How to craft research that resonates (with the media and beyond)
Great research grabs headlines. It elevates an organisation’s profile, influences public conversations, and drives change. It’s a powerful tool for driving media coverage and creating credibility and engagement around topics relevant to your brand.
But there’s also plenty of noise to overcome. Every day we’re greeted with facts and figures that brands hope will grab our attention and lead us a step closer to engaging with them.
Cutting through that noise and crafting research and reports that make an impact with both your target audience and the media is not easy. But it is well worth doing, because the results can be game changing.
So what makes good research good? And more than that, how can we use it to grab people’s attention?
Starting with audience
It’s relatively easy to bombard people with facts. Less easy is making them care. It sounds obvious, but good research knows who its audience is. It asks and answers questions that matter to them.
In conceiving its Quarterly Work Outlook report, Mahlab client the Australian HR Institute (AHRI) had an ambitious objective: shift perceptions to become known as a leading authority on workplace trends among business leaders and key decision-makers in the C-suite. Tier-1 publications such as The Australian Financial Review (AFR) were identified as a key way to reach that audience.
However many well-known consultancies and corporations already produced workplace trend research, so cutting through wouldn’t be simple.
Building understanding
Mahlab surveyed key journalists to understand what made research credible and newsworthy in their eyes.
In an era when junk surveys are a-dime-a-dozen, credibility of the research emerged as a key journalist concern. So we developed a cheatsheet that explained the research methodology and provided assurance about its validity.
After analysing the initial report’s data, we identified angles that would resonate with the C-suite, weaving in current economic factors to create an expert narrative on strategic measures senior executives should be taking.
The cheatsheet also mapped out how the research would appeal to key audiences including employers, decision-makers and policy advocates.
Delivering impact
Focusing on the needs of media and the C-suite paid substantial dividends. The first Work Outlook report generated seven pieces of coverage, including a prominent article in the AFR.
It gained traction because it addressed questions that business stakeholders cared about, including hiring intentions, redundancy risks and wage expectations.
These timely topics allowed AHRI to position itself at the intersection of business, the economy and human resources—a space that naturally attracted the attention of both executives and the media.
Subsequent reports were positioned to address a key economic or business issue for senior business leaders and gained solid AFR coverage. This helped spur more widespread media interest, which grew with each report.
By its fourth edition, which allowed media to link employer views on pay to cost of living pressures, the Work Outlook report generated 139 pieces of coverage across publishing and broadcast media, including pieces in the AFR, The Australian, Guardian Australia and blanket coverage across the ABC.
The broad coverage helped cement AHRI’s reputation as a go-to source for employment related information for the media, and significantly raised the organisation’s profile. AHRI was transformed from a relatively unknown industry group into a recognised authority on workplace and employment trends.
Presentation matters
In a crowded market, sometimes even the best planned and executed research can need a little style and tszuj to get the attention it deserves. So what could be better than a glamorous makeover?
Innovative payments provider Adyen was enjoying good brand recognition among potential customers but needed better ways to identify key decision-makers in target fashion retail accounts and speed up the sales cycle.
Equipped with research data from the 2023 edition of its Australia Retail Report, Adyen was looking for fresh ways to connect and engage.
Rather than rely on a dry, conventional report, Mahlab changed the game for Adyen, packaging findings from the Australia Retail Report into a premium, custom-made ‘fashion’ magazine designed to appeal to its style-conscious audience.
Written and produced in the editorial style of a high-end fashion title, the Ambition magazine became the cornerstone asset in an innovative account-based marketing campaign for Adyen.
Style and substance
Like AHRI’s Quarterly Work Outlook, the Australia Retail Report that underpinned Adyen’s Ambition was carefully planned to address the key interests of its retail industry readers. It found, for example, that nearly half of shoppers preferred retailers that remembered their preferences and shopping history to create more tailored experiences.
But presentation was where it broke new ground. Beautifully designed, written and produced, it used style and glamour to deliver research findings and other insights in a way that was both engaging and enjoyable to read.
Reflecting the magazine’s title, the campaign’s bold ambition to engage difficult-to-reach accounts paid off handsomely, with prospects that had been unresponsive for more than two years re-engaging with Adyen as a result of the campaign.
