6 months of content from one survey

How our insights from one survey helped Adverity create persona-specific messaging and cornerstone content they repurposed for six months.

Quick stats

6 months of content

Data-rich, long and short-form content distributed across channels

Targeted messaging

Developed persona-specific messaging for two distinct audiences

Bilingual survey

English and German surveys followed by multi-layered analysis

About

Adverity is a marketing analytics platform for data-driven companies.

Their software connects to 600+ data sources and enables companies to join data across business functions to create a single source of truth for business performance.

Impressed with the content that we helped NewsCred create from original research after attending one of their webinars, they wanted to do the same for themselves.

From the beginning, they knew that they wanted to create a piece of cornerstone content that could be repurposed and serve as the foundation of their content strategy.

Objectives

Build brand awareness and drive demand through content built on original research, specifically with cornerstone content that could be repurposed

Identify the biggest challenges and priorities for the potential buyers (marketers) and end users (analysts) and how they vary by country, industry, and company size in order to develop persona-specific messaging

Key Approaches

Foundational insight

To create Adverity’s cornerstone content, we focused our research around what mattered most to their ICP in terms of the use of marketing data.

We asked about the top challenges and priorities, analytical maturity level, as well as current and future technical capabilities. This provided a rich tapestry of data to begin our analysis.

By intentionally sourcing a sizable research sample with a sufficient amount of responses across job role (marketer vs. analyst), country, and industry, it enabled us to dive deep into each segment.

The depth and breadth of our analysis generated the cornerstone content: a massive two-part report along with deep-dive reports across audience segments.

Individual themes and insights from the reports became the foundation for six months worth of persona-specific content, including 15 blogs, social media posts, podcasts, and talking points for their CEO.

They also added infographics/data visualizations, videos, and illustrations, which allowed them to repurpose and reformat the content even more.

Distinct survey segments

Adverity is based in Europe and has customers across the world. While the size of the survey was extensive (around 1,000 responses in total), it was the number of distinct audience segments that was even more notable.

We sourced a statistically significant number of responses across roles (marketers and analysts), countries (US, UK, and Germany), and a handful of target industries in order to generate meaningful data for our analyses for multiple reports.

The key differences between these groups is also what enabled Adverity to develop persona-specific messaging for their buyers and end users.

Survey translation

How you ask a question is just as important as what question you ask.

Subtle cultural language nuances can drastically impact how an individual responds to a question.

We worked closely with the Adverity team to translate the survey into German and UK English to ensure we were working with the most accurate data.

Current capability vs. goal in 12 months

We first asked the respondents about their current analytical capability, followed by what the level of importance was in the next 12 months.

This gave us three types of audience insights:

Where the respondents are today
Where they want to be in the near future
What the gap was between the two

From there, Adverity achieved clarity on the aspirations of their ideal customers and how they could position themselves as a solution to help them achieve these goals.

Perspective of organizational capability

Asking respondents for their outlook on certain current technical capabilities allowed us to discover discrepancies on what marketers and analysts believed their capabilities were today.

What we unexpectedly found was that analysts and marketers didn't agree on what these were.

Across the board, analysts were much more likely to say that the current capability level was higher than marketers did.

Understanding how each viewed the organization’s current capabilities allowed Adverity to tailor their messaging even more.

Going the extra mile

The analysis for this project was one of our most challenging to date. Identifying the high-level summary for each question was the easy part; few research companies would have failed at that.

But for this project, “stopping at the first stat,” as we call it, wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere. When the objectives are multi-dimensional, both the data and the analysis must be as well.

Combining answers across questions uncovered deeper layers and helped us demarcate how Adverity could help their two audience segments meet their goals.

Outcomes

Six months of content

The insights from the research allowed Adverity to create a massive research report that was split into two parts.

They strategically built these reports in a modular fashion so they could easily repurpose pieces of the content across multiple channels.

Over the next six months, they produced 15 blog articles, social posts, and podcast topics for the CEO – all from one survey.

The size of the survey and its multiple audience segments also enabled them to create deep dive reports that were gated for lead generation, while keeping the bigger reports ungated.

Press placement wasn’t an explicit objective of Adverity’s when we began our work together. But because their content was based on original research, it got picked up by Business Insider and PR Newswire.

Data-driven value prop

From the “Current Capability vs. Aspirational Future Plans” question set, we found that respondents agreed on the future they want – one filled with predictive analytics, AI, and machine learning.

For companies that had achieved these things, it was their mastery of data organization and campaign reporting that set them apart from those who hadn’t.

This seemingly minor detail became the key that redefined Adverity’s value proposition. They were able to prove that they were the foundation to the aspirational future that their target audience desired.

Targeted messaging

Our insights about the differences between marketers and analysts helped Adverity tailor their marketing and sales content to each persona.

And where there was overlap between the priorities and challenges of each group, they could feel confident using the same messaging to address both groups (e.g., on the homepage of their website).

Clear path for product

Both marketers and analysts (Adverity’s buyers and end users, respectively), ranked integration with all data sources was the number one priority feature while out-of-the-box dashboards were ranked dead last.

This allowed Adverity’s product team to take a data-driven approach to prioritizing and deprioritizing items on their product roadmap.