How to Create Compelling Data For Marketing & PR Campaigns

Public relations professionals pride themselves on being excellent storytellers, finding ways to craft a company’s messages and weave them into creative and insightful narratives. 

To make these stories not only stand out, but be credible, we also need to identify the proof points that will validate the company’s messages and points-of-view. Marketing and communications professionals know that data plays an integral role, and if a company doesn’t possess enough proof points, oftentimes it makes sense to conduct a survey–either on its own or to support existing proprietary data. As such, PR folks need to be just as comfortable in analyzing data and looking at how the facts and figures can provide compelling insights. 

If you’ve decided to embark on conducting a survey, however, how do you decide what data to create, so that it will be compelling and useful? Here are a few starting points: 

1. Define the key issues, themes and trends that your company wants to be associated with. If your company focuses on hiring & training, would you want to be viewed as an authority in identifying the top skills now, and what the most in-demand skills and roles will be in the future? Or how about discussing the need to learn AI across industries, and the role that AI will play in hiring expertise in the future? Before embarking on any data-driven initiative, it’ll be vital to define the top themes and narratives that correlate to the business.
2. Confirm your key audience(s). Who do you want to reach and attract with this data? The key findings from such data should have a clear target audience in mind - whether it’s the C-Suite, technology decision makers, or white-collar workers. This will allow a survey to have questions posed toward this audience, and have findings that they will care about.
3. Research, research, research. Before jumping into creating data, look at what information and insights are already available in the market. For example, ADP is well-known for putting out its monthly jobs report, based on its payroll data. Consider what kinds of data/insights you can present that aren't an echo of what's already readily available.
4. Identify the "white space" and what people would want to learn more about, next. Too often, surveys provide no meaningful insight, because the data they’re soliciting  simply verifies what everyone already knows. This, in turn, renders any report or marketing collateral that would come out of the survey uninteresting immediately. So, it’s important to think one step ahead in coming up with data and create survey questions that are forward-looking. If you can find data that can illustrate or confirm what appears to be an emerging trend, then you’ve hit the mark.

1. For more complicated topics, add visuals. Graphs, pie charts, and colors that vividly and clearly demonstrate the findings can make the information easy to grasp at a glance and, importantly, allow for the media and the public outside of your company to easily digest and share your findings.
2. Keep the tenets of what makes news in mind. When highlighting the key findings, it’s important to consider what makes news–or simply put, what is something you’d find interesting and eye-opening enough to recount to someone at a dinner party. Journalists, for example, will always decide whether to cover a story or not based on its news values, which include impact (its effect on people), proximity (how it affects a specific community), timeliness, conflict/controversy, and oddity. As the saying goes in journalism, “‘Dog bites man’ is not a headline. ‘Man bites dog’ is front-page news.”

At Gravitate PR , we’ve successfully established and led data-driven marketing & PR campaigns for our clients over many years, working with brands including Hired, EDITED, Traackr, Remote and many others. For more information on designing and executing a successful data-driven storytelling program, you can contact us, or download our free eBook for additional recommendations.