How to Drive Demand with Licensed Content
A strong analyst relations strategy requires a systematic approach to building credibility that drives measurable demand. But if you haven't achieved coverage yet - you can launch a high impact demand generation campaign by licensing third-party research.
Licensed content enables you to associate with credible research quickly so you can start filling your pipeline while you're building the relationships that are essential to earning coverage. Launching a reprint campaign requires a significant financial investment and requires thoughtful planning to be able to attribute its influence on revenue. But if you're looking to demonstrate success with a demand gen program, the results are measurable and nearly instant.
How to Prioritize Third-Party Research Investments
There are content investment options for every budget. The lowest cost programs are typically demand gen events. Both demand gen events and sponsored research require production time. Market challenge research, category inclusion, and vendor evaluation reports generally are ready to go, but the insights may not always complement the message you’re delivering to your audience.
Market Challenge Research - This is a report that doesn't mention you at all but addresses the exact problem your technology solves. This is authentic and validating because prospects find you organically while researching their pain point. The analyst's logo adds instant credibility and association with your brand. Surprisingly I've seen the most inbound leads and opportunities generated by licensed research where the vendor is not mentioned.
Category Inclusion - Your company appears as a sample vendor in a technology report with a specific focus on a market category. Requires established market presence and customer base to warrant inclusion. Limited lead generation potential since prospects must be specifically researching your exact category, and you're just one name among many.
Vendor Evaluation - You're featured alongside competitors with ratings or detailed analysis. High credibility, but requires significant product maturity and market presence. Before you get to this point, you'll need to invest time into analyst relations (briefings and inquiries where you have subscriptions with companies like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and GigaOm). Generally this comes after 12-18 months of briefings, but we've seen success in as few as 4 months!
Sometimes analyst firms will surprise you with inclusion—coverage can be driven by inquiries from their customer base. So my tip is to always listen when your prospects ask you if you are mentioned by an analyst firm. Make sure that firm becomes a central part of your semi-annual briefing approach.
Sponsored Research - You commission the research on your chosen topic. High cost, high control, high reward when executed properly. Best for companies with clear market positioning and mid-five figure budgets to invest.
Demand Gen Events - Joint webinars, roundtables, or speaking opportunities with analyst firms. Lower cost entry point, builds relationships, generates immediate leads. Doing these with a partner or complementary technology can drive demand for registrations—but these leads can be a lot of work to follow up on.
Getting Results
Have a strategy in place before you invest. Set clear success metrics upfront, just like any other GTM effort.
Gate the Content - Force lead capture so you can track who's engaging and build your pipeline, don't just give away value. A reader’s consumption becomes an indicator that should be part of your lead scoring process.
Extract Meaningful Quotes - Identify specific pullouts that directly support your positioning and clearly tie back to your value as a vendor. Generic relevance isn't enough.
Build Campaign Tracking - Set up systems to correlate research interactions with conversions in your CRM. Without attribution, you can't prove ROI or optimize performance.
Map to Sales Stages - Just like your foundational content library, you'll want to map licensed content to sales stages. And you'll see even greater success when you use one report as the foundation for social media, email sequences, website features, sales enablement content, partner resources, and event nurturing.
Over time, with tracking measures in place, you'll discover which types of content perform best with your audiences. Each analyst firm has strengths with different geographic audiences, government versus commercial sectors, organization sizes, and verticals. You have to do your research to find your sweet spot.
Investments in these programs will build the third-party credibility required to convert prospects into customers. Once you get it right, you'll have a repeatable system for leveraging credibility across your revenue operations.
This integrated approach to analyst relations and reprint programs is part of our core services at Stealth Cartel. If you need help building a system that works, let's talk.
