If you are looking for a way to gain media coverage for your business, why not conduct a survey and publicise the results. Surveys are a great way to present your business as a valuable source of information and enhance your credibility. You can write a media release to share the survey results and include quotes from an appropriate spokesperson in your business. This will help to position your business as an expert on a particular topic and build your brand.

Journalists often include survey results and statistics in their articles because it provides evidence to support specific points in the article. Statistics also provide validity and credibility to the article making it more believable to the reader.

If you decide to conduct a survey don’t just ask your employees or clients to answer questions about how great your business is. The survey needs to be objective and scientific to ensure the results are accurate and legitimate.

Here are some tips for creating a great survey.

• Conduct the survey around a topic that is relevant to your business or industry. If you chose an irrelevant topic the survey won’t be beneficial to your business.
• Be topical. Choosing a theme for your survey that is topical and linking your business to it will help pique the interest of journalists. For instance, a survey that links your target industry with the use of social media marketing.
• Don’t ask radical questions to try and force the results to be interesting. Sometimes the most basic questions will produce surprising or newsworthy results. Journalists will also be more interested in results which are objective.
• Don’t create the survey solely around your business and how great it is. Journalists won’t write a story about the percentage of people who like your business. The survey results need to benefit your industry or the general public by providing interesting or valuable information to them.
• Your survey must have an adequate sample size to ensure the results are accurate. This will depend on what you are surveying and if you have a good representation of people participating.
• You can think about hiring a reputable research company like News Poll or Galaxy to undertake a survey on your behalf will lend credibility and reliability to the results, giving it more chance of getting picked up by the media.
• However if you are lucky enough to have a large database, particularly in one sector, you can use Survey Monkey to can run your own survey and it will produce interesting information relevant to journalists writing about that sector.

After completing the survey

Present the findings: Once the survey is completed you need to present the findings in a clear and easy to read report. This report should be professionally presented and contain all the questions, results and methods from the survey. You should also include your branding on the document for example by placing your logo in the corner of the page.

You should ensure this document is finalised before you publicise the survey results in case a journalist requests it. You could also include a link to a PDF version of the results on your website.

Publicise the results with a media release: One of the best ways to publicise the results is by writing a media release.

Find the most interesting and newsworthy result from the survey and make this the main focus of your media release. If you have more than one newsworthy result then you should consider writing two media releases. However you should distribute the media releases a few weeks apart to maximise your coverage.

Include quotes in the media release from an appropriate spokesperson in your business. This spokesperson must be prepared to answer questions about the survey if a journalist wants to interview them.

At the bottom of the media release you can provide more information about the survey such as a list of the main findings and a boilerplate about the survey. This boilerplate should contain the dates the survey was conducted, the sample size, types of people surveyed and how the survey was conducted.

Send the media release: Make a targeted list of journalists who would be interested in the topic of the media release and email the release to them. Make sure you send out the media release as soon as the survey results are finalised. If you leave it for a few months it will be old news and journalists may not write about it.

You can also post the media release on your website and share a link to it on your social media channels.

Surveys benefit your business by revealing valuable information about your customers or industry while also giving you the opportunity to increase your exposure in the media.

Has your business undertaken a survey before?

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Sydney Public Relations Agency, CP Communications provides specialist media, traditional and online PR strategies that get amazing results. Contact us today. For more PR tips see www.PublicRelationsSydney.com.au.