5 Steps to Create a Data-Driven Report on a Shoestring

Over my years of producing content for growing brands, I can say with certainty that the highest performing pieces include proprietary research/data. It can feel like data-oriented reports are wildly costly and tough to justify for companies with leaner budgets (ahem, $60k+ for Forrester-generated reports). However, pulling together data and a point of view does not have to break the bank.

Here are 5 steps to create compelling, data-oriented thought leadership on a shoestring:

1. What Do You Want to Talk About: The first step is identifying what it is you’re going to cover in your report. This should be aligned to your thought leadership POV (see how to develop that here). Companies that are trying to own a category can do a “State of CATEGORY” report to secure their position as an expert in that category.

2. How to Approach Content: First, you must have a thesis: a sentence that sums up the central point of your piece. The thesis has to be of value to your reader, and not just about your company. For instance, if I wanted to be known as a B2B Marketing Expert, I might put out a report called "The State of Content Creation in the Era of Chat GPT." My thesis would be something like: Businesses can effectively grow with a smart mix of Chat GPT and core content roles.

The thesis should inform the questions you include in your survey. When doing a report on a lean budget, I suggest keeping your survey under 10 questions for two reasons: more likelihood for completion and less data to analyze. Questions should ideally be binary (yes/no), multiple choice or multi-select. I've found that matrix and open-ended responses require more analysis. If you're trying to compare firmographic (i.e. industry, geo) or demographic (i.e. age, gender) data, ask these questions up front.

Sample questions for "The State of Content Creation in the Era of Chat GPT" (which are aligned to my proposed narrative for the piece):

3. Gathering Data: Ideally you can collect enough data for statistical significance (being the daughter of a statistics professor, you'd think I could explain this concept in simple terms, but, alas, I cannot). I've heard that for press to be interested in data, you should have at least 100 valid responses. That said, I've seen many successful reports that have had fewer. In my opinion, you don't want less than 50 survey completions.

Wonderfully, there are several tools that will send your survey to a target audience for a nominal fee. I cannot express how much of a help these are. A few include:

• Survey Monkey
• Pollfish ($.95/completion)
• Google ($3 minimum/completion)
• aytm

Search "Buy survey responses" and you'll find many more.

I'm sure we've all received emails like this that offer a gift for a survey completion. I believe this method is far more time-consuming than using the tools above.

4. Data Analysis: I suggest hiring an expert for this. There are great candidates on sites like Upwork for very reasonable hourly rates. You should give this resource your project brief/content overview and provide guidance about the types of stats you are looking for. As mentioned above, your survey questions should be aligned to your proposed narrative and you're really looking to your resource to give you the statistics to validate or revise your narrative.

5. Content Creation + Distribution: Writing the report shouldn't be a bear. If you've started with your thesis and questions that align to a narrative, really all you need to do is add in your statistics and augment with points of view. POVs should come from your company SMEs, industry research, and subtlety pull from your brand narrative. You can also pepper in case studies, SME quotes, etc., as long as they are not screaming "buy my service."

Canva is a gem for creating data-driven reports. They have hundreds of pre-styled statistic formats which are very easy to use.

Once you have your report written and designed in Canva, you can create your promotional assets in Canva and begin multi-channel marketing distribution (I'll write a post on this soon).

A huge value of data-oriented reports are that your company's data can get cited by third parties, including press, partners, web content, speaking sessions, etc. Getting brand amplification in this way is a major win. You can also use it to make content babies.

I hope this helps to demystifying the creation of data-driven content. YOU CAN DO IT! And, you should!

As always, please leave your thoughts in the comments and share, share, share!

Until we meet again,

Saleema

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