Every B2B tech company now has access to the same AI tools, the same content generation capabilities and the same ability to publish at scale. The result is predictable: more content than ever and considerably less differentiation.
That begs the question, "Is your team actually shipping thought leadership if the content they are producing sounds like it could come from any one of your competitors?"
That's a hard no.
If you're leading marketing and/or communications for a B2B tech company, you've got a differentiation problem on your hands.
The brands that are building genuine authority right now are the ones investing in original research. When your team creates content that is supported by proprietary data that nobody else has, you're behaving like a thought leader.
Original research is a significant investment. After designing, executing and promoting more than 100 surveys for B2B tech companies, I can tell you that what you do before a single question is written determines whether or not the research will deliver massive content ROI or collect dust after a single press release/report.
Here's some advice I hope you find useful:
Aren't surveys about data, statistics and numbers? Sure, they are. But all of those data points should be building multiple stories that you want to tell.
Therefore, when you're planning the survey, you should include team members with close ties to your marketing and public relations content strategies and content development process.
For B2B tech brands, that usually means getting product and brand marketing, corporate communications, sales and your integrated full-service agency partner around the same table so the stories you want to tell line up with your category narrative and go-to-market priorities.
When you divide that work across multiple agencies, one for research, another for PR, a third for content and another for digital, fragmentation gets expensive fast. Nobody owns the full picture of how the data will be used, so strong findings may only be maximized by the partner that conceived the survey strategy, while others never even use the data.
One of the most common patterns we see is this: PR runs a survey, creates a report based on the findings, pitches the data to media and lands fantastic coverage. The press release goes out, the articles get published, everyone celebrates. And then... nothing.
Marketing never promotes the report. The very same report that journalists referenced to write their stories never becomes a downloadable asset on the website. Nobody builds a landing page around it. Nobody runs a campaign to drive downloads. Nobody turns the findings into a blog series, a sales deck or a nurture sequence. The original research that cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, and the report that already proved its value by generating media coverage, sits on a shared drive collecting dust.
Sometimes it's because marketing wasn't part of the plan from the beginning. But just as often, it's because siloed teams don't want to use another team's ideas. PR created it, so marketing doesn't feel ownership over it.
It wasn't their initiative, their budget or their strategy, and they are busy proving their own ideas are winners, so it never makes it into their campaigns.
That's the hidden cost of the fragmented multi-agency model that nobody talks about. Not only is the model inefficient, but ego also quietly kills your ROI. When research, PR and marketing all operate with one integrated agency partner under a single strategy and shared goals, there's no turf to protect. The work belongs to the brand, not to a department or a vendor.
Even when all the right people are involved, don't expect planning to be quick and easy. You can't design original research to support a content strategy that delivers outsized results from an hour or two brainstorming session.
Planning the stories your original research will support means going beyond a few "media-genic nuggets" and thinking about the many different forms those stories can take and the data you will need to tell them.
This is where having the same integrated agency partner handle research, PR, content, digital and sales enablement pays real dividends. The questions are written with all of those uses in mind, not just a single report or campaign.
You will also want to maximize the efficiency of your survey and gather enough information in a single survey to fuel several different storylines. When we create surveys for clients, we plan to cover multiple topics, providing plenty of fodder for several integrated marketing, PR and sales enablement campaigns.
With one healthcare technology client, for example, we started by mapping out a slate of enterprise-level original research reports by theme, such as patient engagement, hospital readmissions, patient experience, health outcomes and revenue cycle management. We also considered the clients annual tradeshow/events and product launch schedule, so we could ensure we were telling stories that mapped to key events.
From there, we designed two coordinated surveys, one for consumers and one for healthcare providers, that enabled us to capture the data we needed to deliver against a multi-report campaign strategy that was maximized across product marketing, demand gen, PR and sales enablement.
That single original research initiative produced six full reports released over 18 months, 200-plus media mentions, 24 published thought leadership articles, a 70-piece resource library and executive speaking engagements—all from surveys that were planned with the multi-report, multi-quarter strategy in mind.
That's what happens when research, content, PR, demand gen and sales enablement are all connected from day one. And it's nearly impossible to pull off when those functions sit inside three or four different agencies, each with their own priorities and little incentive to coordinate.
Even a well-designed survey can come back with one or two findings you can't quite use. Not because the data is bad, but because the team didn't think through the specific statements needed to support the content strategy before they wrote the questions. If they had, those questions could have been written more strategically.
Here's what we do differently, and what I'd recommend you start doing immediately: for every survey question, draft the exact statements you want to be able to use when the data comes back.
If you can write that future headline, press release quote, byline stat or sales proof point before you field the survey, you know the question is earning its place. If you can't write that sentence, the question probably doesn't belong in the survey.
This is how we approach every original research program for our B2B tech clients, such as PayNearMe.
Then there's the "one and done." Your team invests in original research, publishes every "key" finding in a single report, promotes it for a few weeks and moves on. You've exhausted your data in a single moment. The news cycle moves on. Your sales team shares the report for a few weeks. And six months later, you're starting from scratch with nothing new to say, even though the data you've already paid for could have fueled content for another year.
Here's what smart B2B tech marketing and comms leaders do instead: they plan for a single survey to produce four to six reports released strategically over 12 to 18 months. You don't have to share everything at once. In fact, you shouldn't. By holding back certain findings and grouping your data into themed releases, you create a drumbeat of original research that keeps your brand in the conversation month after month. Each release gives your PR team a fresh news hook, your content team a new campaign to build around, your sales team updated proof points and your executives new material for speaking opportunities and bylined articles.
Think about it from a media perspective, too. Even the best article about your research can only highlight a handful of findings. A journalist covering your survey isn't going to pack 20 data points into one story. They'll pick the three or four that fit their angle and move on. The rest of your data never sees the light of day. Now multiply that problem: a journalist also isn't going to write about your research six times if you hand them everything in one report. But if you release a focused report on one theme in February tied to a major industry event, then follow it with a different angle in May and another in September, you've just created three separate opportunities for coverage from what was a single research investment.
That's the kind of front-loaded planning that turns "a survey" into an original research platform instead of a one-off project.
While your marketing team may know what stories need to be told, they may not be the best option for crafting and implementing the survey itself. Survey design is an art and a science that requires experience writing questions and structuring response options that deliver usable results.
This is also where many teams make the mistake of bringing in a standalone research firm that has no connection to the content strategy, PR plan or sales enablement goals the data is intended to support. In that model, one vendor designs the survey, another analyzes the data, a third turns those insights into content, and a fourth team is responsible for pitching it to the media and securing coverage. In that series of handoffs, nuance gets lost and timelines slip. In some cases, the research isn't maximized across teams (cue my PTSD example).
After designing, executing and promoting more than 100 surveys for B2B tech companies, we've learned that original research programs are most successful when one integrated team is fully accountable for getting results. That's why we build survey design into our integrated agency model. As a single, integrated team, we bring experts across every discipline together to develop the strategy, design the research, and execute across content, PR, sales enablement and more.
When the market is drowning in AI-generated content that all sounds the same, original research built on proprietary data is often what separates a brand that has authority from a brand that simply has a voice. A well-planned survey can deliver more than 100 pieces of content spread across multiple reports over many months. But only if you plan for that upfront.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of the six moments where your involvement changes the outcome, read, "Most Original Research Underperforms, 6 Checkpoints Are the Fix."
If you'd like to talk through how original research can underpin your integrated campaigns for the next 12-18 months, you're welcome to schedule time on my calendar.