WORKWEEK

Proprietary reports are original research that your company commissions to answer questions that your target audience, and prospects, likely have. You want to give them answers, data-backed answers, that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get themselves. 

And those answers, well, you want them to tie back to your company, your point of view, and ultimately your product. 

I’ve done proprietary reports on:

• The State of Omnichannel Marketing 
• The Global State of SMS Marketing
• The State of Ecommerce 
• Consumer Shopping Trends for [Year]
• The Marketing Mix Report 
• The Marketing Freelancer Revolution 

These drive a high-volume of top of funnel leads, and they can be torn apart into smaller assets for blogs, sales enablement, webinars, and so much more. 

Here are a few proprietary reports that I, personally, read:

• Forerunner Ventures’ Consumer Trend Report
• The New Consumers’ Trend Report
• Beam’s Closing the Gap 

Here’s how to do one for yourself:

Survey setup and ideal outcomes 

Start here: What are the headlines you want out of this? 

How would you structure a survey to see if the data backs those headlines? And of course, how does this relate back to your company, your product, and what you offer? 

You always want reports to be a value add and conversation starter to your company’s industry. And remember, these are primarily top of funnel drivers. They don’t need to be incredibly clearly related to your content, but logically so. 

For instance, Klaviyo does an annual proprietary report about how consumers will shop for BFCM. We break it all down by demographics and include tips on how brands can win the biggest share of wallet based on the data based on their target audience demographics. 

How does that relate to Klaviyo? Because if and when you market to different demographics, you need to segment your lists––and Klaviyo is the best in the industry at segmentation (not to mention it has an ecommerce CDP at its core, which collects the data you need to segment to begin with). 

Now, that you have your ideal outcomes from a press point of view, you need to think through survey setup. I’ve found that the press doesn’t care much about surveys if you have under 2,000 respondents. They also seem to care less if you aren’t surveying consumers. 

So, while not always true, you are likely to get more success from a press point of view with more than 2,000 consumer respondents. 

Don’t let any PR agencies talk you out of this. I did once, and regretted it. 

Build the survey and run it

OK, now you need to build the survey and to be honest, I’m not the best at that. There are people whose entire careers are built on survey methodology. Talk to them! Product marketers often have this skill. Some content folks like Erin have it. Or, you can work with a company like Qualtrics or Wynter that can help you build it all out. 

Speaking of, Qualtrics is a great org to run surveys like this with (they help you build the questions!), as is Attest, SurveyMonkey and Wynter. Both Attest and SurveyMonkey can save you a lot of graphic design time (if you don’t have time or budget) because their data visualizations are user friendly (i.e. look nice!) and brandable. 

Surveys don’t typically take long to run––tops two weeks. But they can be expensive. I typically budget about $20K for them, at least. 

P.S. Does your company collect a lot of data? Remember that proprietary data is just data other companies don’t have. You can absolutely use your own company’s data to build reports. Press eats it up. And this kind of proprietary data is free! 

Now, plan your GTM (go to market) 

The beautiful thing about proprietary data reports is that you can build an integrated campaign around them, and they are even more powerful when you do. 

First, to get folks excited about a GTM motion, you need to detail what you will create for the launch. Here is what is typically included:

• Long-form blog / analysis
• A data dump blog
• The gated asset 
• The webinar 

So, what are your GTM motions here? 

• PR: Media outreach, of course 
• Partner marketing: Your partner ecosystem is so important with these things. Leverage them as part of the survey, and you’ll have additional built-in distro and make a mini-industry moment. Work with your best partners to do a co-branded webinar that drives leads for you all. 
• Lifecycle: For distribution to prospects and customers, and also for building the funnel behind the gated asset and webinar.
• Social media: You’ll want custom social assets for sharing this far and wide! 
• Performance: Will your performance team want to help support this with paid assets? I’ve seen some do it, and some not. You don’t need it, but it’s always helpful! 
• Sales enablement: Make sure your sales team is in on the action, and ready to share with prospects and follow up with any leads. 

Think beyond the launch

Plan beyond the launch to create content off of the report. These can include:

• New blogs on thought leadership topics that the data backs 
• Updating existing blogs with data from the report 
• Updating existing landing pages with the data 
• Updating older sales enablement, help content, academy content, and nurture streams with new data 
• Using the data in future webinars––going deep on specific areas and pulling in experts who can really add tactical advice based on the data

So, if you have 1 proprietary report per quarter, you can easily get the following for that:

• 2-3 webinars 
• 4-8 blog posts 
• A ton of updated content with relevant material you know no one else in the industry has