$2M+ in Revenue From a Research Report [Breakdown]

Intro 

Hello and welcome to the Mark Sourced newsletter, where we break down successful B2B marketing programs that you can leverage to hit your growth goals.

Today, we’re looking at how CustomerGauge generated $2,000,000 in annual recurring revenue through a first party research report, a case study that’s detailed on the How The Fxck podcast.

Let’s unpack the program!

By the way, Mark Sourced is a brand-new newsletter built specifically for SaaS marketing leaders by a fellow SaaS marketing leader. I’d love to hear what you think! Just hit reply and let me know if you found it useful — or if there’s anything that you’d like to see covered in future editions.

Summary

CustomerGauge is an account experience platform that enables users to capture and analyze customer feedback.

To position themselves as industry leaders, and to help craft their market narrative, CustomerGauge set out to create an original research report.

The team developed a 35 - 40 question survey that they sent out to relevant contacts within their industry. They then used the responses to create industry benchmarks and state of the market viewpoints that they crafted into a larger report.

The report was created and promoted in collaboration with organizations like Salesforce, Microsoft, MIT, and others to help boost credibility,

The result was the NPS and CS Benchmarking report, which was downloaded tens of thousands of times and helped generate millions in revenue.

The Results

30,000+ content downloads
$2,000,000+ annual recurring revenue (ARR)

Why This Worked

For a piece of content to generate 30,000 downloads and support over $2,000,000 ARR, there are a variety of things that you need to nail about the execution.

The folks at CustomerGauge did an excellent job here, and I’ll try to distill down the highest impact reasons they were able to make this work.

1. The content was unique and valuable

By building the content based upon first party research, CustomerGauge was able to create a report that was completely unique in the market.

On top of that, they crafted the content and takeaways to be entirely focused on education rather than selling their product. That helped the content to resonate in the market and build organic momentum.

2. They partnered with large companies to add credibility  

CustomerGauge was able to create the report in partnership with respected brands like Salesforce, Microsoft, MIT, and others. That helped to bolster the credibility of the report, as well as take advantage of the large promotional network of each of those brands.

Ultimately, they were able to garner those partnerships by reaching out to the brands at the beginning of the project. Once they got the first big brand to agree, attracting subsequent partners became easier.

3. They repurposed the content and promoted continuously over time

When investing this much time and effort into creating a report, it’s imperative to get as much traction out of it as possible.

The team was able to able to create pieces of sub content from the report that they used in emails, blog posts, and social media posts. They then dripped all of those sub content pieces out over time to continuously promote the content and their point of view.

4. They used intent signals to send the most relevant leads to the sales team

From a sales perspective, they were able to use the guide to generate downloads and cookie website visitors. From that, they leveraged intent signals like pricing page viewers and product page visitors to trigger action from their sales team, which led to revenue.

Who Should Consider Running This Type of Program

Creating first party educational content is a valuable activity for any type of business.

It’s also an initiative with a fairly minimal upfront investment to create and promote the content, which is another benefit to this particular type of marketing campaign.

The caveat here is it really does help to have a strong brand behind you to build credibility the report. So, if you’re an early stage, company I would recommend findings others to partner with.

Before reaching out to potential partners, produce some other quality content pieces first, and then you can approach larger brands to show them the quality and value of what you create to get them on board for this project.

How to Run This At Your Company

If you want to execute a program like this at your company, here are some of the resources that you need to have in place to do it:

1. Industry Expertise

To effectively craft a survey, interpret the data, and write some analysis, you do need to have real industry expertise on your team. Make sure you have a dedicated and knowledge industry expert on board to champion this project.

2. Data Analyst

Having a data analyst really helps when doing first party research. The analyst can make sure your survey questions are framed in the correct way, help interpret your results, and output graphs that can be used within the content.

3. Design & Content Support

Last, but certainly not least, you need someone to design a visually engaging report and a writer that can help you craft the narrative. These can be internal resources, or are roles that can be filled via freelancers or project based work.

Conclusion

CustomerGauge did a great job of creating uniquely valuable content that resonated in the market.

It’s a great example of a content playbook that others can follow to develop their market point of view, thought leadership, and grow their business.

-Founder @ Mark Sourced

P.S.
This is a brand-new newsletter built specifically for SaaS marketing leaders by a fellow SaaS marketing leader. If you found it valuable, or if there’s anything that you would like to see covered in future editions, I would love to know. Just hit reply and let me know your thoughts!