Why Research Reports Are Essential for B2B SaaS Content Strategy

You need a key stat for your pitch deck. After an exhaustive search, you realize the best data is locked away in a competitor’s research report. Go figure! 

Most marketers would give anything to have company-authored research reports full of valuable insights on markets, consumers, and trends to support their sales and marketing efforts. 

But creating them can be time-consuming and expensive. You have to gather the data, distribute the survey, write the final report, and promote it to the right audience. Company leaders often struggle to see the value and how research reports will move the needle for their businesses. 

The good news is it’s worth the effort — and here’s why.

Research reports are a cornerstone of your content strategy 

Did you know that market research provides a return on investment of over four times the cost? That kind of ROI is hard to ignore. 

If you want to connect with your target audience, research reports are a great starting point. They give your prospective customers meaningful answers to the questions they’re already asking, while featuring your brand front and center. The people who engage with the report crave your professional insights, making research reports ideal for lead scoring. 

Let’s say one of your ideal customer personas notes an increase in customer churn rates. They’re facing greater competition in the market, and customer expectations have shifted. 

But they aren’t sure how to address these pain points. They might wonder if this trend is unique to their market and what customers want from their software solution. 

Now let’s say your company creates a research report exploring SaaS trends among this audience. You gather valuable data on what drives consumer behavior. Suddenly, your prospective customers are chomping at the bit to see that data — and you have a middle-of-the-funnel marketing piece to nurture those leads. 

When you narrow down your audience and focus on the information that’s relevant to them, you can create effective content that immediately sparks interest. 

Best of all, the content isn’t limited to a specific part of the marketing funnel. For example, a top-of-funnel report might scratch the surface of a topic, while a middle-of-funnel report narrows in on a more specific niche. 

Research reports often perform best when they focus on the middle of the funnel. That’s where you can provide deep insights to your target audience without pushing them too aggressively toward your product or solution. 

But at the same time, you’re digging beneath the surface of a topic to provide more in-depth insights than they’d find in a basic search. 

With any research report, the goal remains the same: driving prospective customers to the bottom of the funnel and converting them into sales. 

Repurpose the report into content for infinite use cases

The beauty of research reports is that they aren’t one-and-done tools. They can become core resources for generating new pieces of content and supporting your marketing efforts across channels. 

Imagine all the valuable insights you’d find inside a 64-page research report. A single report might inspire dozens of blog posts and social posts. 

It can be the focus of your monthly newsletter, or you might even send it to a digital PR agency to attract backlinks to your website. Think of the clicks you’d get sponsoring an email newsletter with a downloadable report that’s chock-full of in-demand industry data. 

Research reports can also be a lead magnet for website traffic, helping you capture prospects’ emails. Many companies use them to create webinar content, revealing the most compelling insights from their reports to a live and on-demand audience. 

Still worried about your metrics-focused company leader who questions the value of the research report you spent months creating? You can showcase its value through your email click-through rate, social media engagement, or notable SEO advancements in your site’s search engine rankings. 

Reveal data insights that allow you to tell a compelling story 

There’s a story at the core of every research report. When you share a compelling story that’s relevant to your target customers, you not only drive interest, but you also position your brand as a trusted authority. 

Many brands shy away from research reports because they worry they don’t have original research or insights to share. They overthink the data they’re providing, viewing research reports as too technical or scientific for their company to produce and distribute. In their minds, the final product has to be double-blind and peer-reviewed. 

But the reality is that these research reports aren’t meant to shape government policy or cure life-altering medical conditions. They’re made to inspire conversations. 

By asking hundreds or thousands of your industry peers about their greatest struggles and how their target market has changed over the years, you give them a platform to tell their stories. Like flies to honey, you’ll attract more people who want to hear those stories. They might even share similar stories about their own experiences. 

When you start the conversation, you invite valuable insights you can use to shape your own brand narrative. 

Build instant trust and establish authority 

Research reports allow you to showcase your expertise. When you take the initiative to generate new data and insights, you signal to your audience that you understand the industry. You can present answers to common challenges and get prospective customers interested in the solutions you’re offering. 

It starts with assembling a group of industry champions to support your viewpoint. Companies that create research reports have a solid backing of peers, colleagues, and competitors to validate their narratives. 

By assembling this information and interpreting it from their own points of view, companies give their audiences the data they need — while also promoting their own brands. 

Many people confuse thought leadership with having a certain number of followers or starting a podcast. You might assume that the brands shouting the loudest on LinkedIn are the pioneers of their niches. In reality, thought leadership comes from having authentic, original ideas, and those ideas have to come from somewhere. 

Research reports support your content marketing strategy while increasing brand authority. Building out content based on your own original data is one of the best ways to establish yourself as an industry thought leader. 

AI-proof content guarantees unique human insights 

Marketers can’t ignore the allure of AI. It’s revolutionized content marketing, speeding up the content creation process and allowing marketers to access the information they need more quickly. 

According to HubSpot’s State of AI report, marketers use AI to create all different types of content — 31% use it for social posts, 28% for emails, 25% for product descriptions, and 19% for blog posts. 

But AI’s biggest downfall is that it’s generic. Unlike humans, it can’t analyze data and generate unique takeaways. AI-generated content relies on existing data and algorithms to produce content similar to what’s already floating around the Internet. 

Research reports re-introduce the originality factor. They present new information consumers can’t grab from ChatGPT. 

Brands that take the time to aggregate this information build instant trust and credibility and distinguish themselves from the companies that rely on AI. And the extra legwork isn’t lost on consumers — 50% can spot content generated by AI versus a human. 

Getting started: How to plan your next research report 

There’s no denying that creating a research report is a big undertaking. But knowing what it takes to create one can help you determine if you have the resources you need to pull it off successfully. You not only need the time and personnel to produce the report but also the means to gather the data. 

If you’re waiting for the perfect time to invest in creating a research report, it’s never going to happen. On a brighter note, there’s never a wrong time either.

But some times might be better than others. For example, depending on your business, you may have some yearly slumps when you have more resources available to devote to the project. Identifying these ideal periods can help you avoid overextending yourself or throwing away valuable time and resources. 

Remember, the goal isn’t perfection. Comparing your research report to those behind monumental policy changes is a recipe for procrastination. When you set the bar too high, you hold your company back from creating quality content for your target audience. 

Define the thesis you hope to prove (or disprove) 

Your thesis will help you frame your research report, guiding everything from the questions you ask to how you craft your narrative. You should also be able to easily define that narrative in a few sentences. 

Say you want to emphasize that companies leveraging a specific technology are able to better withstand fluctuations in the market. 

From your thesis, you can tailor your survey questions to directly address the technology and survey the companies using it. You should be able to phrase your questions in a way that makes the data easy to analyze, even before you collect it. In other words, keep your end goal in mind from the start. 

You might also leverage existing industry data to help you paint the picture, and third-party support can be really helpful here. There’s a ton of value in working with someone who’s been in your position before and can offer feedback on your survey, saving you time and headaches down the road. 

Know how you’ll distribute your survey 

You don’t want to invest in a survey that only generates a handful of responses. But unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t plan their distribution strategies ahead of time and fall flat when it comes to actually engaging the right people.

If you have a solid list of customers and prospects, start there. For SaaS companies that offer a freemium solution, distributing the survey to both paying customers and those using the free option is a great strategy. 

In doing so, you improve your odds of getting the types of responses you’re looking for. Surveys can also help you gather valuable insights from your customers and learn how to better serve them so they’re more likely to renew their subscriptions or contracts. 

If you want to amplify your survey even more, consider sponsoring an email. Identify communities that might be relevant to your audience and see which ones have a sponsored email slot where you can plug your survey.  

Many companies also drive survey engagement by incentivizing completion. You might offer company swag as a prize or give participants the opportunity to access the report early before it’s available to the public. 

Make sure you have reliable support 

A good research report is equal parts data insights and storytelling. Like any good story, your report should include visuals to maximize the impact. 

You’ll want to loop in colleagues who can analyze the data and translate it to fit your brand promise and product positioning. And a strong writer who can weave it all into a story worth reading is an essential member of that team. 

You’ll also need design support, whether that’s an in-house graphic designer or an agency or freelancer. While it might be tempting to save a few bucks by assigning the task to that guy on your team who had some nice graphs in his presentation once, building the right graphics for your report requires real skill. 

You have to get the brand image and cohesiveness right while creating infographics that complement the written aspects of the report. Investing in a high-quality designer will pay your company back in spades. 

Partner with Ten Speed to captivate your audience 

You can certainly create your own survey, distribute it, analyze the data, generate graphics, and build a complete research report. But if that sentence simultaneously bores you and stresses you out, we get it. So why not leave it to experts like us?

At Ten Speed, we know how to craft survey questions that provoke insightful answers. We can then turn that data into a meaningful research report and set your team up to successfully distribute the report to your network. 

We specialize in translating data insights into content that speaks to your ideal customer profile, and we’ll help you tell a compelling story that delivers real value — for you and your audience. 

Inspired to build a research report and demonstrate your authority and expertise? Let’s chat more about how Ten Speed can give your marketing team some extra content firepower.