In this episode, we uncover how original research can be a game-changing tool for driving business growth. Drawing from our extensive experience, guest Meghan Lavin and Kerry highlight how research papers not only serve as valuable assets for target audiences but also fuel business success.

From building credibility and strengthening client relationships to landing press coverage and keynote opportunities, our proven approach transforms research into an engine for limitless content creation and revenue growth. We also share best practices for conducting effective research, overcoming challenges, and tapping into the endless opportunities research offers for lead generation, customer retention, and business expansion.

If you’re looking to scale your marketing impact and future-proof your business, this episode is packed with actionable insights you won’t want to miss!

Podcast transcript

 

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.425)

And welcome, Megan. So excited to have you here on the podcast today. Please introduce yourself and share a bit about your background and expertise.

 

Meghan Lavin (00:12.546)

Yeah, first off, thank you so much for having me. My name is Megan Lavin. I'm the VP of marketing at Acceleration. Acceleration is a data and tech consultancy. We help marketers build the organizational capabilities and technical infrastructure that they need to future proof their businesses and continue to drive strong marketing performance. Also a certified Google Marketing Platform reseller, part of Group I've been there for about two years looking after the North American marketing as well as our global marketing. But before that, I've been in B2B marketing for almost, gosh, 10 years now. I've had my hands in everything from webinars to events to rebrands, website launches now, white papers and original research, which we've partnered on a lot over the years. And yeah, it's been a good experience.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:18.213)

Thank you. And for those who don't, haven't had the benefit of working with you or you and I together, Megan and I were partners for a very long time working side by side, both for Catalyst and Group and have lots of really strong business successes under our belts.

When I finally convinced Megan to join the podcast, or I should say squeeze in some time in her busy schedule for me, there were so many topics, Megan, that we were like, we can talk about this. We can talk about that. We can talk about this. Cause as you mentioned, like we touched everything and you've been a master in everything. But for today, yeah, so we decided we were going to narrow it down to original research as part of a content strategy.

 

Meghan Lavin (01:55.33)

Yeah. Hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:12.933)

And which is, you know, one of our favorite topics. And I always say like, it's my favorite initiative. And we've had, I've had the benefit of, really kind of managing or spearheading the initiative, almost every year for a long time. And to prove that Megan, I pulled out our stack of papers. They're not even all here, but.

 

Meghan Lavin (02:30.894)

Yeah, show the proof of the Hall of Fame. My gosh, I'm not.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:39.713)

They can go back to April 2016, January 2017, but, and all the way until the most recent one we did together was, was it 2022? There should be a date on this, March of 22. No.

 

Meghan Lavin (02:44.352)

My gosh! Love it. Yeah. I mean, it really is. It's such an important part of a content strategy. And I mean, it's just exciting. Even preparing for this conversation, I was like, I need to do another white paper.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:07.743)

Yeah. Right? Well, and that's the thing. It's funny because I often lead with it and then I realized people are like, wait, what? Just a research paper? And so from your perspective, just before we kind of dive into how we did it, talk about from your perspective, why it was so important for us to be part of our strategy.

 

Meghan Lavin (03:31.309)

Yeah. Gosh, a number of reasons. mean, first thought leadership, right? I think when you put out original research, you're doing something that's new. You are truly bringing new insights and new data to the industry that helps you elevate your own business. And it also helps you empower your clients. In our case, that was marketers, right? We were targeting, know, Fortune 500, senior marketers and You know, it really enabled us to give them a tool that they could take back to their businesses to guide their investments and strategies. So I think it's super important from a thought leadership perspective. It's important from a relationship and client empowerment perspective. I think also, and I think we'll probably get into this, but it's a great way to kind of build in a content hub for your brand or agency, right? You're creating so much content when you do original research and there's a lot of …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:32.021)

Mm-mm.

 

Meghan Lavin (04:35.34)

… ways that you can slice and dice it to maximize the value that you're getting out of it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:40.321)

Yeah, no, I agree. it just continues to kind of expand how and where you're sharing your areas of expertise. I will just give a shout out to our first paper, which is the Age of Amazon. And if you'd believe it, we published this in 2017, the fall of 2017.

 

Meghan Lavin (04:58.359)

Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:07.103)

And it was actually the first industry research paper focused on Amazon, such to the point where our data was picked up in the New York Times, which I still have a copy of here somewhere. need to get that framed, but definitely a career highlight to see your data quoted in the New York Times. one of our strategic approaches, as you pointed out, finding that data point that's going to be valuable for our target audience, which for us was marketers, decision makers, buyers, who we wanted to hire our agency, which again was why we wanted to promote our thought leadership and intelligence was demonstrating the gap between, first of all, diving into consumer behavior and like where like this one, was like the we noticed we'd been reading about Amazon taking Google market share, which sounds so remedial now.

Anyway, what we were looking at is consumer behavior and the target audience of our target audience and how they were engaging with Amazon and where, when, what categories and good questions about verticals and categories and research where they go Google versus Amazon, was such a big point back then. And then also surveyed the marketers, the planners on the brand and agency sides who were placing those media dollars. And in this situation, it was like this new emerging advertising giant, but it was like, how are they managing it?

 

Meghan Lavin (06:51.928)

Right? Yeah.

Yeah, I think, what was interesting is like getting them to think about those channels as awareness drivers, right? At the time they were just so much seen as like, you know, last click sales drivers, but we sort of had this like inkling that like, no, it's they're more than that.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:08.469)

Yeah.

No, and you're spot on. so that we were like, how can we help, as you pointed out before, make this a tool to help marketers with how they're approaching Amazon. And you're right at a lot, at the time, a lot of brands had their merchandising team manage Amazon and it had nothing to do with their digital marketing strategy. So you're right, like helping them. So in that we kind of, yeah, sorry, go on.

 

Meghan Lavin (07:43.566)

I was going to say too, I mean, like going back to the approach and how we tried to pull out the most valuable insights. We took sort of a quantitative and a qualitative approach to the research, right? I mean, every year we did it, we had sets of surveys that targeted consumers and marketers to get information from.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:59.157)

Right, right.

 

Meghan Lavin (08:12.78)

You know, large groups of consumers and marketers based on, you know, from a consumer perspective, where are they shopping? How are they shopping? Where do they go at different stages in their decision making and buying journey? And then from a marketer perspective, you know, where are you investing? How do you utilize these channels? And that was great for getting some hard numbers, right? And some really powerful statistics. But I think one of the …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:24.438)

Yeah. Right.

 

Meghan Lavin (08:39.254)

One of the really great things we did in addition to that was add in a qualitative element. We always made it a huge priority to survey marketing leaders and partners and vendors and clients of ours to add sort of like a human element to the research, right? I think we always had a really nice balance between highly analytical and like data-focused content, but sort of supplemented that with experts.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:44.374)

Yes. Mm-hmm.

 

Meghan Lavin (09:08.312)

POV from industry leaders.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:10.985)

No, you're right. And that is another thing that really differentiated our data, right? It wasn't just from one perspective, consumers or marketers, but then it was also the qualitative and the quantitative. and you're right. that was, in getting those interviews, actually added color to the data, which I, yeah, and found that was so valuable.

Yeah, and so, you know, we identified the gaps in consumer and marketer plan or behavior and with the qualitative and quantitative data. And that was kind of our model going forward. And we started with the age of Amazon. Then our next one, which I still think was ahead of its time in the era of e-commerce, didn't quite get picked up by the New York Times.

But I was thinking about it today, so much of that is aligned today, but that for us, was like, okay, now we're starting to see Walmart and Target become players in that space and in Home Depot. And so, you know, it's, it helped kind of, you know, again, like help us monitor market trends and bring new insights.

 

Meghan Lavin (10:44.662)

Yeah, yeah. I would just add that, you know, one of the benefits of us doing this yearly, right, this was something that we did on an annual basis. You know, for a lot of the years, we were also partnered with the same vendor who helped us execute the research and that enabled us to make some really interesting year over year comparisons, right? We were able to ask the same question each year, compare how things were changing and call out some really noticeable shifts in how consumers were behaving and how advertisers were investing.

I think another thing about the approach that in hindsight was really successful was how in the surveys, and I think this was like something you had like flagged and like were, you know, suggested early on, it's something that was super effective was making sure that we, when we did our surveys, we were always asking, you know, what types of items are the consumers were shopping for, right? We'd sort of place them into a category where they shop.

Home goods, were they shopping for electronics, right? And then on the advertiser or marketer survey, we did the same thing, right? We asked what industry or sector they were from and that enabled us to make some really powerful comparisons. I don't remember the exact stat off the top of my head, but something that sticks out in my mind is we were able to say something like, know, 70% of people who are in the market for home improvement items or home furnishings are going to Home Depot, but only …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:06.251)

Right.

 

Meghan Lavin (12:27.022)

… you know, 13 % of marketers in that space are investing in advertising on homedepot.com and that's sort of like an eye opener to marketers and advertisers in that space.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:31.755)

Yeah. Mm-mm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:39.77)

Yeah, no, and those were the, mean, that's the exact kind of insight that we wanted to get out of the paper so that we could help marketers get smarter. And that's a good point. Because I always wanted to, my ideal scenario at your point was like someone walking into their CMO's office and saying, look at this research. We need to be doing this. We need to be approaching it. it, and it happened a lot where like we, it, you know, as a business strategy, worked. I got a lot of phone calls.

 

Meghan Lavin (12:56.558)

Okay.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:08.127)

We conducted a lot of training. Were brought in, we were flown out somewhere to do training. And then obviously the lead gen aspect. So obviously we're obsessed and we love research papers. So let's talk about the process. We talked about the approach for qualitative and quantitative.

 

Meghan Lavin (13:11.819)

Is there any?

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:36.497)

We had to, I guess, know, some of the research, the interviews really required having relationships with a lot of variety of different industry experts, which was hard sometimes.

 

Meghan Lavin (13:54.2)

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like, it almost became this cycle for us, right? You know, we would, whether it was like a client or an industry expert or even someone we saw, you know, speaking at a conference on a similar topic, you know, we made it a point to sort of like pause and say, you know, actually this person would have some really good perspective for our paper. And I think, I think we like, …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:19.647)

Yeah.

 

Meghan Lavin (14:24.128)

… as we were identifying folks to be interviewed, it was always like, you know, we were just trying to pay attention to signals. Are these people who are up and speaking, do they seem like they're folks who are generous with their knowledge? Do they want to be thought leaders, right? And sort of building relationships with them to get them involved in the paper. And I think, you know, they had a good experience, you know.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:37.451)

Yeah.

 

Meghan Lavin (14:47.97)

With their interviews, it enabled us to then go back and ask for an interview in the next year's paper or invite them to speak at a webinar or join an event, right? Like we just sort of created this cycle and this stable of thought leaders that were, you know, happy to partner and be featured and who always brought great perspective to the table.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:56.534)

Yeah, no, definitely. And again, it definitely rounded out the perspectives. And to your point, it wasn't always easy. Like we often wanted to get the voice of somebody that was an expert at Amazon or Google. you know, they had to get approvals or we had to go through like, you know, we had the benefit of GroupM to help us kind of get our way into some of the partners. And then we often, we often …

 

Meghan Lavin (15:27.969)

Is it here?

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:37.865)

… also found that our own clients weren't allowed to participate because it would look like an endorsement and it was against their company policy for many reasons. And we often did have clients participate, but not always. And so it would be a friend of a friend, you know, the industry partner, the platform partner would be say, you know, I can bring this person in, but you're absolutely right that we also went up to people at conferences and, you know, tried to get them to participate.

 

Meghan Lavin (16:06.472)

Hey, it's a great way. Like if they're up on stage talking, right? Like they're someone who likes to share their perspective. Maybe they'd be interested in being featured in a paper. And I think, yeah, I think at times we got really creative. Also, you know, former employees who went brand side or, you know, yeah, even old clients may be moved around to a different organization where they had a little bit more flexibility to speak publicly on, you know, their …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:15.914)

Mm-mm.

 

Meghan Lavin (16:35.916)

… strategies and their thinking. Yeah, we went a lot of different routes and also met our own people too, right? It's important to get your perspective out there as well. So we made it a priority to always identify a few internal thought leaders who we wanted to elevate and feature via qualitative interviews. So you can't forget about your own people as well.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:58.249)

Absolutely. And so, yeah. And so, you we, you and I did this, I didn't know it didn't count, how numerous times. And so we also identified or navigated through some challenges or like best practices. And I'll never forget one of the papers we wrote and I was doing an industry, an interview, a press interview. And the reporter asked me, was there anything in the research that surprised you?

And it took me a minute because I was like, well, no, because I wrote the thesis. So therefore, the day, and then not that I was forcing the answer, but it quickly made us realize for future papers to make sure that as we were, you know, writing the questions for both the qualitative and quantitative surveys and interviews that we weren't leading the witness. Weren't, you know, and I don't think we were, but I think we made it ever, but I think we made an extra effort to make sure it wasn't a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Meghan Lavin (18:04.584)

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. And I mean, over the years, there were times where the research came back and like, you know, did surprise us and that's not what I expected. And like, you know, I think, I think in those situations that the paper, you know, ends up becoming even stronger, you end up uncovering new angles, things that you weren't even expecting and that the industry might not be expecting either. But yeah, I think you have to be careful not to.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:15.935)

Right, right.

 

Meghan Lavin (18:34.444)

Yeah, make it a self -fulfilling prophecy and be, you have to be open to what the numbers and the research is actually saying.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:42.687)

Yeah. Yeah. And I don't remember the exact data point, but I remember being convinced that all marketers were, you know, doing the opposite of what I thought they were doing. And then when they actually, or, or they were, I thought they were doing the opposite of what they were actually doing. And then I was like, shoot. I wanted that to be obvious, like that Home Depot example. And it wasn't. And so we're like, okay. But to your point, then we just pivoted the data.

 

Meghan Lavin (18:52.941)

Yes. He worked with it, yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:10.113)

Yeah, and you know, we ask so many questions. They don't all make it into the paper. But the other thing too we didn't even mention was that all of that quantitative data gets illustrated in graphs in different ways with the comparison side by side of the consumer and the marketer to really accentuate those gaps. And that's where like …

 

Meghan Lavin (19:14.208)

Yeah. Right.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:35.679)

… you know, sometimes it was different than we thought it would be. And seeing that illustration, you're like, okay, like this, this isn't a bad thing. It's just different. Yeah. You know, and so, we've worked with a number of different writers and researchers. Share some of those experiences.

 

Meghan Lavin (19:43.522)

Exactly.

 

Meghan Lavin (19:51.554)

Yeah, yeah, I think over the years.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:55.595)

First of all, we like all of the writers and researchers we've worked with in case you're listening to this, but we just found different best practices.

 

Meghan Lavin (19:59.522)

Yes. No, I was going to say we'd like, you know, different best practices, but I think, yeah, finding a researcher, a writer, a vendor who's a good partner and really understands what you're trying to do and understands your business and industry is absolutely critical. I think it's, you know, certainly something worth getting ahead of time, right?

If you're about to bring someone on to help you do original research, right? Like asking for other writing samples, asking for other research, make sure that they have experience in your industry, especially if it's super technical or niche and some specialization is required. I think another thing that we had gotten in the habit of doing was having them write like an abstract at the beginning. We'd sort of brief them on what we were trying to do, our hypothesis, how we sort of envisioned the paper playing back.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:52.815)

Mm-mm.

 

Meghan Lavin (20:56.502)

Or playing out and then having them come back to us with their version of an abstract and sort of like just a sense check to make sure we're all on the same page and they actually get it and also have the language and vocabulary to talk about the topic in a sophisticated way.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:12.031)

Yeah, no, definitely. I think we found that they needed to have some knowledge of the industry vertical, like they had to be familiar with search marketing or e -commerce. And the other thing too, one of the partners we worked with was not open to data or insights from other sources. And that's one thing that …

 

Meghan Lavin (21:19.768)

Definitely, yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:37.695)

… we actually really liked to include. I think one of our papers, I remember we had relevant stats were out there, eMarketer, Gartner, like we brought that into our paper to further add further value to our audience.

 

Meghan Lavin (21:50.796)

Yeah, I think that shows like objectivity and credibility too, right? You're bringing in data from multiple sources. On a similar note, I'd say too, when you're looking for a researcher or vendor, dig into their requirements or how they handle the final output, the design paper. Is there an opportunity for your brand to shine through or are they going to require that you use …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:13.322)

Right. Yeah.

 

Meghan Lavin (22:19.64)

… their branding and it's in their design. If you want your branding and your sort of identity to come to the front, you need to make sure that the vendor and partners are comfortable to do that and something you can negotiate for.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:34.539)

Definitely, definitely. And I think we found, you know, at a high level, the best practices were like having a relationship with those writers and researchers. I, and I know if we asked them like you and I would get pretty involved because you know, we, we had a vision for how we wanted it to be, but we found that our partners were so great that we had a really good back and forth where I'd be like, well, how about this, this, this, but, but I know you're the researcher and they're like, well, the way we would ask it.

 

Meghan Lavin (22:57.517)

Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:03.145)

Is this and this is how we would do it.

 

Meghan Lavin (23:04.163)

Yeah, they have good, yeah, really good like watching out specifically in terms of how you ask the question, right? Like people may not know that term. What do you actually mean by that? Can you elaborate, right? They help coach you through some of those, you know, some of those things you may not be familiar with if you're not doing research all the time. I think too, like, you know, in our situation, we were lucky to find a partner who we worked with for multiple years. And I think, you know, in that case, it's sort of, …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:13.397)

Yes. Yes.

 

Meghan Lavin (23:35.56)

… optimized our process every year because they knew us, because they knew what we did. It was faster, it was better. Like they had the context from the previous years. It made everything super smooth.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:46.834)

Yeah, no, I agree. And still I'm hoping for the opportunity to work out. That was London research and Linus, and I hope we can work with them. I'm trying to plan to work with them again soon, but I just wanted to give Linus a shout out. The other thing too is the types of questions. So for the quantitative data, ...

 

Meghan Lavin (24:03.585)

You know what something is …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:11.871)

Sometimes it would be multiple choice. Sometimes it would be a scale. Sometimes it would be likely, not likely, you know, that kind of scale. Sometimes it was like three times a week, a month, dates, times. There's probably real research terms for all of these. But first of all, we would always ...

We're not going in any sort of linear order as far as our process here, but also before you even write the survey, it's knowing who you want to answer for the qualitative. And so you would filter out, you know, if it were for shoppers or the consumers, you know, it always be over the age of 18, but I don't think we had many other variables there.

But for marketers, we always wanted to make sure the marketers included in the survey aligned with the marketers that we were targeting and or just managed the volume or had the expertise that would give them, so that their answers were actually accurate and valuable. So I was just thinking about for the marketers, especially if there would be a lot of filters to clarify if they moved forward. And cause we often just …

 

Meghan Lavin (25:30.094)

Totally, right?

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:31.455)

… focused on the US because the markets were so different. Yep.

 

Meghan Lavin (25:34.51)

Yeah, we tried to filter out like SMB, now, we were focused on enterprise Fortune 500 marketers. So there's just questions in place to filter out some of the smaller businesses who might be trying to take the survey. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:47.743)

Yeah, yeah. That's another key point. And then to the point, because of all the different types of data, whether it was volume related or frequency related, it gave us different types of data sets for the visualizations as well. So I think that just added to the dynamic value of the paper is that it gives different data and different perspectives and kind of again, provides different learnings for different people in the audience and different themes. One thing we always ask is what vertical the people work in. So we could then, you know, carve out things for vertical specific data. The most important things we've talked a lot about the paper, but for us it was, especially when we were on a very limited budget, how do we use this to your point as a content hub?

Going forward. So we want to talk a bit about some of the great opportunities that it provides.

 

Meghan Lavin (26:50.062)

It's so exciting because I mean, you're just creating so much content in like one fell swoop and you can do so much with it. You know, obviously you have walked away with the original research, a full on paper that's great as a leave behind, it's great as a printed asset. It's something really meaty that shows your expertise. But from there, I mean, man, like we would pitch it as a keynote at industry presentations, right? So then it turns into, you know, a speakership and conference content webinars, right? That was something we always did as we were launching a paper and it was a key part of our content strategy. We'd host a webinar to walk through the results and findings, but I mean, you know, blogs, infographics, right? I mean, and I think...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (27:23.932)

Mm-hmm. Right.

 

Meghan Lavin (27:47.746)

I think actually even an infographic is, seem like a small asset, but if you consider that you're gonna be producing a paper that's probably a little bit on the longer side, producing an infographic that distills the key highlights and the key stats in a really digestible and visual way actually is an important piece of content, but it can fuel so many different things. mean, put it in your newsletters, do email blasts around it.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (28:04.619)

Okay.

 

Meghan Lavin (28:17.684)

Even some non-conventional, you know, use cases come to mind one year, I think it was, I think it was the age of Amazon paper at the time. I think it was a search engine and had a category in their awards for best original research. And we were like, Hey, we just did this amazing research paper. Let's submit it. Right. We hadn't, you know, we weren't looking for awards to submit it to, you know, we and we ended up winning. And after that, it was like we were ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (28:48.821)

Mm-hmm. Unexpectedly, which it's a whole other story.

 

Meghan Lavin (28:55.736)

We were, yeah, but I mean, right? It's another opportunity for visibility. People hear about it. They download it. So there's just like, just gives you such a robust reservoir of content. I mean, like I can, now I'm getting all excited. I would like to keep going. I mean, Legion obviously put it on your site, gate it, use it as a Legion vehicle. I mean, like the other thing, you mentioned at the beginning that …

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (29:01.653)

Hmm. Right. Yeah.

 

Meghan Lavin (29:26.058)

… not all of the findings and insights make it into the final paper. That doesn't mean you can't use them, right? We always walked away with a deck that had every insight, every graph, right? And, you know, even though maybe we weren't putting all of those on our website, we were using them for pitches. We were using them for presentations. Hey, do you have a stat on this? Do we have a stat on this? we want to do...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (29:31.819)

Right, right. Mm-hmm.

 

Meghan Lavin (29:50.156)

… you know, a verticalized piece of content on CPG. What do we have from our research that maybe didn't make it into the paper? But yeah, it really can fuel your content for like a year, potentially even over a year. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (29:56.181)

Mm-hmm.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (30:09.407)

Yeah, no, you're so right. So, you know, the most recent one I did was for the affiliate marketing industry. And I used it to get a keynote at a huge conference because I was like, look, I'm launching first to market data. And actually, like they aligned it so that it launched at the conference. So the first time anyone was hearing it, other than the press and the embargoes was on stage. And that just had such …

 

Meghan Lavin (30:30.552)

Perfect, yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (30:38.165)

Such a great effect for the brand that I was working with, but also like a year later, I was just back at the last conference and people were still talking about it. They're still referencing the findings and like it was new, it was different and the comparison between consumer and marketer plus the interviews, the qualitative interviews make it different from other research papers.

 

Meghan Lavin (30:41.303)

Exactly.

Right. I mean, yeah, I think, you know, from an event perspective, they always want something new, right? They want something and someone on stage that no one has seen yet before. So if you can go to them and say, hey, we have a brand new piece of research, you'll be the first to have it at a conference. It's a really good way to help secure speaking opportunities. Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (31:08.693)

New data, new insight.

Yeah. And overall too, I think one of the last ones you and I did together, we presented as a paid presentation at a media post conference. And we were able to take the data into an educational piece, right? Like, these are, you know, whatever it was, like four steps to do this or five ways to do that gave our, you know, …

 

Meghan Lavin (31:44.099)

Yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (31:49.363)

… at POV as the agency to again, like demonstrate how smart we are, should hire us, but then back it up with the actual research and data points. So again, it makes it so strong. makes, and remember even like I was saying with last year, the whole strategy was not just to print a paper, but this will serve as our content hub for the next year. And, and that's the value and like, …

 

Meghan Lavin (32:12.28)

Yep.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (32:15.507)

It's just infinite. really is like you're saying there's so many things you can do with it.

 

Meghan Lavin (32:18.67)

I know you can go on forever, right? We didn't even talk about social or just, you know, one year we had a post per week and it, you know, we were highlighting one of the key stats every week, what it meant and yeah.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (32:25.876)

Yeah. And the partnerships with the speakers, again, like the interviewers, interviewees, the industry experts, again, not only did that add credibility, but the social posts, we would quote them in a graphic, tag them, tag their company. Next thing you know, we're associated with them, like we built our credibility. It's just so many valuable aspects to a research paper. And again, like I often go in with it as a top …

 

Meghan Lavin (32:44.919)

Yeah. No.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (33:00.169)

… line of my recommended growth strategies. And people are like, wait, what? So hopefully they're all listening to this and want to hire us to help lead their initiative.

 

Meghan Lavin (33:07.98)

Yeah. I mean, there's just so much you can do with it. And I mean, yeah. And I mean, Hey, like I, you know, we just, we rattled off so many different types of content. People might be thinking like, gosh, that sounds like so much work. Like, how am I going to do all that? It's a million different types of content. Like, my gosh. But I mean, I think, you know, we got to a point where you have a process, right? There's templates, it's operationalized, right? When it, you know,

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (33:21.633)

Yeah.

 

Meghan Lavin (33:34.284)

The first year, first time you do it, you invest a lot of time in making sure you nail those things. And then in the years to come, it was like, you knew exactly what we were gonna do. We had the process, guess it was super easy to crank everything out and really get as much juice out of the content as possible. I think too, like going to your point around the interviewees and the folks in our qualitative interviews also promoting it, right? That's of course another reason to ...

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (33:42.827)

Yes. You're right.

 

Meghan Lavin (34:02.818)

Do quantitative interviews, but I think one of the reasons that people kept coming back and one of the reasons why we got good visibility from our partner and interviewee promotion is that we also just tried to make it so easy for them, right? Like give them canned posts, give them custom graphics, tell them what to say, like make it so they don't even have to think, right? They can copy and paste it into LinkedIn. They can send an email to their teams.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (34:18.623)

Yes. Mm-hmm.

 

Meghan Lavin (34:30.215)

And it's a nice way to thank them for being involved and a nice way to make sure that you're getting some additional visibility.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (34:36.981)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I really want to start another, I have all the topic ideas in my head of what I want to do next. And one last thing that I think another key of when you know your research paper has made it is that one of our papers, I was going through Critio, this was years ago, Critio had an e-commerce accreditation or certificate you could, earn and they had a tutorial that you would take with questions and answers. And our data was referenced, a research paper and data was referenced in Critio's training for the Amazon or e -commerce accreditation. It must have been e-commerce because they wouldn't have been for Critio.

Anyway, so again, you never know where the research is going to show up with your data. And one other win was last year, last fall, eMarketers chart of the day came from the research paper that I spearheaded. again, and then that lives on and you can promote it, another PR opportunity. So anyway, so yeah, mean, if anything's evident, Megan and I are very passionate about the value of original research as a strategy for, essentially a business growth strategy, right? It's content, it's lead gen, it's PR, it's awareness and credibility and retention too, because you can share it with your existing clients to demonstrate and provide that value.

 

Meghan Lavin (36:18.72)

Right. I think that's an important point, right? Like retention is so important and so many clients want to know that they're working with agencies and partners who are, you know, leading the market, who have innovative ideas, who have new ways of thinking about things. If you can go to them and provide, you know, new research, if you've ever seen before, it's your value as a partner.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (36:32.981)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we could go on forever on this topic, but thank you, Megan, so much. I have always loved partnering with you and, hopefully someday soon, someone will ask us to spearhead a research paper together again. Please, if you're out there. Well, thank you so much. And I, hopefully we can have you back on the podcast again soon. Thank you.

 

Meghan Lavin (36:59.071)

Thank you. I know I have the white paper inch now. I like feeling ready. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Kerry. Thank you.

 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (37:11.009)

Thanks.