How to use surveys for competitive intelligence research

How to use surveys for competitive intelligence research

Creating useful, desirable products and services are necessary for any business to succeed, but they also need to stand out against other companies that are offering comparable options. Competitive intelligence research can help them learn what they need to know to present their unique values to become leaders in their market.

What goes into competitive intelligence research?

Competitive intelligence research can include gathering data on competitors, both direct and analogous, customers, market opportunities, products offered, and environmental factors influencing business decisions (such as location).

All of this data can be used in competitive analysis to reveal where there are gaps in their business strategies, messaging, marketing, or customer satisfaction in order to pivot and take advantage of opportunities in the space or correct areas that are working against them.

Members of the company take this information and use it to inform strategic business decisions.

Cost-effective competitive research

There are plenty of ways to start your competitive intelligence research for free. Industry reports that show trends in your market, public forums or review sites where customers are expressing positive or negative experiences with a product or service, or even a simple trip to Google are great places to begin your process.

Begin by creating a list of your known direct and analogous competitors. Direct competitors are those who compete for the same target audience, directly in your market. For example, Uber and Lyft, who both offer app-based ridesharing services. Analogous competitors are those who, although are perhaps not in your market or space, are offering products or services that impact your target audience’s expectations and perceptions of your product. An example of an analogous competitor for Uber might be a traditional taxi service, although could also include other technology companies that offer features that Uber’s users like and expect. If Uber’s target audience is used to using Amazon’s saved credit card feature at checkout and would potentially choose a ridesharing service based on their ability to store that information, the technology team at Uber needs to consider it in their feature-based competitive analysis and potentially prioritize it in their product roadmap.

Using resources already available to you, you can likely develop a matrix of the suspected strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, their features, pricing and more to put together a partial idea of where your business falls in the space.

Some areas of competitive analysis are harder to gather data on, however. What are your competitors' current customers dissatisfied with? How do their customers perceive your product, and why have they chosen to go with your competitor’s instead? What channels are they using to promote their products?

At this point, you are in a good position to invest in competitive intelligence tools to further your data collection.

How to conduct competitive intelligence research with surveys

Surveys are a great way to connect with your target audience to ask anything you need to know. Whether it’s asking your own customers about their satisfaction with your product, or connecting directly with your competitor’s customers to ask what features are missing.

In most survey tools, you can define your target audience using traditional demographic data such as age, gender, location, and more. However, screening questions are an especially interesting feature for surveys dealing with competitive research.

Screening questions are offered by some competitive intelligence tools to help define the target audience further based on their beliefs, behaviors, or attitudes.

If a company wanted to target people who preferred or were users of their competitor’s product, they could easily use a screening question to find these audiences and ONLY allow users of the competitor’s product to take the survey. This gives you direct data from the source you want— the target audience you are trying to win over.

Screening questions are also valuable in doing comparative research on your own product. Perhaps you want to understand not just what your competitor is offering, but what your product is NOT offering. A screening question can help you find the target audience interested in your general product, service, or industry to understand who is leading consumer perceptions and why.

Survey design for collecting competitive data

Some questions you might want to include in your competitive intelligence survey could be:

Questions about brand recall and positioning

• • Please list all of the brands you can think of in [INDUSTRY] space.
  • Please rank the following brands from highest quality to lowest quality.
  • Do you feel that [BRAND NAME] represents the product accurately?

Questions about your competitors' features

• • Please rank the following features from most valuable to least valuable
  • Which features do you like the most on [COMPETITOR’S PRODUCT]?
  • Are there any features NOT offered by [COMPETITOR NAME] that you wish were available?

Questions about intent or loyalty

• • What would make you consider a different solution to [COMPETITOR’S PRODUCT]?
  • How much would you pay if [DESIRABLE FEATURE] were offered?
  • What do you like most about [COMPETITOR NAME]'s brand or values?
  • What do you like most about [YOUR COMPANY]'s brand or values?

Questions about gaps in current offerings

• • What do you expect from [PRODUCT OR SERVICE] that you are not getting from available solutions?
  • What features or offerings do you desire from [PRODUCT OR SERVICE] that would excite you more?
  • Are there any brands that you can think of that are doing this well?
  • When you think about the features you use the most, is there anything you are dissatisfied with?

These questions are simply ideas to help you begin to think about potential needs in your competitive strategy to ensure that you choose the right competitive intelligence tool to help you achieve what you need to know.

Competitive intelligence research can help you see how you stack up against comparable products and services, how the market sees you, and can guide you towards better strategies and business decisions. For further support in creating a survey for competitive intelligence research, connect with the 24/7 CX team at Pollfish to learn how to design and launch your own cost-effective solution to understanding your place in the market.

by Ally

How to create PR surveys for press coverage

How to create PR surveys for press coverage

Public Relations is one of the most effective ways for brands to build their credibility and brand awareness, but it can be challenging to get the coverage you want at a reasonable budget.

One way many brands are able to improve their PR efforts is to use consumer surveys. Consumer surveys are a great way for you to connect with a wide audience of your choosing, at a relatively low cost, to gain original insights that can spark exciting headlines and, if done correctly, consistent press coverage for your brand.

How to approach your PR Strategy

PR is a subtle, but effective way to gain press for your business, but many are unsuccessful because they attack it too directly. Self-serving pitches don’t work. Think a few levels deeper than simply telling a group of people about the thing you want them to know. Good PR relies on good storytelling.

For example, if you were a technology company releasing a new feature, you might want the editors at TechCrunch to cover it. However, if there isn’t a story behind the feature that appeals to the readers of TechCrunch, this is unlikely to be selected. A better strategy would be to pitch a journalist a story of how your new feature impacts their readers by demonstrating how it solves a problem, unveils an exciting new technology opportunity, or improves the market they are in—using data to back it up.

Like everyone else, journalists and PR professionals have their own target audiences to consider. When you pitch them your story, make sure you’re considering what would be the most interesting to their target audience that will help the journalist meet THEIR goals, whether that is article shares, pageviews or other metrics that they are likely using to gauge success.

Using PR Surveys to gain press coverage

PR surveys are a helpful tool in achieving press because they offer data that can help you discover trends or ideas that can be used to build your story and pitch. Original insights gathered from PR surveys give journalists an opportunity to be the first to break a story or offer an original angle, which is highly valuable to them.

They also offer credibility by providing a data-backed perspective to your discovery. With trust in the media being at a record-low 59% (according to Cision’s 2020 State of the Media Report), data can help journalists rebuild and regain that trust.

Some common ways that businesses use PR surveys to gain coverage include:

• “Newsjacking”—The act of piggybacking on hyper-relevant news such as elections, viral or trending content, or other highly-topical and visible subject matter by contributing new information related to the topic. It’s critical for businesses attempting this strategy to be able to quickly launch surveys, gain results, and interpret them as these topics tend to quickly appear and disappear from the news cycle.
• Ancillary topics— This is strategy lets businesses subtly, but consistently, get in front of potential buyers. They are able to use surveys to gather data around topics tangential to their services, which make more interesting stories and gain press coverage for their brand by proximity. An example might be a mattress brand running studies about how much sleep people like to get and what is preventing them from getting it.
• Trade insights—These tend to be market insights for an industry-specific audience and can have a wide reach within that sphere. When put into press-releases on a newswire, they also might garner attention from reporters covering national or global trade news. An example could be an automotive manufacturer announcing that their consumer research shows a 50% growth in demand for electric vehicles against last year’s data.

Best practices for creating PR Surveys

Start with a headline

As with all surveys, the most effective ones are those that begin with clear goals in mind. This can be challenging in a PR survey because the goal is the outcome, rather than the survey itself. One trick to help you get started is to consider what the ideal headline would be based on your survey results.

Say you work for a large hotel chain and you offer complimentary WiFi service on stays longer than 5 nights. Perhaps your ideal headline would be “Free WiFi inspires travelers to extend their stay.”

While this headline is yet to be verified, it gives you a hypothesis to work from and your survey can help you validate the truth behind this claim.

Use varied question types

Different question types help you gain different points of data. Recommended question types depend on your survey goals but ultimately should help create a story with your data that can be used in your outreach.

To continue with the hotel chain example, a question like “How likely would you be to extend your stay if free Wifi was included on 5+ night stays?” would support the desired headline, whereas “Which hotel amenities would inspire you to extend your stay for 5 or more nights?” where a respondent can select a series of features that they find valuable, could be a supporting data point. Both illicit important—but different—information in the story.

While a multiple-selection question might be the perfect way to determine a list of valuable features, a ranking question that positions the features as trade-offs is more valuable when comparing the features to each other, and offers yet another angle that might be interesting or supportive.

From the above examples, we know that the respondent would be extremely likely to extend their stay if WiFi were included, that they value free WiFi as well as pet-friendly options, and that given a choice between the two, pet-friendly options are actually a higher priority than the free WiFi.

Apply advanced skip logic

Skip logic is a feature offered by some consumer survey tools that allows you to create multiple paths for respondents to take depending on the answers they have previously given. It offers a more in-depth data-set and greater ROI on surveys to be able to investigate multiple angles at once.

Because the headline you are pursuing is a hypothesis, it is a good idea to offer more than one channel based on the answers respondents have given. This has the added benefit of extending your survey as well as gives you more data that could be used to create multiple angles and pitches.

Tip!

Keep in mind that advanced skip logic should be used to enhance the depth of your data by gaining more tailored insights, not as a way to run a series of completely separate surveys at once. This confuses respondents, diluting data quality. For example, if a respondent selects that they are much more likely to extend their stay if the hotel was pet friendly, it is appropriate to ask more questions about other things that support that information. It would not be a good time to test a new slogan for the hotel, which could result in confusing feedback or incorrect data correlation, such as “pet-owners do not like the new slogan.” It’s best to stay focused on the high-level survey goal you set at the beginning.

Interpreting your results

Oftentimes results from surveys can be as overwhelming as they are exciting. Depending on your experience with data analysis or your survey tool in particular, this can be one of the more time-consuming parts of the process, however, it is vital to making the previous steps worth your while.

Make sure to look at the individual answers to questions to see if anything pops out, as well as slice and dice the data to correlate different points to different groups. Depending on demographic information like age, gender, race, or geolocation, it’s possible that different groups will value different features more strongly than others. You can also compare people who answered a question one way with another answer they’ve given later in the survey to show the correlation between these responses.

In our hotel example, perhaps the headline wasn’t proven because your survey suggests that travelers are neither likely nor unlikely to extend their vacation for free WiFi. However, when you segment by age, you discover that a younger group is much more likely to factor this into their plans. At this time, you can adjust your headline to an accurate, data-backed statement.

How to write a press release with survey results

Once you’re done analyzing the data from your PR survey, you’ll likely have a pretty clear idea of what the “best” stories are. There can be more than one, and depending on who you’re reaching out to, “best” stories might vary. If you’re planning to reach out to individual journalists, it’s important to do some research into what their beat is ahead of time so you can tailor your pitch to their interests.

• Choose your lede

Even if you have more than one great thing to share from your survey, you need to select one to be the primary hook for your press release or outreach. Ultimately, you want the most interesting piece of information to be the lede, using the rest of your data as supporting and supplemental information.

• Keep it simple

A long list of stats that share everything you uncovered in your survey might be exciting for you, but is likely too much information for the average reader. Stick to one angle per press release/ pitch and create more pitches with different angles if you have the data to do so. This has the additional benefit of reaching more audiences with different interests and improving the ROI of your survey.

In our hotel example, perhaps your survey revealed two great ledes: 80% of Gen Z would extend their stay for free WiFi, and that people would be 3x as likely to take more vacations if they could bring their dog. You can write these as two uniquely interesting stories and pitch to different outlets that would find these of interest.

• Use data in your headline

Leading with an impressive stat immediately builds credibility and catches attention. The news aims to provide new information, so an exciting stat revealing a new idea or data disproving a common belief are always exciting headlines. The more controversial or unexpected the findings, the better!

• Include your research methodology

According to Cision’s 2020 SOTM report, nearly 20% of journalists cite combating “fake news” as a challenge. Data can often come under fire when its veracity is doubted, so its best to use a reputable tool to back up your claims. Know a little bit about the survey methodology your survey partner is using to collect data and ensure that they have a good system for survey fraud prevention, as well as being able to provide a representative sample of your target audience.

• Offer exclusivity when you pitch

Being the first to break news is still attractive to journalists, who want to report on new information—not syndicate what already exists. Offering the same story to all of their competitors dilutes the potency of your news. If you’re doing individual outreach, select your journalist carefully and let them preview your press release under embargo before it goes live. Make sure to mention that you’re offering it as an exclusive to them, but also mention when you plan to publish it to the newswire to give them a deadline to decide.

If you're looking for more great resources on using surveys in creative ways, be sure to check out the Pollfish Resource Center, or reach out to our 24/7 customer experience team for guidance and support.

by Ally

How To Use Consumer Surveys For Ad Effectiveness

How To Use Consumer Surveys For Ad Effectiveness

Ad effectiveness research is as old as advertising itself. If you have paid for an ad, you are going to want to know how effective it was. This can be as simple as a store owner counting foot traffic or sales.

But with digital advertising taking over the traditional advertising world ad effectiveness has become much more complicated, introducing new layers of interest, higher budgets and up-to-the-minute analytics. 

What Is Ad Effectiveness Research?

Ad effectiveness research is a form of validation used to both build a baseline to compare to and ensure the efficacy of advertising efforts. Brands and agencies do this by testing things like brand recall, clarity of messaging, emotional response and more. 

Since the advent of online advertising however, ad effectiveness research has become more complex. Ads can be tested in real-time, with ad platforms dynamically swapping headlines, messaging, calls-to-action and more based on performance. 

Ad effectiveness research may also include testing different placements--where your ad appears--as well as different types of ad units. This will let the advertiser see which types of ads--banners, videos, site takeovers, search ads--work best to deliver campaign messaging. 

Using consumer surveys for ad effectiveness is an essential part of any ad campaign, offering benchmarks, brand awareness, message efficacy and vital context to any metrics you may have collected.

How To Use Consumer Surveys In Ad Effectiveness Research

Whether you are running a traditional ad campaign--billboards, bus shelters, direct mail--or a completely digital effort, or even a combination of the two, consumer surveys help you dig deeper to find out not only how effective you were at delivering your message but what impact your message had on your most important consumers. 

To use consumer surveys effectively, your testing strategy should follow a framework. We created such a framework below. Check it out to see how you can get started. 

Create A Baseline 

Consumer surveys can help you quickly get a baseline on just how recognizable your brand and products are today. Ad effectiveness is based on moving customers towards goals once they have seen your ads and seeing the impact. 

You want to get a sense of not only if people have heard of your brand and what they think of it, but also if they have heard of your products, have opinions on current messaging and can give emotional feedback on their feelings towards you in the market. 

In some cases, it may make sense to run the same survey both before and after exposure. You can do this either by running two separate surveys and using one as a control group or by using the first half of the survey to get blind perceptions or perceptions of old ads before exposing respondents to new ads. This test is more similar to creative testing than traditional ad effectiveness testing but works well for testing artwork, effective headlines and more.

Create A Tailored Audience

You have likely done your homework on the ideal target audience for your ads. Some consumer survey platforms will allow you to target just as effectively as your ad platform. So make sure your ad effectiveness survey matches your planned ad platform targeting. 

Part of ad effectiveness testing is making sure your ads appeal to a broad range of consumers. This is especially important when advertising to very different geographic locations. Make sure you test your copy in different places to ensure you are communicating effectively, as there can be variations in meaning from place to place, even inside the same country.

Create An Appropriate Questionnaire

Before starting any ad effectiveness project, there are a few things you want to be sure your survey platform offers to ensure that you will be able to accomplish your survey goals. 

• Make sure to use a survey platform that allows for unlimited image, audio and video file uploads so you are not limited by ad type. 
• Avoid bias by shuffling answer choices, writing survey questions effectively and avoiding leading or loaded language. 
• Use survey skip logic to test different kinds of consumers inside the same survey. For example, if you have different questions for users who have been exposed to your brand or your current ad campaign than for those who have not, survey skip logic allows you to bifurcate those users to different questions. 

Once you have checked out these basic features, start building your questionnaire. Select your survey questions carefully, and make sure your questionnaire is built to achieve your goals. 

For example, if your goal is to determine brand perception, use a mix of open and closed-ended questions so you can let people respond in their own words. If you are simply looking for which ad creative your targeted sample prefers, brief, direct, quantitative surveys will work well. 

When to use an online ad effectiveness survey

Many agencies and brands make the mistake of either not using consumer surveys at all or not planning for testing as part of campaign planning. 

As a result, if they do decide they want testing, its creation is often rushed, which can return results that are not as beneficial as they could be or fall outside the strategy of the campaign. 

Including effectiveness testing in campaign planning will help ensure that any testing that is created is done with well-reasoned campaign goals in mind and will deliver the best possible insights, instead of a hurried request at the last minute. 

As with targeting and questionnaire creation, campaign goals should determine when ad effectiveness testing should be launched. If you are testing for brand recall, you should allow a little time between exposure and testing to ensure that your brand message was “sticky.” 

It should be noted however that because some survey platforms have dramatically improved lead times required for fielding a targeted sample, the days of needing 4 weeks' notice to set up testing are over. 

It is wise, however, to discuss testing early, and make it part of the campaign instead of something tacked on to simply assuage the fears of marketers and clients. 

Ways Of Testing Ad Effectiveness

Forced-Exposure Testing

Test creative for instant feedback on the campaign's image, video, or audio content without worrying about tracking barriers common with passive measurement. Compare results from the exposed group against a control group test to measure the impact on brand perception.

Pre/Post Study

Run a brand study among the target audience before the campaign launch to get a baseline of perceptions and the competitive landscape. Launch the same survey when the campaign ends to measure the impact on brand perception.

Matched Market Study 

In a geo-targeted campaign, run a test in that market during the campaign as well as a "control" market where no media is running. Measure the differences between markets to understand the impact. 

Survey Template For Ad Effectiveness

To help you get started, you can use the Pollfish Ad Effectiveness survey template. Make sure to keep the best practices for creating survey questions, respondent experience, and platform in mind when developing your questionnaire for the best results.

by John Steele