on the right channels. 

Skype was one of the biggest projects Ryan worked with. Skype had 6 billion leads. Until Zoom, everybody used Skype, especially in Europe and Australia. Skype was how people communicated. Ryan worked with them on reactivating a large number of their audience of billions. It was extensive. They had data science. They looked at propensity and put people in cohort groups. And they developed different touchpoints based upon channel propensity which was the biggest thing out of that project. 

Each cohort group had a primary, secondary, and tertiary channel they reacted to. For some core groups, it was mobile push notifications. For others, it was direct mail, television advertising, print, banner, or email. Ryan had to develop a media plan based upon a channel’s propensity for that cohort group and put together extensive media plans on the best way to communicate with each customer. “It was a big success,” Ryan said. It opened his eyes to the power of data and what it can do.

If we want to do email marketing, we need to make sure our customers can actually be reached by email. We have to make sure it is the right channel for communication for our audience. 

• Use Data

The biggest mistake Ryan made in email marketing was trusting his gut. Even though marketers have asserted for years how important testing is, every once in a while, marketers, including Ryan, go with their gut without looking at the data.  

Ryan once had a client with whom he ran a win-back campaign. When customers are inactive and aren’t opening their emails, a win-back campaign tries to reactivate people’s interest. Ryan created a progression of four emails over 30 days, trying to get the customers back with offers or content. Ryan put them in the order that he thought they should go based on his gut instinct and then launched the campaign. While his client doubted if it was the right order, he assured her that it was. 

About three weeks later, the client told Ryan she wanted to reshuffle the email series just to test it. She was the marketing site manager and she knew her brand inside out. She tested her strategy and Ryan tested his strategy thinking he would win. Surprisingly enough, the client's test worked better than Ryan's.

Ryan learned that his gut is not always right. Instead of just going off our gut feelings, we should look at what the numbers, science, and data are telling us.

• Recognize Changes in the Market

Part of our email marketing strategy should include watching for business tectonic shifts. 

Ryan believes COVID-19 has been the biggest tectonic shift currently facing businesses. Because of the pandemic, marketing professionals have had to learn to be more agile. Things can change overnight. In 2020, the World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a worldwide pandemic and everything shifted because of it. Marketers found themselves in two camps; they either pivoted quickly with everything they had, or they froze and pulled out of the marketplace. 

Being tone-deaf to the changes taking place in the world will only lead us to fail and lose our jobs. The companies that succeeded during the pandemic were the ones that knew their brand voice and knew how to pivot within their brand appropriately. Some retailers had to start curbside pickup to limit store hours. They learned quickly and weren’t afraid to pivot.

Ryan believes surviving 2020 should be put as a badge on our LinkedIn profiles. The greatest badge of honor are those marketers that pivoted fast enough and took advantage of tectonic shifts so they thrived and grew; they didn't just survive.   

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Ryan for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. As email marketers, we need to be creative and read people well.
2. Our goal in email marketing is to recognize a cohort of consumers and provide them with the right information.
3. In order for our marketing strategies to be successful, we need to make sure we are sending information on the right channels. 
4. In email marketing, we can't just trust our gut feeling. We always have to test and look at the data.
5. When everything changes in our world, we can’t keep doing what we’ve always done. We have to pivot to survive in the market.  

Connect with Ryan

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Ryan or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn. You can also visit his company’s website at www.rpeorigin.com.  

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

How has email marketing helped you generate more sales? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: 

Michael Solomon is one of the world's leading experts on consumer behavior. He is the author of Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being, which is the most widely used book on the subject in the world. His newest book is The New Chameleons: How to Connect with Consumers who Defy Categorization. He also advises global clients on marketing strategies to make them more consumer-centric. 

Michael is a contributor at Forbes, and he's frequently quoted in publications such as New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, USA Today, and Adweek. He is also a professor of marketing at the business school at St. Joseph's University. 

In today’s episode, we’re going to discuss the psychology of consumer behavior and the marketing strategies Michael uses to gain customer loyalty. 

Chameleons 

Michael has a Ph.D. in social psychology and through his observations, he found that consumers are constantly changing. 

In grad school, Michael did a lot of research on how physical attractiveness and a person’s look influence what happens to them in their lives. This led him to realize that a big part of our social identity is formed by the services and products we buy. He started looking into the fashion industry and did a lot of work on the psychology of fashion. He found that everyday products fundamentally influence who we are.

Over the years, he had the opportunity to work with many companies on how to understand their customers, and he has written numerous textbooks and a few trade books on understanding consumer behavior. His biggest home run was writing a textbook that is used around the world and has changed the way we teach consumer behavior. 

In his most recent book, The New Chameleons: How to Connect with Consumers who Defy Categorization, he compares customers to chameleons. Since consumers’ identities are influenced by the products and services they buy, they are often changing. 

“Unlike the old days where things were a lot more static and we just dealt with mass markets [and] really large groups of homogeneous people, today, everybody is much more of an individual,” Michael said. “Just as a chameleon changes its color as it moves into different environments, many of us today are doing something similar with our identities. We try on new identities. We try on new lifestyles.”

Michael explained we often alter our identities when we surf the web or look at someone’s Instagram page. We are influenced by the people we see around us and tend to change our needs or wants very frequently. This means we have to be very careful about categorizing our consumers. Since they are always changing, we should constantly reevaluate our target audience and research what our customers’ needs and wants are. 

4 Tectonic Shifts

If customers are constantly changing, how can we effectively build a business strategy to connect with our customers? Michael shared four customer tectonic shifts we should be aware of if we want to build relationships with our customers. 

• The End of Artificial Dichotomy

When I asked Michael to share one of the biggest tectonic shifts happening today, he told me it is the end of the artificial dichotomy. The artificial dichotomy is when we assign individuals to a category based on an arbitrary criterion. 

The old categories we used to describe our customers don’t make much sense anymore since society is changing so rapidly. Before, we could use basic categories such as rich vs poor or male vs female, but those have become too broad. 

One of the biggest mistakes we can make as marketers is falling prey to the fallacy that if we assign a name to something, we understand it. We tend to think we can place our customers into categories such as “women in their 20s who live in urban areas,” and then understand all of them. 

“Don't assume that you know all your customers and certainly don't assume that just because you've put them all into a certain segment that they're all going to react identically,” Michael said. 

Even if we narrow down our customers into a niche group, we still can’t assume we know everything about them. As we said above, consumers are constantly changing and so we should reevaluate our categories quite often. Even with extremely niche categories, we often make the mistake of projecting who we want our customers to be, rather than who they actually are. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is marketing to the customer we want to have rather than the customer we actually have. 

• The Role of the Customer

Customers are beginning to take over a lot of the roles in our businesses. 

Many companies fall into the trap of spending an incredible amount of time and resources on a product to get it to the point where they believe it is perfect. Once it’s “perfect,” they launch it with their fingers crossed, hoping it goes well. However, this method includes a lot of risks. If their customers don’t like their product, they just wasted months of work and have to start all over again. 

Instead of doing this, companies are beginning to give customers a role in their product development. Companies will launch a product right away, get feedback from their customers, and then make adjustments based on their comments.  

“Customers are taking over a lot of the functions or at least helping with a lot of the functions that used to be only on one side of that fence so to speak. For example, our customers are content creators. Our customers are advertisers. . . . Our customers are becoming product designers,” Michael said. 

SiteGround, a popular web host provider, is a great example of a company that prioritizes customer feedback. Their brand has three different channels customers can leave feedback at. They listen to their customers and make adjustments based on their ideas (Source: Myfeelback.com). 

Starbucks is a great example of companies using customer content. They promote their brand with #RedCupContest every December. They encourage their customers to submit a photo of their coffees for a chance to win a gift card, and then they use those photos as part of their marketing strategy (Source: Business2Community). Even BMW uses hashtags to share social media posts created by their customers. 

“Customers and also our employees, are our two biggest underutilized assets,” Michael said. “Many companies are figuring out that it doesn't make sense to keep the consumer at a distance, but rather you want to embrace that consumer and involve them in the process, and you get some great insights as well. Consumers who are more proactively involved in this process are more engaged with the products and services that allow them in.”

• The Horizontal Revolution

Instead of communicating customer to business (vertical), there has been a shift of communicating customer to customer. Michael calls this the horizontal revolution. 

In the early days of the internet, a lot of communication was one way. Businesses created ads and websites that told customers how good their products or services were. However, now communication is all about interactivity. How do we have a conversation with our customers? Nearly every website we go on has the option for reviews and comments. We also have social media platforms where customers can interact with each other. We can communicate peer to peer. 

“Word of mouth is really what determines whether people are going to buy a product or avoid it, and so we not only have that up and down communication that we had 10 years ago, but we have that horizontal communication which means that so much of our daily lives are spent networking with our peers,” Michael said. 

This is one reason why influencer marketing is becoming such a prominent tectonic shift. An influencer’s opinion is considered in a similar way to a friend’s. Since they don’t work for the company, consumers believe their information to be truthful and accurate. It also makes the consumer’s job easier. Instead of filtering through all of the information on the internet themselves, they can listen to what their peers have to say. 

• Content Marketing

One of Michael’s best monetization strategies is focusing on content marketing. 

“The real bonds that people are forming with companies or with individuals are because those people are putting out great content that attracts these people. You're not, so to speak, putting a gun to someone's head just to sign up for your email newsletter, you're creating content that's so good they want to be a part of whatever it is you're doing,” Michael said. 

By creating and offering valuable content that resonates with our audience, we don’t necessarily need to sell anything to them right away. If the content is valuable, it will give our customers a path back to us. It also provides credibility for us and nurtures a relationship with them. Content marketing encourages customers to come back to us when they're ready to make a purchase decision.

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Michael for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Consumers are constantly changing.
2. The old categories we used to describe our customers don’t make as much sense anymore since society is changing so rapidly.
3. Don’t assume that customers within a specific category will behave the same. 
4. Customers are taking over a lot of the functions in our businesses. 
5. Customers trust peer reviews over advertisements or self-promotion. 
6. By providing valuable content to our customers, we pave a path for customers to come back to us when they're ready to make a purchase decision.

Connect with Michael

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Michael or connect with him, you can find him on his LinkedIn or his website, michaelsolomon.com.  

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

How do you connect with your customers? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/133-the-psychology-of-consumer-behavior-4-important-consumer-tectonic-shifts/ 

Deirdre Breakenridge is an author, entrepreneur, and CEO at Pure Performance Communications. As a 30-year veteran in public relations (PR) marketing and branding, she's worked with senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies. 

Deirdre is the author of seven business books, including Answers for Modern Communicators which was recently named one of the 100 best storytelling books of all time by BookAuthority. Deirdre is also the host of the podcast, Women Worldwide, which is in its sixth year and has nearly 2 million downloads. 

Today, we’re going to discuss modern public relations and how it works alongside marketing.

Public Relations Then and Now 

Bill Gates said, “If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on public relations.” PR is a great way to build awareness and credibility while protecting our reputation through the media, social media, and within our communities. Our goal should be to find the positive messages and stories in our organizations and share them with consumers. Since PR is such an effective way to build our businesses, we need to be aware of how the industry is changing. 

When Deirdre entered the public relations industry, it looked very different than what it does today. Traditional PR was about writing press releases to hand out to news outlets, who would then share our story. However, this approach of trying to control the messages sent out to consumers doesn’t work as well with modern media. Our stories, whether good or bad, can be spread on social media in seconds. 

The Pew Research Center found that 86% of Americans get their news from their smartphones or computers, over radio, television, and print publications. This means consumers don’t have to rely on news outlets to learn about our companies anymore. They have Google. They have Facebook. While 68% of Americans still get news from news websites and apps (traditional PR can still work), nearly just as many look to social media. According to a study, 53% of Americans say they get news from different social media platforms (Source: Pew Research Center). A news outlet may wait for a press release, but social media doesn’t wait around for an email to share a story.

PR professionals need to adjust to the fact that people have a wide variety of media outlets and platforms where they can get their stories. Today, many stories don’t flow out of a company’s communication department. The stories are created inside communities on social media. We don’t have as much control over the stories that get shared as we did before. Instead, people are citizen journalists and the power of the story lies in their hands-on social media. Modern media has become increasingly interconnected with marketing. 

5 Ways to Effectively Implement Modern Public Relations 

Here are five ways our companies and businesses can effectively use modern public relations.  

• Monitor Social Media

Often a story about our brand or company will find its way on social media before we know about it. Social media monitoring is essential to see how we're perceived by our audience. We need to watch for the negative comments so we can catch them early on and find a way to amend them, while also watching for the positive comments so we can learn what stories our customers resonate with and continue to share them. 

It only takes a few negative comments or missteps for our image to be impacted and our reputation to go down the drain. If we aren’t monitoring our social media channels, we won’t know when a negative story about our brand is circulating the web, and we won’t be able to take action to fix it. With modern PR, it’s our responsibility to monitor everything affecting our brand. 

There are different tools and platforms we can use to monitor how our brand is perceived on social media. Deirdre recommends the free plan of Hootsuite. It can help us see who's talking about our brand on social channels and what the conversation points are about. 

Deirdre also recommends using Notified by Intrado, another platform that lets us monitor digital conversations. Notified can help us craft our stories and reach out to journalists through the platform, monitor and measure how well we’re doing, and see how much engagement our brand has. 

Talkwalker is another social listening tool Deirdre finds useful. Talkwalker has an AI-powered analysis that provides real-time insights into what's happening on all social channels and online media.

• Be Active on Social Media

We shouldn’t just monitor social media. We should be actively engaged on all platforms to share positive stories about our brand. We have to realize that many stories develop away from the media. Even major media outlets keep an eye on social media for new stories. If we aren’t putting positive stories and messages about our brand out onto the world wide web, who will? One of our main goals should be to enhance our online presence. 

As we become active on social media, this is where we begin to see a huge overlap in PR and marketing. With marketing, we want to create content to market our brand and with PR we want to create content to build our reputation. With both, we want to build relationships with our customers. The majority of our customers are likely active on social media platforms. We can engage with them through our content to build those relationships. 

• Build Relationships

We should develop good relationships with media outlets and influencers.  

When it comes to getting our stories out in the media, it helps to have good contacts. When we’ve developed good relationships with producers, editors, or journalists at media outlets such as CNN, New York Times, or other local news sources, it is easier to reach them and get our story out. Even if a story is released on social media first, we can bring in experts who can comment on the stories. We can foster relationships by getting to know editors or journalists really well. 

Once we know and understand the agenda of a journalist or outlet, it's a lot easier to creatively pitch a story to promote our expertise. It’s important to remember that, when we want to be in the news or want to be covered, it's not just about our agenda. It's about their agenda as well. We have to think about what the media wants to share and why they want to share it. 

Sometimes media outlets may release a negative story about our company. This is another great reason why we should be developing relationships. If a company releases a story that will reflect badly on our brand, we can get in contact with them sooner to make amends if we already have a relationship with them. I have found that recently, a lot of what PR practitioners do is repair reputations. They need to know when to make comments on stories and when to leave them alone. 

Not only should our PR practitioners focus on building relationships with the media, but they should also start building relationships with influencers. According to a Global Communications Report, 60% of PR executives believe influencer marketing is becoming a vital part of PR (Source: MediaKix). We can use our PR department to help reach out to influencers to share our brand messages. 

Since public relations is about credibility, public opinion, and shifting opinions, it is great to align with other influencers who have credible brands. Whoever we align with will be a brand representative. 

• Work with the Marketing Team

PR and marketing often overlap. Teamwork between these two critical components of our business can be the difference between success and failure. 

Search engine optimization used to be separate from PR, but this has changed. PR is all about storytelling and content. In fact, “80% of PR professionals and marketers believe the future is digital storytelling.” (Source: mediakix.com) We have to understand how we are tagging our content and what descriptions we are using. We also need to be on the same page with marketing. Who is using our content? How are they optimizing? How do we optimize together? When a campaign is rolling out through marketing, the best thing the marketing department can do is have the public relations team on board and ready to gauge public perception over a campaign. We shouldn't have to guess what's going on. 

We don’t want to have “silo working” within our organizations. Silo working happens when different departments don’t communicate with other individuals they work with. This can create a huge problem as it leads to misunderstandings and confusion, reducing efficiency. 

Deirdre said we can help break down work silos by helping our PR and marketing teams understand what each other's jobs are. Deirdre said that she once had a training session with PR and marketing and found that each department didn't know what each other's day looked like. To fix this, it helps to have a buddy system where we share what we do or walk a day in someone else’s shoes. This can open our eyes to what others are doing, why they’re doing it, and how we can help each other. 

We should have closer internal communication. Collaboration and innovation have to start with the entire team. 

• Be Conscious of What We Say and Do

Above all else, if we want to have a good brand reputation, we have to actually be good. We need to make sure we are staying positive, staying true to our brand, and providing value to our customers. A news outlet can’t write a bad story about us if there isn’t one. They also can’t write a good story about us if there aren’t any. 

Deirdre believes that modern PR is a responsibility. What we do and say is part of this responsibility. It’s essential to know what goes on around our brand. It’s as if we’re in a fishbowl. Everything we do is seen by everyone else, emphasizing the need to be open and transparent. Our stories must show ethics and good judgment. In the current saturated media landscape, we want to be the experts who bring helpful information. 

A PR executive can help our company say and do the right things. They help us interact with the media and can provide advice on touchy subjects. For example, in 2020, the Black Lives Matter Movement became so powerful and important, that many businesses decided to come out and release a statement supporting it. With such controversial and deeply emotional topics, our brand needs to be careful about what we say and don’t say. A PR specialist can help us with that. 

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Deirdre for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. PR has changed. Many stories no longer flow out of a company’s communication department. The stories are created inside communities on social media.
2. Social media monitoring is essential to see how we're perceived. 
3. We should be actively engaged on social media to share positive stories about our brand.
4. We should develop good relationships with media outlets and influencers. It’s better to have 10 really good relationships with media professionals than to have a list of 100 connections that barely know us.
5. PR and marketing leaders should collaborate and lead the way for their teams to collaborate. 

Connect with Deirdre 

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Deirdre or connect with her, you can find her on LinkedIn. You can also visit her website at  www.deirdrebreakenridge.com.

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

What are the most effective PR strategies you’ve used to share your stories and messages? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/132-how-to-effectively-implement-modern-public-relations/ 

Welcome back to another episode with Michele Linn. In the first episode, we talked about Michele’s journey to become an expert in original research and how original research can give us credibility. In today’s episode, we’ll dive deeper into doing marketing through original research, discussing the specifics of what original research is and how to do it.

What is original research?

Original research is any type of data that is presented in a way that provides meaningful, new, and unique insights, helping a company build credibility and authority for its brand. 

Michele said, “We specifically look at original research as something that you publish out as part of your marketing efforts. It's different [from] market research which a lot of people use because that's typically used to make internal marketing [decisions].” In other words, it is publicly published content to establish our credibility and authority.

Why do people do original research?

When Michele is starting a new original research project with a client, she always asks them, “What does success look like to you guys?” They often respond with, “We want to build our subscriber base,” or “We want to become thought leaders,” or “We want to build our email list.”

“These things are very, very tied together,” Michele said, “but we always try to focus on what's that one core thing you want to do.” When we are deciding to do original research, we need to have a core objective like this that we can design everything to work towards that focus.

Four Stages of Original Research: IDEA

There are four stages of original research: impact, data, exploration, and amplification.

Impact

The impact stage is all about putting together our strategy, understanding why we're doing this, understanding the topic that we want to focus on, and what's actually going to be new and original. It’s about trying to understand and working backward to know how our research is going to help us meet the goals we want to meet. 

What Topic to Focus On

How do we know what topic to focus on? Michele said, “Sometimes marketers don't spend enough time trying to figure that out. . . . [For] example, I had a client who came to me in a sales enablement space, and they said, ‘Hey, we want to do research around sales enablement.’ [But] if you type in ‘state of sales enablement,’ you'll see like 678 companies have these state of sales enablement reports out there.”

“So you need to dig in and you really need to understand what already has been done in the space,” Michele continued. “And then you need to go in a different direction because you need a topic that's meaningful to your audience. It needs to align with your brand; it needs to stay something new.”

We need to find our own space and angle that we can do a research project on that no one else has the answers to. If we're trying to establish thought leadership then we have to have a unique topic. Parroting something that someone else has already done is not thought leadership.

Data

The next stage centers around data. It’s putting together our survey, programming it, doing the testing, and getting our responses. This stage also includes data cleaning and analysis once the data is compiled.

Drafting Questions

How do we draft the right questions to get really good, insightful data that tells a compelling story? “I always recommend,” Michele said, “that once [people] have their topic identified, the next thing they [should] do is picture their research table of contents if you will. What are those key categories that you want your research to focus on?”

In a study Michele did on thought leadership, those categories were the characteristics of thought leadership if companies were interested in being thought leaders, and the different things that companies were doing with their own thought leadership efforts.

We need to identify the key things we want to learn and draft questions for each of those categories instead of trying to draft one encompassing survey. 

Another point to consider with our questions is how we can create questions that provide insights and stories. “Oftentimes,” Michele explained, “especially if people are new to research, they are . . . asking research questions that effectively take an inventory of their industry, like ‘what do you do here?’ and ‘what do you do with that?’ but you might find that those questions are not all that interesting. Instead, you really need to shift your thinking and say, ‘How can I ask questions that are going to provide insight?’”

Participants

The next step is how we choose our participants, how many we need, and how to get them to respond.

How do we choose participants? “For many people,” Michele said, “the easiest way to field a survey is to use a panel of consumers. These are adults in the US or the UK, or wherever that place may be. You can get these panels; they're relatively easy to access and inexpensive.”

Michele also has clients who are B2B who do surveys of customers to help their B2B audience. “A lot of B2B marketers don't want to go after a consumer audience; they want to survey other B2B people. The easiest way to do that is if you have access to your own list that's engaged, if you have an email list or a community of people who want the insights, who are happy to share the insights, and they also want to learn from those insights. That's the best way to get data, [but] a lot of people don't have that.”

“The best next thing to do is to partner with someone,” Michele explained. “For instance, we did a survey a couple of years in a row where we wanted to learn about the state of original research. . . . We partnered with BuzzSumo . . . because they wanted to understand how marketers were doing research too. We put together all of the survey questions and so forth, and then they sent out the survey to their list, so we had the people to participate. It was a very joint effort, and we both published that research data in a really collaborative way.”

The last way is to use panels of B2B participants. However, Michele said, “B2B panels are tough. They're expensive. There are quality control issues.” We need to make sure that people are who they are supposed to be. For marketers, are they actually a marketer or are they just trying to get that survey incentive from the survey company? “So you really need to put a lot of quality checks in place and know you're going to spend time and money to get the right people if you use a B2B panel.”

How many participants do we need? Michele said that if we’re going after a consumer-based audience, she generally recommends a minimum of 1,000 participants. However, if we’re going after a B2B audience, the sample size is much smaller. Michele recommends at least 300 unless we are doing comparisons such as B2B and B2C. In those instances, we must make sure we have enough participants in each group. Michele also said there are sample size calculators we can use to determine how big our sample size needs to be. 

There are a couple of ways we can get people to participate in our survey. We need to give participants some kind of value or incentive to participate. “Oftentimes offering someone a chance to win something be it a gift card, cool earbuds, or some other thing of the moment can work really well. It gets people to take the survey, and it gets people to actually complete the survey, and that's a huge thing.”

Michele also said, “It's useful to make sure the audience knows why they're actually taking their time.” She continued, “One thing I would not recommend is giving each survey participant an actual gift card or some kind of financial incentive if you're going to use your own list. . . . There's a high probability that you're going to get in spam and fraudulent respondents because people want that incentive.”

What do we do with the data?

Once we’ve written the questions, found participants, and gotten the responses, what do we do next? The next thing we want to do is clean the data and then analyze it. Michele said, “Make sure that you don't just take what comes in and say, ‘Look we got all of our responses. Let's go.’ But once you clean the data and you have a good data set, I always analyze it for what are the themes, what are the insights, what are the stories. Really pull those out because you want to make sure that you have key takeaways.”

“You want to make sure that you really try to understand and articulate because your reader has this report. [They should know] how you're going to make their life better. . . . Make that very, very clear to yourself and make that very clear to your readers. This isn't a bunch of data; this is what we've learned that you can apply to yourself.”

Explore

Stage three focuses on exploration. We should take what we’ve learned from the data and put together our launch plan. In this stage, we explore our findings to create meaningful insights, then create a plan for how we are going to present those insights to our audience in a meaningful way. 

Presentation

A standard way to present the data is in a static PDF, but we can often find more interesting and engaging ways to present it. “I think that marketers can get a lot of value if they think beyond that,” Michele said. “Andy Crestodina does this really well. He has an annual blogging study, and he gets backlinks to that study every single day. So if your goal is backlinks . . . put together a really comprehensive blog post.”

Michele has also been thinking about presentations that allow the audience to interact with the data such as an interactive dashboard that allows the audience to click through the data, filter it, look at it through a specific lens, etc. “Anything that we can do where people can interact with the data is going to be really useful moving forward. Just a marketer giving the story to someone is useful, but I think people want to see the data and how it changes. I think it feels a lot more credible that way.”

Amplification

This last stage is what we do after our research is published to amplify it. How do we continually grow and get great energy and results from this project we’ve invested in? How do we promote it and get continual backlinks? Do we use our email list, social media, etc.?

How long should this process take?

The whole process can take more than two months. “We have a process that we use with our clients that takes you from strategy until you put surveys out on the field, but it takes three weeks. It can certainly be condensed, but we always know clients have other priorities to work on. So, we'd say on average, you know, allocate two to four weeks to create your strategy, your questions [and] program, [and have] it tested.” 

“[Then] your survey needs to be out in the field, so if you're using a panel that can take days to weeks to happen. If you're using your own list, I always allot four weeks as an average bucket of time. So then, you're at two months.”

“And then the last step is putting together those findings. . . . Some people have really fast processes where they can write findings, get it through design, and so forth, and other clients, it takes longer. I think marketers probably have the best idea of what that last stage looks like. It's just going to depend on how quickly your organization works. Long story [short], I would say two-plus months to get it done, but there [are] ways to condense that.”

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Michele for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. We can use original research to build our following or become thought leaders.
2. The four stages of original research are impact, data, exploration, and amplification.
3. The topic of our research should be something that no one has done before.
4. When drafting questions, we can picture what we want our table of contents to look like and create questions around those key categories.
5. Our questions should provoke interesting insights and stories.
6. To find participants, we can use our own email list, panels of participants, or we can partner with someone and use their email list.
7. For a consumer-based audience, we should have at least 1,000 participants. For a B2B audience, we should have at least 300.
8. Once we have the data we must clean it before we analyze it. Then we can look for key insights and stories.
9. We should try to find an interactive way to present our data to our audience. 

Connect with Michele

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Michele or connect with her, you can find her on LinkedIn at  https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelelinn/ or visit her website https://mantisresearch.com/. You can also check out episode 1 of this interview.

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

Have you done original research? If so, what process did you use and how did it help you? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/131-how-to-do-original-research/ 

Original research is one way to make our content marketing more effective and efficient. In 2018, about half of marketers were using research, and only 3% said their research did not meet expectations (Source: Mantisresearch.com). In today’s episode, we’ll discuss Michele Linn’s journey to becoming an expert in original research and some of the ways original research can help our businesses.

Michelle Linn is the co-founder and head of strategy at Mantis Research, a consultancy focused on helping marketers publish and amplify original research. Before starting Mantis, Michelle was head of the editorial at Content Marketing Institute, where she led the company's strategic editorial direction. Michele has written hundreds of articles. She is regularly cited as a content marketing influencer.

Original Research and Making an Impact

Michele’s passion is original research. She said, “I have been in the content marketing space for many years, and I'm always looking for those things that can really make an impact, that can make an impact right here in 2021, and I'm super excited about original research simply because I think no matter what industry you're in, you can still do something really meaningful, that makes an impact, even though there is a lot of noise out there.”

Michele’s Journey to Original Research

Michele’s journey with content marketing has been long. “I started out in the product marketing space for about 10 years,” she explained. “I left to freelance back in 2008. . . . I used content marketing, even though it wasn’t called that at the time, to build my own business, and . . . that worked to be helpful.”

Michele joined forces with Joe Pulizzi at CMI (Content Marketing Institute). He asked Michele to help him launch the brand he was building. Michele was doing content and teaching others how to do content marketing.

When I asked Michele what the greatest home run of her career has been, she said it was working at CMI. “CMI was my favorite job,” Michele said. She loved being part of the team that was building something meaningful. She also loved hearing people’s feedback and being able to help them. 

“There was a lot,” Michele said. “It was just a really special time in my life and a lot of gratification from the people who were just so grateful that CMI did what it did. I loved everything about that tremendously successful organization.”

Eventually, Michele left CMI. She said, “When I left CMI many years later in 2017, I knew I wanted to help content marketers, but I also knew I wanted to help them in a very specific way. So I thought about what is the best way to break through the noise and what is the best way to be mean right here, right now.”

“I really thought about a lot about original research because [they were] the projects that I enjoyed working on most when I was with CMI, and [it] was also those projects [where] we could make the most impact and had the best results [with]. . . . Clare McDermott and [I] launched Mantis Research so that we could do original research as well as educate marketers on how to do it better, so they could all get the benefits from this tactic.”

Michele’s Biggest Monetization Secret: Original Research

When I asked Michele what her biggest monetization strategy is, she immediately responded with original research. “When you do it well—and the caveat is [you must be] doing it well—I think that you are going to have a lot of meaningful data and insights that people want. . . . You can use it as a lead generator to get people into your sales funnel.”

“I've worked with clients who have published research,” Michele continued, “and because they're that industry leader, we've actually [been able to] trace their research to clients [who] come to them. So I think it just works really, really well. It's a great monetization opportunity.”

Social Media Examiner is an example of an organization that does it well. Their page uses original research as their leader, and they produce great content with it.

Providing Data and Saying Something New

Michele recently did a study with Survey Monkey and Orbit Media on thought leadership, specifically how marketers are using thought leadership and how marketers are defining thought leadership. They found that the essential things people are looking for in thought leadership are creating something that's easy to understand, creating something that challenges the way people think, publishing data to validate their position, and saying something new. 

Publishing data and saying something new are two things that build credibility and authority. Original research does exactly those two things. With original research we are conducting surveys and studies that haven’t been done before, then publishing that data and putting that new information out there. Original research is a powerful tool for us to use in becoming thought leaders in our industry.

The Most Linked to Content

“Authoritative research and reference content are the two types of content that consistently get links and shares.” - Steve Rayson, BuzzSumo director, and cofounder

Original research is the kind of content that gets linked to most often. Michele said, “I'll go to a brand, I'll look them up on Buzzsumo, [and] I'll search the top link to the content. So often that content is original research. It just works incredibly well because if you are the source of something new, people just naturally want to link to it.”

Original Research Helping Startups

One of Michele’s clients, Andrea Fryear (who I interviewed not too long ago), does an annual original research project called Our State of Agile Marketing. On the topic, Andrea said, “Our State of Agile Marketing has been a virtual goldmine for subscribers, backlinks, and real money in the bank of our clients. In our CRM, I'll see someone who has downloaded the report, and within a couple of days—sometimes even a couple of hours—I'll see that same someone requesting a call to talk about becoming a client. There's a clear correlation between reading the report and being ready to make a purchase.” 

This research was one of the first content pieces that they put together. Michele said she watched as “the really small, scrappy startup business [used] research to directly get clients to them. I've had other brands . . . use research for those same purposes. . . . You don't have to be this big brand with a big budget to do research. These little . . . startups can use research to have a really great impact.”

Helping Kids Find Their Paths

Michele is also very passionate about helping kids try to find their own path. “I have two kids at home,” she explained. “I am really passionate about helping kids try to find their own path and be accountable in this world. I think that there's a lot of opportunities for kids to be this vibrant part of society, and I'm trying to help kids help themselves.” 

Kids can do great things. I had a boss who felt that our most important role as parents was to help our kids find their passion and then invest in helping them achieve that passion. By doing that, we help them find their place in society. We can help kids change the world through the things they’re good at and passionate about. As parents, that's how we can make a contribution. Plus, as we get involved in supporting them, it helps us build stronger and more connected relationships.

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Michele for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Original research is a great way to step up our content marketing game.
2. We can make an impact with original research.
3. Original research allows us to provide data and say something new, two things people look for incredible thought leaders.
4. Original research is often the most linked-to content.
5. Original research is a great way for startups to get the attention of clients.
6. Helping kids find their path will help them make an impact in the future and help us have a stronger relationship with them.

Connect with Michele

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Michele or connect with her, you can find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelelinn/ or visit her website https://mantisresearch.com/. 

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

Have you tried original research? If so, how did it go? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/130-how-original-research-can-help-us-gain-credibility/