How do you understand your customers?
Are they going to tell you how they feel about your product or services up-front? Absolutely not. They don’t have that much time.
If you want to know about their feelings, you have to collect their responses.
Surveys are the best way you can do that. There’s a constant buzz around surveys you may have heard of. Like it is so powerful, it’s easy to do, and other similar things.
Let’s decode what surveys can do for your business and how you can make the most of surveys in this blog.
A friendly reminder: Surveys are not always literally mean 🫢
Types of market surveys
Primarily, there are four ways a company can conduct market surveys. These are;
🔺Face-to-Face Surveys
🔺Pen and Paper Surveys (self-administered)
🔺Telephone surveys
🔺Computer surveys (online)
Surveys are not only a useful resource for the marketing departments, but they also serve various purposes. People like survey methodologists, statisticians, psychologists, and people from other fields of research use survey documents. They bring out the analysis and explanation of survey responses.
Now, let’s decode the types of market research surveys that organizations commonly use for various purposes.
Customer demographics survey
It’s the most typical type of survey where organizations gather information on all relevant demographic features of their customers. It helps reveal the structure of the audience, and, of course, it helps organizations frame better-targeted strategies.
Competitor research survey
Identifying your competitors is the primary objective of conducting a market research survey. Once you discover your competitors, you can frame strategies to outshine them. Service verticals, pricing, targeted audience, and many other valuable insights you can gain from these surveys.
Put some open-ended questions like “What do you think first when you hear this brand name?”. These questions reveal the perception of a brand in people’s minds through your prescribed survey format. Using these metrics helps you measure your competitors’ ecosystem.
Consumer behavior survey
Understand the behavior of your consumers throughout the purchasing journey. Conduct surveys at each stage to know it better. This will help you figure out which factors drive your customers more.
Find out who the primary decision makers are for each of your product categories. It also helps you extract which brands influence your consumers. Overall, a consumer behavior survey will reveal the sentiment of your customers and track the changes over time.
Brand personality survey
The personality of a brand rapidly changes over time, and that needs to happen in a good way. Collecting public opinion before attempting advertising techniques is essential here. That’s where brand personality survey monitors come into the picture.
Conducting brand personality surveys is a way to understand how your customers are perceiving your brand. Adding up open-ended questions like “how unique is our brand?” can reveal a lot of hidden facts about the brand. These surveys help reveal brand associations and track how your brand is changing over time.
Price testing survey
Pricing is the top factor that influences buying decisions. A survey to test your pricing elements is surely a welcome move. It will reveal whether your customers are happy with the price that you offer for your products and services.
Besides the level of affordability, this survey also keeps the product satisfaction level in check. Therefore, you can focus on optimizing your pricing strategy and get instant insights about your audience’s paying capacity.
How online market surveys grow your business
Millions of survey forms are sent out each year. In B2B, most of the companies are sending surveys using the best survey tools to get organized responses. Over the past decade, the popularity of using tools and software for conducting market surveys has increased. As a result, more companies have started using online survey tools and migrated their system to cloud platforms for the best use.
In general, surveys overwhelmingly benefit marketing and sales operations. Here are the best measures we are going to cover that will explain how market surveys can help your business achieve more growth.
Insights into a specific audience
Surveys are a great strategy for reaching your audience in the quickest possible way. Using the survey results, you can make data-driven and customer-centered campaigns and solutions. It will drive business profitability and fulfill customers’ needs.
Research and analyze a niche market
A market research survey always helps companies to understand various aspects of the target market. Ultimately, it enables the company to make informed decisions. Surveys reveal the potential market size and assist in determining the optimal price for the product. Before implementing any plan directly, you must always consider surveying your niche market to understand the actual needs.
Always confirm the strategies that showed up benefits. Market surveys can help you review those strategies. Hence, you can deploy the strategies that drive your success in the most confirmed measure.
Create brand awareness
You think superficially optimistic about your products, but your target customer base might not think like that. What they think about your products and your brand overall, you need to assess first. Conducting a market survey is the best possible way you do so.
Brand awareness surveys are the best choice for this case. These surveys help you understand what your prospects and customers think about your company, image, and, of course, your products. Getting to know what your customers and prospects think about you is the best way you extract insights about your brand from second perspectives.
Extract insights from your product
Product feedback surveys are different from the rest kinds of market surveys that exist. Sending online product feedback survey forms to your targeted audience fetches you unique customer experience insights. You can deploy those insights for the development of your products, bring innovation, and use the same metrics to boost product sales.
It’s necessary to ask relevant questions through your product feedback surveys. Adding a few questions like “What do you like most about our products?” and “What areas of our product do you think we should improve, and if so, suggest to us.” These questions are compelling and advanced in terms of getting the feedback from your customers at the rational level.
Competitors’ assessment
Keep a close eye on your target market through a complete understanding of your competitors. Tracking them constantly is important if you want to minimize the market competition. Here, the best way to look inside the competitors is to consider identifying and analyzing your competition. Market surveys can help you provide all the relevant competitors’ insights into your operational procedure.
Understand the customers’ demographics
Identify potential customer demographics easily using the insights of market survey research. While conducting your surveys, ask your respondents about their age, gender, income, location, their likes, dislikes, favorite brands, and other types of demographic details. Collecting all these details via survey responses is easy and less time-consuming.
Having all the demographic information with you can help you understand your target audience as well as the target market. Therefore, it will become easy for you to strategize your messages and campaigns. Your marketing team can easily target the desired audience and convince them with valid messages.
Analyze target markets
Online surveys are the most effective way to figure out your target market. Basically, it will cover the geographic metrics where you will target. Online surveys are the best way to get insights into the target markets, and that too, instantly. It also helps you to find out the ways you can serve your target customers better. Plus, you would have an understanding of which channel you should use for targeting your desired market segment.
Conduct market segmentation
Splitting your target market into different segments is the best way you provide wholesome support to your marketing efforts. Segmenting your customers into smaller groups helps in making business decisions and improving marketing efforts. Segment your customers into different categories based on demographics, location, brand affinity, product likability, etc.
Segmenting your market into different categories makes it easier for your marketing team to understand what your customers really want. Many successful organizations have segmented their target market into different categories and addressed them respectively. It helped them to improve the response rate and brought more new opportunities.
Test branding & positioning
Brands should always listen to their audience and serve what their customers want. A real insight into customers’ perspectives is essential when it comes to doing the branding stuff. Hence, surveys provide all the answers in this case to the brands. Surveys help brands to understand customers’ attitudes, preferences, motivations, and other factors that your competitors are influencing. Ultimately, it helps brands to come out with a strong brand image and powerful positioning in the market.
Get to know customer sentiments
“How your customers are feeling” matters to you the most as a brand. You must provide enough scope to your customers so that they can express their opinion about your products and services. Conducting an investment research survey works best to add customer sentiments to your survey findings.
The aim here is to include customers’ feelings and likes in decision-making. It will help brands to deliver more satisfaction to customers and establish more credibility in the market.
Extracting fresh content ideas
Surveys also reveal exciting things that your marketing team can use in creating content. For example, surveys can extract personal stories when you send your customers open-ended questions. These stories are your best content that you can post throughout your social channels. This will also bring a fresh and unique perspective to your content strategy over time.
How to create surveys
Be a little tactful when creating surveys for your audience.
Online surveys are easy to create and share. Also, recording and processing survey data from online databases takes less time than traditional measures. It will become much easier when you understand how to create your surveys more conveniently.
Having a good design for your survey is important as it would help to move your respondents from one question to another. You should spend a decent amount of time designing your surveys. Positioning your questions and arranging them based on priority.
Define your questions
Every survey comes with a purpose. Be it exclusively made for checking customer response or brand popularity, every survey comes with a defined purpose. The purpose or goal of the survey should be reflected in the questions. Without having a goal in mind, a survey will only produce data, nothing relevant.
Who’ll respond to your survey?
A clear vision you should have on who to share your surveys with. The respondents can be your customers, prospects, or anyone else. You must have an idea about this. To conduct a good survey, you need to identify your target people and develop the best way to reach them. The path can include social media, emails, your website, or anything else.
Pre-test your surveys
After framing the questions and designing the basic survey, now comes the testing phase. Designing the questionnaire format and pre-testing it is crucial to validate the question data. It provides clarity that the respondents may interpret the survey questions in a similar way you want or differently.
Sampling your audience
Find a fixed sample size for your survey. The sample size should reflect the entire set of population that you want to cover.
Suppose you want to survey how much the youth in the UK spend watching web series. Does that mean you want to send your survey to everyone in the UK between the ages of 18 and 28? Obviously, not!
Thus, sampling can help you get an idea of the overall target population without surveying everyone. Always consider taking only an unbiased sample from the population.
Send out your surveys
Getting responses from everyone that you included in your samples is important when you send out your surveys. Because it will determine the response rate of your surveys. Getting a positive response also depends on the fact which platform you are using to send out your surveys. The platform should have fewer complexities. Sending out your surveys using mail merge with Outlook and Google Forms can be a perfect example of this.
Best practices to improve your survey creation & engagement
Keep your surveys as engaging as possible to get all the attention. Your respondents should feel like “ahha! What a nice survey!”
Time is valuable, and if your target people are spending time responding to your survey, then you should pay them respect. Making the survey engaging and worthwhile is the biggest respect you can deliver to them. Engaging surveys take away more attention than boring questions and answer formats.
Besides the attractiveness of the survey, here are a few things you need to focus on for improving your survey creation and enhancing its engagement.
Bring on-point relevancy
Do not clutter your survey space with unnecessary questions. As per common sense, people tend to skip questions when they see multiple things instead of a clear question in surveys. Thus, put one question in a specific area and let that question take up the space fully. It will bring on-point relevancy into the process and make your survey distraction-free.
Check on visual appeal
Your survey should also look appealing to make people engage with it. Awful-looking surveys have the highest abandonment rates. People keep rejecting them due to design perspectives. Hence, you should always take care of the visual appeals and functionalities while designing your surveys.
Improve language and tone
Use simple and plain English to write your questions. Remember, people must understand whatever you have asked through your surveys. Adding unnecessary questions to surveys makes them tough to read and respond to. So, always try to improve your language and fix your tone before developing your survey questions.
Limit your questions
Don’t pressurize your respondents to answer too many questions. Limit your questions as much as possible. Adding too many questions may decrease the response rate sometimes. People tend to leave the survey platform or start skipping the questions when they find too many questions. Therefore, you need to limit your questions to 5 or 6 per survey.
Reject biases
Surveys should be free from all types of biases. Avoid adding any opinion from your side when drafting your survey questions. Try to take out responses from an objective point of view. It will make your survey free from all types of biases.
Use multiple channels
As a distribution medium, optimize multiple channels to send out your surveys. From social media to SMS, try out everything to check which channel is working well for your specific types of businesses. Use all the available channels that you interact with to get all responses.
