Building and Monetizing Research Panels

Most of us have used surveys in one shape or form at our publications. These surveys ask many questions to understand better who is reading or watching our stuff. For example, I’ve been building one for AMO, so I can go to advertisers and tell them who might see their ads.

And for the most part, this is how surveys are deployed: get data about the audience for your media kits.

But what if you could also use those surveys more strategically to help unlock new revenue for the business directly and indirectly? As with first-party data, once you have developed a panel for your surveys, monetizing it becomes much more manageable. But it takes time to get ramped up.

So, let’s dig into that.

Audience building

When many operators think about surveys, they treat it very one-off. You might send a dedicated email or two asking your entire database to answer it. Perhaps you offer a gift card to encourage them to complete the survey. And then you wait.

And this works. For the most part, this is enough if you need basic information for your media kits or sales materials. Then, you create the survey in Survey Monkey or one of the other fancier tools, collect enough information, and you’re off to the races.

But if you want your survey audience to become something monetizable, you need to be able to follow up with these people with additional surveys.

This means you need to build a panel. This is an always-on group of people that you can send questions. They are choosing to be part of this panel and understand that you will reach out more regularly.

There are low-and-high quality ways to do this. The low-fi way would have you inviting people to apply to join the survey by filling out a Google Form and then adding them to a unique email list. The high-fi way would be to use a tool like Alida, built to support research panels.

Ultimately, you need a way to go back to the same people and ask them additional questions, which is why you create a panel. So, for example, let’s say you run a crypto company and want to know people’s feelings about bitcoin; you could ask them today and then again a year from now. Since the same audience answered both times, you can confidently discuss how the audience’s sentiment has evolved over time.

That has a lot of value, especially when you’re talking about advertising. For example, if a brand runs a campaign with you, you’d want to do a before-and-after survey to understand whether the ads worked. As we discuss how to prove your ads’ value, articulating to advertisers that the ads worked can be powerful.

But there are two additional ways to monetize these research panels.

Sponsored focus groups & surveys

A specific product that you could provide partners with is sponsored focus groups. When companies think about creating new products, they will likely talk to their prospective customers to better understand their needs.

What if you could facilitate this?

Now, some operators are doing in-person focus groups. But you could also do them digitally. You work with your partner to understand what they are trying to learn about something and then create a survey or a small group of people for a digital discussion.

Let’s use crypto again.

Say you run a financial advisory publication, and a crypto exchange comes to you to understand what FAs are looking for. You could build a custom survey for them, distribute it, and then build a research report.

Or, you could find 8-10 people who fit your sponsor’s criteria and invite them to a live, Zoom discussion. From here, you run through a series of questions, collate that data, and then present it as a report to your partner.

Both of these examples are the sponsor directly paying to gain research from your audience. Again, this should sound familiar to my arguments about having first-party data. Advertisers will work with you because they believe there’s a clear value in having access to your audience. That’s what they care about. And so, if you spend the time to build a legitimate research panel, you can start to create these sorts of products.

Topical research

We know what our readers are interested in because we can see what they’re clicking on. And that is very helpful. But it lacks context and comparison to other topics. Are people more interested in a particular subject because you’re creating more in that category, or are you creating more in that category because more people are interested? It’s a bit of a chicken and egg.

And so, one thing you could do is survey this same audience and ask them what they think. For example, one of our newsletters at Morning Brew is Money Scoop, which is all about personal finance. We didn’t know it until we surveyed the audience, but they are really interested in insurance. There’s a genuine desire to understand how different insurance products work. We would have never known this if we had not asked the audience.

But you can start to imagine how this translates into actual dollars and cents. If you find out your audience really cares about insurance, maybe you should consider talking to one of the major life insurance companies and working on a content package with them. The sale should be straightforward. “Hey, our audience has told us they are really interested in understanding insurance. Do you want to sponsor something about that topic?”

It’s an incredibly compelling argument. Because the audience has articulated where their interests lie, you can create very targeted sales material to go after a short list of advertisers. And you can imagine there are plenty of topics you can make here.

The other way to tackle this is to ask the audience about prospective advertisers. For example, let’s say you want to find a prominent crypto exchange partner. You could ask your audience their thoughts on Coinbase, FTX, Binance, and Gemini. If one of those comes back with unusually low brand recognition or perception, you could use that in your pitch.

Let’s say it’s Gemini. Your readers are active crypto traders but do not know much about Gemini. You could show them that data and pitch them on a brand campaign to help these traders know more about Gemini.

This is unbelievably powerful because the marketer knows exactly where they should spend. You’ve given them two qualifying data points: the audience is their target market, and the audience is unaware of them from a brand perspective. So now you can get to work on the ad campaign.

I’ve spent the past few weeks digging into data as the product because I believe it’s a significant growth opportunity for publishers. You have an audience. How you leverage that audience into monetizable opportunities is up to you. But surveys could be the answer.

Thanks for reading today’s newsletter. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack. Have a great weekend!