Question

Topic: Advertising/PR

Creating A Uk Survey For Media Exposure

Posted by cce on 3/13/2018 at 11:25 AM ET 125 Points
Hello!

I am an intern for a comparison site company who specialise in the 'sub-standard' consumer (consumers with low or no credit score and need a loan/credit etc.)

I have been asked to create a survey of the UK so the results will then be used to create around 4/5 press releases that will hopefully get us media coverage. Ho

I have done this before and did not succeed. I want to know if this is something you would recommend or are we wasting our time? Thanks so much!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 3/13/2018 at 12:03 PM Accepted
    Who are you trying to survey (presumably your potential clients, but may not be) and what information do you want to survey about?
  • Posted by cce on 3/13/2018 at 12:16 PM Author
    Hi thanks for responding!

    We are surveying the general UK consumer about debts. Do people ignore debts? What reasons do they turn to debt? How much debt would they consider to be problem debt?

    We would then like send out press releases to in our targeted publications (those are target audience are reading) and then hopefully be published.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 3/13/2018 at 12:19 PM Accepted
    Why not place an advertisement, rather than a press release? Why should the publications care about your survey?
  • Posted by cce on 3/13/2018 at 12:26 PM Author
    We're a start-up so we do plenty of advertisements on Facebook etc. but some further research into our target customers revealed they do read news online. Some sponsored posts cost about £60,000 and we really don't have that kind of money - unfortunately!
  • Posted by mgoodman on 3/13/2018 at 4:10 PM Accepted
    Conducting a consumer survey to serve as the basis for a series of press releases is likely to cost quite a bit ... especially if you survey a large enough group to be statistically reliable.

    Whenever I hear that a start-up is not well funded a red flag goes up. That suggests the marketing plan was not thoroughly reviewed up-front. Maybe the goals of the research, or the research methodology, were not matched to the marketing budget. If that's the case, you will either need to rethink the objectives or somehow come up with additional funding.

    If you simply take short-cuts with the research and assume it won't make any difference in the success of the program, you will almost certainly be disappointed.
  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 3/13/2018 at 4:12 PM Accepted
    Becoming an expert on the market/industry and writing byline articles about that is one route to promoting products outside of the standard route of paid advertising. Not as effective with press releases as it would be with articles. If press picked up the PR and decided to write an article about that, then it possibly could be effective (but it all depends on how/what they write - only way to control this is to write the articles yourself - maybe consider hiring a writer rather than just submitting pres releases).

    Of course, this all is based around you having compelling content to write an article or press release about. Not clear that you will find such content in a survey.

    This is a round about way of promoting, and there are reasons it is roundabout. If done correctly and well, it could work. But not likely to succeed for most, IMHO.

    You do comparisons of loans and credit - is there information your site has already learned which consumers could use to hear? How some credit/loans are better than others? Maybe just have an article written about that and published. Shows the company's expertise and that the comparison site is of value so should be used by people looking for credit/loans.
  • Posted by cce on 3/14/2018 at 1:05 PM Author
    Hey thanks for your in-depth responses :)

    We write our on onsite blog about loans, credit cards, bank accounts etc so we have content that can be used as advice pieces. However, often we use this to approach for influencers and get them to talk about our content. Most of our articles are written by professional writers or in-house.

    Many articles work off of research commissioned by other companies, GoCampare are big on this. We tend to pay for 1000 responses for the survey, which for most papers is a big enough representative amount but it’s knowing what they want to write about before they write about it as the survey prep takes time.

    My press releases were looked over by a professional agency before I sent them out so I don’t think it was a case of bad writing, just don’t think it was big enough news.

    I have also negotiated on price a fair bit so survey cost is about £500 incl VAT so not horrendous and if it was picked up by at least one fairly large publication it would be a win!

    What I struggle with is I have no guidance on this and I feel I’ll let everyone down if I don’t get the value out of it :( I’m tryong to prove myself as a good intern! I would like to get exposure in publications just don’t know how when we don’t have any news to tell! Hope this makes sense :)
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