How Savvy Startups Use Unique Data to Go Viral

If you work for a new company, you’re likely faced with this common business conundrum: You’ve got to differentiate yourself from competitors and get people to pay attention to you as you grow. Now, if you’re lucky, the funding you receive and your product announcements are enough to garner great media coverage, driving loads of new customers. But what if there’s too much time between your major announcements? How do you stay relevant so that you’ll get coverage the next time you’ve got something big to share?

Faced with this challenge, you may talk to consultants and business experts who will tell you that it’s important to maintain a corporate blog with frequent updates. Plus, they’ll tell you to engage your customers and fans on social media. This kind of advice, while helpful at its core, is kind of like telling your newly single friend to “Cheer up.” The end goal of engagement is correct, you need a solid plan maximize how you’re using social media to promote your business.

Large brands may have the resources to waste time writing blog posts and social media updates that no one reads, but startups and small and medium-sized businesses do not have this luxury. Luckily, there’s a very simple way to make your blog posts and other updates work for you: Share unique data via surveys. Unique data is all around us in the minds of customers just waiting to be discovered. All you need to do to discover (and ultimately share this data) is ask for it!

If you have the time and interest, you can sit down with your customers and ask them to simply talk about their lives. There’s no one that doesn’t have an interesting story to tell and you can get great content to share about how real customers use your products. This tactic is used in politics all the time. As you may have noticed, a typical political stump speech always contains individual stories about people who have been helped or hurt by particular policies. For more a scalable approach to gathering unique data, you should send out an online survey to a mass audience and then parse the aggregate data for interesting stories.

You really don’t need to ask a lot of questions to get great unique data. This survey about how people use their phones while on the toilet only had ten questions, but it generated dozens of data points about who spends more time on social media, who brings their phones to bed as well as the toilet, and which type of device is more likely to be dropped in the toilet. And, chances are, you can get more out of your data even beyond the simple answers to your questions by comparing how certain segments responded to different questions.

Think about it this way: If you asked your customers if they used an Android or Apple device and in another question you asked who their mobile provider was, you compare these questions to get an Android vs. Apple breakdown by mobile provider. (That could make for a great headline: iPhone Users More Likely to Text On the Toilet.) Depending on the size of your dataset and the tools you are using to analyze your surveys, you can continue to drill down in the data to discover even more insights. Continuing with this mobile example, if you ask about price sensitivity, you can even discover if respondents chose a lower-priced mobile plan to buy a more expensive device. Now this data might be interesting to read!

Here’s another lower-tech example to illustrate how this can be effective for all businesses in any vertical. Food buying habits can be a treasure trove of interesting data if you just ask the right questions. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know if those with the healthiest lives really have healthier eating habits? You could ask a question about how many times respondents consume unhealthy foods like fatty meats or sweets. In a subsequent question, you could ask how many kilometers they walk per week. Lastly, you might ask how many servings of vegetables they eat per week.

If you compare all of these questions, you’ll have a fascinating data point on how kilometers walked per week might compare to unhealthy eating habits. This kind of data shared on your grocery store’s Facebook page might generate far more engagement and social shares than an update on your latest sale. More than just collecting the data, you need to put get the data to work for you by distributing it effectively. Don’t post it on your Facebook page and hope it sticks. You need to be very deliberate about how you promote your data, so you can get the maximum ROI. Here are the steps to follow with every unique data project:

1. Write a blog post that summarizes the survey results. A blog post should contain as much of the data as possible as this will be the linked URL in all the other assets you create.
2. Publish the results into an engaging and embeddable infographic. Make sure the infographic is branded with your logo, so if it does get spread virally the credit will go back to your brand. The infographic should contain a link back to your blog to see a full write up of the results.
3. Release a summary of the results data in a PowerPoint or PDF that you can post to Slideshare. Place one conclusion on each slide and use interesting images that will encourage people to view the entire Slideshare.
4. Create a YouTube video that explains the survey and the results. For a low-tech way of doing this, you can just narrate the PowerPoint to give a bit more color and context. Alternatively, you can make engaging video content that exposes the data in an interesting way.
5. Release the raw survey results in another blog post that encourages people to download and conduct their own analysis with the data. If your dataset is large enough, you probably have more insights than you have time to write about yourself.
6. Utilize press releases and social media to spread the word about your unique data. Don’t just share the data once; keep sharing the different assets you’ve created. If you are getting viral pickup, but it’s not moving fast enough, you might even want to consider buying some traffic on Twitter and Facebook to get the data in front of more people.

Lastly, if you’ve been successful at generating organic pickup of your data, you may find there have been sites that scraped or quoted your data without giving you attribution. Set up an alert that searches for keywords within your data, and immediately reach out to any sites that neglected to link to you appropriately. The goal of your unique data is to increase the awareness of your brand and the last thing you want is for another brand to become known as the source of the data.

This unique data exercise is not just for brands looking for increased awareness. Bloggers can run surveys to unlock their writer’s block and increase links to their blog posts. Marketers and sales people can collect data that supports their sales efforts. Investors and bankers can even collect data on their investment targets to supplement the information that the company releases publicly.

Are you convinced that a survey will help you increase your branding efforts? Then what are you waiting for? Start harnessing that data! If you’re still not convinced, just spend a few minutes looking through your Facebook news feed and think about the types of corporate posts that you click. If you’re like most people, you’re likely clicking the stories that are unique and reveal something about human behaviors or attitudes that you can’t find in the the latest corporate update.