There are so many different ways you can engage in content marketing … eBooks, white papers, checklists, cheat sheets … but I think one of the most overlooked tactics is the simple, yet effective marketing survey.
Surveys are the perfect way to take the temperature with your prospects, leads, and customers as you uncover:
- Thoughts and feelings on products and services (psychographics)
- Levels of customer satisfaction
- Areas needing improvement or more info
- Items or content that influence your audience to purchase
Few other content marketing tactics/tools allow you to gain insights about the people who are in tune with your company or brand.
That said, you have to be especially savvy about the way in which you formulate your surveys.
Here are five, easy hacks to ensure your marketing surveys are collecting the valuable data your business needs.
1. Better Marketing Surveys Ask Better Questions
With surveys, you can collect a wide variety of data.
Are you looking for facts? What about feelings?
Facts may represent demographic data sets, like:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income
- Marital status
While feelings, or psychographics, may look at subjective data sets including:
- Behaviors
- Interests
- Opinions
- Attitudes or lifestyle
When formulating your questions, ask yourself the following:
- Are there more than two possible answers?
- Can people select only one answer or more than one?
- Do I need to understand value or importance of the items in the question?
- Do I need to understand behavior or sentiment?
By going through these questions with your possible survey questions, you’ll be able to determine the best questions for your marketing survey.
Sometimes you’ll want multiple choice versus one choice.
Other times a drop-down box or box where comments can be left is best.
You can also use ranking or interval scales to help with comparisons and measurement.
2. Survey Question Wording Is Critical
Questions can inadvertently sway someone taking the survey if suggestive wording is used, so you must choose your words carefully!
[bctt tweet=”Staying neutral when trying to understand feelings with your survey is very important.”]For instance, instead of this:
“On a scale from 1 to 5, how awesome is B Squared Media’s social presence?”
Try this more neutral phrase:
“On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate B Squared Media’s social media presence?”
Other things to avoid:
- Being overly generic – instead, ask specific questions
- Combining questions or asking more than one question per number
- Asking about extremely personal information (unless your products or services warrant this)
- Making lengthy, difficult to answer, surveys (try 10 questions or less)
3. Incentives Help!
By offering something of value — a white paper, free gift, or raffle entry — you will dramatically increase the number of people who take your survey.
Some studies show that incentives help with response rates and surveys with incentives also tend to receive longer answers to open-ended questions.
Generally, few will people be interested in spending their time helping you with your marketing efforts for free.
It doesn’t need to be large, expensive or extravagant and better marketing surveys give rewards that are attractive to your particular audience.
4. Analyze, Test, Repeat
Once your deadline for taking the survey has passed, collect all data sets and evaluate.
Where are areas that need improvement?
Where are areas in which you’re excelling?
Are there obvious ways to segment the users who took the survey to better create personalized content for them in the future?
How do potential customers and current clients feel about your brand?
Use this info to decisively pinpoint areas of your business to work on.
Remember: Revamp, restyle, and repeat!
5. Use Tools For Conducting Surveys
Nowadays surveys are very easy set up.
There are both free and paid survey sites you can use. I’ve listed a few I’ve used successfully below:
- Constant Contact (includes surveys with its services)
- SurveyMonkey (free for up to 10 questions)
- Google Forms (free)
Are you using marketing surveys as a part of your content marketing efforts? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below!
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