Alexis Carroll:
One of the brilliant things about the TrustRadius reports is that there’s a narrative, there’s interesting data, and then you have both the text and the graphs. When you’re reinforcing messaging through different modes, you’re able to reach a much broader audience and make your points more firm and memorable.
We also do interactive pieces so that the user is driving their own experience of the report. There are so many ways that you can do this. A lot of it depends on, do you have a bunch of Millennials as your audience? Since we’ve learned that they’re the majority now making decisions, things like that will be part of your preparation but then can feed into the way that you actually decide to present the information once you’ve gotten it together.
Brenda Caine, VP of Marketing, Content4Demand:
I want to emphasize something I think is so important: TrustRadius does this survey every year. You can start to see trends over time. This is such a great resource that people can come back to year after year to see how things are changing, to see what’s new, to see how they have to adapt and change their business in order to keep up with the trends. Your story then becomes a multi-year story.
We don’t want people to go into it and think, “I’m just going to do a research report and we’re going to do it this year and we’re done.” You can do this every single year and just update it and see what’s really happening in the market.
Allyson Havener:
When you think about that kind of “campaign in a box,” this is just really that the precursor to a whole content strategy. When we think about the self-serve buyer, the underpinnings are a Trust Radius solution.
We’re essentially alluding to this macro trend and how B2B marketers should be thinking about that. Then in our campaigns, we talk about how you address it and how you think about going to market when buyers want to self-serve, when most of them are Millennials, when most of them don’t want to talk to your salespeople. We talk about these high-level solutions and really educate the market on that.
You have that more bottom-funnel content where the solution is, “Hey, TrustRadius supports that.” You can have a whole profile on TrustRadius. You can add your pricing. You can add product demos. You can have a CTA link so they can book a meeting right away and make it completely self-service for them to get in touch with you.
You can see that story arc that you’re creating, but it starts with the research report. It’s rooted in data. You’re inserting this problem for people where they’re like, “Oh, I really need to think about how I go to market so I enable the buyer to want to buy from me. How do I do that?” We lead them down this story arc and then eventually it all ladders into TrustRadius and what we stand for.
The report’s really just the beginning of it. This is feeding our campaigns. This is something that we’re always touching on. We use it in our BDR research, our outreach, we use it in our website. This is just really foundational, but any good content marketer knows that one piece of content should be 10 pieces of content. When you think about that “campaign in a box,” that report is that anchor, anchoring your whole story arc that you create with the rest of your marketing campaigns and assets.
In next week’s blog post, we’ll recap the second half of the conversation, when Allyson describes all the ways she used her research reports not only in demand-gen campaigns, but as an integrated marketing strategy that went from public relations down to bottom-of-the-funnel content.
Watch the webinar for the full discussion and to see examples of TrustRadius’ research reports and why they worked so well.
