How to Survey Your Audience with a Market Research Platform
How to Survey Your Audience with a Market Research Platform
Any research endeavor will leave you wondering how to survey your audience properly so that you can collect quality data from the correct survey subjects.
While surveying your audience shouldn't be a daunting chore, it should also not be brushed aside as something requiring little to no thought or structure. Instead, a quality survey campaign requires taking certain actions to ensure you’re studying the survey audience you need, with the correct questions and more.
Online surveys provide the strongest conduit to your target market, a must when conducting market research. In fact, one of the top reasons businesses fail is because they don’t invest in their target market.
This article explains how to survey your audience, including the major aspects to pay attention to and advice on how to achieve your survey campaign goals.
The Major Aspects to Observe When You Survey Your Audience
There are a few chief considerations to consider when surveying your audience. A few of them were mentioned in the intro of this article. But there are several others that are key to work towards when setting up any survey campaign.
The following major aspects show how to survey your audience:
- Targeting the correct survey audience
- Setting the purpose of the survey campaign
- The best time to send a survey
- How to set up your questionnaire
- How to incentivize your respondents
The following section will explain how to survey your audience while keeping these considerations in mind and working towards a campaign that includes all of them.
How to Survey Your Audience
Let’s take an in-depth look at how to survey your audience via the five major aspects identified above. These provide the makeup of any survey campaign.
Reaching Out to the Correct Survey Audience
First, you’ll need to reach out to the correct survey audience. You’ll need to understand who your target market is, and for this, you ought to conduct secondary research. Refer to all the available information on your industry, your specific niche, its customers, its peak sales periods and more.
There is a vast amount of information available online. You can learn more about the different market research techniques and how to perform them.
To understand your target market, you should also consolidate your secondary market research with your own internal documentation. Do you have any customer audits or documents on customer personas?
If not, you should consider creating them by conducting survey research. Surveys allow you to understand the makeup of your customers via market segmentation. The right online survey platform will allow you to target your customers in a granular way, as it will enable you to filter your survey audience through a variety of demographics and add screening questions.
Setting the Purpose of the Survey Campaign
Next, you’ll need to set the purpose of the campaign, if you haven’t done so already when you’ve decided on running a survey campaign. In the realm of market research, it is best to tie your campaign to a particular business goal.
For example, do you need survey insights to strengthen your content marketing strategy? Or, do you need more insights onto who your target market consists of? You may also need to run a campaign to A/B test your advertising. The insights surveys derive are virtually limitless, so you’ll be able to use them for a variety of business matters.
Whatever the case may be, you’ll need to have an overarching campaign or particular goal under which you’ll set up your survey research. This will help you form a well-organized survey and help you put together your questionnaire.
To do so, ask yourself, what is it that you’re looking to gain from the survey and how can it help immediate business needs. Use the following characterization of survey insights to form the basis of your survey campaign:
- Validation of an idea, product or campaign
- New ideas
- Feedback
- User insights
The Best Time to Send a Survey
After you’ve targetted your survey audience, contemplate when you would like to send it.
But first, in order to determine the right time to deploy your survey across a wide network, or by sending the link via specific digital channels, you’ll need to consider the following:
- The point of your survey campaign
- Whether it is tied to other sub-campaigns
- The target audience of the campaign and their habits
- For example, you would target different times to send a survey to the unemployed younger generation, than you would to parents who work a full-time job.
After you’ve consolidated all of these matters, you ought to infer when the best time to send your survey is for different demographics of people. If you seek to send your survey abroad, consider the difference in time.
For example, Monday at 6: 30 PM may be a good time to send surveys to younger, unemployed individuals who enjoy playing video games. But Monday, at 6:30 PM in New York, isn’t the same time in other parts of the world, and even the country.
If you need more help on deciding the best time to send your survey, click on the link to the best time to send a survey, which you’ll find in the “Major Aspects to Observe” section above.
How to Set up Your Questionnaire
There are various routes you can take when it comes to setting up your questionnaire. First, consider the larger campaign or purpose of your survey. Then, consider the curiosities you have and the insights you’ll need.
If there are too many, it is apt to separate the survey into two or more surveys. This is a general best practice for surveys, as no one enjoys filling out long questionnaires.
Then, choose from the following approaches for creating your questionnaire:
- Coming up with your own preliminary questions
- Using survey templates
- Using survey templates, then customizing them to your liking
- Conducting secondary research on survey questions
- Considering using the 6 main types of survey questions
Make sure to personalize your questionnaire, especially if you intend on sending your survey to specific individuals. Even if you’re going to deploy the survey to a massive network, it is best to personalize the contents of it to your target market and customer personas.
Did you know that a whopping 90% of consumers in the US find the idea of personalization appealing? This makes sense, given that no one likes to feel marketed to; nobody wants to see generic content or the kind that does not appeal to their interests or sensitivities at all.
How to Incentivize Your Respondents
Incentivizing your respondents will depend on how you’ll send your survey. If you’re going to distribute it through a massive network of digital channels, opt for a survey platform that partners with publishers that offer survey incentives. These may take many forms, including mobile game incentives.
If you’re going to send your survey to specific individuals, such as via email, or to a slightly broader audience — although not as broad as via a publishers’ network — you’ll need to offer your own incentives. These can be monetary or non-monetary.
Often, they’ll involve your products, services or unique promotions. In this way, survey incentives are a potent marketing initiative, as they bring more exposure to your offerings. Moreover, if you incentivize your respondents with your products or services, you can then send a follow-up survey asking them to rate their experience via a product satisfaction survey.
All in all, survey incentives are useful, as they motivate your target market to take your survey, and to do so quickly. After all, the sooner they’ll complete your survey, the sooner they can get their reward.
Successful Survey Campaigns
All business and non-business entities ought toa conduct their own research via a potent DIY market research platform. How to survey your audience ceases to become an intimidating task when you have a strong survey platform powering the entire process.
You should opt for an online research platform that makes buying survey respondents a quick and simple affair. This way, you’ll collect all your necessary data from the right respondents in a short space of time.
Opt for a platform that features artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
It should include advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers.
Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of individuals, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of just deploying them across a network.
With a market research platform that grants you all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to survey your audience and run quality research campaigns.
Gauging and Improving Your Brand Reputation with Market Research
Gauging and Improving Your Brand Reputation with Market Research
Brands must constantly track and work towards improving their brand reputation, whether it is a fledgling business or one with a high degree of brand equity, that is, name recognition and notability.
That is because your brand reputation can make or break your business, given that it is made up of the collective viewpoints of not just your stakeholders, but your customers — the lifeblood of your business.
You should therefore steer clear of any harmful agents towards your reputation — from negative reviews to word-of-mouth and all else. A company risks losing 22% of business when potential customers find a negative article on their first page of search results. This increases to 44% of lost business with two negative articles and 59% with three.
Conversely, 75% of customers will trust a company with a good reputation more, such as in the form of good reviews, for example. You should therefore constantly monitor and attempt to improve your reputation.
This guide expounds on brand reputation, its importance and how to use market research, specifically survey research to gauge and augment that of your own.
Understanding Brand Reputation
Brand reputation is the idea relating to the public's perception of a company or an organization.
This perception is formed by all the actors and agents of a market, which include:
- Stakeholders
- Investors
- Existing customers
- Potential customers and your target market
- Competitors
- The media
- Virtually all spectators who are aware of your brand
How the market and all of its actors view a certain brand is determined by their personal direct or indirect experience with a brand. This means that all kinds of interactions with your brand factor into your reputation.
These include direct interactions with your brand, hearsay, advertisements, secondhand communication from the media and word-of-mouth and much more.
Direct interaction doesn’t merely encompass customers who use a band’s products. Instead, these interactions can include: browsing your website, signing up for a newsletter, viewing your social media, buying a product, experiences with customer support and observing how your business treats its customers and employees.
The public can discover how your business traits its customers and employees personally, or indirectly. This means they can also form their perceptions of your brand based on what they hear or read about from others.
When it comes to the latter, there are various external means that form your reputation, that is, those that come from indirect interactions with your brand. You ought to monitor these factors to avoid any negative feedback, which tarnishes your brand reputation.
The following lists the external factors and means that can harm your brand reputation:
- Bad reviews on review sites
- Poor feedback on forums
- Negative social media mentions
- Negative comments on your social media channels
- Complaints on a major platform such as the Better Business Bureau
- Bad press via articles, blog posts, editorials, press releases, news sites, videos and podcasts
- Negative ads targeting your business
- Adverse word-of-mouth mentions
- Comparisons with competitors that paint them in a better light
On the contrary, when businesses have an excellent brand reputation, it is a marker of a high degree of brand trust. This points to your target market’s willingness to do business with your brand, thereby sustaining it.
Aside from producing a good product or service, your customer experience plays a major role in your brand reputation. In addition, your employees also help build your reputation. That’s why you need to properly train your employees so that they can develop and maintain a good reputation.
It is primarily through different customers’ experiences that other members of your target market — namely those still deciding — base their decision-making process.
This experience can involve any stage of the customer buying journey, as customers can form their opinions from both their personal experiences, along with those that come from hearsay, the media and various other sources.
When it comes to their firsthand experiences, some customers value the post-sales service organizations offer, viewing it as an essential factor in ranking your brand.
The Importance of Brand Reputation
Your brand reputation is crucial for a wide range of reasons.
First off, it is important for customers to do their research on a business, before patronizing it. They would therefore need to study a brand that already has a reputation. This is why startups and newly established businesses must work towards their brand image as soon as possible after launching.
This is especially true for those who intend to spend a considerable amount of money, use a business for a major milestone (think a wedding, a birthday, etc.), or use it for a key aspect of their health (think weight loss, avoiding inflammation, etc).
As such, patronizing new businesses, or any at all ties into customer trust. Customers are far more willing to do business with a company that they trust, as opposed to one with a poor reputation or one without enough information for customers to decide whether it is worth buying from.
When you gain customer trust, your target market will favor your brand over others, giving you a strong market advantage over your rivals. With it, a domino effect has the potential to take place, driving demand for your business.
With a surge in demand, naturally, your business will have a boost in sales and monetary returns. There are various self-evident reasons as to why this is important for your business, along with less obvious, yet equally important, such as increasing your market share.
Your business’s financial value will rise, as it correlates with higher demand and sales, both of which are the benefits of a strong reputation.
Furthermore, it is key to build a healthy brand reputation, as positive brand impressions will lure in more potential customers. This is the by-product of reaping a higher demand for your products and business. As such, a good reputation helps you acquire more customers.
Aside from acquiring new customers, your brand reputation can also help you increase your consumer loyalty. This ties into the idea of customer trust. When customers trust you, not only will they patronize your business once; instead, they’ll be inclined to make repeat purchases.
These are the core of customer retention, the concept that maintains lasting business relationships. When your customers stay with your business for a long time, they grant you a high customer lifetime value, which is the total monetary value a customer brings to a business across their lifetime. This is one of the main benefits of customer retention, which you can establish by maintaining and improving your brand reputation.
It is key to maintain a good reputation, as it also affects the employees of your business. Businesses with poor reputations will suffer higher turnover rates. When businesses have a terrible reputation, they are far less adept at recovering from losing their talent. This is because a bad reputation costs a company at least 10% more per hire.
All in all, it is in the best interest of all businesses to build, track and maintain a healthy brand reputation.
How to Use Surveys to Measure and Improve Brand Reputation
Building a strong brand reputation is highly bent on satisfying your customers. In order to satisfy them, you’ll need to conduct certain market research techniques, as market research is primarily focused on studying your customers.
Surveys, in particular, give you quick and easy access into the minds of your customers, allowing you to understand their consumer preferences, needs, desires, aversions and virtually all else.
As such, you can use surveys to obtain customer feedback on the way your customers perceive your brand. In doing so, you can evaluate your brand reputation directly from the customers themselves.
But even more important is that by using survey research, you will gain the intelligence necessary to correct any issues that trouble your customers, along with optimizing your products, services and customer experience.
By removing bugs and improving your entire customer experience, you’ll delight your customers and maintain a solid brand reputation, the kind that will allow you to reap all of the benefits of it. You’ll just need to track it.
The following explains how to measure and improve your brand reputation through market research, including survey usage:
- Do an internet search of your business.
- Read review sites, forums, social mentions and all other places that mention your brand.
- Check for long-form content if you operate a major brand, such as blog posts, articles and new pieces.
- Conduct secondary market research on your customers.
- Pay attention to what your target market responds well to, along with what they dislike and object to.
- It’s key to study scandals within your industry so that you can avoid them.
- Example: lawsuits, tales of unhappy customers.
- Conduct secondary market research on your competitors.
- Make sure to study how your competitors have handled scandals.
- Pay heed to companies that fell from grace and how they bounced back, along with those that didn’t improve their reputation.
- Learning from your direct and indirect competitors will help you avoid running afoul your customers, industry and media.
- Speak to your customers.
- Conduct one-on-one interviews, phone interviews or focus groups to learn more about your customers’ pet peeves, triggers, etc.
- In addition, ask them about how they feel about your brand and ask for comparisons with other brands.
- Conduct a survey to assess your own reputation.
- Based on your prior research, conduct a survey asking customers to reveal their perceptions about your company.
- Alternatively, you can begin your research by using a survey alone.
- Use a brand perception survey to do so.
- Make sure to ask customers about familiarity with your brand first if you’re deploying your survey to a massive network.
- Survey existing customers. In this case, you don’t need to ask about their familiarity with your brand.
- Analyze your market research.
- This includes your earlier secondary findings, your direct talks with customers and your survey data.
- Run more surveys if you need more information.
- You ought to create follow-up questions and send them to specific people.
- Alternatively. You can call customers to discuss their survey results if this is their preferred method of communicating their perceptions.
- Take action.
- Take action after you consolidate all of your dings, including those of follow-up/additional surveys.
- If you find your reputation to be in good standing, don’t make any changes.
- Rather continue doing as you were before.
- You should also consider creating similar marketing campaigns if your customers put in a good word about them.
- Don’t stop. Continuously track the standing of your brand.
- Use the brand tracking survey to assure good brand health.
- Additionally, run surveys that track brand visibility, so that your brand has not fallen by the wayside, that is, become forgotten about.
Creating a Reputable Brand
Building a reputable brand is a must for your business to survive and remain competitive.
Sustaining a strong reputation goes beyond avoiding scandals and bad press. You’ll need to constantly satisfy your customers and stay relevant in order to sustain a healthy brand reputation.
Conducting market research with surveys helps you achieve these goals. You’ll need a strong online survey platform in order to carry out all of your research.
Use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create and deploy surveys to your target market. You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a poorly constructed mobile environment.
Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific consumers, instead of deploying them across a vast network.
With an online survey platform that offers all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to continuously measure and improve your brand reputation, allowing your business to satisfy your customers and remain competitive.
Buy Survey Responses With a DIY Market Research Platform
Buy Survey Responses With a DIY Market Research Platform
Rather than relying on survey panels or syndicated research, you can buy survey responses and access highly sought insights yourself when you use a DIY market research platform.
Such a platform evades many issues present within the aforementioned research methods, such as panel fatigue, which is found in survey panels and exerting less control over a research project, which occurs in syndicated research.
Additionally, in keeping with the idea that any team member can perform quality market research — very much in tune with data democratization — you can buy a set amount of survey responses for your market research needs. You can do so without breaking your budget.
On the contrary, research firms and various market research platforms don’t offer the ease of performing and sharing market research as does a DIY market research platform. What’s more is that many research projects are expensive and time-consuming. As a matter of fact, brands spend $60,000 and more on market research, with an estimated 6 weeks or more to complete a market research project.
With a DIY research tool, you can buy responses, which is far more cost-effective and quicker.
This article explains what it means to buy survey responses and how to do so on the Pollfish online survey platform.
What it Means to Buy Survey Responses
Relatively speaking, buying survey responses is much like buying a survey sample, which is an exclusive pool of all the respondents that make up your survey. As such, it does not mean you’ll need to reach out to individual respondents or send your survey via an online portal yourself.
So what does buying survey respondents entail? In the context of a DIY market research platform, it means you buy the participation of your target audience based on a particular number of individuals.
Given that you and your team are at the helm of market research study, it is up to your team to decide the number of respondents you would like to partake in your survey. It is key to note that you are not buying for participation in an entire campaign. Rather, you pay for individual respondents’ participation in a specific survey.
By buying survey respondents, you’re allocating all the data you need for any survey; at times, one survey is all you’ll need for a market research campaign, unless you’re seeking out other market research techniques.
Thus, when you pay for individual survey respondents, you’re building the entirety of the subjects that make up a DIY survey.
As such, when you buy responses in a DIY market research platform, you’re hastening the speed to insights and reducing the span of the research project. This is one of the many benefits of buying your responses.
Benefits of Buying Survey Responses
When you buy survey responses on a DIY market research platform, you’re doing more than just opting in research participants. A strong DIY market research platform offers various benefits. These include the following:
- Reaching the exact number of respondents you need
- Obtaining respondents where they naturally exist online
- via RDE sampling or random device engagement
- Market segmentation and targetting
- Quicker insights
- Reaching your particular target market
- Dictating the demographics, psychographics and geolocation of respondents
- All the data you reap is proprietary to you (not the DIY survey platform)
- Being equipped with key data for decision making
- Insights for business decisions
- Steering the direction of a research campaign
How to Buy Survey Responses on Pollfish
Buying respondents is easy and hassle-free — with the right DIY research platform. You can buy individual survey responses on Pollfish.
All respondents are pre-screened and pre-qualified to take part in a survey study. This means, only the respondents you target can take your survey. They will need to tick off all your requirements, from location to demographics and more, depending on how you set up your screener.
To buy responses on Pollfish, you’ll first need to choose a pricing plan. On this page, you have the option of choosing a basic or elite plan. In the basic plan, you can buy survey responses at an individual basis.
Each completed survey, aka, individual survey respondents starts at $0.95. Prices range from $0.95 to $1.25 based on the number of questions in your survey.
Once you choose a pricing plan best suited for you, you can then begin your market research endeavors. The Pollfish dashboard is easy to access and allows you to make your own survey in just 3 steps.
Then, commence targeting your respondents by setting up various qualifications in the screener section of your survey. In Pollfish, this interface is referred to as the Audience section. Here you can also set the exact number of survey completes in your survey. Each complete is done by an individual survey respondent. As such, a survey with 800 survey completes = 800 survey respondents.
You can also create custom quotas to narrow down specific people and see how different groups answer questions. For example, you can create quotas such as: 300 middle-aged men with a salary between $100,000-$250,000.
Constant Access to Any Target Population
All business and non-business entities can conduct their own research via a potent DIY market research platform. Even individuals who seek data on a specific target population can do so at speed when they buy survey respondents.
You should opt for an online research platform that makes buying survey respondents a quick and simple process. This way, you’ll collect all your necessary data from the right respondents in a short space of time.
Opt for a platform that features artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
It should include advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers.
Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of individuals, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of just deploying them across a network.
With all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to reach any target audience and run quality research campaigns.
Attracting a Survey Audience the Right Way with Market Research Software
Attracting a Survey Audience the Right Way with Market Research Software
When it comes to attracting a survey audience, you’ll need more than just a well-built questionnaire and an idea of your study’s primary targets. You’ll need to incorporate the proper methods and tools to attract your target market — or your target audience, if you’re not a business.
After all, your target market makes up the core of any market research survey campaign and most notably, the heart of virtually any business matter. You should never lose sight of who comprises your customer base and what their preferences are.
When you attract the proper survey audience to your survey, you’ll glean crucial insights that can help you optimize your entire customer experience. This is a must, as improving customer experience creates up to an 80% increase in revenue for businesses.
Moreover, understanding your target market provides key data for decision-making, the kind that informs a wide breadth of campaigns, from content marketing, to advertising, sales and more.
This article explains how to obtain the proper survey audience and how to do so on the Pollfish online survey platform.
How to Begin: What to Do Before Reaching Out to Your Survey Audience
Before you reach out to your target audience, you’ll need to take a few considerations into account and act on them. You wouldn’t want to end up surveying the wrong people. This will cost you money, create wasted efforts and fail to reach those who are interested in your offerings.
Many companies fail on this front, as 80% of marketing initiatives are aimed at the wrong target audience.
While gaining insights on different segments of a population is important for different research pacticies, when it comes to market research, you should stick to following your specific target market and its different segments and customer personas.
What to Do Before You Attracting Your Survey Audience to Your Survey
As aforementioned in the previous section, here’s what you ought to do before targeting your survey audience:
- Determine the primary needs of your market research campaign.
- Determine the main findings you seek to take away from it.
- For example: do you need insights into customer behavior?
- Or, are you looking to conduct market research for advertising?
- After identifying its primary concerns, create a title and theme of your market research campaign.
- Determine the efforts you’ll need to carry out your campaign.
- This includes choosing various methods to accompany your survey, such as conducting secondary research.
- Then, identify a preliminary amount of survey research you’ll dedicate towards your campaign.
- This includes determining how many surveys you’ll need to conduct, their primary subject matters, their questions and a timeframe.
- Choose a strong online survey platform to host your market research campaign.
- The is a wide range of criteria when it comes to decking on the best survey platform.
- Determine the primary needs of your market research campaign.
How to Choose the Best Survey Platform to Reach Your Target Audience
Piggybacking off of the last point in the previous section, you’ll need to find a potent market research platform before reaching out to your survey audience. That’s because this platform will be the centralized space for all your survey campaigns, which includes attracting the correct audience.
It plays a major role in dealing with your survey subjects throughout the entirety of your research campaign. That’s because you’ll need it prior to reaching out to your survey audience and while you target them, as their responses get filtered out via a cycle of quality checks.
The following explains what to consider when choosing the best survey platform for attracting your desired survey audience:
- A platform that deploys surveys across a wide network of publishers
- Ideally, these are highly trafficked websites, apps and mobile sites
- One that procures respondents where they naturally exist online
- This can be done via RDE sampling or random device engagement.
- One that allows surveys to be formed in a wide variety of languages
- Ideally, one that offers a feature for survey translations
- A platform that quickly gathers all responses
- A strong platform will have turnover rates of no more than 2-3 days maximum.
- Easy to use and create
- One that allows you to make your own survey in 3 easy steps.
- An interface that allows you to screen respondents based on their demographics, psychographics and geolocation.
- All the data you collect is proprietary to you, as opposed to the provider of the market research platform.
- Software that doesn’t charge extra to conduct global market research.
- One that partners with publishers that offer survey incentives.
- A platform that offers a multitude of question types, media files and survey templates to build a custom and engaging questionnaire
- One that offers the option of sending surveys to specific people or via a link you can place anywhere.
- This can be done via the Distribution Link feature.
- A platform that offers 24/7 support, so that you can conduct market research from anywhere, at any time.
How to Reach Your Survey Audience on Pollfish
To reach your survey audience on Pollfish, you’ll first need to decide how you’re going to distribute your surveys. You can opt for the RDE method, in which your surveys will be automatically distributed through our vast network of publishers.
Or, you can use the aforementioned Distribution Link feature, which allows you to send a link to specific individuals who you’ve identified or have the email of. This route also allows you to send surveys to a more narrow scope of respondents.
Usually, these are people who are familiar with your brand, as they will have clicked on your survey through a link via your brand’s web page or social media account. Or, they may have been directly emailed the link, in which case, they’ve provided their email address to your brand.
After you’ve chosen your distribution method, you can then hyper-target your survey audience.
The following provides instructions on how to reach your target audience on Pollfish:
- Create a new project on the survey dashboard by hitting its designated button.
- There, you‘ll be asked: How would you like to collect responses to your survey?
- Choose between the two distribution options of buying responses or send your survey your way.
- Buy responses: This allows you to use the Pollfish global survey network to reach your audience, in which you pay $0.95 per complete response.
- Send your survey your way: This allows you to send your surveys via the Dsitvition Link feature. As such, you can choose whether to send the link via email, social media or a web page.
- If you opt for the latter, offer survey incentives to attract your audience to your study.
- Then, you’ll be taken to the Audience section of the platform.
- Here, you can target your audience as you see fit.
- You have the option of using Multiple Audiences in your survey, or just one.
- Find it on the lefthand panel, which is automatically titled Audience 1.
- You can add another audience by clicking on the + symbol at the bottom of this panel.
- In the lefthand audience panel, you can choose the number of respondents who will partake in the survey/ will be targeted.
- Do so near the pencil icon beside ‘Survey completes.”
- Then, you can select the gender of the audience, along with quotas that dictate how many of each.
- After that, you have the option of adding up to three screening questions and choosing the answers that will disqualify people from your survey.
- This allows you to target respondents via a psychographic and behavioral-based approach.
- Next, add and filter all your demographic, geolocation and device requirements.
- Here, you can be very granular, as each type of criterion allows you to include various subcategories and quotas.
- For example, under the employment category, you can add quotas to a variety of employment types, such as employed for wages, out of work and looking for work, military, retired, etc.
- Review all of your survey respondent requirements.
- Make sure you are targeting the correct audience, ie, your target market.
- In the questionnaire section of the survey, add 1-5 questions.
- Keep your question count short and your questions relevant and interesting to your audience.
- Add different media elements to keep your audience engaged throughout their survey experience.
Constant Access to Any Target Population
With the right online survey platform, you will have instant access to any target population, no matter who it comprises and how far it spans geographically.
To reach the correct survey audience, you’ll need a platform that deploys surveys within a mass network of publishers, ones that account for major websites, apps and mobile sites, along with one that also grants you the ability to send surveys your own way.
A strong market research platform will also attract your survey audience with an appealing digital element that leads to your survey and easily grabs users’ attention. In addition, it will partner with publishers who gamify surveys, allowing respondents to gain incentives while playing a game, making the experience far from boring.
You should also opt for an online research platform that makes buying survey respondents a quick and simple process. This way, you’ll collect all your necessary data from the right respondents in a short space of time.
Additionally, use a platform that features artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
It should also include advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers.
When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to reach any survey audience and run quality research campaigns at any time.
How to Analyze the Conjoint Analysis Feature on the Pollfish Platform
How to Analyze the Conjoint Analysis Feature on the Pollfish Platform
We covered the critical question of what is conjoint analysis, explaining its utility, especially in the product development and customer development space. A previous article has also discussed how to build a Conjoint Analysis survey on the Pollfsh online survey platform.
With those insights in mind, it’s crucial to learn how to analyze the Conjoint Analysis feature, which is choice-based on the Polfish platform. You can do so by familiarizing yourself with its different data visualizations, which adequately provide data for decision making.
This article expounds on how to analyze a conjoint analysis feature on the Pollfish market research platform.
Generating Insights from the Conjoint Analysis in Your Dashboard
You can easily generate the insights you’ll need to understand your conjoint analysis in the Pollfish dashboard. To access this feature, simply visit your survey results page and remain on the Conjoint Analysis block. No visualizations will appear until you have collected four responses.
In the Conjoint Analysis block, you will see three graphs: the Attribute importance chart, the Level Utilities chart and the Distribution of Level Preferences chart and a Ranked list of product alternatives as preferred by customers.
Check out this preview of the results page:
https://www.loom.com/share/745f0240ef1c4b879c6e9bc5db6db3a7
The Attribute Relative Importance Graph
This graph displays the influence an attribute has when the respondent selects their preferred alternative. The higher the percentage, the more influential it is in the decision-making process of the potential consumers.
Assuming a survey with 3 attributes tested and None of the above options enabled, the Brand is the most influential attribute relative to the Colour and Price which is the least influential attribute (as displayed below).
This chart shows how strongly the variations of attributes affect customers' choice, but only for the levels that you chose in the design.
Level Utilities
This allows you to dive deeper to understand what specific levels within an attribute drive customers' choice. Each graph displays the measurement of preference for the levels of an attribute. Level utilities are calculated based on the average preference scores for each level. The higher the percentage, the higher the influence of the level at the customer's decision to select a product alternative.
Distribution of Level Preferences Graph
This visualization displays the measurement of the probability that a level would be selected over another, if all other attributes were held constant. The higher the percentage a level has, the higher it was preferred within the levels of the attribute by respondents.
Willingness to pay
Willingness to pay is the maximum price a customer is willing to pay for a product or service (ie. how much users are ready to pay for an upgrade from level A to level B, in addition to the price they are already paying now).
Each attribute has its own chart, where values represent monetary values. By using the chart and selecting a different baseline level, you can compare how much respondents are willing to pay for an upgrade or a downgrade to another level.
Willingness to pay is a chart available only for Conjoint surveys containing an attribute of Price type.
In the example below, the baseline level for “Perfume” attribute is set to “Floral”. From the graph, we can understand that users are willing to pay $2.05 more for “Lavender”, whereas for the “Green Citrus” they are willing to pay $0.77 less than for “Floral”.
You can change the baseline level for the specific attribute to “Ocean” to compare how this performs against the other levels, by clicking on the relevant bar. This will convert “Ocean” to the baseline level, where we can see that users are willing to pay more only for the “Free of perfume”, whereas for all other levels of “Perfume” they are willing to pay less than they would for “Floral”.
Ranked List of Product Alternatives
This table displays how the product alternatives are ranked, based on the level utilities. The first ones are the most preferred among the respondents.
You can apply the results of the Conjoint Analysis feature through filters. Just use the filters with the selected demographic criteria and to the rest of the demographics gathered.
The information in the graphs gets recalculated to provide insights only for the filtered audience, as long as there are at least four remaining responses. Post-stratification is not available on the Conjoint Analysis feature.
What is Conjoint Analysis and Why It’s Crucial for Market Research
What is Conjoint Analysis and Why It’s Crucial for Market Research
Let’s dive into the market research method called "conjoint analysis," as the Pollfish platform continues expanding its features and capabilities. This is excellent news for researchers, given that they can now apply the conjoint analysis research approach in different survey research endeavors.
One of many market research techniques, this new feature allows researchers to measure the value that consumers place on various aspects of a product or service. By studying how your customers perceive the makeup of your offerings, you’ll understand the distinct advantages and shortcomings within their features.
In addition, by applying this research method, you can uncover your consumer preferences to better innovate, design and price your product or service. That’s because conjoint analysis allows you to understand how consumers make complex choices in real-world scenarios.
This article explains what is conjoint analysis, how it can be applied, its benefits and how to use the conjoint analysis feature in the Pollfish platform. While this research method comes in different varieties, this piece focuses on choice-based conjoint analysis.
What is Conjoint Analysis
Conjoint analysis is a kind of quantitative market research for measuring the value that consumers place on the features of a product or service. A survey-based research method, this commonly used approach merges real-life situations and statistical techniques to understand market decisions.
A kind of statistical analysis, this method helps businesses understand how customers evaluate both components and features of their products and services. This method is based on the principle that any commodity can be broken down into a set of attributes, each of which impacts how users perceive the value of an offering.
Conjoint analysis is especially useful for product and pricing research, as it unearths a wealth of consumer preferences and leverages that information to optimize the products and services in question.
It does so by allowing researchers to make important business decisions concerning their products and services, such as the following:
- Select product features
- Assess consumers’ sensitivity to price
- Forecast market shares
- Understand the demand for certain features or components
- Predict the adoption of new products or services
The conjoint analysis method breaks a product or service down by its various components; these are called attributes and levels. Researchers can test different combinations of the components to identify consumer preferences.
The objective of conjoint analysis is to conclude what combination of a limited number of attributes is most influential on respondents’ choice or decision making. A controlled set of products or services is shown to respondents.
Then, researchers analyze how the respondents make choices from these products, which allows them to determine the implicit valuation of the individual components making up the product or service.
These implicit valuations (utilities or part-worths) can be used to create market models for estimating market share, revenue and even profitability of new product designs.
Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis
Currently, Pollfish is offering choice-based conjoint analysis in our online survey platform. You can add this popular form of research to an Elite account.
Other types of conjoint analysis involve asking respondents to rate or rank items. Asking responders to choose a product to buy provides insights specifically on whether they would buy it or not.
As such, choice-based conjoint analysis may be more useful for campaigns that seek to uncover consumer buying preferences, in regard to specific products. The insight you gain can also be used to predict whether consumers will buy from a competitor.
This is how choice-based conjoint analysis works:
Survey respondents are shown a series of options and asked to select the one they are most likely to purchase or use.
A respondent will see alternatives included in choice sets that are repeated.
The Importance of Conjoint Analysis
This kind of analysis is important for a variety of reasons.
First off, its main purpose enables researchers to understand which product or service features their customers prefer over others. As such, you’ll understand the main contributors behind consumer purchasing decisions, as well as the most off-putting attributes that prevent them from buying.
With this information in tow, you can make more informed decisions about pricing, product development, sales and marketing activities. You will be able to optimize your product, its promotional activities, accentuating the proper features and more. You’ll also be made aware of the attributes that repel consumers, which is essential for optimization.
By optimizing your product, its pricing and the marketing activities surrounding it, you’ll increase revenue, foster repeat purchases and strengthen consumer loyalty. All of these outcomes are highly sought-after and necessary for the success of your business.
Conjoint analysis offers the convenience of being able to break down utility to consumers at individual levels, as well as to aggregate all of their responses.
This analysis can also be employed as an exclusive focus on product features and attributes regardless of price or brand name. This allows you to enable the calculation of utility on an individual basis and in regard to specific features that you intend to evaluate.
It can also be used to measure the value of brands in comparison to competing brands, thereby measuring the brand equity of each brand. The information you reap shows you how strong a particular brand is in comparison to a specific product or price.
Consequently, it helps businesses make decisions based on their own brand value in their market. This is important, as having a popular brand is not always enough, as price fluctuations and new features could impact demand.
This research technique also offers straightforward experimentation with varying factors, such as price, capabilities, color and other attributes. As such, it allows you to create a product profile, which you can change to form additional profiles for varying attributes. This is key to do before launching a new product.
Conjoint analysis is also important, as it can be used across different industries for virtually all types of products and services, such as consumer goods, electrical items, insurance plans, housing, luxury goods, and travel.
As a result, you can apply it to different instances if you seek to discover what type of product consumers are most likely to buy, along with what they appreciate the most — and least, about a product. Aside from marketing and advertising campaigns, this is also useful for product management.
Businesses of all sizes can benefit from conducting conjoint analysis, including local establishments, such as grocery stores and restaurants. More importantly, the scope of this kind of analysis is not limited to profit motives only. This means charities and educational institutions can also benefit from conjoint analysis, such as for using it to determine donor preferences.
All in all, conjoint analysis is essential for examining how consumers and other respondents rate and perceive the attributes of a product, service or experience.
Optimizing Product Campaigns and Beyond
Performing a conjoint analysis is critical for optimizing your product and concept campaigns. All brands should conduct it at multiple stages of your product’s life cycle. Conjoint analyses can break down a large number of attributes into smaller bundles for evaluations and comparisons.
As such, you should opt for a strong online survey platform to easily create and deploy conjoint analysis to your target population.
You should use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.
Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
The survey platform should offer advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers.
It should also allow you to survey any employee. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of users, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific respondents, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.
With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to set up an insightful conjoint analysis and understand your consumer, or other key actors’ preferences.
How to Build a Conjoint Analysis Survey on the Pollfish Platform
How to Build a Conjoint Analysis Survey on the Pollfish Platform
We explained what is Conjoint Analysis in a recent article, which includes the purpose of such an analysis, how it exists in the Pollfish platform, its importance in market research, particularly in product development and more.
In the Pollfish online survey platform, we offer a choice-based conjoint analysis, which works differently than ranking and rating items. Instead, the choice-based version asks respondents specifically if they would buy a certain product or not.
As such, this version shows survey respondents a series of options and asks them to select the one they are most likely to purchase or use.
The respondent will see alternatives included in choice sets that are repeated. Let’s learn how to use the Conjoint Analysis tool on Pollfish
This article guides you through the process of building a conjoint analysis on the Pollfish platform.
How to Build a Regular Conjoint Analysis Survey
Follow the instructions below to easily access and utilize this new feature.
- Open the Pollfish dashboard and hit “Create a new survey.”
- Add the conjoint method to your survey.
- At the question types option at the panel, there is a new method called Conjoint. Select it.
- At the question types option at the panel, there is a new method called Conjoint. Select it.
- Add the instructions.
- At the block displayed, provide instructions for the respondent on how to respond to the question text. Conjoint is presented as a repeated single selection question with different sets of product alternatives each time, so that the respondent selects one of them.
- At the block displayed, provide instructions for the respondent on how to respond to the question text. Conjoint is presented as a repeated single selection question with different sets of product alternatives each time, so that the respondent selects one of them.
- Add attributes and levels.
- Attributes are the different characteristics that a product comprises, such as the shape, type, quantity, etc.
- Attributes can be categorized as Features by default. If you need to specify price attributes, use the Price type, so that the analysis includes the Willingness to Pay graph. When using a Price type attribute, we suggest the following: none of the levels of price is zero and if there are more than two levels, they should have approximately equal gaps between them.
- Levels are the values that each attribute can take. For example, the perfume attribute can have levels of floral, green citrus, lavender, etc. Product alternatives are constructed from level combinations of each attribute included in the Conjoint Analysis feature.
- You can add the price levels formatted with a currency symbol or text that is displayed at the Conjoint question, while the plain numbers displayed at the “Just the number” fields will be used for the analysis.
- Heed the following restrictions and advice on attributes and levels.
- A conjoint experiment should have at least 2 attributes.
- Each attribute should have at least 2 levels.
- Use a maximum of 6-7 attributes. We recommend displaying no more than these in your conjoint question; any more and respondents will have difficulty in weighing the different options available.
- It is suggested that when using a Price attribute, the levels are linear so that Marginal Willingness to Pay is not biased.
- Prohibit particular level pairs.
- By default, all attribute levels have an equal likelihood of displaying together. This means that some product alternatives that will display in the conjoint question are not realistic. For example, sometimes a product will be shown with all the best features and at the lowest price.
- In order to prohibit such alternatives, you can use the “exclude combinations” setting. We advise prohibited pairs to be no more than 4.
- Enable none of the above.
- By default, the “none of the above” option is disabled.
- However, if you select to enable this option, this is visible on mobile every time a respondent views a choice set of alternatives (as a last choice under the alternatives).
- Access the preview.
- In order to preview a survey that contains a Conjoint question, you should click on the “Generate preview” button at the questionnaire tab while editing your Conjoint.
- By clicking the “Generate preview” button, your Conjoint attributes and levels are used to “feed” the Conjoint Design of Experiments algorithm and you will preview the actual Conjoint question that respondents will get.
- In the case that the survey contains any other questions, these will be included in the survey preview flow.
- Additionally, the Total Cost gets updated, including Conjoint costs, the survey’s path length gets updated and the number of alternatives per choice set and a number of choice sets are displayed (as determined by the Conjoint Design of Experiments algorithm).
- Every time the number of attributes and levels changes, or excluded pairs are altered, you have to click on the “Generate preview” button, to preview the new Conjoint question and get informed about the cost.
- Set the alternatives that each choice set contains and the number of choices that the respondents view.
- After you use the Conjoint Design of experiments, you can view how many times the Conjoint questions/ choice sets will be repeated and how many alternatives each choice set contains, as determined by the Conjoint Design of Experiments algorithm. Conjoint algorithms automatically decide the number of choice sets that each respondent will see in order to guarantee that all alternatives are displayed the same number of times to respondents.
- Add additional content
- Once your Conjoint question is set up, you are free to edit the rest of the survey in the questionnaire tab. You can add questions or question groups before and after the conjoint analysis question, determining survey behavior via survey logic.
- Before the conjoint question, you can add consent questions and you can add follow-up questions after the Conjoint question, as you would at a regular survey.
- Checkout
- Once you've completed setting up the Conjoint Analysis feature and any other questions, you can check out the survey. After it gets reviewed and approved, it will be live to gather responses.
- Translate your Conjoint Analysis survey.
- You can translate your specified attributes and levels, so that you can view the analysis in the language of your preference. In addition, the translation of attributes and levels is applied to the exported data at the Excel, CSV, SPSS files and at BQ.
- You can translate your specified attributes and levels, so that you can view the analysis in the language of your preference. In addition, the translation of attributes and levels is applied to the exported data at the Excel, CSV, SPSS files and at BQ.
How to Create a Survey Link with Conjoint Analysis in Pollfish
Researchers on the Pollfish platform can use the Conjoint Analysis feature by way of a survey link and share it with your audience.
They can also duplicate a survey link that contains the Conjoint Analysis to a regular survey using the Pollfish global survey network, or you can do the opposite, duplicating a regular one to a survey link to distribute it to your own audiences via social media, email and more.
How to Make Your Own Survey in 3 Easy Steps
How to Make Your Own Survey in 3 Easy Steps
As a business, you’ve probably mulled over how to make your own survey for market research purposes. The power of survey research is that it allows you to extract data for a wide array of campaigns, such as marketing, advertising, branding et al., on virtually any focal subject of interest.
Surveys are unique in that they collect data from a pre-defined group of people. Online surveys take this method to the next level, as they only permit qualified respondents to enter the questionnaire portion of a survey.
As such, online survey tools allow you to define the participants allowed to take part in your survey; you can do so by selecting your desired demographics and screening questions.
There’s more to making your survey — but not much, that is, depending on the online survey tool you use.
This article will teach you how to build a survey in just 3 steps, a process that correlates with the Pollfish survey platform.
The Benefits of Using Survey Software
Aside from the above, there is an abundance of benefits to using survey software, which is why it is encouraged to make your survey.
If you are skeptical about employing survey software that allows you to build and launch your survey in just three steps, consider the following. It enumerates the various benefits of using a survey platform; the fact that you can make your survey in just 3 steps is an added benefit.
- Cost-Effective: Although the total cost depends on several factors, such as deployment methods, survey types and the stipulations of your online survey platform provider, online surveys are generally cheap. At Pollfish, they start at only $0.95 per complete.
- Versatile: Software survey often offers versatility in functionality, interface, visuals and more. As such, they allow you to create multiple types of surveys such as multiple-choice, ratings surveys and surveys that focus on different disciplines like customer satisfaction or community feedback. They also allow you to add unique features such as advanced skip logic.
- Respondent Control: A potent survey software grants surveys with the ability to identify each respondent by their IP address, so that no person can take part in the same survey twice to skew results. Therefore, if for example, you set your sampling pool to include 1,000 respondents, you can rest assured that there will be 1,000 unique individuals taking the survey, as no responder will take the survey more than once.
- Quick and Accurate: Online survey tools collect data quickly and accurately. They can gather thousands of survey submissions in a short period, one that is often no longer than a few days long. The entire sampling is accurate to the study you conduct, as screening questions and demographic quotas ensure only the targeted respondents participate in the survey.
- Ease of Analysis: Survey software facilitates the process of analyzing, by allowing you to observe the data in various formats. For example, a strong tool gives you the option of viewing your responses in spreadsheets, graphs, charts and cross-tabulation. This allows you to examine your survey results in a way that suits your preferences best, as some campaigns require specific data formats.
- Easily administered and completed: Online survey tools offer the convenience of administration ease and completion. That is because these tools deploy the surveys for you, meaning that you don’t have to worry about reaching your intended target audience and amount of respondents. The Pollfish platform distributes your survey to a sweeping network of over 140,000 of the most popular websites and apps. It doesn’t finish the process until all respondent quotas are filled.
- Flexible and amendable: Online survey platforms ought to make it easy to control all survey content; that involves adding different media files to questions, skipping questions (skip logic), using a blend of open and close-ended questions and much more. In short, survey software makes survey-building easy to tailor and change.
Make Your Own Survey With a 3-Step Process
Now that we’ve covered the bases of online survey advantages, it’s time to put survey building into action. The following elucidates the three steps, or stages, to make your survey using an online survey platform.
These steps parallel the steps required to take on the Pollfish platform dashboard; they make it easy to jumpstart your survey research campaigns.
Beginning a New Survey Project
When you begin a new survey project, you now have three options. You must select the type most appropriate for your needs. To do so, on your survey dashboard, hover over to "Create project," the big blue button on the upper right side of the screen. Click on it to reveal the two-option dropdown menu. These two options form the basis of your survey campaign type. The two options for creating a new survey project are:
- From Scratch: entails building your survey entirely on your own for custom needs.
- From templates: gives you various templates for building your questionnaire, which you can edit (from moving around the questions, editing the question content, adding new ones, adding media files, etc).
After choosing how you will use the Pollfish platform for your survey project, you will be prompted with the following message:
How would you like to collect responses to your survey?
Here you can choose between buying your responses and sending your survey your way. The latter refers to sending your survey across our vast network of publishers, which includes a bevy of websites, apps and mobile sites. This is part of our random device engagement, a kind of organic sampling in which surveys are distributed randomly to users of different digital spaces. This method allows respondents to take the surveys while they are in their organic environments — cutting back on survey bias.
The latter refers to the Distribution Link feature, in which you can send surveys to specific respondents, rather than through a massive network. Out of the many survey sampling methods, this is a non-probability sampling method. This means it is not random and designed to target people you either know, such as in the case of B2B surveys, or, consumers and other web users who have given you their contact information.
This feature also offers convenience sampling, in that it generates a link you can use at various digital properties to send people to your surveys. Willing respondents can then partake in your survey after coming upon your link on social media, landing pages, site pages, your homepage, etc.
Step 1: Enter all your audience qualifications
The specifics of the audience enable you to dictate the kind of respondents to take your survey. These specifications certify that the respondents who answer the survey qualify to take it.
The audience section is twofold: it features the demographics section and the screener. The demographics section features various demographic categories. You should tick off all the boxes of categories and subcategories that you would like to study in the survey.
These categories include everything from geolocation — from country to postal code — to employment type, marital status and many other demographic categories. You can assign quotas to each category and subcategory. Or you can set each subcategory to receive an equivalent number of responses.
If this wasn’t granular enough, the screener portion allows you to ratchet up your audience requirements even further. For example, you can ask behavioral questions, such as: how many times a year do you go shopping on [vertical] sites?
Or you can ask more hyper-targeted demographics questions, such as: how many children do you have? This allows you to choose the answer(s) that allow the respondents to take the survey.
You can also place preset quotas on the screening questions.
Pollfish offers the addition of multiple audiences for your screener. This way, you can create separate audiences in one survey and achieve any targeting combination you desire. It expands the number of quotas you can employ per survey. Essentially, it allows you to widen your audience in one survey, eliminating the need to create several.
After you’ve applied all of your audience qualifications in the demographics section and the screener, it’s time to move to Step 2.
Step 2: Establish all the questionnaire content
The questionnaire stage is the heart of the survey. This stage allows you to add all the questions that you would like qualified participants to answer. It is the content of this step that will grant you market research data.
The survey platform you choose should allow you to choose from a variety of question types to add to your questionnaire. These are important as they control the type of survey you can create.
For example, in some surveys, such as Net Promoter Score surveys, you’ll need to include a numeric scale, as it is the basis for NPS surveys. In Visual Ratings surveys, emojis are required as part of the answer options.
The following lists some of the question types crucial to have in your online survey tool:
- Single selection
- Multiple-selection
- Open-ended
- Numeric open-ended
- Rating stars
- Likert scale
- Matrix questions
The question types should allow for multiple functionalities, such as:
- Adding media files to questions (images, GIFs, videos, etc.)
- Shuffling answers
- Using batch or predefined answers
- Adding “none of the above”
- Applying logic so users can go on custom question paths depending on their answers
You should be able to regroup questions and answers at the click of a button or two for a flexible survey research experience. This section should also allow you to add in the exact size of your sampling pool, i.e., the total number of respondents.
Additionally, this stage of the survey-making process should provide you with an estimated survey completion time, so that you will have a sense of how long it will take you to yield the number of responses that you preset.
Review all of your questions, answers, question paths and any other elements you have applied to your questionnaire. Make sure you’re not missing any questions you feel would be pertinent to your survey study.
Also, keep an eye out for spelling and grammar — these are going to go live as they appear on your dashboard. If you’re satisfied with it, then move on to Step 3.
Step 3: Set off the Survey Launch at the Check Out
The final step of the survey-making process is essentially the simplest one, as it doesn’t require ideating or tweaking any in-survey content. Instead, all it requires is to fill in 3 quick requirements and your survey is almost as good as live.
Here are the requirements in 3 small sections making up this final step:
- Enter your billing information, such as your address and credit or debit card number.
- Choose from 2 options on survey scheduling: either to launch your survey then and there or to schedule it.
- Review your payment information in the Cost Analysis; here you can add a discount code if you have one.
- After you’ve reviewed the survey cost, hit the big button that reads “Submit for approval” and your survey is about to go live into the vast ecosystem of partner websites and apps that will deploy it.
Some online survey platforms (like the Pollfish one) will include a review stage from experts before your survey officially launches. This will ensure all your content is set up to run smoothly, with no glitches, eros, or logical issues.
There you have it; that’s all you need to do to make your survey and have it distributed to the masses.
Please note that this process is not universal to online survey tools; rather it is used in the Pollfish platform and meant to illustrate how convenient survey software programs can be when it comes to helping you make your survey.
Reaping the Most out of Your Online Survey Tool
Online survey tools are exceedingly important for market research, however, there’s more to them than just survey campaigns.
Your business ought to use secondary sources and perhaps other primary sources to bolster your survey research. This will ensure you are conducting a holistic market research campaign.
Keep in mind that while the survey-building process delineated in this article may seem simple, all survey tools are not the same. Some will demand a much more intricate process to create your survey. Others may not even contain the function of distributing your survey.
As such, you should invest in an online survey platform that provides the most gainful survey research experience. You should opt for survey software that offers a wide range of capabilities and functions (such as the ones mentioned in this article), along with the kind that makes it easy to configure your survey and launch it.
Frequently asked questions
What are some benefits of using survey software to make your own survey?
Survey software offers many benefits to those who wish to make their own surveys. Creating surveys in this way is cost-effective, versatile, flexible, easy to use, allows for easy data analysis, provides a simple way to control respondents, allows for a variety of applications and can be administered from anywhere.
Which three steps are required to make your own survey?
In general, this simple process can be followed: 1) target your audience by defining demographics and screener questions; 2) create the survey questionnaire; 3) launch your survey.
Why is it important to define your survey audience?
In order to ensure high-quality data, you want only qualified respondents to complete your survey. By establishing the correct demographics and presetting the screener to permit only the respondents that answered in a specific way, you are set to receive the respondents that belong to your target population only.
What types of responses do survey platforms typically offer?
A good survey platform will offer a variety of question responses including single-selection, multiple-choice, text entry field, numeric, scaled and visual rating systems.
What other features should you look for when choosing a survey platform to make your own survey?
Advanced features allow you to create better questions and can result in higher quality data. The types of features you should look for include the ability to add media to questions, random shuffling of survey responses, provision of predefined answers to simplify the question writing process and skip logic.
The Pollfish Survey Process for Reviewing and Approving Surveys
The Pollfish Survey Process for Reviewing and Approving Surveys
The survey process at Pollfish involves a variety of factors and actions that ensure quality results from your deployed surveys.
As soon as a researcher hits “checkout” on the Pollfish online survey platform, their survey undergoes a process of survey review and approval before it launches.
This way, the researcher can rest assured that their survey is error-free and the questions make sense, should they choose to add survey logic or advanced skip logic. The last thing you would want is to have poorly structured surveys that confuse your target audience.
After a survey gets approved and is launched, it still undergoes a rigorous post-launch survey process using artificial intelligence, as the survey is being completed and responses are gathered.
This weeds out quality data and prevents survey fraud from the Pollfish network.
This article explains the survey process of reviewing and approving surveys before they get deployed on our massive publishers’ network.
How the Review and Approval Survey Process Works
After you reach the third (and final) section of the Pollfish online survey platform — the checkout action — you can check out your survey by hitting the “Submit for approval” button.
This begins the review and approval process, in which members of the Pollfish review team — examine your survey before launching it. Not all surveys will be launched upon review. Some surveys may require you to go back and fix an issue that the Review team had flagged.
If the team has any concerns with any aspect of a survey, they will communicate them in the form of comments. These comments can exist as an add-on to a question or its structure. Thus, you’ll see them in your survey after the Review team adds them.
Comments can be either mandatory or optional. When researchers receive both mandatory and optional comments, they must address both forms of comments, otherwise, their survey will not launch. With mandatory comments, you must edit your question according to the suggestion(s) in the comment.
With optional comments, although you do not have to follow their orders, you still ought to acknowledge them so that your survey can go live. To do so, you’ll need to click the accompanying “OK, got it” button.
Once you’ve responded to the comments, by either following their orders or clicking the acknowledgment button, the Review team will be notified and your survey will be under review once more.
From there on, the team can approve the survey and launch it immediately across our wide network of publishing partners. These include websites, apps and mobile sites.
Before the Review team approves a survey, researchers can withdraw it.
This process does not apply to the Distribution Link feature, in which researchers send surveys to specific individuals, rather than a large network of visitors of different digital properties.
Elite accounts can contact their account manager if they need extra tips or advice for the review process.
What Happens in the Review and Approval Survey Process
When the survey review process starts, the survey under review is locked, thus, no changes can be made to it by the researchers.
If the researcher wants to make any last-minute changes, they must contact the team to apply them. This can be done via the support chat or a phone call.
During the review and approval survey process, the Review team searches for errors that could cause the client's survey to not function properly. The goal of the team is to intervene with the survey design as little as possible, leaving the original design up to the use of the platform.
The review team suggests best practices based on our methodology, whenever they are applicable, along with checking for compliance with our policies.
The team will start flagging aspects of the survey by making mandatory comments (in which questions or aspects of the survey must be edited/changed). Optional comments offer suggestions to optimize the design of the platform to get the best possible outcome for your market research goals.
The review process can be completed in as quick as several minutes or take up to 2 hours. This is because there may be a lot of surveys in the pipeline. Elite surveys have a higher priority in the review queue.
Mandatory and Optional Comments
Not all surveys will receive comments, as the review team adds them to resolve errors. If there are no errors, the survey is launched immediately after the review.
When you have both types of comments in a single review — mandatory and optional, the survey goes back to draft status. Also, in the case of both, they go to a draft state, in which researchers need to edit and resubmit the survey.
Mandatory comments or both mandatory and optional comments render the survey to a draft state and researchers must apply the changes asked for in the comments.
In the previous cases, researchers will need to edit their survey again and resubmit it for review. After sending a survey back with mandatory comments, the survey goes back to the draft status — the draft tab in the dashboard.
As such, a survey with mandatory comments goes to a draft state, in which researchers need to edit and resubmit the survey.
Optional comments only grant the survey an approved state, but in the case of both mandatory and optional comments, researchers still must acknowledge the comments. After hitting “OK, got it” in optional comments, researchers can then launch their survey.
The comments can be seen within the questionnaire.
If the review consists of optional comments only, the researcher can proceed with two options. They can proceed with one of these two actions directly from the review email that they’ll have received.
The first optional action is to launch the survey directly, with no review process thereafter and without opening the questionnaire again.
To do so, you would need to click on the 3 dots next to the survey in the ''approved'' tab in their dashboard, then select “launch now.''
The second option is to edit the questionnaire if they seek to proceed with the optional suggestions and go through the review process again. To do so, you would need to click on the 3 dots next to the survey in the ''approved'' tab on the dashboard and select '’edit.''
If researchers don’t make any changes to mandatory comments, they’ll repeat the survey process, as the survey will be blocked. It will be blocked until all mandatory options are addressed by adding their respective changes.
For example:
If there are 10 mandatory comments, but the researcher only made changes to 2 of them, the survey will still be blocked and they’ll continue receiving emails to address the comments.
If the researcher resubmits the survey without making any changes, the process will repeat. They also have the option to contact the support team.
In short, optional comments get an approved state. Researchers can edit if they want and resubmit the survey, or launch it without resubmitting.
Pollfish could be flexible when it comes to specific mandatory comments. For example:
In a question that asks for the sentiments of respondents, typically, statements that are contradictory in multiple selection questions will be flagged. The team will make a comment for this kind of question to be changed to a single selection question.
However, if the purpose is to collect all sentiments of the respondents, due to their complexity, the researchers can ask for the mandatory status to be removed by either replying to the email (more on emails in the second section below) or by chatting/calling a support team member.
They can chat within the survey. Then, a review member will evaluate the request, and if it complies with our policies, they will disregard the comment.
How Surveys Are Rejected in the Process
The review team can reject the surveys for any reason in the system. If a survey is rejected (due to one or multiple comments that need to be either acknowledged or fixed), it will be sent back.
Aside from technical issues in the comments, which can relate to improper survey logic or any of the types of survey questions wrongly formed, surveys can also be rejected for the following reasons:
- Violating the terms of the survey
- Design issues
Unique Respondents Across Surveys
If researchers need to send them to different respondents, they must reach out via chat and tell the support team that they have two or more surveys and want to group them on the backend so they will get unique respondents. This must be done before submitting the survey at the checkout.
For example, they may have the same audience to see a campaign: highly educated people in the US, but need different individuals in the audience to see a certain campaign survey, and others to see a different survey.
Scheduled Surveys
When the team approves a survey that is scheduled, the survey gets an approved status. This means it goes to the approved tab until the launching date and time.
Researchers must acknowledge comments even if the survey is scheduled. If they don’t acknowledge the comments, the survey won’t launch.
To make changes or acknowledge the comments, you must edit the survey, and then checkout. Doing so will enact the required or optional change. By clicking on “submit,” the survey process for review and approval starts again.
Emails in the Survey Process
Emails play a major role in the survey process of review and approval, as they are the main communication tool between the review team and platform and the users of Pollfish.
Researchers will receive a series of emails. The first email is a confirmation that you submitted the survey for approval. Often, the second email relays that your survey requires action. This type of email will include notice of either mandatory or optional comments.
The optional email will be titled as such: “Our survey review team has recommendations only.”
The mandatory email will be titled as such: “ACTION REQUIRED: Please edit your survey [name of the survey] for it to start.” The body of both kinds of emails will inform you that your survey has recommendations. However, the mandatory one is marked as such in red in the body.
If you’ve made all the necessary changes to the mandatory comments and acknowledged all the optional ones, you will then resubmit the survey.
Issues in the Survey Process that Prompt Comments
The review team comes upon different issues during the survey review and approval process. As aforementioned, these issues hamper the launch of the survey and are up to the researcher to fix.
The previous section on how surveys are rejected gives a few key examples of issues that cause the team to block the survey and place comments for the researcher to address.
The following lists more key issues that prompt comments and temporary blocks to surveys:
- Personal Information
- Per the Pollfish terms and conditions, we do not allow questions collecting personally identifiable information and/or contact information (such as name, address, place of work, phone number, email address, etc.) to protect the respondents’ privacy and anonymity.
- We also do not allow researchers to share their own personal or contact information through the survey.
- Links/URLs in questions/answers
- We do not allow researchers to insert links within questions redirecting respondents outside the survey environment; per our methodology, a respondent's participation will be considered abandonment if they click on the link.
- Proper language selection
- The survey’s language must be the same as the language selected on the audience page, at the upper left corner of the Audience page.
- Questions about Age or Gender
- Pollfish shares by default each respondent's age range on the results page and their specific year of birth (and therefore age) in the downloadable Excel file.
- We also provide, by default, each respondent's gender in the results.
- Age restrictions regarding the survey's content
- Based on the content of the survey, you must target adults above 18 or 21 years old to take your survey if there is an age restriction in your targeted market.
- Sensitive questions and content
- Surveys including sensitive content must meet the three following criteria:
- Respondents must be adults above 18 years old. You can review your age targeting in the audience tab.
- The survey must contain one initial screening question stating the study's content, for example, ‘the following survey contains questions regarding alcoholic behavior. Are you willing to take part in the following survey? Your responses are anonymous.”
- Statement 1; Yes, I’m above the age of 18, and I’m giving you my consent.
- Statement 2; No, I do not wish to take part.
- Then, you must add one description question briefly explaining the content of the survey and why you want to know this information or how you will use it.
- Surveys including sensitive content must meet the three following criteria:
- Multiple Open-Ended questions combined in one question
- You must not combine multiple Open-Ended questions into one since it causes confusion and frustration to the respondents.
- Demographic questions
- We provide, by default, the demographic data of the respondents, so you don’t need to include questions to collect them.
- If you choose to include demographic questions, we will not provide the relevant demographic data, to avoid any repetition, which might affect our respondents' experience.
- A question with a topic that does not match its targeting
- When your question is aimed towards a specific demographic, you need to add Skip Logic to the previous question referencing the audience filters; this way, only the relevant audience will respond to this question, whereas the rest will skip it.
- Read more on how to implement advanced survey logic.
- Promotional content
- We do not allow any promotional content (e.g., website links, subscriptions, discounts, etc.) within the questionnaire. Pollfish is a market research platform and not a traffic provider.
Getting the Best Out of Surveys
Researchers should use a mobile-first online survey platform to get quality results at speed, as mobile dominates the digital space. No one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.
Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
The survey platform should offer advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers.
It should also allow you to survey any employee. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of users, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific respondents, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.
With Pollfish, you’ll have all of these capabilities, along with having your surveys reviewed and examined by a wealth of experts.
Keeping Your Brand KPIs Simple For Efficient Branding Campaigns
Keeping Your Brand KPIs Simple For Efficient Branding Campaigns
If you’re a business owner, researcher or marketer, you’re probably well aware of the various brand KPIs in existence that you can measure, track and apply to maintain your branding efforts and overall business success.
It often appears imperative to keep track of as many brand KPIs as possible to fulfill all your branding market research and general branding objectives. However, although it may seem counterintuitive, relying on fewer brand KPIs is the key to successful branding,
This is because, although it is important to use data for decision-making, dealing with too much may incur big data problems, which refers to large volumes of structured and unstructured data that overburdens a business on a daily basis.
Nearly 36% of companies don't use all the data they possess and 47% are planning to implement a data analysis tool in the future. All businesses should avoid excess data, as it does not provide the utility that data is supposed to support: making insights-based decisions to propel your business to success.
This article explains why you should keep your brand KPIs simple, you to do so with market research, while maintaining efficient branding campaigns.
Understanding Brand KPIs
There are so many KPIs that you already track or have heard about, at the very least. For the sake of clarity, a brand KPI refers to key performance indicators that relate specifically to your brand and its perception.
This involves maintaining your brand’s reputation, promotional strategies, image, symbolism and all else that distinguishes your brand from others and makes it visible as a brand.
As such, it deals with performance indicators in the following subtopics of branding:
- Brand visibility
- Social mentions
- Share of voice
- This includes various measurable brand awareness metrics, such as the reach of online mentions, PPC, website traffic and others.
- Brand awareness
- Aided and unaided awareness
- Aided Research, aka Brand Recognition: This ability of customers to recognize your brands when they view it among others, including your competitors and non-competitors.
- Unaided Research, aka Brand Recall: This measures the ability of customers to bring the name of your brand to mind without seeing it on a list first.
- Customer Acquisition Cost
- Aided and unaided awareness
- Brand trust
- Time spent on website and social media
- Conversion rate
- Email subscriptions
- Bounce rate
- Brand equity
- Customer preferences (choosing your brand over a competitor)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Each of these sub-topics of branding include various metrics and KPIs that you can study to maintain brand tracking needs. However, there is an over-abundance of these KPIs and many SaaS providers and agency marketers take advantage of them, using them as advertising and marketing fodder designed for you to purchase their services.
While branding is critical for business upkeep and data is necessary to understand your target market and make informed decisions, too much branding data can inadvertently hurt your organization.
The Importance of Keeping Brand KPIs Simple
There are several cases to be made in favor of reducing your brand KPIs. After all, there are so many business needs that require your attention — not to mention the need to preserve your resources and allocate them correctly, whether they involve money, time, managerial oversight, etc.
As such, too many such KPIs can easily lead to employee burnout and a host of other issues. The following explains the four major reasons why you should simplify your brand KPIs.
Reducing Your Costs
No matter how large your marketing or market research budget, you need to be economical with your expenditures. Money is involved in many of the metrics mentioned above, including many others. This is because you’ll generally be paying when obtaining data for decision-making.
Some data providers, such as Google Analytics are free, but it will still cost your analysts and other team members time to parse through these metrics, some of which you’ll find are surplus and unnecessary to improve your branding.
As such, your team members will face difficulties to prove that these KPIs bring value to the business, undergoing pressure to show the ROI of their activities.
By using fewer KPIs, your team members can invest their time in showing the value of the data that they generate. As such, by scaling back on the number of KPIs you use, you’ll be minimizing operational costs. By doing so, you can properly allocate your budget across your business to focus actions based on findings from KPIs that matter the most.
Cutting through the Noise
To avoid the aforementioned big data issues, you should go by the adage of “less is more.” By reducing the amount of brand KPIs you track, thereby decluttering your data arsenal and analyses, you can focus on the meaningful, quality data, the kind that plays a major role in your key decision-making processes.
To cut through the noise, you’ll need to evaluate your data set(s) and identify what kinds of data are important to study, what kinds provide valuable insights and which you can use to make improvements. When mulling this over, you’ll notice various brand KPIs that receive little consideration, the kind you hardly look at, let alone analyze.
Although determining which metrics that matter most can be challenging, especially when it comes to reaching consensus among team members, narrowing down your core measurement metrics and KPIs will grant clarity for the business and a direction for making progress.
Creating A Sense of Focus on What Matters Most
Minimizing the types of brand KPIs you track and work towards optimizing involves zeroing in on a particular set of matters. These can be quantifiable metrics or more abstract concepts, such as brand equity or top-of-mind awareness.
Either way, when you downsize the amount of your brand KPIs, you’ll be able to create a greater focus around your branding objectives, which extends to your overall business objectives. As such, marketing departments (which usually head branding initiatives) will have a clearer focus of goals and will require using less time and other resources to increase the ROI of their KPIs.
A clear and precise focus of goals and objectives will also make it easier to communicate with the C-level suite of a company. This is because using fewer KPIs simplifies the process of explaining the metrics you’ll need to justify using. In turn, this will result in simpler communication and less documentation in PowerPoint slides, for example.
Avoiding Big Data Pitfalls
Dealing with big data can be useful, but it often leads to a surplus of unheeded information that remains unused and is ultimately discarded.
There are various other problems that can arise from big data, such as large, unorganized swaths of information, imprecise insights, a lack of integration, a lack of data democratization and more.
Many times, brand KPIs involve using existing data to calculate specific metrics, which creates not only more work, but more data clutter. While some metrics may be more important than others — this will vary from company to company — you should avoid using too many as a rule of thumb. The more KPIs you’ll need to track, the larger your pool of big data will be, which will, consequently, lead to more data problems.
Which Brand KPIs You Should Measure and Heed
While you should use brand KPIs sparingly, there are still certain KPIs that are crucial for your brand to track and optimize to ensure business success. As stated earlier, these will vary from company to company; however, there are certain key aspects that you should observe regularly.
Some of these are metrics, just like many KPIs. Others are broader concepts that are invaluable for your business, as they revolve around understanding your consumers. As such, the most ideal approach for gaining insights into your target market is by conducting market research.
There are various market research techniques you can apply to understand your consumers; survey research is the most important because it allows you to cut back on tracking KPIs and instead lead a customer-centric approach when it comes to improving your business.
The following provides the key KPIs and major concepts you should record and observe regularly in order to adapt to your customers. Your company should not use all of them, since minimizing your KPI reliance is a must.
- Customer Experience
- This involves the totality of feelings, experiences and perceptions your customers have about your brand.
- You can track yours via the customer experience survey.
- The KPIs include:
- The Net Promoter Score.
- Customer Satisfaction Score Survey (CSAT) Survey
- Customer Effort Score, via the CES survey
- Brand Awareness
- This is the level of consumer consciousness of a company. It involves customers’ ability to recognize a brand and associate it with a particular product or service.
- This also involves whether customers have any familiarity with your brand.
- You can access it using the brand awareness survey.
- Brand intent
- Similar to brand awareness, brand intent occurs farther into the customer buying journey. It deals with whether a customer would consider using a brand and whether they would prefer to use one brand over another.
- KPIs include consideration and preference.
- Consideration: The percentage of customers that would or have considered using a brand for their needs.
- Preference. The percentage of customers that prefer to use a brand over another.
- You can study this with consumer surveys.
- Purchase
- This notion deals with how customers interact with a business in terms of their customer buying behavior.
- It typically relates to the brand conversion funnel directly.
- The KPIs include:
- Usage. The percentage of customers who use a brand among a target market.
- Recency. How recently a given customer has purchased from a business.
- Frequency. The average number of times customers purchase over a certain period.
- Value. The average value of customer purchases over a particular time period.
- Conversion rate. The percentage of visits ( online or in-store) that result in a purchase (or other non-monetary conversions).
- Conduct an RFM analysis via survey research to gain these insights.
Making Constant Improvements with Data
In order to simplify your brand KPIs, you should be attuned to your customers. To do so, you’ll need to conduct primary market research through a potent online survey platform.
A strong online survey tool uses random device engagement (RDE) sampling, which enables you to reach respondents in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures and will cut back on biases.
You should also use a mobile-first platform, since mobile usage dominates the digital space; as such, you would need a survey tool with the best mobile experience.
The platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data.
Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of just deploying them across a network.
When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be getting all the quality customer insights you need to cut back on using a host of KPIs.