5 Steps to Creating a Successful Marketing Survey
Surveys are powerful research tools for marketing. They serve as an outlet for marketers to gather information about target markets, customers, customer opinions, preferences, and more. If utilized appropriately, a marketer can use survey results to improve business and marketing strategies as surveys help us as marketers to understand our target audience better. Last week we talked about the importance of marketing research for small business owners, you can check it out here. This week we will discuss the importance of survey research and how to write a quality survey to meet your objectives.
Surveying customers is the best way to determine what they really think about your company, services, or products. Surveys are often used to determine customer satisfaction, likes and dislikes, and opinions. But what makes a survey successful? A survey is only successful if you collect the intended data and are able to utilize it for your intended purpose. To help you with your marketing research, I have put together a list of things to consider when developing your marketing research survey.
1. Define your Research Objectives
First and foremost, it is essential to establish clear research objectives for your marketing survey. Defining your research objectives will allow you to formulate appropriate survey questions to help you obtain the results you are hoping for. If you do not develop a clear set of objectives, you are likely to experience many problems.
2. Define your Target Audience and Market
Defining your target audience will make all the difference in the success of your survey. Why you ask? Well, if you were trying to determine what consumers liked most about your company, you would need to survey your consumers. If you survey people who have never heard of your company, your results would be inconclusive and would result in a low ROI. This is why it is important to define your research objectives and your target audience prior to the development of your survey questions.
3. Decide How You Will Utilize the Data
This step goes hand-in-hand with step 1, defining your research objectives. This is because you need to determine your objectives and how you will use the results and data from your survey to benefit you and accomplish your goals. This step is essential to how you will format your survey question too. Knowing how you will utilize your data will assist you in knowing which type of survey question format is best for each question. Because there are many types of survey responses, you need to determine what kind of data you are looking for before developing your survey questions.
4. Write Quality Survey Questions
After you have defined your objectives, target audience, and decided how you will utilize the data, you can begin formulating your survey questions. Each question should be written clearly with the objection in mind. It is essential to ensure that your questions are not leading the respondents to choose a specific answer in any way. Make sure your questions are written using common terminology and read allowed the way you speak. Refrain from creating wordy or confusing questions. Consider your question type, and determine what type of question response is best suited for your objectives and ensure you include all valid response options.
5. Organize your survey questions
The organization of survey questions is important because you want to refrain from including questions at the beginning of the survey that might serve as a determent to surveyors. Remember to put demographic questions at the end of the survey, not at the beginning. Demographic questions are questions that pertain to age or gender. Very personal questions in nature are off-putting, but surveyors are more likely to answer these questions at the end of your survey after already answering the more important questions. At the beginning of your survey, you should include questions that are applicable to everyone such as “How often do you go to the movies?”, “Do you like scary movies?” “If you saw this movie, how enjoyable was it to you?”. After establishing whether or not the respondent is applicable to the survey, you can move on to your classification questions.
Now that you have completed steps 1-5, you are on your way to collecting valuable marketing research data and designing a successful survey. It is important to remember that developing a successful marketing research survey is more than jotting down a few questions and sending it on its way. It requires well thought out consideration into the objectives and goals of the survey, whom the survey should target as respondents, how you will use the collected data to enhance your objectives, how you will ask your survey questions, and in which order. If you are interested in learning more or would like to utilize our marketing services to enhance your marketing research through the use of surveys, contact us for a consultation!
