Designed Specifically to Support Agency Thought Leadership
Thought leadership research is different from other research in its purpose and its structure.
First of all, it’s important to recognize that in itself the research isn’t the thought leader — YOU ARE. Good thought leadership research provides a strong, credible platform from which you can share your expertise, your experience, and your helpful advice.
It demonstrates your investment in helping your ideal prospects and clients. In fact, the research is really designed to help THEM — not just you.
And it provides enough data for you to riff off of for a year of thought leadership content. That’s right — one study should give you a year of things to talk about that show off your agency’s smarts. No more sitting around a conference table trying to come up with blog topics for the next quarter.
To accomplish all of this, we build our agency thought leadership research on the following:
- Your agency’s POV. What do you believe? What do you know to be right and wrong in terms of doing the work your agency specializes in? We want to provide lots of data from respondents that will help you talk about the approach you take and the help you can provide.
- Hot topics. What are the things your ideal clients and prospects are hearing and talking about? Having fresh and unique insights about these topics make sure your research gets attention and helps you get an opportunity to present at trade shows, conferences and other events.
- Assumptions. What do stakeholders in this space (maybe even you and your agency team) assume to be true about their customers or peers are feeling, thinking, and behaving? Testing assumptions allows you to credibly report whether they’re completely true, true for some groups and not for others, or not true at all. Nothing gets attention like blowing common assumptions out of the water.
Always Custom-Built for Your Agency
We work with agencies all over the place, and many of them do similar things. But each of them has a perspective and expertise that is unique to them, and their thought leadership reputation will be based on different insights and have different followers.
The research we develop will be built for you, with your collaboration, and will be YOURS. We’ll explore the questions you want to be able to answer, the perspectives your followers need to understand, the challenges and goals of your audience.
What We Do
Help You Plan Your Research
It’s critical to plan your research strategically to fit your goals, your target audience, and your budget:
- Help you figure out your topic and your target respondents
- Strategize respondent sources and get panel respondent bids if appropriate
- Test your database for likely survey respondents
Conduct Your Research
From start to finish, custom-built for you:
- Help you reach out to potential partners to distribute survey invitations to their communities on your behalf
- Coordinate with panel providers to source respondents if needed
- Conduct a kickoff workshop with you and your team to capture your agency’s POV, objectives, questions, assumptions, and everything else you’d like to know
- Develop your survey content and work with you to tweak it until you’re happy with it
- Build and host your online survey
- Set up links for you to use for partners, social media platforms, or different groups within your prospect and customer database
- Set up and administer an incentive for your respondents
- Monitor your survey and provide regular updates
- Analyze your data
- Prepare a custom interactive visualization to help you see, explore and understand your results [see examples]
- Conduct a results workshop with you and your team to review results and discuss implications
- Develop an outline of key findings from the research so you and your team can plan a year of content
Provide Post-Research Content
A host of post-research content elements to support your agency thought leadership efforts at no additional charge:
- Draft content of an Executive Summary to which you can add your perspective, expertise, and design, and which can serve as a cornerstone content element for your thought leadership efforts [see examples]
- A public-facing interactive visualization for your thought leadership purposes that can be embedded on your website [see examples]
- Susan’s participation in presenting a public webinar of the findings that can be recorded to serve as thought leadership content
- Full text of all open-ended responses from survey respondents
- A list of respondents who volunteered to participate in more research with your agency
- A list of respondents interested in being notified when your research is available (if appropriate)
- An outline of key findings from the research to support a year of content activity
- A self-segmentation question based on the research findings that will allow you or your followers to gain insight into the segments of prospects and customers
Content Atomization
With our agency partners Predictive ROI we’ve developed a program specifically designed for our agency thought leadership clients to ensure you have a year of content to share and are using it to build your list, engage with prospects, and get more clients.
Audience Engagement Programs
We offer additional services to help you get your thought leadership content out there consistently and use it to deepen your engagement with ideal prospects and clients.
