Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

Reports Based on Surveys

Releasing original research in the form of a report is one of the most powerful ways to draw attention to your business. When you create reports based on surveys, you provide insight that is highly valuable to your audience. When survey data is packaged into a valuable report and released for free, the results can be explosive.

Here's an example of the power of this type of content. In Chapter 4, in the section about fire starters, I shared how I conducted an industry survey and generated a report called the Social Media Marketing Industry Report (see Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1 Here's a sample page from the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

We surveyed about 800 marketers, generated a visually appealing 26-page report, and then released it. What happened literally shot our business beyond the stratosphere—overnight.

By 9:00 AM on day one, more than 5,600 people had read the report and 10 bloggers had written about it. After only a week, 22,000 people had read it, more than 100 media outlets had covered it, I'd been on three Internet radio shows, and the report was coming up on the first page of Google for the phrase “social media marketing.” Crazy, huh?

I stopped tracking a few weeks later after 40,000 people had read the report. Even a year later the report was still in the top 10 search results on Google.

We went on to release a new report each ...