Here’s a content idea – conduct an industry survey. This will help you garner more visibility, and likely even free media coverage. You can easily establish yourself as a thought leader by doing this.

The results of your survey will be full of useful information that can be turned into many different forms of content – as long as you ask the right question and you don’t make the survey too long.

I recommend in addition to multiple choice questions, you also leave room for survey respondents to fill in their own answers – in some of the surveys I’ve conducted, the most eye-opening and interesting insights came from these open-ended responses.

Anyone can conduct a survey with tools such as Survey Monkey, or you can go a step further to hire someone to help you distill the results and turn it into a formatted white paper.

The survey results can also be repurposed into blog posts, long-form articles, a webinar series, multiple social media posts, an infographic and more.

It’s important to remember to ensure you survey enough respondents so the results are credible. You can do this by promoting the survey on social media and sending out several emails to encourage participation. You may also want to offer incentives for taking the survey such as a Starbucks gift card.

Another idea to increase survey participation is to partner with a prominent trade association or other organization in your industry to gain access to their mailing list and build credibility for the survey.

By creating your own research and publicizing the results, you are in essence becoming the trusted news source on the pulse of your industry and that will only enhance your brand and give you more visibility.

Creating thought leadership like this where you are the resource is a great investment in your brand and business and can be repurposed into many different content types over a long period of time. It’s well worth the time and effort!