Benefits of carrying out surveys for PR purposes

Look at any newspaper or any magazine on any day, and 99% of the time you’ll find something where research is quoted. Just type the word “survey” into Google News and you’ll get thousands of results, all news items referring to research carried out by companies and organisations.

Why do we encourage our clients to carry out surveys?

• The media loves data – it gives weight to something
• We all love reading about the latest survey, whether it is justifying those cheeky two glasses of wine you have a day as medicinal* or feeling smug that we aren’t one of those one in four people who are prone to use text words instead of proper English**
• Research can be interpreted in different ways, making it reusable depending on current news and views
• All reputable media will quote the company who carried out the research as a resource – giving you free name awareness.

This all means that from just one survey and one piece of PR, you have the potential to get lots of media coverage and name awareness, from many different sources, on and offline.

You get lots of bang for your buck

Surveys can be carried out in a number of ways:

• Engage a research company to interview individuals on your behalf
• Post a poll on your website, blog and social media feeds and  analyse the data
• Use an online service such as Usurv.com that can run targeted and instant polls from as little as £10 via their network of respondents – great for piggybacking off current news stories. Plus, all the data is broken down into percentages per age, gender, income etc, so you don’t need a Maths degree to understand it!

All of these ways of carrying out research have their own benefits. We can either set these up and carry out the survey via any of the methods above, then produce the PR.  Or, you can provide us with the finished data and we’ll write something newsworthy! Whatever suits you.

Having run surveys for over a decade now for some of our clients via a number of methods, we are so pleased that services such as the Usurv one now exist. They are cheap, quick to run and give you everything you need to know, meaning you can be reactive to current news stories and piggyback off them within hours, or make your own news just as quick!

*Daily Mail quoting research carried out by Boston University School of Medicine (24 June 2012)

**SecurEnvoy survey quoted on 4RFV website (5 Oct 2012)