MarketResearch.com’s business is content. They provide their customers access to the most comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services from over 720 top publishers. With a steady stream of new content, the MarketResearch.com communications and marketing teams are continuously looking for a way to improve visibility, engagement and consumption by top industry media influencers, clients and prospects—and to drive revenue.
CHALLENGES:
Driving Visibility & Revenue
In an effort to drive additional awareness about new content, to increase revenue through engagement, and to promote their new offerings to key influencers in trade and other media outlets, MarketResearch.com engaged PR Newswire to jointly design a content distribution program to efficiently utilize their budget and deliver maximum ROI.
APPROACH:
Frequent Content Distribution Designed to Spark Engagement & Sales
MarketResearch.com committed to executing a high volume of 67 press releases over a two-month span to test the effectiveness of utilizing the PR Newswire distribution network to promote content and to determine what would be the optimal cadence of releases and content promotion for the organization moving forward.
As part of the design and kick-off process of the trial, the content developers and marketing communications team from MarketResearch.com participated in an intensive training session with the PR Newswire Customer Content team.
This team focuses on offering counseling and editing services to ensure that content distributed via PR Newswire follows the best practices in the industry and delivers the best overall results.
Utilizing their experience, PR Newswire was able to build out best practice guidelines specifically for MarketResearch.com around content creation, distribution (including headlines and multimedia), and audience targeting. These guidelines were updated and maintained based on an evaluation of key metrics throughout the program.
Relevant multimedia images were distributed with key releases as part of MarketResearch.com’s overall strategy to drive maximum visibility and traffic to their site. Each press release contained a specific call to action for their target audience, ranging from viewing a specific page on MarketResearch.com to joining a trial of one of their new product platforms. To improve overall tracking, each link within a press release was monitored through marketing automation software. This allowed the MarketResearch.com team to track and measure a variety of distributed content and announcements, including New Products, Existing Reports and Content, Corporate Marketing and News.
RESULTS:
Significant Increase in Engagement & Web Traffic
At the conclusion of the program, PR Newswire and MarketResearch.com evaluated the results based upon data provided by both firms’ measurement systems.
PR Newswire exceeded expectations in each of the three key areas that MarketResearch.com was evaluating:
1. DIRECT REVENUE CREATION
- Sales revenue directly tied to press release traffic was 73% of the total program cost.
2. INCREASED ENGAGEMENT
- Press releases drove thousands of click-throughs to product pages and hundreds of click-throughs to MarketResearch.com's owned media pages (promotions, blog, etc.).
- More than 300 engagements with the releases (shares, re-tweets, etc.).
- Press releases delivered 260% more website traffic to MarketResearch.com than all other paid marketing sources combined, including PPC, digital and other advertising avenues.
- Releases had views from key prospects and target companies, including divisions of HP, Institute of Food Technologists, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Fisher Scientific and LEK.
3. INCREASED BRAND AWARENESS
- Organic media pick-up of content increased year-over-year in both mainstream and trade media as measured by postings and inbound media calls.
- Releases from MarketResearch.com produced first-page search results on key unbranded search terms that had been previously controlled by competing firms.
- 18,000+ postings of releases on news and other content sites.
“Our primary aims by working with PR Newswire were to increase distribution of our messages for specific products and increase brand awareness.”
FUTURE PLANS:
Drive Visibility & Achieve Revenue Goals by Sharing Content
Based upon the evaluation criteria—direct revenue tied to the program, increased online visibility, media engagement and pick-up—the MarketResearch.com executive team plans to continue with their content distribution program and has established a long-term partnership with PR Newswire to achieve this vision.
“Our primary aims by working with PR Newswire were to increase distribution of our messages for specific products and increase brand awareness,” said Paul Rickets, Director of Marketing at MarketResearch.com. “In this, PR Newswire succeeded in providing us wide distribution to a large number of media sites. It is encouraging that we are being picked up by a number of relevant trade outlets in addition to the major news networks.”
“PR Newswire succeeded in providing us wide distribution to a large number of media sites. It is encouraging that we are being picked up by a number of relevant trade outlets in addition to the major news networks.”