Editor’s note: Tyler Kettle is international insight program manager at Google, New York. 

I want to share with my fellow marketing research and insights professionals a term I have been using lately to describe where I have seen marketing research going in the past couple of years: marketers of research. For many of you, this will not be totally new; the storytelling of insights has been a popular topic the past several years. However, we need to move from being marketing researchers who can tell stories to marketers of research, professionals who understand their target audiences in their organizations and are able to compel them to think and act differently based on the insights they share.

My definition of a marketer of research is someone who can tell a compelling story based on secondary or primary insights who influences others to think differently and ultimately persuades them to make strategic decisions based on those insights.

Like marketers striving to create a compelling story to cause consumers to change their current thinking and buy the product or solution being offered, we as marketers of research want to tell a story that causes the organization to think differently. By implementing marketing research into strategy, organizations can better align with current and future expectations and trends.

Influencing with a compelling story

I often see potentially impactful insights ignored due to two key reasons:

  1. The insight was not effectively communicated in a compelling, story-like manner or was not tailored to the audience’s communication style.
  2. The audience had a preexisting, generally accepted belief and was not willing to change their view based on the numbers and findings.

So how can you overcome these barriers? It all comes down to knowing your audience. Just as in traditional marketing, you need to know what channels work best for communicating and what is needed to get your target audience to pay attention and believe in the business impact that could be achieved through research insights.

Depending on your target, achieving this goal could be as simple as demonstrating that the insights are based on a reliable, robust sample of individuals that fully represents the population. Some people don’t care about the numbers so it may be more effective to create an interactive video series that includes consumers from focus group or ethnographic research, bringing to life the true voice of the customer.

Just as many companies strive to take a customer-centric approach to growing their business, we as marketers of research should be implementing the same tactics to drive change within our companies.

Nurturing business relationships

Effectively communicating the value of our research and the insights it produces is all about establishing and nurturing relationships with our business partners, which will help us to drive meaningful business results through marketing research.

Just like marketers who strive to continually build relationships with their customers, we as marketers of research must continually build relationships and develop trust within our organizations to ensure that our insights are being used to drive decision-making.

This can be accomplished by becoming experts in our field and delivering the voice of the customer to our business partners. We can achieve this objective through conducting more primary research or creating compelling viewpoints on potential solutions to key business problems based on our expertise and professional knowledge. However, we also need to support this by understanding our business partners’ needs.

Everyone in an organization has different needs and priorities for their departments and teams. It is our job to understand these needs to provide customized methodologies, reports and insights. For example, you might not need to provide a 100 percent solution to a business problem. Depending on the situation, a directional solution that gets someone 70 percent of the way might be enough.

In the end, we are still marketing researchers but to maximize our impact we need to become marketers of research – individuals who can ultimately lead an entire organization to think differently.