17 May Creative Ways to Relay Market Research Data to General Audiences

You’ve got the data insight – now how do you present it?

Market research is often regarded as a valuable tool packed with useful insights that businesses and organizations can use to maximize their potential. But what happens when you have deep, rich insights with no idea how to paint a positive picture that will solidify stakeholder buy-in, especially among general audiences?

Usually, professionals provide their learnings to stakeholders in the form of market research reports – a proven and reliable way to get complex information across to stakeholders in ways that are actionable right away. Reports are often rich in detail and contain executive summaries that help tell your story or inform your business problem.

But what about when you need to get market research data out to a wider audience of people? People who may or may not know they have a stake in the organization or business? Or more challenging yet – an audience who may not care?

Learn how to make your market research reports stand out with 6 Creative Ways to Present Your Market Research Data.

This situation is something that is perhaps more common than you’d think for organizations like municipalities, government agencies, non-profits and many others.

For industries like these, getting research details and findings out to a mass audience of stakeholders can prove to be difficult. And sometimes a market research report may not be the solution to get concise information to those who have a stake in the subject matter.

In cases such as these, market research reports will be a tool to help inform those who commissioned the research in the first place, but they may not be enough to get the underlying intelligence out – quickly – to the people who matter.

In cases like these, a different approach may be what is called for!

There are ways for brands to get market research intelligence out there that will not only get their audience’s attention, but will also keep it long enough for the market research data to speak for itself.

Often, the best tools available are those that are familiar (or look familiar) to a general audience. That’s because familiarity with a medium engenders comfort with it – making these messages much easier to digest.

That’s because familiar things make us feel comfortable.

Think about it this way – when we’re exposed to the same stimulus over and over, and we don’t suffer any ill effects as a result, we learn we can trust that thing. The same goes with content. The more we are exposed to a specific kind of content, or the channel that content is on, we become familiar with it. When these become familiar, we don’t have to bother worrying about whether we can trust – we just engage.  

Check out the creative outputs listed below to see how some familiar media can be used as great ways to relay market research data to general audiences.

Blogs

It may seem head-slappingly obvious, but adding a blog roll to your organization’s website may be a great place to start.

Blogs present information in a comfortable style that many readers are used to. Familiarity with this format will allow many who may be unfamiliar with the concepts presented to learn about them in an unintimidating way.

What’s more, blogs allow for either linking or embedding of many of the creative outputs discussed later in this post, which makes them like Swiss Army knives for reporting to mass audiences.

Check out some of our blogs to see how we do it!  

Vox Pops & Other Multimedia

When it comes to relaying research data to mass audiences, video is a great tool to use. That’s because when it comes to getting and holding the attention of audiences and getting information across to a wide audience, video cannot be beat.

Why it is a great tool comes back to engagement – people love video. In fact, according to HubSpot, a leading software in customer reputation management, using videos on landing pages will increase conversions by 86%. What’s more, just having the word “video” in the subject line of an email can increase open rates by 19%.

One of the ways Insightrix has used video to relay and encourage discussion about the findings of our independent research is through vox pops.

Vox pops are short interviews in which participants are asked research questions like those fielded in the market research and their responses are recorded. Another way to make vox pops work is to present market research findings themselves and get reaction to them.

Have a look at a vox pop Insightrix developed in the past embedded below to get a better idea of what they are all about.

There are many different other ways to use multimedia for market research data – from motion infographics to explainers (short videos that are used to explain concepts through the use of visuals and narrative) to re-enactments (staged recreations of events or occurrences). Watch the explainer video below that we produced to see how they can be effective in getting complicated messages across to wide audiences.

Both multimedia strategies go a long way to humanize the research data itself by giving a face to research participants.

Infographics

Not everybody takes in information in the same way.

Generally, some people may be more drawn to the written word, others will prefer video to access information – others, on the other hand, will connect more with your research data if it’s relayed to them through a graphic representation.

Infographics are a great way to get a large amount of data across all at once in an easy-to-swallow form. They combine text, images and design to tell the story of your data. What’s more, they are easily shared through social media, which will help to amplify the messages you want to get across.

Infographics do more than engage and entertain – they help audiences internalize and understand complex or subtle data stories easily and demonstrate insights in a rich and communicative way.   

While infographics can be a quick way to represent your data – the tools used to build infographics are not always the quickest to learn and are sometimes not the cheapest option either.

But don’t let that discourage you!

There are plenty of great resources available to the aspiring or intermediate infographic developer such as platforms like Piktochart – combine a platform like Piktochart with graphic resources such as Flaticon for an inexpensive but professional result.

Below is a recent example of a study infographic we’ve developed through publicly accessible assets: 

Podcasts

When podcasts started out in 2004, they were pretty niche in their messaging and their audiences. Since then, though, they have grown to become one of the major communications channels out there today. And many organizations and businesses are jumping at the opportunity to use podcasts for their own needs.

This is mostly because of two factors: easily affordable reach and versatility.

Reach

Podcasts are one of the fastest-growing communications and marketing channels organizations have at their disposal. According to “The Canadian Podcast Listener – a Landscape Study 2018”, across every metric they measured, podcast awareness and usage has grown even since 2018. In fact, more than 10 million Canadian adults have listened to a podcast in the last year. This alone makes podcasts a great way to relay your business data to a wider audience.

Sure, the reach of podcasts may not be as large as legacy media like radio or television, but they’re much more affordable (much, much more affordable!). This affordability, combined with the growth in the medium, means that podcasts will continue to be one of the best ways for organizations to reach a broad audience.

Versatility

And podcasts are also quite versatile, which makes them ideal for relaying complex messages and data to a general audience. The messaging and the style in which messages are conveyed are up to podcast producers, opening up untold possibilities when it comes to the way information is relayed. Podcasts can be dry and informational, entertaining and fun – or a mixture of both.

Take a listen to our own podcast series, Stories of Market Research: The Insightrix Podcast, for an example of the ways that a podcast can be an awesome way to relay market research data to general audiences.

 

It Is Possible to Relay Market Research Data to General Audiences

Even though market research intelligence can sometimes be a little enigmatic to general audiences, it is entirely possible to get the story of the data across to folks who may not have a background in data interpretation or market research analysis.

Some of the best ways to do this is to take the data out of market research reports, which may be a bit cryptic to the average person, and put it into formats that are more familiar to general audiences, like blogs, videos, infographics and podcasts. And what’s more, each of these media have their own benefits and each can be used in different and mutually complementary ways.

As tools to communicate with and relay market research data to general audiences, they are invaluable. Using one, or all of them together, can be a great way to relay market research data to general audiences.

Interested in seeing how Insightrix uses video and podcasts to get our data story told to folks without a research background?

Check out the Insightrix YouTube Channel for vox pops, video clips and podcasts.