How to Do Market Research for Public Relations

Brands and corporations are able to reach their target audiences in a variety of ways, from advertising, social media platforms, contests, publicity, to in-store experiences and more. However, generating content that is going to reach the target audience in a relevant way can only be done through one thing, and that’s market research.

Market research has become essential, whether it’s done for storytelling purposes, or to gather more insights about the market, such as their interest and preferred platform Telling stories that are relevant to the target audience is key when companies are looking to build a consumer-brand relationship. 

Buyer Persona

The first step in doing market research for PR is to gather a lot of information about the ideal customer for the company and what’s important to that customer. This includes learning about their common behaviors and their lifestyles, along with where they most prefer to gather online and offline, which publications they follow to inform their buying decisions, and the best way to reach this audience.

Outlets

Once the company gets a better idea of where the customers frequently go to get information about the products or services they’re looking to purchase, it’s time to research those channels and outlets and to figure out what they talk about, and how they talk about these products or services.

This entails researching the outlets both offline and online and learning about whether they’re willing to publish guest posts, press releases, or even paid ads. For example, there are plenty of YouTube content creators that have large audiences in various niches that are extremely helpful in reaching audiences on a brand’s behalf that are more than happy to work with different companies.

Content

After researching the channels and outlets, it’s time to start creating content that’s going to interest the target audience. This can mean creating written, video, or audio content, and the best choice is always the type of content for which the target audience has shown the strongest preference..

The content should be appealing both to the target audience, as well as search engines, which means employing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that are extremely helpful in getting digital content to reach the right audiences.

Distribution

The last step is to go back to the list of channels and outlets and learn the type of content that they prefer, as well as the best way to submit that content to them so that they can publish it to their audiences. One of the best ways to get a pitch accepted and published is to have a previously established relationship with the influencer or the journalists; another is to make your content so interesting that the outlet publishes it of their own accord.