Your target audience’s opinions are crucial to ensuring the success of a marketing campaign and, ultimately, your brand. Soliciting survey data can help brands determine how their products and services are received, refine their marketing efforts and identify how to promote future offerings best.
“Even when you think you know [your audience], there is always something to learn — a new trend, a new change of attitudes, a new brand on the block,” explained Yana Ernazarova, chief marketing officer at Edushape. “Brands need to continuously survey their target audience to pick up on any disruptions that might be coming their way and, even better, gather enough intelligence to be disruptors themselves.”
Here are the benefits of incorporating survey data into your marketing and how your business can gather this vital intel from consumers.
Importance of survey data in small business marketing
The widespread adoption of digital marketing strategies has allowed businesses to collect survey data formally and informally. Survey data and collection can make a massive difference in the success of a brand. In this era of data analytics, companies have more options than ever to solicit feedback through survey data from their target markets. Survey data allows small businesses to connect with specific demographics for the following purposes:
- To gauge their satisfaction with their products and services
- To understand their buying patterns and spending habits through behavioral research
- To determine which new offerings to develop based on pain points participants identify
“If you don’t understand your audience, marketing to them is basically impossible; it’s the equivalent to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks,” explained Jay Egger, senior SEO manager at SBG Funding. “You might get lucky, but it’s better to be prepared.” [Related article: SBG Funding review]
Survey data also helps businesses create and launch more effective marketing strategies by refining their approach to appeal to customers based on age, gender, location, digital platform (including social media) and socioeconomic factors.
“By conducting targeted surveys with your specific goals in mind, you will better understand what drives [customers] to not only use your product or service but to do it eagerly,” said Egger. “You may pick up pain points that you didn’t fully comprehend or discover something brand new to your company.”
Benefits of surveys for businesses
Developing compelling and successful marketing strategies for your small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can be challenging without survey data to guide your decisions. Surveys can help businesses with the following:
- Marketing strategy: Market research surveys can help pinpoint your customers’ pain points, preferred platforms and purchasing habits. Using these insights, your marketing team can develop optimized marketing campaigns that cater to your target audience on the channels they frequent most.
- Demographic research: Demographic research illuminates the genders, age groups, economic status, race, interests and other identity markers of your target audience. Knowing this information can help your marketing team develop campaign language, creative assets and promotion placements that resonate with your audience. Accessing your audience demographic data allows your marketing team to use personalization and segmentation options when building your campaigns.
- Product testing: Marketing new products can be challenging without the critical information surveys can provide. Product testing through focus groups can help your marketing team tweak their campaign approach to emphasize what participants liked most, such as innovative features or interactive design functions.
- Customer feedback: SMBs should deploy customer surveys regularly to gauge satisfaction with their brand, products and services, website and brick-and-mortar locations. Your marketing team can use the data from favorable responses to create campaigns centered around each of the positives. For areas needing improvement, your marketing team can build campaigns highlighting new processes to address these pain points.
- Brand loyalty: Regularly conducting surveys shows your customers that you care about their feedback and value their opinions on improving their experience with your products, service offerings and overall brand. Customer survey data can also help SMBs identify why they prefer your brand over competitors. With this information, your marketing team can develop compelling campaigns that cultivate brand loyalty by expressing your brand narrative, showcasing your latest offerings and highlighting why employees choose to remain with your company.
- Employee recruitment, retention and satisfaction: Marketing teams can use employee survey data to create campaigns to attract top talent by highlighting unique benefits, career advancement opportunities and other perks your workforce enjoys. Employee satisfaction data can form the basis of a user-generated content campaign where your employees share what they enjoy most about working for your company to aid with employee retention and building your new hire pipeline.
While survey data benefits SMBs for marketing purposes, the act of conducting surveys provides a direct, invaluable connection to your customers and target audiences.
Types of surveys
These are some common survey types for businesses to use:
- Customer feedback surveys: By gathering customer feedback, you can shape your future marketing campaigns, product offerings and services to better meet your consumer’s needs.
- Employee satisfaction surveys: Although businesses usually use surveys for external purposes, you can use an anonymous survey (online or by email) within your company to gather employee feedback. Employee satisfaction surveys can help you streamline your office practices to improve morale, productivity and, of course, employee satisfaction.
- Market research surveys: To get a sense of your consumer base’s needs and preferred shopping locations and methods, not to mention your business’s competitive placement within your industry, a market research survey may prove helpful. The primary question to answer with this survey is what consumers think of certain products or services. This feedback can inform your future marketing and product development strategies.
- Brand awareness surveys: Surveying consumers about how well they know your brand can reflect how successful your marketing, advertising and branding campaigns have been. Brand awareness surveys can point you to areas of future improvement and reveal unexpected associations that customers make with your business.
- Lead generation surveys: A lead generation survey can connect your business directly with potential customers and give you the opportunity to learn more about their specific needs and desires. You can quickly forge bonds with your consumer base through lead generation surveys and increase your revenue.
Prominent survey methods
Just as there are many types of surveys, there are several methods of administering them:
- Online surveys: Filling out an online survey in a few minutes from the comfort of their home is a hassle-free way for consumers to provide their data and opinions — and for you to collect them.
- Email surveys: Many online surveys are first administered by email and for good reason. An email directed to a specific consumer instead of a generalized web form may incentivize consumers to provide more honest feedback, as the experience feels tailored to them instead of aimed at a large audience and containing no personalized messaging.
- Anonymous surveys: Not everybody wants to share their opinions, and some people who do want to share their opinions would rather not have their thoughts directly associated with their names. Anonymous surveys can offer consumers a privacy shield that might encourage their involvement in something they would otherwise avoid, meaning that your company gets access to more data it might otherwise struggle to obtain.
- Paper surveys: Other people concerned with privacy might worry that online surveys store or track their data. A paper survey will keep consumer data between the customer and your business, so consider using a paper survey — despite the prevalence of the internet — if the questions involve more personal topics or opinions.
- Focus groups: Focus groups are essentially surveys turned into group conversations. Through focus groups, you can obtain valuable feedback on your products and services without having consumers fill out any paperwork or traditional survey materials.
- Mobile surveys: As smartphone use increases, surveys administered through mobile apps or text messages on smartphones may be more accessible to certain audiences. [Related article: Best Text Message Marketing Services]
- Telephone surveys: Like mobile surveys, telephone surveys target people with smartphones. However, telephone surveys may be better if your marketing plan involves sampling a population of older users, as they may be more likely to have a landline than a device with texting or messaging capabilities.
Regardless of the method you choose, send your survey to an appropriate sample size. If you sample too small of a population, you may not yield accurate numerical data.
You can also use surveys to aid in talent acquisition. Create surveys and polls to understand how prospective hires rate your business against competitors who are also searching for top talent.
How to analyze and leverage your survey results
Once you have conducted your survey and all of the results are in, you will need to figure out what to do with your newfound information. According to Alexandra Tachalova, founder of Digital Olympus, it’s best to evaluate your survey results based on these categories:
- Implementation difficulty: Determine how difficult it would be for your company to tackle the areas that need improvement based on your results.
- Potential revenue: Forecast how much revenue could be gained if you were to implement survey feedback and make customers happier.
- Potential losses: If you decide against implementing the feedback suggested by your audience, identify what’s at stake for your business.
“Once you assign these three grades to each survey insight … you can easily eliminate the ones that would require the most effort and focus on the insights that have the potential to bring the biggest value to the business while requiring the minimum investment,” Tachalova explained.
Survey says: Surveys crucial marketing tools for small businesses
Even with more in-depth analytical tactics, a simple survey is sometimes the best way to get a clear snapshot of what consumers and potential customers are looking for. You can use surveys at any marketing campaign stage: in the preliminary stages to help shape your strategy, during your campaign’s run to gauge public perception and in the post-launch stage to gather feedback. Whether you use them for an existing product or a brand-new concept, don’t underestimate the importance of surveys. Their data can be critical to a product or brand’s lifespan.
Sean Peek and Max Freedman contributed to this article.
link