Content should add value to your target audience: Research

Full disclosure: I’m a content marketing strategist and tactician. I’m also a freelance writer so I’m constantly reading and researching.

Lately, I’ve been writing about how hybrid and remote working have disrupted and driven demand for internal communications, rendering it a business-critical function.

Searching for statistics to support my thinking, I came upon a post by UK enterprise collaboration software provider, Oak Engage: 21 Scary Internal Communications Stats for 2021 & Beyond.

On the surface, this appears to be a terrific roundup of internal communications statics. It references research by McKinsey, Harvard Business Review, Deloitte, Gallup, Korn Ferry, and Forbes, among others.

The thing is though, I’m not one to repeat a statistic without first verifying its validity.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that half of the statistics referenced in this article are so old they’re simply not relevant (see Table below).

To illustrate my point:

7. THE NUMBER ONE REASON EMPLOYEES LEAVE IS A LACK OF RECOGNITION ACCORDING TO A RECENT HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW STUDY. 

This claim sounds powerful and being a finding from a Harvard Business Review study makes it seductively repeatable…

…except the HBR research which Oak Engage describes as ‘recent’ is actually dated July 1973.

Content Marketing Best Practice

Here is a 2021 static I’m willing to broadcast (credit: SEM Rush): 41% of companies encounter problems with content quality when outsourcing.

Whether your company outsources or has an in-house content development team, processes must be in place to ensure content is reviewed and approved before publication.

This piece of content might have generated clicks but it won’t have generated value for Oak Engage’s target audience.

It’s worth remembering that content marketing, by definition, is the creation of content which is relevant and valuable to your target audience.

When Publishing Research-Based Content

• Include the year in the research title.
• Be upfront about the methodology – who was surveyed, how, when?

When Referencing Research or Quoting Statistics

• Check the facts.
• Include the date the research was published so your audience can assess its currency and relevance.
• Link to the actual research, not to someone else’s article about the research. Otherwise, you could be perpetuating the problem.
• Consider how quickly research dates. What is reasonable will depend on the subject. In B2B, I’m generally reluctant to reference research which is older than, say, five years. Bear in mind, the research was probably conducted a year earlier as it takes time to analyse results and publish the findings.

Research referenced by Oak Engage