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| Research findings can often point towards the Big Idea on which an entire programme can be built |
| Using Market Research for Effective Public Relations |
Visit the website of almost any public relations firm, and you'll find a commitment to market research. There's a reason: good market research is critical to building and measuring effective public relations campaigns.
Most people know, of course, that an opinion poll can be a good way of generating visibility. Polls provide news and interesting facts to attract the media's attention and get a brand or a message into the news. But market research can play a much bigger role beyond media relations.
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| Research can be used to develop and test messages and ensure they are as relevant and compelling as possible. |
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The insights and understanding revealed by research can generate the Big Idea on which an entire programme is built. Research can be used to develop and test messages and ensure they are as relevant and compelling as possible. It can be used to develop and test materials including speeches, brochures, web copy, toolkits, advertisements, and all the other collateral that brings a campaign to life. And, critically, research can be used to measure the effectiveness of the entire campaign.
Finding the Big Idea
Market research is a fantastic tool for generating ideas. The better we understand our audiences - who they are, what interests them, what motivates them - the more likely we are to come up with attention-grabbing and relevant messages and programmes.
Secondary research, or compiling and distilling all the information already available, is often the first step, and this can frequently be supplied by the client's own market research department. Primary research is usually the next step, including focus groups and other interview techniques that give us a chance to truly listen to our audiences, as well as surveys to help us measure and compare views.
For example, we conducted focus groups, surveys and desk research for a public-private partnership in a Middle Eastern country to help them better understand the future tourism needs of international leisure and business travellers. The goal was to best position their country to attract tourists and business visitors. Given perceptions of instability in the region, the client wanted to increase the country's much needed but declining tourism revenue. Through the research we were able to create a profile of the type of person most likely to visit (for example age, interests, spending behaviour, and country of origin) and what messages were most likely to appeal to them. The client has used this information to develop a long-term marketing strategy that is currently being implemented.
Getting the messages right
One of the first rules of communications is that you cannot say everything to everybody. You have to choose your audience, and limit the number of messages you deliver to avoid confusing people and watering down the campaign's effectiveness. Effective communications are often about repeating one key idea in as many places as possible.
Identifying that one key message can be the difference between success and failure, and research can help identify it. Surveys can be used to identify the attributes of a product or programme that are most appealing or interesting, or the arguments that are most persuasive. Focus groups can be used in a similar way, as well as to help us understand why people respond more positively to some messages than others.
Even when our clients have already chosen the messages they want to emphasise, research can help us determine how to deliver the messages most effectively. One client, for example, told us they wanted us to create a campaign to deliver a message that their products were healthy. When we conducted research to explore how to communicate this to their customers, however, we learned that "healthy" had a different meaning for the customers than it did for the client. Our client had assumed that "healthy" meant nutritious. For their customers, however, "healthy" had more to do with "freshness" than nutrition. At the end, the message was indeed that the products were healthy, but the way the team illustrated this changed entirely.
Getting the materials right
Adverts, brochures, posters and websites can look great when they are created, but consumers do not always react to things the way we hope or intend. Particularly when the client's investment is substantial, research is a good way to make sure materials draw attention, communicate clearly, and deliver the right messages.
In addition, new on-line technologies mean that the use of research to test communications materials is now faster and less expensive than ever, and can be done around the world. This is particularly true of B2B campaigns, where the target audiences often have high-speed Internet access at work, and taking the time to ask a small sample of people to look at materials and react to them (Do they like them? Would they read them? What is the main point they are making? Are they believable? What needs to be improved or changed?) can make an enormous difference, not only to the effectiveness of the materials, but in building our clients' confidence in us.
Getting attention
Of course, market research is still most commonly used in public relations to attract attention. A timely and topical survey can generate news that drives media coverage, getting more visibility for the client's name, brand or issues.
The best surveys of this kind are short, easy to understand and easy to explain. The best ones come from researchers and PR professionals working together to define the desired outcome and developing a survey concept likely to drive the headlines we want, where we want them.
Survey concepts that have successfully driven media coverage for our clients include:
- A pan-European survey of migraine sufferers and their families on the impact of migraine on their lives, generating media coverage of the issue.
- A survey of young urban consumers on how they live their lives today, to allow a well-known contact lens maker to discuss its new lens.
- A survey of European drivers on behaviour behind the wheel, to help a major tyre manufacturer get their product in the mainstream consumer press rather than the trade press.
- A survey of doctors on why their patients had switched from Viagra to a competitor product and then switched back to Viagra, highlighting the reasons why men "switch" back to Viagra and generating news around a medical conference.
- A survey of CFOs on the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley, to position the client as an expert on this issue.
| When a PR campaign is intended to create awareness or influence perceptions, research is a critical piece of the ROI puzzle. | |
Measuring success
Finally, when a PR campaign is intended to create awareness or influence perceptions, research is a critical piece of the ROI puzzle. By designing carefully targeted research programmes at the very beginning of a campaign, research can provide data to measure whether awareness in fact increased or perceptions changed.
Of course, as most public relations professionals know, market research can be costly. What they don't always know is how scalable these costs can be. It may not make sense to invest in large-scale quantitative surveys, but creative research agencies, experienced in public relations and communications research, can generally find ways to provide insights, testing, and measurement that fit within a campaign's budget.
Good ideas, effective implementation, and measurement are pillars of good public relations, and research enhances them all.
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| Jennifer Sosin, president, and Phil Riggins, senior managing director, Europe, KRC Research |
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