Playing the Fame Game: Getting PR Right for Market Researchers

Getting some positive media exposure is good for market research agencies – it helps attract clients and build businesses. But I think the benefit of engaging with the media is much, much broader than that. If we want people to participate in studies, to share their data, and if we want good people to join the profession, research and insights need to be better understood by the wider world – and PR is the key to that.

Differing paths to fame

There are various ways to create awareness or fame. These are mostly categorised as owned media, paid media, and earned media. Each has its pros and cons. Owned media is content that you create and control such as blogs, web content, podcasts, and webinars. This allows you to set the agenda, but it can be a struggle to find a sizeable audience from these alone. Paid media includes advertising, sponsorship, and events; all examples of where you will have paid to reach a target audience. However, this type of exposure is not impartial and expert positioning is often lacking.

It is earned media, where a third party has written (unpaid) about your organisation, that I am going to talk about here. This type of endorsement provides authority, and a large, relevant, and engaged audience, for very little investment by comparison to the other channels.

The key difference is that it will be the journalists and not you who control the message. So what can you do to try and ensure you get the right messages out there in the media?

It’s all about the story

This may seem like a very obvious point, but what a journalist writes about has to be interesting to readers. So think about what is relevant and important to their audience first. It may seem really important to your company that you have launched a new online tool, but you are only going to get a journalist interested in it if you are able to demonstrate and prove its value to their audience. That said, don’t be discouraged as the media is always on the lookout for ideas. As Katie McQuater (of Research Live Impact and previously The Drum) explains, “journalists need good ideas; we’re not bottomless pits of creativity”.

Take a stand, be confident, and focus on your expertise

Alex Brownsell of WARC, previously with Marketing Week and Campaign, advises, “Be authentic, unique to you, don’t use buzz words, and don’t sound like everyone else. We want people who sound real and hold opinions”. Focus on your expertise and be the sought after thought leader or commentator on that one thing. To do this, you need to know your secret sauce and create content that highlights your particular distinctive strength.

Talk about something new – and use data to back it up

It is crucial that you do your research to see what might have been written around the topic. This helps ensure that what you are offering is original or has a fresh angle. As Robert Langkjaer-Bain says, “We’re not interested in someone stating the obvious”. Luckily for us in insights, we often have new data at our fingertips. Provided this is not yet another study on the impact of Covid on the office worker, this is a great help to build relationships and profiles with the media.

Quantitative data is easier to use than qualitative, so ensure you have covered all angles. And be sure to avoid being too self-promotional. The media will not publish something that comes across as a sales pitch. Indeed, trying to be promotional can ruin future interactions with journalists and is to be avoided at all costs.

Time is of the essence

Journalists are under tremendous time pressures, with huge numbers of stories coming in every day, and they face very real deadlines. Be aware of this and don’t waste their time with material that isn’t appropriate or strong enough.

Remember why this is important. By doing better PR and spreading positive stories about research and insights, we can help ourselves – and our profession as a whole.

Header Image: Vanilla Bear Films, Unsplash