When it comes to today’s marketing, there are a lot of different tools (and expenses) that come with tracking the way your audience interacts with your products and services. The success of marketing campaigns for products is determined by tracking your customers’ purchases and measuring the click-through rates. However, marketing budgets are typically one of the biggest expenses for businesses, no matter if the strategy is successful or not. And the most successful strategies? They’re not left to gut instincts — they’re based off data, which makes online surveys well-worth the effort for understanding what your target market thinks of your products and determining if your products are even reaching them.
The intersection of strategy and survey
Utilizing online surveys is a great way to assist a marketing campaign in any step. The right survey can help shape your marketing strategy, track the public’s perception of your campaign, and gather feedback.
Even though surveys are more commonly thought of as a tactic to track the success of a product release or campaign, survey data is also helpful in shaping a strategy. Generally speaking, the first step of developing a marketing strategy is to define the target market. Our clients supplement and refine their target market goals with demographic research from surveys, like location, gender, and more.
Another way to collect data is to track the conversion funnel or transactions completed — this is called behavioral data and is commonly used to determine the success of a campaign. This data can be collected through website and marketing automation analytics. Understanding your behavioral data is important; direct data confirms whether your strategy is successful or not. However, this kind of data comes with its own limitations, like determining if you’re converting the right kind of audience, how your content and brand are perceived, your audience’s intent, and their and expectations (and if their expectations were met).
Collecting data from your own customers can help to inform you of your target audience’s perception of your brand and serve as a guide for tailoring your content and strategy to better suit them. One of the misconceptions of surveying customers is that they may not tell the truth because their perceptions differ from the actions they took online or in-store. However, effective surveys shouldn’t attempt to predict behavior, or ask their customers to effective surveys should measure characteristics, perceptions, and preferences.
How businesses use surveys to collect useful data
There are three main kinds of surveys that businesses use:
1. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
For businesses looking for direct feedback from their customers, customer satisfaction surveys are usually the quickest way to measure desire and identify opportunities for improvement. This kind of survey also helps to get feedback on existing products or services.
2. Market Research Surveys
Market Research Surveys are typical to use when developing a marketing strategy, as their main goal is to help provide insight into the target market. When collecting data about market research, businesses are able to gain insight into customer demographics, learn their values, and learn how your target audience perceives your competitors. These surveys are also useful for advising which creative assets should be used in your next campaign – for example, is your target audience more likely to respond to a display ad or a bench ad? In the long run, market research surveys are a great insight for prioritizing ad spend and resources.
3. Event Surveys
Crucial for businesses that host meetings or events, event surveys collect feedback to make informed adjustments for future events. A variety of questions can be asked, from topic suggestions to event flow, accommodations, venue location, etc.
The best type of survey for campaigns that aren’t converting
Survey data helps determine why a campaign is struggling to perform. By performing primary market research, or by gathering new data via surveys, interviews, and questionnaires, you can ask your customers close-ended questions to see where they lose interest. You can gather a more conclusion outlook on your audience’s feelings by running surveys that only allow multiple-choice or “on a scale of 1 to 10” answers – and also determine if this failed strategy is reaching the right audience. For example, if your business targets mid-sized businesses, do your consumers work for mid-sized businesses? If not, then your strategy needs to be re-worked. If they do, then the issue is at another point down the marketing funnel.
Completing a market research survey for product research can guide you in a variety of ways; it can let you know if your products are meeting expectations, if your marketing message makes sense/is clear to your audience, or if you need to work on customer service for that specific product. The same can be said when testing products; you can see if your product has a competitive advantage if it’s something consumers are interested in, and which features your consumers like best.
Building an effective online survey
A simple way to build an online survey is to use a social media poll — Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all allow the ability for you to create simple polls for your customers.
An online survey building tool is the way to go for those looking to expand how they measure customer satisfaction and collect research. With QuestionPro, the streamlined interface allows users to create drag-and-drop questions to build the ideal survey for your needs. QuestionPro also offers the ability to customize ready-made templates, built by survey specialists.
Besides assisting with survey design, QuestionPro can also help distribute surveys in a variety of ways, analyze responses, open, and completion rates, and also translate data into usable graph and chart form.
While creating surveys, collecting data, and managing insights can seem overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. QuestionPro’s online interface makes it easy to select which survey tool would work best for you. Get started with a free account today.