Ever downloaded an industry trend report or e-book?
As for me, I've downloaded 100+ of those....
Why?
The landing page text might say things like "we polled nearly 1,800 designers and developers from four continents..." (Figma) but, of course, I never read the promo text.
Because it's the impeccably designed cover that gets me.
Like 8 billion other human animals, I'm a visual creature. The design team at Intercom wins the beauty pageant – as well as my email address that I exchange for the PDF – the email that will receive tens of marketing newsletters over the next 3 months until, finally, I open one of them to scroll down to the almost-transparent unsubscribe link.
So why do I download trend reports and e-books? (Why do you?)
Perhaps, it's the human curiosity, the FOMO that scares you to miss out on some very important shifts in the industry, game-changing tactics, considerably pleasant ways to waste a few hours of your working day.
Be it as it may, trend reports (and other kinds of e-books) work. Especially in enterprise-level B2B sales where their purpose isn't as much education but...
Leaving the impression of an established, industry-leading brand.
And, naturally, collecting hundreds of potential future clients' emails. (You already know what to do next with those...) 🌚
THE question is: Do trend reports lead to sales & revenue growth?
The short answer is: Yes.
But let's rephrase the question: Are trend reports worth your marketing team's time, effort, and the ad budget that goes into promotion?
The answer shifts to: Maybe.
It takes A LOT of time to create a trend report. The reason I know is because I just wrote, designed, and promoted one.
Together with Sera, the super promising Estonian startup building AI SDR (you should check them out!), we decided to create the 2025 Trend Report: How AI Will Change Sales Operations.
The joke's on me because Sera's team is essentially three people. And, obviously, there are no designers. (In Estonia, the first designer enters the game as ca 60th hire – hence the high success rate of local tech companies.)
So when creating the 30-page trend report, 70% of my time went into designing the thing.
As a result, I learned so much about cutting corners with Figma Library templates and unearthing legit-looking 3D icons for $80. More on this later!
As I use Toggl to track the time spent on clients' marketing projects, I can more or less present the breakdown of a trend report creation timeline.
Time spent on creating & promoting a trend report:
- Research + discussions with team: 8 hours
- Writing the content (drafting with ChatGPT Premium): 10h
- Designing the PDF from zero: 16h
- Designing ads + social content for promotion: 6h
- Setting up ad campaigns: 1h
- Designing, copywriting, and setting up landing page + website popup: 4h
- Setting up post-download email automation: 4h
- Random back-and-forth + reporting: 6h
In total, we have... 55 hours. 🥲
And let me assure you that if there was a team of 3-5 people (plus extra stakeholders) working on the project, the time spent would be at least 5-6x higher.
Now, add to this resource pillage the paid advertising budget...
... and what your get are pretty damn expensive leads.
So you better know exactly what you're doing when starting to work on an industry trend report.
Time for the first Moomin break.
Should you create & promote a trend report?
Here are 5 reasons not to:
- It costs a lot of time, consider the alternative things your team could do with it.
- You need to have industry expertise (or be great at learning fast from other industry leaders (fairly easy, tbh)).
- Once the PDF is ready, you have to promote it. Otherwise, nobody will find or download it.
- You need to keep milking the report for weeks if not months to justify point 1.
- The leads that come in via download need a lot of nurturing before converting.
But then again...
Here are 10 reasons why trend reports are worth it:
- You've exhausted other acquisition channels or maxed out the spending to ROAS limit.
- You're a new startup and want to quickly establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
- You're willing to invest in the long game, and turn leads into clients via marketing automation.
- You've never tried it before – marketing is all about experimentation.
- You want a high-quality resource to share with existing leads and include in outreach emails.
- You invest in a long-form content piece to turn into... LinkedIn posts, webinars, blog articles, etc.
- You gather and visualise statistics that gets picked up by other blogs and media publications, resulting in high brand reach & awareness.
- You use the trend report as one stage in your marketing funnel, not as a one-stop acquisition channel.
- Your marketing team is too big and has no higher-ROAS projects to focus on (cut the headcount).
- You establish your annual trend reports as a thing people look forward to, à la Spotify Wrapped or Adobe's Creative Trends report. And make them so fun / innovative others will do the distribution for you.
To sum it up: Trend reports are worth it if you do them well.
How to create an industry trend report that people want?
For better or worse – and this is my aesthetic brain typing – the content of a trend report is 20% of its attraction and efficiency. The rest is design (40%) and marketing (40%).
Here's the zero-to-one process I followed when creating the AI x Sales trend report for Sera.
#1 Research
The obvious first step was to ask Sera's founders what we should talk about.
Just as obvious as the founders not being marketing people so they gave me free rein. I was on my own, again.
So I went to spy on the competition, as well as the established B2B SaaS brands that I know to do great marketing (and design).
The best spy tool was LinkedIn Ads Library. For example, when I checked which ads HubSpot and Intercom are running, I quickly found their latest trend reports (set up as LinkedIn Lead ads).
To see the LinkedIn ads any brand is running, go to their Business page, navigate to Posts, and click "View ad library."
When doing the initial research, I was looking at:
- Headlines and subjects of the trend report
- Structure of chapters and content
- Layout and design ideas
- Landing page + download form setup
- Marketing communication around the report
I created:
- A Google Docs with screenshots of various trend report ads, landing page URLs and content ideas
- A Google Drive folder with downloaded trend reports to keep referring to
- A Figma file with screenshots of good cover design + layout examples
This was about all I needed to be ready to write & design one myself.
Time for the second Moomin break.
How to write an insightful industry trend report?
Industry trend reports are essentially a grown-up version of e-books.
They've got to be longer, more insightful, and involve lots of statistics and charts.
Ideally, you've got lots of industry data – or customers to send a survey to.
As a startup, you have neither.
So I suppressed my anti-AI attitude for one day and asked ChatGPT to find statistics on relevant topics.
Like a good journalist ever, it wasn't particularly forthcoming on its sources.
It became slightly more forthcoming once I'd upgraded to the Premium plan.
In any case, using ChatGPT, I regret to admit, saved me lots of time when writing the trend report (in a Google Doc).
Important to note: I rewrote most of the text ChatGPT provided, and prompted it to rewrite chapters 10+ times to get less jargony, repetitive, and much much more detailed and original.
After a long day's work, I had finalised the content draft and shared it with Sera's team for review.
And now we're getting to my favourite part...
How to design a trend report PDF?
I began by looking for the easy options.
Canva had no good templates for e-books or other PDF formats.
Neither did the Google search for "e-book templates" yield any crop.
So I went to Figma Library and found some helpful magazine layouts.
What was most helpful was using the screenshots of other trend reports to create templates for the project. I could copy the right font size and alignment, as well as get inspiration for simple design solutions.
I'd also like to thank my past self for investing in a $80 package of fully customisable 3D icons I found in an online creative market. They really made a difference in the report looking expensive and trustworthy.
(My WIP Figma file looked a lot messier...)
Coming up with the initial style, design elements, and typography was so horribly difficult that after two hours, I gave up, thought why do I do this to myself, and decided to continue the next day.
The positive thing is that once I'd figured out the first 3 slides the next morning, it got a lot easier to design the rest via duplication and playing around with the branded colour scheme.
I'd even go as far as to say that designing the report became fun and gratifying.
By Sunday evening, I had the 30 pages designed and, once again, posted the result in our team Slack.
The founders approved.
It was time to make some final adjustments and export the PDF.
I uploaded it to Google Drive as "accessible to everyone with link" and started preparing (designing, uff!) the ad campaigns + social media (LinkedIn) posts.
How to promote a trend report?
I suppose you agree that this newsletter is becoming exhaustingly long.
So I'll stop here, and send another dispatch on the promotion + results in the coming weeks.
While you wait, I've compiled a little award for those who reached the end of this soliloquy – a Figma file with some Library finds that were super helpful to me.
I also included some LinkedIn lead ad examples + good layout examples from my initial research process.
You can access the Figma file here.
Merci! 🐿️
In other news, I'm open to 1-2 marketing projects starting in January 2025.
(If you're new to this newsletter, read more about my background here.)
If you're unsure whether I'd be a good fit for your project (or what exactly you need help with), let's have a 30-minute intro call and take it from there.
Reach out on LinkedIn or at marketing@karolakarlson.com. Mention your brand + product, stage of business, and what you'd need help with.
Thanks for reading!
Karola