Betsy Hoag

September 6, 2024 by Betsy Hoag

Professional services firms face an uphill battle to stand out and promote their expertise, as overwhelming amounts of content flood target audience’s inboxes and feeds each day.

How, then, can your firm avoid contributing to the noise — and instead rise above it? The answer lies in bespoke research that informs distinctive, high impact thought leadership campaigns.

The Power of Research-Backed Thought Leadership

True thought leadership isn’t just about reposting articles or chiming in on the latest news. It’s about unleashing fresh and unique insights and practical guidance that can address the critical issues facing your key audiences. In doing so, you can differentiate the most important practices at your firm and open doors to new business opportunities.

Research-based PR and marketing campaigns offer unique advantages over run-of-the-mill content, enabling your firm to:

Go deep on a topic. While most content just skims the surface, well-crafted research reports provide original data and in-depth analysis that clients and prospects value.
Fuel content for multiple channels. A single research initiative can drive articles, presentations, infographics, videos, podcasts, and more — creating a content engine that keeps producing long after you launch the report itself.
Strengthen relationships with clients and stakeholders. Research gives you insights into the concrete needs and challenges of your internal and external stakeholders. When you understand these deeply, you can deliver clear and actionable guidance that makes a difference.
Leverage findings as a catalyst for business development. When you connect the dots between your research findings and your prospects’ needs, you’ll be able to more easily open doors to high-value sales conversations.
Establish authority. Staking a claim on key topics and building your position on those topics year after year is an effective strategy to elevate visibility and deepen trust with your audience.

Of course, research-backed campaigns will only drive results if the research they’re based on is both salient and sound. Rather than go it alone, it can be helpful to partner with a firm that specializes in this work.

Greentarget conducts approximately 50 major research-based campaigns for our clients each year. Of those, about half are ongoing campaigns that we iterate over time to help clients build their brand, strengthen their reputation, and drive growth.

Let’s take a look at what it takes to conduct research and market intelligence projects that drive results.

6 Steps to Create Research-Backed Thought Leadership Campaigns

Effective research must be tied to the issues that matter to your audience and help your firm differentiate itself. So what tools and strategies should you use to effectively move from idea to insight? Here’s a look at what it takes to develop research that delivers tangible results.

Identify your audience and brainstorm relevant topics. Conducting research for research’s sake is an exercise in futility. To make an impact, your research must be targeted and purposeful, relevant to thought leaders’ expertise, client needs, and timely news hooks.
Conduct a white space analysis. White spaces are where you have an opportunity to differentiate — where you can bring something new and valuable to the conversation, and your audience.
Choose the ideal research methodologies for your objectives. Whenever possible, leverage a combination of secondary research (e.g., existing industry reports, academic studies, and publicly available data) and primary research (e.g., quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews or focus groups).
Execute the research. This step involves developing your research instruments, recruiting participants, and conducting fieldwork. But bear in mind: It takes experience and know-how to gather high-quality data with statistical significance. Partnering with a firm like Greentarget helps ensure you reach the right respondents and maintain methodological rigor.
Analyze findings and develop strategic guidance. After you’ve collected your data, you need to extract meaningful insights from it. Be sure to invite internal stakeholders and subject matter experts back into the process at this stage. They have the insight and expertise to help you interpret the results accurately, contextualize key findings, and identify the most significant implications for your clients.
Create the cornerstone report and supporting content. Package your insights into a report and related content items to distribute to your audience. Make sure all pieces of content are relevant, urgent, novel, and useful to provide maximum value to your audience.

Remember, the goal is to create multiple touchpoints that reinforce your key messages and position your firm as a thought leader in your chosen area. Monitor the performance of different channels and content pieces, and be prepared to adjust your strategy based on what resonates most with your audience. Directing smarter conversations requires powerful insights that are rooted in sound market intelligence. Greentarget can help you find them. So let’s talk.

November 5, 2020 by Betsy Hoag

It is time for business leaders to develop enlightened positions on social issues that are also authentic, constructive and on-brand for a new generation of ‘citizen consumers.’

To say that 2020 has been a challenging year would be a gross understatement.

But the unprecedented chaos and confusion, our annus horribilis, has delivered a string of revelations for business leaders – revelations that will have lasting implications.

One of the most profound: Leaders in the private sector can no longer comfortably avoid taking an unambiguous and very public stance on what had been traditionally viewed as “social sector issues” such as climate change, racial injustice and economic disparity.

The reason is simple enough yet – still – not widely accepted: Social challenges are business challenges. From the violent union struggles and workers’ strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; to the Great Depression and Cold War eras; to the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s; right up to the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter protests of the current day, business leaders have, time and again, been assigned a hard but necessary task, and that is to design strategies to respond to wide-scale social conflicts that impact those who produce and sell products and services as well as those who consume them – i.e., people.

There was a time when the C-suite grudgingly stepped up to meet an obligatory commitment to social responsibility simply to stay clear of bad publicity – and to keep the CEO out of the proverbial hot seat. But things have changed – dramatically. There are new, earnest expectations, articulated and memorialized by Business Roundtable in 2019, for businesses to true up on social responsibility in the belief that what is good for the planet and the society upon it is, in fact, good for business.

Therein lies another challenge for business leaders: How does a company effectively develop and communicate a position on key issues in a way that is constructive and not just reactive or performative? And is it even possible to do this while staying on-brand?

Answering that question, nearly a decade after Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer said CSR should be framed as a shared value that will deliver on unmet social needs, is more pertinent now than ever.

“I see this [conundrum] not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum with different poles,” said Caroline Grossman, executive director of the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “At one end, CSR is about positive impact on the planet’s most pressing problems, and at the other end it’s greenwashing. Risk mitigation falls somewhere in the middle.”

Getting to a meaningful place on this spectrum is about asking questions, sometimes tough questions – the most interesting of which focus on understanding why this new approach to key issues is, actually, good business.

Drawing from the Past – and Other Industries

Companies, specifically C-suites within those companies, should incorporate key questions as a strategy exercise or strategy reorientation.

This approach has become increasingly common across industries, said Grossman, whose research center supports people committed to helping solve complex social and environmental problems. “Some dramatic examples are companies founded on innovation that itself has the potential for outsize impact.”

Take plant-based meat. Grossman points out that Beyond Meat had a successful IPO last year and, as of this writing, is trading well above the offering price (even after a recent plunge). Impossible Foods, based on current research, is not planning an IPO but continues to attract investors. Both companies are also drawing attention from companies like Walmart, Kroger, Burger King and Amazon, and McDonald’s just announced a new “McPlant” line for 2021.

“I don’t think these retailers and restaurants stock plant-based meat because of CSR but because they think it is good business,” Grossman said.

Tables Have Turned

In the latter part of the last century, the most successful American corporations were uniquely positioned to drive consumer habits. One need only think of Nike, Google and Apple when it comes to what is now socially expected of us when it comes to deciding what athletic shoes we should wear, what email service we should use and what smartphones we should palm.

During the last six months, however, there has been a noticeable shift. After a ponderous and reactive response in the first weeks of the pandemic and then widespread protests, the social – social concerns, social issues, social anxieties – became a bigger influencer of big business.

As a placard at a Black Lives Matter protest in Chicago this summer read: “no justice = no peace and no profit.” [Emphasis added.]

Ideally, however, business leaders are not acting solely out of financial self-interest. Recent events should be spurring them to consider the concept of social responsibility as a vital part of business – an essential, indeed intrinsic, component nested within any for-profit enterprise.

Currently, there is strong support from consumers and investors for positive social/business impact. in Aflac’s 2019 CSR Survey, 82% of consumers said that companies bear responsibility for “making the world a better place,” ahead of the 75% who selected “making money for its shareholders.” Nearly all investors surveyed, unsurprisingly, placed importance on making money for shareholders (93%), but a similar portion of investors said that making the world a better place was important.

“I believe every business is inextricably linked to social responsibility. It is now part of our culture,” said Diane Primo, CEO of Purpose Brand Agency, an award-winning public relations, branding and digital marketing firm. “Even asset managers, investment bankers and financial giants are evaluating companies that do not comply with extensive ESG matrices.”

Primo’s insights reveal something else. Present-gen consumers have awakened to the fact that they hold real power – buying power – and they are quickly giving way to what will surely be a new demo for the 21st century: citizen consumer.

“What consumers care about, and how much they care, is redefining social responsibility,” Primo said. “Shared activism in combination with digital engagement is shifting culture quickly. We witness shifting perceptions as Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 spread and corporate responsibility evolves.”

This “evolution” was one of the reasons GreenHouse and Greentarget, in partnership with LAB/Amsterdam, launched Immediate Frontier. An independent research and innovation initiative, it was designed in part as a model for leaders to better see how to engage with the concept of CSR in a new, more holistic, less compartmentalized way.

Some business leaders are ahead of the curve, Primo said.

“Public companies are already undergoing significant change,” she said. “As powerful consumer action groups team with investment groups to modify sales and reduce capital flows, change will happen – and quickly.”

X (and Boomers) Includes Y and Z Now

The fact that more leaders are willing to tackle issues that would not have seemed relevant to a for-profit entity’s business goals previously seems all the more natural, indeed necessary, as one contemplates another revelation: These social issues, now front and center, are leading the way to entirely new value propositions for corporations – and serving up impressive business outcomes.

But present-gen leaders – Gen Xers and, in some cases, Boomers – shouldn’t bear this burden alone, nor are they capable of taking it on, experts suggest. Next-gen leaders deserve a seat at the table.

Grossman, who teaches a CSR course at Booth, said young leaders take a long view and have sprung into action when it comes to the pandemic and helping Black-owned businesses.

“The next generation is demanding that business does things differently,” Grossman said. “[They’re] challenging leadership to take issues of diversity, equity and inclusion into account.”

Students are eager to jump in to think about social issues in a business context, and vice versa. And, Grossman said, the leaders at companies that sponsor the course at Booth are listening to fresh, new perspectives and straight-up challenges that students bring to the experience.

“It’s critical for me to connect with all of [Rustandy’s] stakeholders – students, faculty, alumni, social sector practitioners and business leaders,” she said. “But it turns out that it’s the students who always ask the toughest questions.”

October 1, 2020 by Betsy Hoag

Advising business leaders in 2020 means helping them see through the fog of a pandemic, run their businesses from afar and keep themselves safe, not to mention sane. For the marketers who support advisors, it’s critical to stay abreast of those leaders’ fears and challenges, the shifting and often distorted market dynamics they’re facing, the opportunities they’re discerning, and even their personal travails.

Enter voice of the client (VoC) research, a tool for helping professional service firms get multi-faceted understandings of clients’ needs, expectations and most importantly, their pain points.

Built through client interviews, focus groups or surveys, VoC research arms marketers with a wealth of insights. It delivers individual insights that fuel business development, organic growth and client retention. And it produces broader qualitative data the firm can use to identify market challenges and opportunities.

The pain points unearthed in VoC research also fuel stronger thought-leadership research. After discussing their own business and professional challenges, interviewees generally get more candid and insightful on industry topics and trends. The resulting insights add depth, credibility and authority to a firm’s thought leadership – and turning it into a valuable business development tool.

Voice of the Client Research: Interview Best Practices

Research into client pain points aims to first understand what keeps the client up at night and where they seek guidance. The interview findings inform how the firm serves its client’s business, but the priorities and opinions of each individual interviewee matter too. Topics, for example, could be:

Attitudes about where their business was, where it is now, and where it’s going
Constraints that prevent them from accomplishing more, personally and organizationally
What better outcomes would look like from both personal and organizational perspectives
Assessment of the most pressing and emerging business and legal risks and opportunities

For example, when a law-firm client wanted to evaluate the ways it assigned and delegated work, we conducted interviews with clients that produced blunt insights on where the firm’s approach diverged from its clients’ business objectives. The firm responded by reconfiguring the project management process and tailoring roles and responsibilities according to project scope.

While pain points are the primary focus of the interviews, the conversations often lead to insights on where the advisor or firm have fallen short. The conversations can evolve into discussions of the subtleties that advisors can’t see from the outside – how a particular business’s needs are different than others in its industry, for example.

Clients may not be expecting those discussions. But business leaders always appreciate transparency and candor. And while the conversations occasionally get awkward, pushing through the awkward moments breaks down communication barriers. Knowing their outside advisors care enough to ask makes clients eager to open up.

Picking the right interviewer

It’s important to think about who’s asking the questions. Putting interviews in the hands of a trained researcher always pays dividends; aptitude in eliciting candor, probing for fresh insights and analyzing the interview content will ensure nobody’s time feels wasted. And interviewees tend to be more candid with a third party.

At the same time, the firm has to be a collaborator – connecting the interviewee with the interviewer, introducing the project and process through an initial email or phone call. The advisor or firm rep should also thoroughly brief the interviewer on any pertinent issues. For the interviewee to feel at ease, the interviewer should understand the relationship history and any hot button issues.

The right approach for your clients – and for you

There are several options for undertaking this type of research. Selecting one approach versus another depends upon the topics and objectives at hand:

One-on-one, in-depth interviews often make the most sense for pain points research. There are situations where clients will dish frank insights if they feel they’re engaged in conversation with an audience of one and that person is a trained moderator who they can trust to report the conversation accurately – and with the right discretion.
Focus groups, online or in-person, can reveal challenges and serve as forums for testing potential solutions. In some cases, it’s preferable to have a group of peers weigh in on business pain points in an iterative discussion, particularly if a firm wants to get a sense for differing priorities among executives in different roles. The CFO and CMO may be thinking about the same problem with very different levels of urgency, for example.

Working on behalf of a financial institution, Greentarget moderated an online discussion between attorneys, claims administrators and the judiciary regarding pain points in class action settlements. Each group provided a different level of awareness about our client’s capabilities (and letting them interact with each other enhanced the discussion). Our findings gave the client a road map for determining which of their services and audiences – clients and prospects – deserved greater focus and attention.
Online surveys can also foster pain point conversations. Greentarget sees stronger data sets overall – with more decisive opinions – when we kick off a survey with a series of thoughtful questions around how respondents are feeling and where they are most desperate for guidance. In a recent survey about business operations in Latin America, we uncovered a business challenge that had not been directly addressed in messaging by any of the respondent’s outside counsel. It was easy for our law firm client to address the issue – but they didn’t know about it until we asked the right questions in the right setting.

Turning interviewees into advocates

Finally, engaging clients in one-on-one or small-group interviews, even surveys, can generate advocacy. There are a couple of important considerations for professional service providers here – and they should be considered in advance, lest an interviewee feel his or her insights were wasted or commoditized.

First, the firm should have a clear follow-up plan. Keeping in touch with the interviewees through individual outreach, even with just a summary of the interview content, can prove important in generating their long-term advocacy. Second, in cases where VoC research is part of a thought leadership initiative, the firm should have a clearly defined role for interviewees in the resulting article or report. In some cases, it may have an opportunity to quote them as experts.

Steve Jobs once urged companies to get as close as possible to customers, “So close that you can tell them what they need before they realize it themselves.” Getting to that level of intimacy takes more than treating clients to the occasional dinner – especially in the social-distancing era.

Asking the right questions, in the right moments, knowing how to process the answers and acting on the results helps a firm stay a step ahead of its clients’ needs.

July 17, 2020 by Betsy Hoag

The idea was straightforward but big: Identify the norms that govern the ways we work and the spaces we work in to better understand how those norms shape workplace wellness. The goal was to help corporate America reduce employee burnout, attract talent and build healthier organizations.

To accomplish this, Greentarget and two partners planned to convene a roundtable of experts from an array of industries through the new Immediate Frontier initiative. On February 4, we announced that the roundtable would happen in late April.

In between, of course, the world changed on us.

Without the ability to bring a group of experts together and amid the chaos of the abrupt work-from-home transition, we seriously considered spiking the project. But then we realized that finding solutions around work, wellness and space had just become more important than ever.

We just needed a new approach – so we created one. We call it qualitative, consultative research.

And that approach is fueling Work, Wellness & Space, the inaugural research offering by Immediate Frontier. The project, which is a partnership between GreenHouse::Innovation and Greentarget in special collaboration with Learn Adapt Build (LAB)/Amsterdam, launches today.

How We Got to the New Approach

If our task became more important in March, it also became more difficult. Decision-makers around the globe didn’t just face an economic disruption in the wake of COVID-19, they also faced momentous questions about how work would continue in the months and years ahead.

We could have pivoted to a traditional quantitative survey, but we knew (even from brief conversations with decision-makers in March) that direct conversations would be the best way to thoroughly explore attitudes and opinions. We considered a video roundtable, but finding a mutually agreeable time when many participants were dealing with critical business issues seemed tone-deaf and unlikely to work.

Instead, we set about a series of one-on-one qualitative interviews with experts in commercial real estate, architecture, medicine, design and several other fields. But from the earliest moments of our earliest conversations, we saw that these weren’t just interviews. They were consultative discussions.

How the New Approach Works

A good analogy is traditional beat reporting, in which a reporter, after months or years covering similar topics, develops knowledge bordering on expertise, enabling her to ask better questions and write more fully developed, insightful stories. Over the course of two months, our team began that journey through a combination of seeking out top experts, asking informed questions and knowing our stuff better every day.

We pulled this off through close collaboration with our Content & Editorial Strategy team, which has a strong background in journalism, and our Research & Market Intelligence team, which has years of experience in qualitative research. The new approach also benefitted from the willingness of our research participants to hop on Zoom within a few days’ notice.

This all led to something we hadn’t expected, something we think we can replicate. While providing guidance in research reports is something we’ve done for years, we were able to test possible guidance before findings were released by bouncing one expert’s view off others. And by bringing actionable insights from one related field to another – e.g., telling a commercial real estate executive what we heard from a healthcare executive and discussing why and how that mattered – we connected some interesting dots.

The Result

This approach has fueled a research report – the first chapter of which we’ll release today – covering a bevy of work, wellness and space issues. As decision-makers around the world think about what their offices will look like, how workspaces will function and how employees’ wellness can be reimagined, the work we’ve done through qualitative, consultative research has provided an important perspective on what appears to be a generational inflection point. It has also afforded the ability to iterate and advance the conversation as the impact of the pandemic evolves in tandem with the release of our research report chapters.

We believe our findings could help pave a way forward – one that perhaps leads to greater workplace wellness. We’ll release the results each week between now and Labor Day.

We hope our insights spark broader conversations that help decision-makers at a critical time and that improve the interplay between work, wellness and space for years to come.

May 12, 2020 by Betsy Hoag

How do we design immediately actionable research with longer term implications? In our latest video installment, we explore a few different nimble and flexible approaches to research that help professional services organizations demonstrate true subject matter authority and drive door opening conversations for client development during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Return to COVID-19 Resources for Communicators

April 8, 2020 by Betsy Hoag

With Covid-19’s full effects still bearing down on us, professional services providers might be tempted to stand pat on critical business initiatives. But those initiatives could help them weather an economic downturn — and prepare them for when some semblance of normalcy returns.

Put simply, waiting is not a strategy right now.

Organizations can still do a lot thoughtfully and strategically, particularly in areas that can work quite well with so many Americans working from home over the coming weeks and months.

Research Surveys in the Time of Covid-19

When they’re not trying to concentrate with screaming kids in the next room or investing in noise-canceling headphones, American workers are taking more video conferences than ever before. That is out of necessity, but it also means that those workers are growing more comfortable with online communication platforms.

With this somewhat-captive audience there is an opportunity to conduct online surveys – surveys that can teach us a lot about the topic of the moment. Over the past two months, Greentarget has developed several Covid-19 surveys related to topics or trends relevant to services our clients offer. We have successfully surveyed about Covid-19’s implications for employment issues, cybersecurity issues and CMS changes, among other topics. The best surveys ask not only what has happened and how that has impacted business but also explore near-term plans and where future challenges are expected.

Staying focused is crucial to produce a newsworthy piece of quantitative research. This is not the time for wide-ranging questionnaires that will take weeks to analyze. Audiences are hungry for trusted voices to provide actionable advice in the near-term.

Don’t Forget About Qualitative Research

Qualitative research – frequently conducted through electronic channels in the best of times — is another way to provide insights. It can refresh thought leadership that was published prior to the pandemic as key audiences can weigh in on how perceptions may have changed, or to what extent those previous insights look different to them.

To do this, Greentarget deploys an online focus group, with respondents similar to the original survey respondents. Participants can comment on past findings and can elaborate on what that specifically means to their business. We often focus on whether respondents expect a return to normalcy or a completely new normal.

That was the approach for a project Greentarget partnered on with GreenHouse::Innovation and Amsterdam-based Learn Adapt Build (LAB). Since early this year, the three groups had planned the Work, Wellness & Space Summit in Chicago, scheduled for April 23. The 20 confirmed participants included leaders across commercial real estate, architecture, construction, commercial healthcare, big pharma and wellness consultancies.

Their discussion was intended to start a longer-term wellness initiative, called Space::The Immediate Frontier, organized around a pressing need to uncover a healthier relationship between wellness, work and space is possible, with the holistic employee experience at its center. But by late March, it was clear the format needed to change.

Rather than rescheduling, the partner groups opted to engage key stakeholders in the initiative through remote interviews about the specific business challenges. These interviews will build momentum leading up to the summit, while allowing Greentarget to take the pulse of key leaders about how they process the twists and turns that the pandemic has brought to their respective industries and how they each approach this very relevant topic.

Maintaining a willingness to explore creative approaches to research in a time of unprecedented constraints can empower your organization to emerge from this period in a position of strength. A compelling perspective rooted in audience empathy will keep you a step ahead of competitors and tuned into what is truly most important to your clients.