Stop Sharing Your Opinion, And Start Sharing Great Research
Stop Sharing Your Opinion, And Start Sharing Great Research
It's easier (and usually cheaper) than you think to gather excellent research on almost any topic. Make it a habit to regularly gather great research for both yourself and your clients.
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Invest More In Research As You Grow
Once your consultancy practice grows, it’s time to invest more in research.
Imagine walking into a meeting with a prospective client and being able to say:
Here’s the data we collected from 500+ people about [client issue]…
Or imagine showing how your client compares with ten similar organisations across a dozen relevant categories.
Or imagine using a website like Usertesting to show how people felt about the client’s website and using this to prioritise the key issues they should solve.
If you want to stand out from your competitors and impress prospects, these kinds of insights are difficult to beat.
Great research doesn’t just take your client work to the next level; it makes your content remarkable too. Almost all the most popular business books and articles are built on deep research of a topic. They typically include new data, examples no one else has seen, or studies that aren’t widely known.
Imagine being the organisation which provided the data everyone else quoted when making their argument.
So why don’t most people do this?
It’s a time and knowledge problem. Most people don’t have the time to do this kind of research. Thus, we get an overwhelming supply of opinion posts.
I suspect most people don’t realise that undertaking great research isn’t as difficult or as costly as you might think.
In this post, I will share the power of great research, how to do it, and what you can expect to spend. Great research is critical if you want to stand out and become an indispensable consultant.
How Research Made A Recent Project Pop
In a recent project, we advised a client on whether to respond to support-based questions on Reddit and their own hosted community.
They knew Reddit was becoming increasingly important but didn’t exactly how important, or what resources they should dedicate, or the best way to engage and participate in it.
This kind of problem where we (any anyone else) could’ve given an opinion in seconds. But instead we:
Pulled together a list of five brands of similar size and whether they engage with Reddit.
Reviewed how these brands participated on the platform and if there were any unique best practices.
Ran a survey to understand what people want from Reddit vs. a hosted community.
Calculated the % of questions asked on Reddit vs. their hosted community to recommend a % of time investment.
Tested asking the same questions in a hosted community vs. Reddit to see the generated in response.
Pulled together a process for engaging with Reddit, which integrates with the organisation’s current processes.
This gave us insights no one else had, giving the client ammunition internally to support their decision.
But all of this is based on deep research. This is where we can quickly gather great insights without the process consuming our time.
Basic Research - AI Tools
It helps to quickly check ChatGPT alongside search engines for almost any topic to give some basic insights and ideas you might want to explore.
Given the tendency for hallucinations and incomplete answers, this should always be a starting point rather than the final destination. It’s like Wikipedia—broadly accurate—but not to be fully trusted as a correct or comprehensive answer to any question.
But it’s often the best way to identify the questions you might want to explore.
Hire Individual Researchers - Finding Examples and Summarising Research
If you need to find great examples and data or summarise literature, hire individual researchers.
When writing my second and third books, I wanted to extensively research different companies and summarise academic literature. I didn’t have time to do this, so I hired researchers to help.
There are two ways of doing this.
One option is to go to Upwork, look for researchers that meet your criteria and hire whomever you think would be the best match. Give them a clear remit and let them get on with it.
You can hire great people for around $15 to $50 per hour. I’d suggest going more towards the higher end of the payment scale for anything that doesn’t involve automated tasks.
Another option is to write to universities with PhD programs and post a job on their noticeboards. The hallways of academia are (tragically) filled with overqualified post-grads who need money and have advanced skills in statistics, academic research, and more. Both options can work well.
For my recent book, I hired two researchers to summarise the academic literature on a variety of questions which I could sprinkle alongside the examples uncovered by other researchers. This was the (admittedly primitive) brief I used, but the results were good - here’s an example of one question.
These folks are great for finding examples, conducting market research, and summarising literature. Once you’ve found a few people you like working with, skip the job ad process and contact them directly (through the platform).
Undertaking Audience Analyses
One rung above finding examples and summarising existing research is undertaking audience analyses.
It’s easy for an organisation to survey its existing audience and draw conclusions. But this isn’t a representative sample of any population other than their customers. If you want to research any general audience, then you need to have a means of putting together a representative sample of this audience
Online Research Tools
This is where tools like CloudResearch, SurveyMonkey, Prolific, Aytm, and others, enable you to create a survey and then use their services to recruit a representative sample of a given population to complete it.
You can usually create either qualifying questions to filter the kinds of people you want to respond to the survey or ask the tool itself to select people who already fall within an existing demographic/behavioural graphic or psychographics.
The fees vary, but you can usually expect to pay between $1 and $4 per response. We’ve recently been undertaking a survey using Prolific on how people wish to engage and perceive brand communities. Prolific gathers the audience together, and we collect the data via Google Forms via some data validation questions.
If you have ever wondered how many organisations gather the data they use in news stories or research reports, this is often how it’s done.
The results have been illuminating.
Because we’re collecting the data via Google Forms, we can do plenty of additional segmentation and analysis.
Online Panels
Online panels consist of a pre-qualified and vetted group of individuals who have agreed to participate in surveys. They tend to be paid more than participants recruited to respond to a single survey.
For example, you can use a tool like YouGov's self-serve tool to recruit a nationally representative sample of the USA for a survey.
The advantage of online panel tools is that they provide advanced data reporting and support to help you design the questions and begin with large, diverse panels. There’s also the opportunity to integrate with other data sources.
Another benefit is you can track the same people's results over time and monitor their attitudes or behaviour changes.
The cost of each response ranges from $2 to around $4, depending on the number of questions and how targeted the audience needs to be. The downside is you’re locked into using their system and can’t easily download the demographic data of recipients. This means you can’t do additional segmentation analysis.
Panel Aggregators
The disadvantage of panels is that while they do their best to gather an audience reflective of a random sample of various demographics, behaviours, and psychographics, there is always likely to be a skew based on the panel itself.
YouGov, for example, began to survey political opinions and still attracts those with stronger political views than the general population today.
One way around this is to use panel aggregator tools. These tools let you create a survey and sample several panels to create a more reflective and balanced audience.
Tools like Appinio, Attest, and others are excellent for this. They pull respondents from several panels and provide an entire suite of tools. However, they are beyond the budget of most solo consultancies, with fees beginning at around $20k per year.
Hire An Organisation To Do The Research
The final level is to partner (or hire) a research firm to undertake the research on your behalf.
With all the above options, you’re paying an organisation to identify and motivate people to complete your survey.
This is where organisations like Kantar, Nielsen, Ipsos work with major brands to develop a comprehensive study. I’ve never taken this route, so I can’t speak to it. However, the fees tend to begin at $50k, which puts them outside the range of most solo consultants.
Summary
In solo consultancy, there are many ‘aha’ moments. These things are so obvious in hindsight but never considered in foresight. One of my biggest was being able to pull together great research at high speed. It’s a gamechanger if you do it well.
Here’s a summary.
Gathering excellent research (surveys, examples, data, studies, etc…) is critical to making your content stand out, improving your consultancy efforts, and giving you an edge in the sales process.
Gathering excellent research is cheaper and quicker than you might think. You rarely need to budget more than $2k for outstanding research on any topic. For simple research, you only need a fraction of that.
Use researchers to compile a great list of examples on any topic. Whenever you want examples or to pull benchmarks together, use researchers from Upwork or similar sites.
Hire PhD undergraduates to compile academic literature reviews. Set specific questions and let these folks gather studies and summarise the academic literature on almost any topic.
Use online research tools to survey representative samples of the audience. If you want to know what people think about any relevant topic, use online research tools like YouGov, Prolific, and similar to gather insights.
Thanks for reading.