Ever wondered what goes into creating a public relations survey, and why they’re so worthwhile? Read on to find out more from the team at GingerComms.
What is a public relations survey?
It’s pretty simple – a public relations survey means creating a story for the media which is backed up by statistics. But the best PR research takes time to craft and get right as it needs to feel relevant and interesting enough to land, which we’ll go into more detail later.
Why create a PR survey?
We know how difficult it can be to keep things fresh for clients and ensure you’re consistently securing top target coverage. Doing a PR survey is an innovative way to get your clients in the media, usually in a completely different way to how traditional press office activity works. Public relations surveys secure great results, whether you use news gen as a standalone way to get your brand coverage or to draw attention to other activity your client is doing.
Benefits of PR Surveys
Every single story we sell in has a promised KPI of two national hits, and most of the time we’ll secure more. So instead of spending cash on campaigns which may not hit the mark, going with an effective PR survey promises the coverage your client is after.
How do you prepare a public relations survey?
The Gingercomms team understands that no client is the same, so we spend time crafting the best story for each PR survey, ensuring it will secure coverage while ticking off those all important key client messages.
When it comes to PR surveys, knowing the sweet spot for what our contacts will want to cover while staying true to a brand is a fine balancing act, and one which the whole team is confident in doing.
How do public relations surveys work? What is the process and the best practices?
You might have created an incredible story, but if a PR survey isn’t sold in in the right way, the whole campaign will fall flat.
We carefully watch the news agenda everyday, working out how busy it is and which date is going to be best to sell in for your client. And we know the early bird catches the worm. We sell in early in the morning, so our contacts have seen the story ahead of their news conference meetings.
We also know that journos hate embargos, as they always want stories they can publish right away. Sending out public relations research under embargo means the journalist will unfortunately have forgotten all about your story by the time you want it to go live, so always avoid it.
How long does it take?
What is becoming more apparent when making PR and comms plans is the importance of high quality coverage over low tier hits – and how important it is to craft up a long term plan to achieve this.
With public relations surveys, patience is needed to secure good results. Which is why we prefer to spend up to a week selling in every story we’ve created for our clients. This ensures we’ve squeezed out every last bit of coverage possible, and also gives us time to share the story with all of our top contacts throughout the week.
Rush things and you may end up with some low quality coverage, which ends up buried on a website with very little ROI.
How to maximise the return
Here at GingerComms, we’ll also work as hard as we can to secure as much coverage as possible.
But a good way to maximise your ROI with a public relations survey is to use the research to create two stories. We always offer packages to include more questions, and this is a good way to implement your overall marketing plans with more research led campaigns that work.
We also advise that PR led research campaigns can also be supplemented to make them stronger. So this could be through using a psychologist to provide an expert comment on the findings, a celeb let photoshoot or social media imagery. This helps make your campaign stand out more against the competition, which is particularly important within today’s busy news agenda.
Recent PR led survey campaigns
Perspectus Global recently conducted research for a fun PR survey into the most annoying words in the British language. The results were used to create a top 25 list of the phrases and words that Britons feel most frustrated by, and the campaign felt fun and newsworthy with plenty of talkability. This helped to secure coverage with Yahoo, MailOnline, the i, BBC News online, the Sun and more. The total number of pieces secured was 34, with an estimated 1.42 million views.
Want to learn more or get some support with your PR Survey? Drop the team a line at unleash@gingercomms.com
Want to know more about how to use consumer research to get your brand in the news? Drop us a line.