In this episode, Nneka Otika shared invaluable insights on conducting research and writing reports.
The insights given in the session provide a practical and comprehensive guide to conducting research, leveraging data, and creating impactful reports.
She also emphasizes the importance of maintaining data credibility and provides guidance on effective report promotion to reach the intended audience.
Name: Nneka Otika
What Bernard Does: Content Marketing Manager
Company: Her Writing Portfolio
Noteworthy: She is a content marketer with 6+ years of experience. She has primarily worked in the B2B SaaS space creating strategies and content that marry business goals with helping customers via storytelling.
💡Components of a Research Report
Nneka explains the key components of a research report, which include the data itself, visuals or graphics to enhance the presentation of the data, and the written content. She emphasizes that writing should be concise and used as a tool to support and complement the data.
💡Types of Data.
Nneka differentiates between first-party data obtained through surveys and interviews and secondary data sourced from publicly available information or aggregated data. She provides examples of how companies can leverage these data types for research reports.
💡Overcoming Analysis Intimidation
Nneka reassures that data analysis is not as intimidating as it may seem. Depending on the company and project, the data provided may range from ready-to-use data points to raw data that requires analysis.
She encourages researchers not to be intimidated by the analysis process and highlights the importance of finding interesting and relevant data points for inclusion in the report.
💡Survey Question Development
Nneka highlights the process of developing survey questions based on the research topic and objectives.
She explains the importance of breaking down the topic into different areas for comprehensive coverage and avoiding bias toward the company or client in the questions.
💡How to Decide on a Research Topic
Nneka Otika explains the process of deciding on a research topic. She emphasizes the importance of exploring what others are doing in the industry and conducting thorough research to identify existing reports that people are using.
By analyzing industry trends, statistics, and salary data, one can identify gaps in coverage and find topics that haven’t been covered extensively. Nneka also suggests focusing on original research and building upon a chosen topic over time by comparing data from previous years.
Role of a Data Analyst in Report Writing
Nneka explains the role of a data analyst in report writing. The data analyst’s main responsibility is to make sense of raw data collected from surveys and transform it into meaningful insights.
Common analysis techniques include cross-tabulation analysis, which helps identify correlations or relationships between different data points.
The analyst uses software tools to streamline this process, as hiring someone solely for data analysis can be costly. By conducting the analysis in-house and leveraging software, companies can reduce expenses associated with research reports.
Incentivizing Participants for Research.
Nneka shares alternative ways to incentivize participants without offering direct monetary rewards. She recommends donating to a charity related to the industry or cause, making it more relevant and appealing to participants.
By aligning the chosen charity with the industry’s values, participants feel good about contributing to a cause while providing their responses. This approach not only helps reduce spam but also ensures more genuine and valuable answers.
Connect with Nneka;
Nneka’s Research Writing Course
Michelle Linn’s Research Half Hour
The State of Talent Optimization Report by The Predictive Index
Chima Mmeje 0:09
All right, thank you so much for joining us today we have Nneka how do i pronounce your surname? I always need to ask this before and I always end up asking it while we are recording. Otika? Yeah.
Okay, we have Nneka Otika with us. And I’m excited because she’s going to be teaching us how to create research reports. That’s to finish the entire process. And without further ado, I’m going to turn off my camera, turn off my mic and pass the baton over to Nneka, alright Nneka you’re on now.
nneka otika 0:41
Okay. Hi, everyone, I’m going to share my screen, because I kind of like prepared a presentation. But like, let’s dive into this. Right. So my background is, I’ve been in content marketing since 2018. But I’ve been in marketing in general before then.
I’ve been in marketing since 2015, I worked mainly in lifestyle before jumping into content marketing in 2018. I finally got into original research last year, attending webinars on things like that. And one of the things I discovered early on is that there is like, the barrier to entry for original research is quite high, when you want to really like see somebody that would like is willing to give you a chance on it.
So once a goal was established paper because of how much resources that goes into producing this. So last year, I fell working for Office butter as a part time Content Marketing Manager. So this was one of the things I said doing cause, like, the best way to achieve the goals the company wanted. So we know to get more people into the ICO space to become a thought leader, all these kinds of things. Everything could be achieved with the with the research, original research.
So that’s what I did. And this year, but like the report launched, and then I say I’ve seen like everyone’s talking about Chapter CP, and the slowing down content, I kind of like were like, how could I even do something about this? So yes, original research is important. But again, the process is kind of like, how do I say, research, in fact, like, very intensive.
So the original research process has like 10 steps, depending on what you want to do. So you have possible you have research, which is funny, because like it’s original research, but you’ll first have to, like, know exactly what other people in your industry are creating, you know, before you can actually create something. So for example, in office attire isn’t the administration Administrative Professional space?
But do there are already other reports in the industry who are in the foster to the reports, but most of the reports that were in the industry were focused on salary. So if we do if you didn’t, if you don’t do research, you may not really understand or see, okay, how do I find a topic to talk about, you know, so the research that tells you like, okay, these are the topics that’s been covered in my space, how do I like okay, knowing that all this has been covered, we can then find an angle.
So, knowing that most of the research in the industry was basically on salary, I went like callback something more comprehensive something that would cover like, okay, job support, salary, technology and tools and all that and also research research time also be like a way for you to get how do I say this, like get insights from your customers and things like that.
So, the next thing is like getting leadership by it, I mean, I mentioned this is so, original research is very expensive to produce. So companies are not very willing to like, Shell out the money for the original research and actually can’t prove okay, this is going to help us do this, do this do this. So, for the repository, office attack, we actually had a plan by hospitals to foil contents for the rest of the year.
Now before office shuts down marketing and most of their functions perform like engineering and customer service. So after you get leadership time, you can then go into like planning stage, we want to know like, Okay, who will be doing what, how much everything costs, you know, if are we going to do a survey based in software based, original research, if value based or are we going to do like a bench Mack bass kind of interview, then okay, so how are we going to get people to respond to this survey?
How are we going to do? What kind of software are we going to use? Will we need to clean the data in the future? How will we promote this? All these things? I think, Tim, it’s like, first outline, before you get into the, it gets into any even before you start to write the survey, like we did. So this was our process than project management, like, it’s very easy.
It’s, it’s very advisable to like, have it written down, who is in charge of what you know, who is going to handle the writing, you know, who is going to handle the analysis, who’s going to handle this, who is going to be, you know, in touch with leadership to give updates, who is going to be in touch with like, if you’re working with clients and stuff like that, you need to have all this with the timelines for everything, so that you can carry everybody along.
Yeah, and then the next thing will be writing the survey questions. So, so writing survey questions, you start with a topic. You start with the topic, sorry. I mean, it’s all. So start with the topic, and then you break it down. So let’s say like, our stuff was about the industry, right? We weren’t like, see, okay, so what topics do we want to cover? Right?
So we wanted to cover like, Okay, how satisfied is our audience with their job? So the thing that even like, the cheat code, we had was a crossword a player in this space, we kind of like saw some pain points. And and the question was, like, is this an individual thing? Or is this an industry wide thing? You know, so like, Okay, people complain about my job doesn’t recognise me at all, pays too low. I don’t get any job support 40 hours a week is too is too small to accomplish what I want to do.
So we kind of like took all this together and use that as a way to build our list. And the way you can do it is like break down things into topic. Right? The areas you want to research. And again, if you’re working for your clients, right, or your company, this writing the survey, or interview questions can be a really quick time to like find out to like, get more information for your company like Office, authorising is a b2b SaaS company with a product.
And they were to see, okay, yes, in this industry, how how, who actually has the buying power, you know, so that’s when we ask things around technology tools. But you also have to be very careful not to like turn your, your survey or your interview or whatever, into something that praises your company, or makes your company to focus.
So that then you get to the next stage, which is the runtime, now, if you’re going to like be doing a survey based in a survey based research, it’s going to run for a period of time. And this time is like, as run for a month, this time is the best time to like, jump into a raffle, you can’t analyse the data, because the data is not yet complete.
So what you do is the repurposing and distribution for the research, you know, how are you going to like come up with like, Okay, where do we share this, and stuff like that, for example, at office otter, we the nine months of contents, based on the reports that come in political seat, preliminary data, so Tekapo, sec created like, Okay, this is where we want to share this, all those kinds of things, and the stock was in that kind of planning place so that once you have your report, you can hit the ground running, then the next thing you’ll see is I do data from the list and you have to like clean the data, I have to do data analysis.
So it’s our analysis, the most common form you see in research is cross tabulation, right? In which case like, it helps you to, like make associations between two data points. For example, you could ask yourself, like, would I have higher salary? Are they like to do reports having more job satisfaction, this during the analysis, I can begin to like make this associations between these two points, right. And then the next thing you do is the witch research reports right in itself.
And it’s kind of one of the things I wanted to focus on today, right? Because each of these things are like, very each of these things can like take like, an hour on its own. And of course, the final processes, the repurposing and distribution, their research reports is not just meant to live on your, on your websites.
In order to get your system you need to like get it into the hands of people get into the face of people where they can consume it and stuff like that. So that’s like another thing you have to do afterwards. So the reason why I wanted to focus on research reports writing for this, this webinar is the fact that it’s very easy to get to, you know, it’s very easy to get into, you’re not going to like me thinking about pain, like paying for tools that are like Oba.
nneka otika 10:44
Give me a minute please. Okay, let’s see. Oh okay, please let me know if you can see my screen
Yeah, it’s visible. Okay. So this is, what I’m talking about, this is what I’m pulling from. So the, the research writing process is like, why I want to focus on this is that it’s a lot, it’s a lot easier to get into this, you don’t need a lot of like money or anything, most of the tools you use for these are things you probably already use.
And it’s much easier to like create something to start selling the service. So basically, a research report is basically like, story based on the data you get from your research, you know, so the components of, of the storyteller, basically, like a research report is you have the data itself, right?
That’s like the star of the show everything around. This is like information that nobody else has done the graphics. Now I’ll say this, right? It can, it can have something like 20% of people say, ABC, but it’s not interesting until you add like visuals to it. And then finally, the writer.
And a word mix up with that is really funny, because this, like I come from b2b SaaS, and I’m used to writing very long form content, it took me a while to like, reframe my mind that when it comes to research reports, and writing them, the writing is not the start, you know, the writing is like to be used as parently as possible, because sometimes it can stand on its own.
And then we go on to the types of data you will encounter. So you have like, because one of I talked about original research, there’s always the, the, the test that you might, you can only probably like encounter, like only like surveys or something like that. But it’s not a surveys. So first, primarily, first party data is what you get from doing yourself, like you’ve got like surveys and interviews.
And sometimes you actually get something like you have secondary data, right? Is a country data is the one you get from like, publicly available. Data, I don’t know if you know Camille trends, where she has, like, we pulled, we pulled this stuff from like, this place, or we pulled this stuff from, like this place, you know, so she has like examples of that. Whereby, like, the aggregates data, right?
And then they share the aggregated data. Um, I’m trying to find an example to share with you, as I have her LinkedIn, yes, this is what I’m trying to share it right. So something like this now, we collected this different asset to seven b2b staff, signup, page screenshots, right, they can create a report from this, right? So this is like, the country they don’t own the data about, like, it’s publicly available information so they can actually share it. So that’s like, the secondary data.
And then like, because you are getting like, you’re getting data, right? Depending on the company you work with, you can actually see the kind of data right, you cannot tell the candidate how you get is going to be different. Right? So, um, I’ll get her to see my screen. Yes. Okay. So like data data analysis is going to be is is important, but most people kind of like get very scared that the analysis is scary, but it’s really not right. Don’t let it intimidate you because the system’s scary and intimidating, intimidating, but it’s not.
You won’t really be dealing with raw data, if depending on the company you work with, they will give you, they can give you different kinds of things, right, as the end product to work with some, some savvy companies, or some companies I do original research will give you the exact dicasteries, you need to tell stories, you don’t even need to do any analysis with that. Some will give you like a document, like a Google Document filled with data points that have the half essentials to each other.
Some will give you like the crust of the rock or stablish on data, and you have all your stories from it. But the third option is usually like not as common, you’re most likely going to like it like the second option. And sometimes depending on the company, the first option. So like for us in our Office portal, when we got like our data, we had like 37 pages of data points that had associations with each other.
And that was where we had like pull stuff to like, create, create stories to like, pull the stories from and then create the reports, not everything out of within certain features, not everything made it into the report. So that is something that you can actually like see. The next thing is like finding in the second scenario, whereby you’re given like, there are some page documents, for example, finding the asterisks from this, that will go into your report.
So the asterisks are like interesting bits of information, like based on two data points, like for example, office otter, we realise that, okay, people that don’t have certification, the reason why they don’t have a tradition in the industry is because they don’t get company they don’t get support from that kind of company doesn’t have learning budgets or things like that. So that’s why. Yeah, so that’s why then, how do you find the asterisks by your report?
The first thing I would say is like, because the reports is a lot. It’s, it’s very daunting when you look at that it’s seven pages, right? But you need to like go through and read it. So one of the things I would say I did is, I copied everything into like a Google Doc, then I tell you the comments, you know, when I find associations between like two data points, I’ll use comments. An example is like, I’m looking at education among different demographics, and the salary rates, I realised that you had, in the respondents we had, millennials actually had more.
They have more graduates at postgraduate degrees, they have more masters than any other age group by the end less than the other age groups. So this is like an assertion you can make. So to get you started, one of the things I always ask, I will say like, Do you have any assets? The company or the client that hires you? Like, do you have any assumptions about your data? Or what do you hope to find with this data? Right? That kind of like, guide you.
And then during the survey process, most people try to like come up with like, Hey, this is what we hope to find with this data, and things like that. So, for example, we had this thing that what can we be like people that have certifications, probably no more money. This is something that we hope to find, or like, oh, maybe like, Jeff has a section on salary would end more have better job satisfaction and stuff like that. So like, I like that to guide you to, like start making associations.
And that kind of pushes you to like, spend more time with the data, you know, so the more time you spend with the data, the more you can make associations between two different data points. Basically, like finding the customer is about making a decision between two data points, and presenting that. So the tools of the trade, like I would say, a data visualisation tool.
For this, we use Canva Pro, right, so like, make the desktop pop at all. And then the next one, we’ll use them, I use them grammar and spell checkers. I use the Hemingway app because I tend to write very long sentences. And I use Pro writing aid. Because I come from like a British background right? And for an American audience, you want to make sure that the spelling’s right.
I have a friend to write to you in like labour and behaviour, right. So this helps me to catch all that. And then a workspace to like Google Talk suits or like Microsoft set of tools, one of this stuff to like help you do all you need. Now the next thing we want to talk about is this visualisation. Right it’s So hold on. I haven’t been scrolling down. This is where I am on. Okay.
So for the time utilisation, right, it kind of like helps to, like cause shall be consequences hospitalised your data like, it makes it easy for people to like, understand what you’re talking about, right? When you say 20% of people having a visual data, like something that people can, like, basically see, and amazing, does have more real.
And one of the things, I see people that are trying to, like, get into this space, the mistake, one of the mistakes they make is to like, focus only on using like bar charts, flow charts and stuff, you know, and data visualisation has to go beyond all this for you to like, be able to, like give people like really great. So like, make your report really nice, make a report pop.
So here I have some examples, but like, let me tell you why you should care as a writer, because again, when you can, even if you’re not designing the reports, right? Being able to, like tell someone that okay, here is where you can present this right away can present this, it takes you from being just a writer to more of a strategic partner in the reports, you know, and because it’s spending a lot of time with the report, you can start to get up ideas of ways to present your data. So I have a few
Lily Ugbaja 21:36
reports I want to like up and share. So like example of what to do, and what not to do. So this is something from Erin Balsa, when she was a predictive index, right? If you look at this report, everything is not presented with bar charts, pie charts, she charts it, she used as many
nneka otika 22:02
as many musical elements as possible to present the data. So that is interesting, because again, I keep seeing the same thing after a while your eyes kind of like glaze over. So hey, something from from Peak freelance, well, they had a good report, everything was just bar charts, pie charts. And I thought it was supposed to get boring, and heavy.
When you have like a very long page, you want things want to keep things interesting for your readers, even though this is like a more formal and different form of, of, of contents. So then we get to before you even get to the reports, we haven’t even gotten to like the tips to write the report. But the next thing what once I want to talk about is hold down and all done, yes, there we go.
Yeah. So, your audience consideration like before you even write the report at all, you have likely thinking about okay, so, who is going to be reading the report to the end users, but again, like everything and like I said, we have like gearing towards an audience to make it more relevant. Who will be reading this it is geared towards like people that are like, you know, in b2b SaaS or in b2c, you know, you want to like share something that is like okay, who will be reading it.
So, the language that they use kind of determines a lot for you like, who will be reading as you know, the language and tone will be just based on that, and then what industry are they in what what language does the industry use? Because again, different industries have, like their own language. So you have also, like, consider that so often is, is the audience already a part of your customer base, right?
Because it does have existing relationships, you don’t want to like, be too formal and too uptight. Right? And then a third thing you can use is to ask about the pinpoints of the audience like asked about a possible research, for example, if the research is supposed to highlight issues in your industry, it can tell you I can tell you things like okay, these issues are probably like pain points that this audience has, can also like help you understand the language the audience’s is to talk about their issues.
And then we cannot get to like the report itself. So tips to help you write your reports. So one of the I think the most important rule here is never say anything that is not backed by the data. Even when it seems like you’re disappointed that the data is not saying this. Never say anything that’s backed by the data. For example.
One of the things I was, I was excited to see with the tower back in office or tower was, the reports was people that had sort of Ken on salary, I was trying to find the combination of they have to make something by the end of the day, I didn’t find any correlation between people that has an entire load, it was no competition at all. That was heartbreaking.
But I couldn’t like you know, because I was like something to be true. Say that, you know, so everything has to be, you have to only say things that are like, in the dollar these assets. So like, this is like the king hit. And the next thing that seems to come common components, right? You will always have like a methodology that will tell people that okay, if you’re doing if you’re using something based reports, how many people did you do survey? Where did the respondents come from?
You know, how did you get the respondents all this kind of information. The next thing that will always be in your report is demographics. If you pulled benchmark data, for example, you might be like, okay, like, Okay, we’ll put this up on like several 100, b2b SaaS companies. And then we had like, this ones, I tack, this one’s I in manufacturing, this one’s I invest.
So when it comes to demographics, you can break down like the study, you can break it down by age, gender, things like that location. When it comes to like benchmarks, I can break it down by like industry, company size, etc. Then the next thing is the language and tone for your reports. Again, the language and tone depends largely on your audience.
So you can use most reports use tend to become mighty formal, depending on our audience, or semi formal, like at office, or we went to submit format, because like, the audience is already part of our audience, like people are going to read the reports, we’re already customers of Office quarter. So it didn’t make sense to like, just go ahead.
And you know, and just be not acknowledged our relationship, which is why we went semi formal with our tone. One of the things that you would also find is our most requested to us, we have a day, and they don’t really use you, because you feels very pointed. And because original research tends to be like a collaborative efforts, right?
How are you doing survey based once you have to use the you, you doesn’t acknowledge the efforts for of the efforts from like the respondents and everything that goes into the report. And they find nothing on language and, and tone is, you have to use the language that your audience uses to talk about themselves. So for example, in office attire, like industry, Administrative Professionals don’t call themselves that all the time.
They say, admins. So in the reports, you could see admins here and there to acknowledge the fact that we are speaking the language that’s the intended audience rights picks when talking about this. And then like, you also have to like keep your writing short and straight to the point, I struggled with this because like, again, I’m used to write like 2000 2000 word, blog posts.
So I had to like mentally, like, be very concise and brief. And then Okay, the final thing is, like, she said the most, the most, the most important that Aster is to tell you and also it’s like nothing is how, like, you have to find things that are supported or disprove by the data. And sometimes the things that you hope the data will prove, won’t actually work. Like, like indicators execution on salary.
Like, there was no correlation. I thought no, no opposition could be drawn between the two data points. But I realised that instead of like saying, Oh, no, no, there was no, there was no correlation in the report. I still had I still read that to tell. And that was the fact that I would I didn’t have certification rights. They actually wanted the certification, which is a more interesting story.
And the reason why they didn’t have is because the companies didn’t give them learning budgets. And again, given that the industry struggles with low pay multiple cannot justify paying close to 500 600 USD out of pocket for for certification, you know, so that’s like a story I chose to tell. Right? So you have like also be very open minded about what it is that tells you and going for, like things that are more interesting. And a final thing is because I will Like, if you’re used to like writing a lot of words, you’re always going to like jump in habits to write you want to write words for everything. You know, he wants to write towards support everything.
But that is not always like possible because you have to ask yourself candidate as can on its own. Most times it’s going to be yes. If you say yes, then you doesn’t you don’t really need to put in, like so many. So many words. So one of the things I wanted to like, I wanted to show you was from the office otter reports, that places are by you see, okay, heritors. So that place is about you see, that we decided to, I think it’s like 20, it’s okay.
So if you look at slide 28, I don’t have any words underneath it. Because once you had just this extremely stressful, somewhat stressful, it just makes sense. And you didn’t need to, like, explain anything again. So you always have to ask yourself and writing reports like, okay, can the data speak for itself? Is it a yes? Then you just kind of like, let that go. If it’s a no, then you can write something. There.
So, um, a final thing I want to talk about with about writing reports, is the fact that beyond writing a report, there are like, so many opportunities to like, sell your services, right? I know, like things are hard right now in content, things are slow. But if you can write a report, you can also like, sell other things. For example, you should probably go into like semi get their reports, like the will we did was we are still going to like put up a full page.
You can ask them if you can create the page that the report is going to sit on. You know, like, for example, the reports from pic freelance, right? If you if you did a report, you can kind of like soft talk to them about doing a page like this for them. So that’s an example of what you can do. Depending on like, on your ask, right. Sorry. Okay. Um, contact McKesson plan.
Again, like the past, they’re meant to sit down there, I’m not to anything, you know. So you can ask them that. Okay. Do they have a plan for this? You can actually ask, okay, you can’t turn this report into like blog posts. Since you’re, you’ve spent a lot of time with their data. And you spend a lot of time creating the research reports itself, it’s much easier to like, talk about, okay, let’s create social media copy to like, push this report. Let’s create a new marketing copy.
Let’s create blog posts. Well, we’ll use this copy, right there. Next thing you can talk about, like creating a distribution and show plan and extend, it’s like, how do you distribute this? Where do their audiences live? You know, things like that. Maybe creating a plan to propose the report, and things like that. So these are like things we can offer. People. And the final thing I wanted to share is this, I’m actually like launching a course next month, right? Like Share this.
A lot of people have covered like the survey and all that. But many people don’t actually go in depth into research reports right into like the writing part of it. So this is what I’m going to focus on. The things I want to talk about in will be like you have like different examples, like what to do, what not to do. And then you have real research data to work with, like, Okay, what what do you want, can you expect clients to send you, you know, all that you have, like a workbook.
And the biggest thing knowing that companies can justify just handing $10,000 to somebody to like create a report from start to finish. So the attorney before is to like, have the workbook and the workbook and all the things you go through will give you the chance to like create your own reports, your own mini reports.
We like real data and stuff they can actually use as a sample to show clients like when you’re offering like writing research reports as a service, and then of course how to price this based on put already doing it and then how to sell other things like selling blog post, social media copy and all that in addition to the research reports, writing service, so this would launch in July.
The class is supposed to be parents that one four to nine USD, but I will get Is this at 105? For anyone that signs up before the report goes live before it goes public. So but this is like my only thing. And I’m going to pop in the I think the link to the landing page. So if you want to sign up, you can sign up. So I think I’m ready for questions now.
Chima Mmeje 35:28
That was amazing. That was amazing. My first question is probably what everybody’s asking, I know, you already covered these boats, can you go over it again?
Chima Mmeje 35:44
How do you decide what to write on? I just want you to provide, again, outside of the commission. Okay, so
nneka otika 35:50
one of the things like, if you want to like write research reports, you actually get a topic, right? So your topic to get your topic, you need to like, see what everybody else is doing? You know, like, so the thing I keep saying is like, what is everybody else doing in your industry? Like, for example, if a consumer wants to make a report and content, like I said, it’s already like, a very saturated field.
So you have to go through, are you going to do a blogging kind of thing every year? Like, obviously, media and underdose? Are you going to do something like content marketing, digital does, so you have to like, look at what everybody else is doing.
He was like, your industry, plus statistics, your industry plus salary will build like point you to like, already existing reports that people can people use, you know, people already have, and they are using. So that’s like, how you find topics. So when I say at office, Otter, the way I found our topic, was the fact that I looked at what we’re having.
So I looked at the industry, I didn’t see anything, right? I looked at the industry name plus salary, I found like three different reports. But otherwise deep into into, into like, okay, job satisfaction, honestly, the only focused on salary by like, location, I looked at industry as statistics. So to try to find a way for people to like, you know, know, okay, this is something that’s possibly covered yet, you know, so it’s about finding something that hasn’t been covered yet, then Pauline that can, unfunny thing is that when you find a topic, you can, I can, like, keep doing that thing, like, over and over again.
And then like, you have a natural like cause of action salaries from like, the past, for example, right? It’s like, every single year, you don’t need to like, once you find out one topic, you don’t just like change it, you can parlay and everything is like every year, you kind of now look at comparing the previous year’s data in the first year, you had, like people earning like, say 70,000 USD, and it goes up or it goes down. That’s news.
If it stays the same, that’s news that interests you know, so you can be like, okay, based on based on what’s happening in the in the world right now, this is why salaries haven’t gone up, like as opposed to. So it’s like, once you find that one topic really likes that original research, that’s research. Once they find that one topic, that’s like, why you were hanging on with and you keep going? Okay.
Chima Mmeje 38:35
My second question is on the difficulty of finding research participants, because I know that that’s what many people struggle with, they say, Oh, we want to have 1000 respondents, and then they end up having 500 or even less.
So I feel like that is actually the biggest barrier to creating research reports like because the more participants you have, the more credible the data is. So you get passes by where do you go to find research participants to give you like a really reasonable number that makes the data credible?
nneka otika 39:06
Okay, so yes, it really depends on your industry. And again, for example, if you are like sometimes like service, like say, b2b salespeople, for example, our b2b CEOs are visible CMOS. The usual method of like, of using your own destiny, if they’re not already your network, many of them will not participate.
You get so dependent on your so let me I’ll give you an example of people that are like very high level the week and so they have like, companies that assemble panellists that you can already Savi and again, because you need at least 250 for your support your data to be valid. That’s a lot of money because you have to pay these people for their time.
You know, doesn’t mean like 10 minutes 15 minutes I’m busy with like I say I’ll report to you how pay them for their time. Now, if you’re doing something about like the audiences, people that you already like market to, like we had an office otter, it’s a lot easier, right? You can send them, you can send them emails to like, oh, do this, you can put it in the in the software, you can put it on your homepage, you can talk to your partners, you can talk to influence as opposed to large audiences in your space.
It’s much easier, or you don’t spend a lot compared to when you’re doing it for like, heads of the heads of marketing, for example. And then the other thing you have to also be be aware of when trying to like recruit people for survey is that depending on the on the recruitment thing you use, like the incentive you use, right, you managed to get a lot of bots, I had someone telling me recently that they have got like, 250 responses, and it’s all spam. So I asked them, what did they use?
Are they using Amazon gift cards? To have like, 15 of it? And people were literally lying to their seats? Because most of it gives you like, which qualified people right? Based on their answer, is it Yes, or No, they can’t take our survey, people were actually like, lying to the artists to like, get into the survey, and just answering things that they don’t that is not it’s not, they’re not, it’s not really much time at all.
Other than like the Amazon gifts, cafe, anything you can do is like to prevent like spam here is to excuse me, it’s like, only circulate the survey within the industry, you get like, so it’s not like putting the survey everywhere. Somebody will just go to like, only people that are in your industry, like, it doesn’t mean your industry switches at all, like you find. Maybe it will be like, say, a community in your distance companies in your space to like promote it.
And you find like a news item, your industrial permits in your chart up within the industry that kind of limits the amount of spam you get. But again, when you get spam, you still have to do the academic letter, which costs you money. So by keeping your industry and the people you’re targeting, and not spreading this everywhere, it’s kind of limited exposure.
And again, also, you can use like industrial partners, like if you have partners already that your company collaborates with, you can use them to like, increase respondents. This is what we did an office otter, and you can also like this, this incentivize people. So instead of like doing like, $100, Amazon gift card, which a lot of people would like, go crazy for and like to get, you can do something, which is all we did a word that sums up alibi, they do like to donate $1 to a charity for every restaurants.
So the people that want to take it for are the ones who win money, when will it be interesting because there’s no money to win it Allah is nothing. You know, if all I felt like in the industry, and they have the relevant experience, they are looking for tickets, and then they feel good cause at least a response has contributed to charity, you know. So that’s kind of like other ways that we did this to like reduce spam, because, again, when it comes to somebody based this time, you is a big problem. Very good one,
Chima Mmeje 43:42
because I was just thinking about, then what is a good way to incentivize, and you just covered that I like the idea of, instead of giving people money directly donating it to charity, or like say, oh, maybe we view trees or something for every response. So that’s a very good one. Because I remember that. I was working on a product research with a very big company.
And we were trying to collect information like user feedback, and we incentivize people with like, $50 amazon gift card, and just what you said many of most of the things that they were in the industry, but a lot of their answers, you could just tell that they were just doing it for the gift card.
So I’ve always been thinking like, what is a great way to incentivize people to to answer questions without giving them money directly so that you’re getting like really good answers. And like you said, you’re avoiding spam. So
nneka otika 44:35
a good one. Yes, again, I know we can even make it even more relevant is finding a charity that supports people that are close to your industry, for example, it for the administrative industry, we have a charity in South Africa that supports nurturance underprivileged people. So join this walk, Spot the workforce and become like office assistants, office managers and things like I was just like, out of our industry.
So people were like, well, it’s a cute money. The other charity, we chose what the 30 day because then we might cause the, the industry is like 96 cents we made according to our survey, right? So the Malala Fund for education. So this way people feel good about doing something good. We’ll just their response. Give us 10 minutes, who donates money to charity, you know? So it kind of like helps to cut down on this. What do I type in the link for the signup?
Chima Mmeje 45:32
So you can just put it in the chat, and I will share it with everybody. Okay. Yes. All right. So I’m just going to take some public questions now. So I want to start with God.
Our admin from the CDC says, Thank you so much for the insights. Weapons on gets recent data, most times people from statistics, but sometimes it’s not recent, people may not want to read an article with data. Okay, so basically, where do you go to find recent
nneka otika 46:00
data? It’s why I always like talking about this. Like, if you’re trying to like, you’re trying to like look for data, depending on the industry, you can basically like, one of the things I do with Google search is I put like, say, I’m looking for content marketing, statistics.
I put these like content marketing statistics, and I put it in like quotes, and Google only shows me reports that have that exact keyword. Right? And I cannot look at it to see, okay, one of the big mistakes people make with research reports is that they want to get it’s easy to like get to acquire customers, right?
But you can’t actually acquire customers, if people don’t know that you have this reports, you get so finding that like so, using keywords like this or this industry, right? I’m looking for like, statistics, or like salary or like that, right.
And if you know people like say HubSpot, for example, or obvious media that does things around like blogging and stuff, you can basically put up his media reports, or custom magazine reports, like this kind of keywords, kind of like show people that have webpages already. Right? And they can actually like their reports, so you can easily just pick and choose.
Chima Mmeje 47:22
Okay, thank you for that.
Oh, okay, Amna is asking, hello, Nneka, what is the role of a data analyst of data analysts in report writing?
nneka otika 47:36
So, the data analyst is like, usually you have someone that their job is to, like, look through the raw data you get from like, obviously, like, your survey, maybe like 50 questions, and you have any questions and by, like, 500 people, their job is to, like, make this make sense, you know, it’s, well, I’ll say that the common most common form of analysis you will see for research reports is a cross tabulation analysis, whereby you find the correlation Right?
Or the assertion between two data points, for example, you have like Okay, say, recognition, for example, and salary is there any, any, any relationship between these two things, the people does have more recognition in the company, they add more salary, or the Buddha and masala we get more recognition. So, this is kind of thing that cross tabulations does, which kind of past shows you the relationship between like two different data points.
So the role or the analyst here is to like take the raw data and put it into a form that makes sense, right? For other people, so more scientific content is like us, like, we use software for this to like, cut down on cost, because if you want to, like hire somebody to do this, it costs money. It’s why I said like, the big the biggest hurdle for like many, many companies is the fact that this costs money.
Obviously, by by doing everything in house, and using this guy, like we spent aren’t $5,000 And we had to do all the work ourselves. You know, so and by using pay for software for survey and and to analyse it, that was like the big chunk of this of what we spent money on just like make it so the other things like I spent, I worked Melissa Sundays going through the the crosstab data to pull out the data information that we would, we would use. So it’s like, the more you can do, the less money you can spend. Okay, and I
Chima Mmeje 49:55
understand that but I now understand why big companies have entire teams for reasons All research, just search that is the entire job just research because she is expensive man.
nneka otika 50:07
It is. It really is.
Chima Mmeje 50:10
Okay, next question from Katya, Luca. Hi, Nicole, thank you so much for this session. I’m currently a b2b SaaS writer. And I’ve been freelancing for a year now. And I’m interested in getting into data storytelling. Where will you recommend that I start?
How can I find opportunities to write research reports? And what are your most recommended resources for self learning? So basically, he’s asking, he wants to get into writing research reports, where should we start? Who will?
How did he How does he find people who need research reports? And where does he start the training? What resources would you recommend for that? I know you have one. So please recommend your course. And any other ones that helped you also recommend this.
nneka otika 50:51
So for like, the reason why I actually like, wrote a course was because like, when I went like, write the research reports, nobody had a course. Like nobody had something I could like, learn. So basically, I had like, read, like so many reports, find, Okay, this one works the ad and this one, you know, Aaron Barcia has a research on original research costs, it’s 60 minutes and records from every process, because it goes through the entire process.
It may not be as monetary, like the definitely thing, because I find that there’s a lot of experts, blindness, right. I was having this conversation with somebody she said, I don’t know that. We don’t use you in reports. She’s like, she’s American, the reports they used to you, right? And I’m like, but it’s too high. It’s a natural thing.
She has done this for over 10 years, she’s about you in it. So me this is like, somebody needs to tell me coming from like, a b2b SaaS system where you write a blog post, I use you a lot, you know. So I have a cost to like, go through this.
And the point of my costs, is the fact that I realised that cause it took me a long time to find the materials to get into this space of how expensive it is, companies don’t want to give somebody that has not done this before the money to do it. So that is why I have a workbook that’s an emerald lie, you can actually use to like create, like a mini five page report that I can show people as a sample, you know that I know what I’m talking about.
Because, again, we all know, like having samples for something is much easier to sell yourself on than willing someone to take a chance on you. So that’s the thing. I’m like, I realised like, okay, the writing path has less barriers to reach than the entire process. Yes, and that process cost a lot of money. But the writing part is cheaper. And you can get into that one.
And they get an add on, I will say is when you add to your services, if you already have clients you work with, you can tell them that you’re offering this, right. You can get into communities, like super PACs, for example, a lot. I’ve had like three different people ask, like since early this year, like Oh, do you know anybody that does research reports.
And also you want your name to come up? And again, you need to like attend things like Michelle Lynn runs research, have our disaster monitor webinar every month, where all things research social features, that does that do research have been offended since last year. So over time, you can begin to like, learn okay, what kinds of sorry, what did you What did you call it? Okay. Michelle, Lynn, Michelle,
Chima Mmeje 53:46
LinkedIn know what the teacher wants.
nneka otika 53:49
Research half hour. Okay. Yeah, so I follow her on LinkedIn. So she runs research half every every month on LinkedIn on she features different ways I do research so you can begin to like learn you can activate questions, I have done it, we can learn things like Okay, why don’t why should why why gets hot gets in your report is not a good idea.
You know, so all this digital land, okay, which ways are to like use it to incentivize the or the respondents how to avoid this, how to avoid that, like, all these kinds of things. So I’ve been attending this last year, and I feel I can do good. Okay, that’s a
Chima Mmeje 54:35
good one. Thank you so much. All right. Next question from Sandra. Sabanci when it comes to making a conclusion your reports and do reports is not giving you the conclusion you hope for? What do you do?
nneka otika 54:48
So that’s what that’s one of the things I say like when it comes to writing a report you have like a project like where is the company ways a company and our clients are For example, if your company is already known as a top leader, right?
You can interject opinions. Right? Into this, for example, like they ask the researchers to tell will be the ones that were you pull your way you pull your what’s it called your conclusion for your research report. Like the key findings, I do not include a conclusion I chose to use, like, the key findings, right? I mean, that everybody can just read and go with it. So, again, never said anything that it just the title is nothing.
It’s just like saying like 20 people 20% of people are saying, the sky is blue, or the sacrament of the sky is blue. You say this, you can actually like, begin to like, if you’re already it’s certainly that you can then begin to present this this does that start the evidence we have from science 70% of respondents are not agree with science that the sky is blue, you can’t really interject your own opinion, you know, so but if you are like a thought leader, like a predictive index like sample that coined a term like talent optimization, or hospitals that has like inbound marketing, HubSpot, can afford to, like, inject their opinion into their research, because they’re already known as a thought leader in the marketing space.
Predictive index is already known as a top leader in the talent and HR space, so they can’t afford to inject their own opinion. But if you are like an upcoming person, you want to like start establishing trust first, before you can begin to like, step up in your, in your opinion, but again, people don’t yet trust you. So you can’t really be putting in like, this is what we think in the reports.
No, you want to like, Okay, we did this, like without any bias. Now that we can conclude like, in two years time, we can be like, this is okay, this dropped, this might be wider, you can start to put your own fake, you understand?
Chima Mmeje 57:09
That you just you know, this question actually just give me an idea for what I’m going to be doing for for research reports for a job, I’m starting soon. And that is don’t even have a conclusion. Because the conclusion is meaningless. In my opinion, you basically summarise what you’ve already said.
So instead of having a conclusion, the conclusion means that if you say, okay, when you said, completion that you hope for that means that you are going in with bias already and you cannot go into you cannot go into research with bias for an expected outcome, you need to go in with an open mind. So already, that defeats the question there, X and Sandra.
So when you are doing research you need to do with an open mind and allow the data to tell you the truth, allow the data to help you form an opinion. You can’t go in with preconceived notions of what you want to see from the data. Because then trust me biassed and creepy now something that I think it will be better for for instead of a conclusion, like what Nick has suggested, I think having recommendations, okay, the data has shown this, this, this this this, but you’re not really an authority, why don’t you share some of that insights with people who are thought leaders in your field and say,
Okay, we just did a research, and we found this this this, what would be your recommendation to fix this? Exactly. If you put that in the report that gives it more credibility, because then you’re improving your EA t score, or your Yes, LM said your EA t score. you’re improving your authority and proven expertise by featuring people who are leaders in that field and on that topic.
And your brand is also going to enjoy that benefit, because Google is going to see you as the as a thought leader, because you are publishing that report and you are sharing that expertise. So it’s kind of like borrowed expertise.
So instead of having a confusion, why don’t you have recommendations, actionable tips that, okay, we’ve shown you this data, showing you this problems? What can you do to fix it, and then go and make your process better? So I think that’s something better.
nneka otika 59:05
And I think you can do it because what we actually the time we had an office Porter was because the reader was our audience. And audience, we’re mainly employees, right? We charge like tackle this twofold. We will give our audience the tools and stuff.
And then for the thought leader one we will talk company to company that is the contents we have to have contents, one tiny audience, I want to ask people to employ our audience. You got what I’m saying? So I know.
Chima Mmeje 59:36
That’s, that’s already confusing stuff again, slowly, slowly.
nneka otika 59:40
So obvious, all right. We realise the problem in the industry is the fact that people we surveyed are mainly employees, right? There are people that do this survey employers. So we realise that okay, employees have this problem.
The employers may not be ready he’s had this problem. So we are going to be the bridge, the way to become the avenue to becoming a top leader for us was to become the bridge. So share this with like, the employers. So we’re gonna talk so people like HR operations, Chief of Staff, this kind of opposite kind of put like, like bring these issues to visible are you doing like company to company right?
So that he has more weeds. So even when employed employees are talking about this, right, companies start to trickle down from both the top and the bottom. So that’s how you can actually like, you know, become like your own expertise.
And again, you can also like borrow and like she’s like, like you said borrow expertise for product, but we have like, a lot of like podcasts apparently like, common occurrence in like, influencers in our space, right to talk about issues we have identified, you know, so that’s how we burned the expertise, I found in all this into like, something that Google will recognise you as experts in this field.
Chima Mmeje 1:01:15
It’s a very well known. Alright, and just need to take. We have two questions. Okay. Let’s see if we can answer these two questions. Nick, can you publish a report by Can you publish a report made by bewteen? already existing data? I think the answer to this is yes.
Because you talked about REITs cameo strengths, this, so let’s not waste time on that. Last question from Karen summers. Nick, what is the average length of research reports you’ve handed out? Is this important? Because importance? I don’t
nneka otika 1:01:43
just let me just share this, like, I’ve been fairly like I tried to like keep it very tight. So we did have like 34 pages. And that included like me from the CEO, and like partners, or all those kinds of things.
So probably, it’s just like 30 pages. And we didn’t really do like 30 long detective pages or slides. And like, really, all that modelling is basically, yes, more image based than than writing this? Because it’s a lot easier to
Chima Mmeje 1:02:14
digest when a small image fits. Yes. So I feel like it’s not really about the length, in terms of words, is more about how much information can you condense in an easily digestible format so that people actually read the reports to the end, instead of getting maybe like five pages in and they’re bored, and they want to live? And she also asked that is data is data with a tool you use for visualisation? No, we didn’t use
nneka otika 1:02:40
Canva. Right. Yeah, I know. Yeah, because like the the thing, the thing I want to say is like, it’s, it’s, it’s much easier, I am talking about how we can basically like we can, how do I say this? We can use tools we already have, right? Because it’s much easier to like use have been able to like we already had, we had already had combat Pro, right. paid for. We didn’t want to like add additional costs. So it was like, Okay, how do we like, get us what we have, because we had a very limited budget.
Like we have this under this amount of people, right? This amount of money. So it was like okay, we can really buy new tools. We’re already spending time to avoid cleaning the spend money on software to avoid cleaning, like the data mentioned with this application is clean and all those many things. We don’t have any extra for visualisation, so we had to use tools we had, right. So it was like, very was crappy.
He was he was scrappy, he was on a very limited budget. And so we had to do all that kind of work that we did to replace the camera. Anyone is shocked. And I’m like seriously like we didn’t there was no room in the budget to pay for a designer to be for somebody to like visualise this we had to like do this ourselves in this.
Chima Mmeje 1:04:10
Yeah. Have you scanned that so I used canva Pro to to, to to analyse data when I was doing my research projects for my MSc and it worked. So it was was was the was the point in buying something expensive. I used it was great.
I use it it’s great on my visuals I used to do everything see was amazing. Please let’s dig into spending money. If you can afford to, cool if you can’t please Canva Pro is affordable for anybody. So yes, that’s alright, I think we’ve answered the questions.
We’ve already gone pass the one-hour mark oh my Nneka thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for putting up with my questions because I did I a look. I want that to have answered. So thank you so much. The recording will be available in a few weeks. And thank you to everyone who showed up
