Features and blogging

Do the right research and the best content will follow

I’m delighted to welcome Laura May, Managing Director of Never Forget Marketing, as my next guest blogger. Never Forget is an Essex-based agency specialising in charity marketing and communications. Laura is passionate about creating engaging content and undertakes research on a daily basis for her charity and corporate clients. Here she shares her top tips for getting started.

Research, in a nutshell, is all about listening. To your stakeholders, your peers, your competitors and to the world at large. By taking a systematic approach to listening, you can discover engaging, shareable content that will take your marketing from good to great.

Check the news
This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to conduct desktop research about a chosen topic. Simply type a word or phrase into Google or another search engine and select the ‘News’ button from the top. This will give you the latest news that is relevant to your search term. You can then share this news and begin to tell a story.
You can also set up Google alerts for certain search queries, and Google will email you a list of headlines related to that search. Visit https://www.google.co.uk/alerts to get started with this.

Always find the source
Statistics and data make great content, but you always need to keep digging to find the source of anything you decide to use in your marketing. For example, there is an article in Happiful magazine stating that four in 10 men feel they have been negatively affected by the isolation and social restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic. This statistic is supplied from a poll by Samaritans. By visiting Samaritans website, I can find out that this is part of their ‘Real People, Real Stories’ campaign and that they carried out research with almost 2,000 men aged 18-59 in July 2020. However, to see the research itself I would have to contact Samaritans and request a copy of the data, if it is available publicly.
That’s quite a few clicks to get through to the source, but it does ensure credibility, something that is vital for any content I hope to share about men’s mental health.

Listen to your stakeholders
The best content, I believe, is ‘user-generated’ – this simply means it comes from your users. So if you run a business supplying soft drinks to vending machines, ask your customers for their feedback. What percentage of customers think you are great at customer service? Run a short survey or poll to find out. What do your customers say about you? Host a focus group or conduct telephone interviews to find out.
This will help you tell your story, and storytelling is at the heart of great content.

To sum up:
Start listening to what the world is saying about your area of interest, and then keep listening. Research can often be seen as a bit dry, but it’s only by systematically listening that we can learn and ultimately take actions to improve and create even better content in the future.

You can find out more about Laura May and Never Forget Marketing at www.neverforgetmarketing.co.uk