When it comes to creating strong, original copy to feed a content marketing campaign, one of the toughest hurdles is often finding fresh things to talk about. This is especially true if your product is not necessarily something that would seem to lend itself to a variety of different angles and narratives. This is where online surveying can add real value to a content marketing strategy.

Online surveying is one of the easiest ways to extract compelling, headline-friendly statistics that can be fed into a campaign at multiple stages, from social media and email marketing to advertising, outreach, PR and even product development.

The best place to start with an online survey is with simple questions that lend themselves to unambiguous answers. “How many times a week do you eat meat?” for example, or “Do you have a pension?” With the help of an online polling company, you can tailor the respondent profiles and get more information about them, making it easier to create compelling stories, for example “one in three British adults have no pension plan” or “70% of South African adults eat meat at least five times per week.”

As well as producing SEO-friendly original content, these surveys are also great for anchoring a more targeted PR or link building campaign. By sharing the story you can attract links from local, national and industry-specific media, tailoring your information to gain more chance of exposure in each. This is an example of a PR campaign that generates publicity with original research.

For example, you could have your data broken down into regions, to create stories like “50% of London adults don’t have a pension”, or “Johannesburg is South Africa’s largest meat-eating city”. This gives you the potential to spin off a single piece of data to multiple different areas of local press. You can also add an interactive element by creating an infographic or a virtual map so that readers can compare their own region against the national average. This level of interactivity has the added bonus of making your content more shareable.

In this way, using online surveying is not only a great content marketing tool, it’s also a cost-efficient one. By funding a single well-targeted study, you can spin off content with multiple angles and audiences in mind, delivering more value for money while generating excellent insight into your customer base.