Online surveys are helpful tools that can help businesses create more efficient products and services that consumers really need and want.  Through online surveys, businesses don’t have to guess what their target consumers need or want; they can immediately know what kind of products and services will appeal most to their target buyers.  Businesses will also be able to know how and when they should introduce and promote your new products to consumers with the help of surveys.

Problems Online Surveys Can Help You Solve

There are a lot of things online surveys can help you with.  Online surveys can help you solve problems pertaining to various marketing goals.

• Market Research

Online surveys are quite helpful in market research.  By using online surveys, companies are able to identify the relationship between their product or service and their customers.  Businesses are able to determine their standing ien their industry, the awareness of the consumers on their company and the status of their branding on the market.

Online surveys also enable businesses to create a buyer persona based on the answers of their prospective customers on the surveys that they have released to the public.  This significant factor in inbound marketing can be crafted with the help of successful online surveys that are being given to targeted audiences.

• Optimization of Marketing

Whether you are utilizing email marketing, content creation or other forms of marketing tools, online surveys can help you improve your existing marketing strategies.  By obtaining significant information from targeted consumers, you can effectively enhance your existing marketing strategy to make it more efficient and make it gain more satisfactory results.

Email Marketing

By using online surveys, you will be able to create offers that are quite relevant to your target customers.  Your emails will more likely be read because they are relevant to your recipient’s situation instead of being marked as spam due to irrelevancy.

Content Creation

Online surveys will enable you to create content that will appeal to your readers.  Through online surveys, you will be able to create more relevant content and deliver your offers in the manner that suits your target customers’ preference.  The content on your website, landing pages and blog will also be more interesting and pleasing to your customers because they are timely.  You will be able to release offers based on your customers’ lifecycle.

Events

Just like in email marketing and content creation, you will be able to conduct events that are more relevant and timely to your target audience with the help of online surveys.  By collecting information from your target customers though surveys, you will be able to tailor events that will seem more relevant and advantageous to your clients.

• Thought Leadership

Aside from market research and marketing optimization, online surveys can also help you develop thought leadership.  By being able to gather information about their audience and prospective customers, you will be able to provide your audience with things that they will find useful.  This is important if your want to gain and show thought leadership.  And by doing so, you will be able to improve your presence, making you dominate your industry online.

• Internal Communication

Online surveys inside your team or company will also improve your internal communication which will enhance your company’s marketing stratagem.  By organizing regular surveys, you will be able to discover unnoticed concerns and problems inside your organization.  This will help you come up with plans that will solve your company’s problems and better your communication and relationship with your consumers.

The 5-Step Methodology to Launching Marketing Surveys

Adopting the right methodology in launching a marketing survey will ensure that you will reap satisfactory results that you can use to improve your marketing strategy.

• Define Goal

Before creating an online survey, you first have to determine your goals.  You have to know what you want to achieve through your online survey so that you can clearly and easily make decisions on your online survey and overall marketing strategy.

You have to determine what your online survey is for.  You also have to know how and where you are going to use the data you have gathered from your survey.  Also, you also have to determine the decisions you want to make for your company based on the results that you have acquired.

• Identify Segment

After you have determined your goals, you can now find the right audience that will take and answer your online survey.  By publishing your survey to the right audience, you will gather significant data that will greatly help your business.

• Define Timing

Knowing when to conduct the survey is also very important.  By knowing when you should release your survey is crucial because this will make your online survey more successful.  Knowing your target audience’s life cycle will significantly impact the result of your survey.

Letting your survey run at least for a couple of days is very efficient because it will enable more people to answer your online survey.

• Pick the Right Distribution

After creating your survey, determining your target audience and knowing the right time to conduct your survey, you can now decide what type of distribution you should use to deliver your online survey to your audience.  You can choose between email, paid ads, social media or personal presentation.  But before you decide, you need to know which one is more effective.  You have to know the nature of your audience so that your survey can reach your target audience promptly and successfully.

Collecting and analyzing results

After you have successfully conducted your survey, it’s now time to gather the results and analyze them.  You can either analyze the results using tools that can automatically segment the answers or input all the results on a spreadsheet so that you can create charts and reports through it.

Use your gathered results to come up with marketing strategies that will improve your business’ campaign and overall performance.

How to Build Your Survey Questions

It’s important to ask the right questions on your survey so that your target audience will complete the task.  Here are some of the best practices in creating a successful survey.

• Build Up a Flow

Start with a simple and short introduction that will motivate your audience to answer your survey.  Ask broad questions at first before asking topic-specific or narrower questions.  Also, if you are asking for contact information, better put it at the end of the survey.

• Keep it Simple

Keep your questions simple.  Use simple words and try to keep your questions short so that your audience will not get bored.  Also, try to make your survey short – do not include unnecessary questions so that the completion rate of your survey will be much higher.

• Avoid Double-Barrelled Questions

Avoid including questions that your audience must answer on two parts or have difficulty answering.  Be sure that your target audience is familiar with the questions that you want to ask so that you can get accurate data from their answers.  Make your questions closed-ended (yes or no).

• Randomize the Order of Questions

Avoid letting your audience focus on a single subject on your survey by randomizing your questions.  Don’t ask questions about a single topic consecutively so that your audience will not focus on the topic of your last question.  This way, they will be able to provide their own insight on a matter instead of the topic suggested by your consecutive questions.

• Be Specific

Be specific on your questions.  Avoid including questions that are hard to understand or can be interpreted into multiple meanings.  If you want to know how helpful your products are, you may ask ‘Do you find our company’s products helpful on your daily tasks?’ instead of asking ‘Are you happy with the quality of our products?’  There are many meanings of the words ‘happy’ and ‘quality’ so your audience might have a different interpretation of the question

• Add Scale Points to Specific Questions

You can include scale points – say, one to five – on questions where you want to know your audience’s rating on a certain website, blog, product or service.  Make sure that your scale points are consistent and represent the same value to help your audience answer your questions more easily.

• Consider Offering Rewards

Consider offering rewards if you want your survey to be completed immediately.  But if you want to interview the same people again, they might not want to complete the task without rewards.  Giving rewards is good if you need to have the survey completed quickly but it might hurt you in the long run.

• Test Your Survey

Before launching your survey, test it on a small number of audience or co-workers to make sure that there are no errors, glitches and unexpected question interpretations on your survey.

Tools You Need to Launch an Online Survey

• Form

After you have listed all of your questions, it’s now time to input your questions on a form.  You can either use a survey software or just your landing page to create your survey form.  Use a software if you want to do a series of surveys and you want the data be automatically compiled on a record.  You can use a simple form on your landing page or website if you want to do a single survey and won’t need to integrate your data on various records.

• Promotional Tools

Once you have finished creating your survey form, you can now decide what promotional tools you are going to use to spread the word about your survey.  You can use email, paid ads or the social media to let your target audience know that you are conducting a survey.

• Analysis Tools

Once your survey is finally complete and filled, you can use various tools to analyze your results.  You can use software that can automatically analyze your data or you can use a simple Excel spreadsheet to compile the data and analyze the results yourself.  After that, use the final results to create steps that you can apply to your marketing campaign to enhance your business.

By Candy Lowe