Why Your PR Agency Needs Research Skills in its DNA

A hunch or data-driven insights: which would you trust?



People trust data because it is objective, reliable if the sample size is large enough, quantifiable, verifiable, precise and less prone to personal bias.

Should your brand lean into data?

According to the AI-powered research engine Consensus, hunches are subjective and often lack a clear rationale. This ambiguity can lead to misinterpretation and reduced trust. Have you ever tried explaining a hunch based purely on intuition?

That’s why The Ideas Suite champions the use of data as a foundation for our media stories.

When we make a claim in a media release or thought-leadership piece, we need to back it with data—and data allows us to do just that. This often involves uncovering data unique to a brand’s business and sector, primary data the media wouldn’t usually have access to.

Data also reveals emerging trends, which are ideal for news hooks. It’s worth noting that something trending for two years isn’t news.

Top-tier media eagerly engage with well-presented data that comes with a meaningful narrative.

With data, brands can position themselves as thought leaders. It’s crystal-ball gazing without the hocus-pocus, mystical thinking, or pulling sentiments from thin air.

Data and our engine

We’ll explain why and how we harness original data, sift through it for insights to strengthen our content, and how this benefits our clients in building their thought leadership. Our evidence-based approach may seem complex—it has, after all, been honed by our founder since 2007. We follow a refined process and partner with an external data analytics company to wield this expertise effectively.

This means The Ideas Suite, a Sydney-headquartered PR agency, also serves as a research powerhouse for brands. Our team includes staff with a range of journalistic and PR experience, including with diverse academic backgrounds.

Developing primary research is in our DNA—here’s how we do it.

Our twin approach to data

We work with two types of data when developing our media content strategies:

• Retrospective: data on customer purchasing or user behaviours, and
• Forecasts: surveys capturing customer attitudes and intended future behaviours.

Our approach enables you to leverage your existing data to strengthen your position and anticipate trends. If you’re unsure about what might interest the media in your data, that’s where we come in. We partner with brands to create briefs, helping clients find relevant data that we then transform into reader-friendly formats. To ensure our content is original, we conduct audits of the media to check whether the media angles we want to use have not been created before.

You may worry that your customer data is market-sensitive and prefer to protect it from competitors. But rest assured, our clients don’t reveal raw data or customer numbers, simply percentage movements that support their claims in a media release.

Here’s an example of how we used our client Corporate Traveller’s data to create a media release that’s palatable to journalists, while sensitive information confidential. It made an impact by revealing something unexpected – the sporting event that attracted the most corporate travel bookings:

Meanwhile, an earlier data-backed media release we wrote for Corporate Traveller showed Brisbane overtaking Sydney and Melbourne as the top business traveller destination. It got a guernsey in The Australian (as we say in journalism). This data uncovered a surprising trend in Australia’s business and leisure travel landscape.

These examples draw on transaction data to capture past behavior and help us identify trends. Through our analysis, we’re able to extract client insights and build thought leadership around key issues.



But there’s another way to extract newsworthy insights from data.

Unlocking insights with surveys

For surveys, we carefully design each question-and-response option to avoid any bias. We ensure we are neutral, clear, offer respondents balanced answer options, and we avoid double-barrelled questions to avoid confusion.

Our external research agency that provides us with our independent respondent panel then pilot-tests the survey questions, allowing us to refine them if needed. The survey is then rolled out to at least 1000 people across Australia, making it highly representative. This approach provides a cost-effective way to pulse-test issues on both a state and national level.



Sometimes, the responses contain enough substance to be repurposed into a whitepaper. Clients often find these documents useful as lead magnets on landing page, for instance.

Client data + surveys = thought leadership

Think we’re giving away our secret sauce?

We’ve just lifted the bonnet on our process because new or prospective clients often say, “We don’t have much to say,” yet they still want media coverage.

Here we’re being proactive, coming up with the angles and questions ourselves. We’re not waiting for journalists to ask us these questions – we’re a step ahead. In fact, often we sit down with our clients to discuss their key messages, then develop a 12-month story plan that’s brimming with potential angles, but has enough flexibility to tweak as needed.

The Ideas Suite has partnered with businesses in finance, travel, insurance, e-commerce, property, professional services, engineering, urban planning, project management, and more.

Could you brand benefit from our process? Find out – get in touch here.