SmartPM identified that they had access to 70,000 schedule files that nobody else could analyze. The key insight is recognizing when your company sits on proprietary data that can answer questions your market desperately wants answered. Don't just think about survey data - look at your product usage data, customer outcomes, or technical analyses that only you can perform.

What used to require hiring specialized survey consultants and going through rounds of expert review on Upwork can now be handled in-house with AI assistance. Alexandre specifically uses ChatGPT to refine question wording, identify bias, and improve survey structure. This democratizes access to quality research methodology for smaller marketing teams without sacrificing rigor.

Distribution isn't a press release and LinkedIn post - it's a multi-week orchestrated campaign. SmartPM's approach included: partnering with industry publications (Construction Dive), creating participation lists for internal company-wide social amplification, strategically embedding quotes from external authorities to give them skin in the game for sharing, running targeted LinkedIn ads, and planning content syndication. The asset is expensive regardless - distribution is where ROI happens.

A one-week asset versus a one-month asset might seem like a 4x time investment difference, but SmartPM found the research report delivered 100x the results. This fundamentally changes the calculus around resource allocation. Rather than producing multiple shallow assets, concentrate resources on fewer, deeper pieces that have legitimate authority and staying power.

When reviewing survey results and data patterns, SmartPM intentionally brings in engineers, product managers, and other non-marketing perspectives. The reasoning: you're not marketing to marketers (unless you literally are), and different cognitive approaches will spot different patterns, angles, and narratives in the same data set. This prevents marketer groupthink from limiting your storytelling.

No matter how rigorous your methodology or insightful your findings, if the visual presentation doesn't stop someone scrolling LinkedIn, your research won't get downloaded. SmartPM's designers focused specifically on creating assets that would visually stand out in social feeds - treating boring graphs and data tables as design challenges rather than accepting them as-is.

SmartPM requested quotes and testimonials from vendors, semi-competitors, and industry authorities, offering them featured placement in the report. This wasn't just for credibility - it gave these external parties legitimate reasons to share and promote the report to their own networks, exponentially expanding distribution beyond SmartPM's owned channels.

Alexandre candidly admits the tension: ungated content likely builds better long-term brand equity and inbound momentum, but gated content provides the tangible metrics (form fills, contact lists) that organizations measure marketing performance against. His compromise: gate strategically while maintaining substantial ungated content, and always provide ungated access to survey participants as an incentive for completion.