Mobile Market Reseearch Resources

Diving Into the DIY Survey and How It Can Aid Your Organization

When it comes to primary market research and its chief method of survey research, the DIY survey reigns supreme. To some, this may appear to be subjective, but this kind of survey method sits at the forefront of market research innovation.

A DIY survey offers virtually everything that you would expect from the data you extract via syndicated research. The main difference is its benefit of saved time, as this method collects all that is necessary for completion, requiring very little from the researcher.

Depending on the online survey platform hosting this survey, it also applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify dodgy answers.

Given that market research is a gateway to customer data, a customer data platform is now more important than ever, as 60% of customers have higher expectations than they did before COVID-19. Crafting a DIY survey brings customer insights directly to businesses, so that they can fulfill all of their customers’ needs.

This article explores the DIY surveys, their importance, uses and how to conduct an insights-driven DIY survey study.

Understanding the DIY Survey

The DIY survey is a kind of survey that, as its name suggests, allows researchers to take a do-it-yourself approach to the survey. As such, a DIY survey is a tool that grants researchers ultimate control over their survey.

A DIY survey platform offers multiple capabilities that facilitate the survey creation process. With such a survey approach, the end-user is at the helm of the study; as such, you get to dictate its overall theme, objectives, target market, design, quotas and all else.

However, not all DIY survey platforms offer the same functionalities; as such, some will have more limitations than others, some will have completely different survey sampling methods and these platforms will also offer different levels of reach.

For example, such a platform may offer survey deployment to a wide network of websites and apps, but not offer the RDE (random device engagement sampling method), which captures respondents in their natural digital habitats.

The DIY survey provides agile market research, as researchers can quickly iterate their surveys and test different concepts. Some platforms even provide in-survey A/B testing so that you can test ads and virtually anything else.

The Importance of a DIY Survey

The DIY survey approach allows you to create effective surveys for market research campaigns. Given that surveys are the heart of a market research campaign, it is important to correctly carry them out correctly.

This includes properly creating, deploying and analyzing survey data. The proper DIY survey facilitates all of these aspects.

A DIY survey allows start-ups, early entrants and long-established businesses to evaluate their product, service, experience and brand without spending a large sum of money. They can apply a DIY survey to just about any market research campaign, to support marketing, advertising, branding and other campaign types.

For example, researchers can carry out brand tracking campaigns with the brand tracking survey. Using a DIY platform, they can keep continuous tabs on their business and how it’s perceived.

A DIY survey is especially important, as it offers three major capabilities: survey design, deployment and sampling and analysis. The following explains the importance of a DIY survey in regards to each capability.

Survey Design:

A DIY survey puts you in control of the survey design. A strong online survey platform allows you to make your own survey in just three steps. As such, it won’t take days or even hours to put together a well-designed survey.

This kind of survey allows you to add all the main types of survey questions. As such, you aren’t bound by one question type or format. Questions can be set up as scales, scores and even icons.

You can also create survey paths based on respondent answers via advanced skip logic, which routes respondents to different follow-up questions, based on how they answered a question. This way, respondents are only presented with relevant questions, the kinds that allow you to probe further on a subject.

When it comes to designing a DIY survey, you are also in control of the target market sample. A DIY survey platform should allow you to target your respondents as granularly as possible, setting qualifications on various categories, such as demographics, behaviors, psychographics, education and many more categories.

It should allow you to target your respondents via screening questions, which enables you to qualify or disqualify a respondent, based on their answers to questions. In these ways, you get to target your audience as precisely as possible.

Survey Deployment and Sampling

A DIY survey makes it easy to distribute your survey to the masses. As such, you don't need to wait for third-party results from a research firm. Instead, you’ll see your results arriving in real-time. A strong survey platform will automatically send your survey to the most highly trafficked websites and apps, exposing your survey to the masses and ensuring that someone from your target population sees it and partakes in it.

When it comes to sampling, an effective DIY survey will apply the aforementioned RDE (random device engagement) method, in which the survey platform gains respondents by extracting the responses of random people from their organic digital environment, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

This weeds out the possibility of societal pressure to answer in a certain way, along with survey bias. This sampling method grants respondents complete anonymity. As such, they are more inclined to answer truthfully.

Survey Analysis

A powerful DIY survey grants you the ease of analyzing your raw survey data. In the correct platform, there ought to be several displays of your survey results. This includes results configured as questions and answers, charts, graphs, crosstabs and spreadsheets.

It should also include SaaS integrations for you to easily integrate your survey dashboard with other SaaS providers, such as BigQuery. This gives you a comprehensive survey research experience, as you can refer to more than one platform to analyze your results. By integrating them, it makes cross-referencing two sets of data that much more feasible.

A DIY survey platform should offer a robust filtering data capability, so that you do not merely have filtering options in the screening section of the survey, but in the post-survey results as well. You can filter this data in a variety of ways, which includes doing so based on respondent location, demographics, psychographics or answer type.

This grants you easy access to a variety of statistics, allowing you to easily maneuver with all the data you’ll need to power your study.

The Pros and Cons of a DIY Survey

A DIY survey is the foremost tool of modern-day market research, granting you all the insights you’ll need without relying on a third party. If the above section didn't fully convince you of the importance of the DIY survey, the following list of pros will support its prowess.

However, as with anything, this type of survey has a few disadvantages, which you should know about before you implement it for your next market research endeavor. The following lists provide highlights of the pros and cons of the DIY survey:

The Pros

Ensures complete control over a survey research campaign.
The main and usually only tool you’ll need to carry out primary market research.
Provides quick results, protecting researchers from waiting weeks for the survey to be complete.
Takes as little as a few days or hours to complete.
Gives you access to affordable research
Allows you to easily gain consumer, partner (via B2B surveys) and employee feedback.
Easy to set up and user-friendly.
Avoids having to rely on third-party results, which may be altered.
Enables you to set quotas, so you receive the exact amount of answers as you please, from specific groups of people.
Allows you to add multiple audiences in just one survey.
Grants you access across all geographies, which makes it possible to conduct global market research.
Supports data democratization so that all team members have easy access to data and all can contribute ideas on using it for critical business decisions.

The Cons

Since you’re fully in charge, you’re required to work on all aspects of the survey campaign and keep track of all its details.
To ensure an inaccurate campaign, you’ll need to measure and keep several variables to a minimum, such as the margin of error and the sampling error.
You’ll need to be aware of and attempt to reduce various kinds of survey bias.
You’ll need to be wary of the different kinds of survey respondents; some of them break rules and provide faulty information, such as flatlining or gibberish answers.
You’ll need to contend with survey attrition; as such, you’ll need to optimize your surveys.

How to Conduct A DIY Survey

To conduct a successful DIY survey, you’ll need to gather all of your requirements, so you’ll know the best appropriate type of survey to use, along with the best survey method.

The following explains how to conduct a DIY survey:

Determine what you need to study; consider all the things that matter to your business, such as matters that you have few answers to or would like more clarity on.
If you have already conducted exploratory or explanatory research, consider other related factors or issues that you’d like to study.
When you find a topic of study, tie it to a larger purpose or campaign, such as advertising, optimizing the customer buying journey, etc.
1. Consider conducting causal research on the matter, as this will find cause and effect relationships.
2. If you perform it and identify cause and effect relationships, you may need to rework your intentions or original questions.
Come up with several preliminary questions. An ideal starting point is to sift through the 6 main types of survey questions and to deliberate which will be most useful and relevant.
When you’ve come up with 10-15 questions, consider organizing them into two or more surveys. Shorter surveys yield greater survey response rates.
As you organize your questions, create the appropriate theme for each survey.
Create a callout that briefly explains what the survey is for.
Use a strong online survey tool to create, launch and run your survey to the correct target market.
Perform a survey data analysis, jot down key findings and share them with your team.
Take action from your survey findings. You can also create more surveys to test your actions, such as via A/B testing.

Mastering All Business Endeavors

A DIY survey allows you to gain actionable insights quickly, moving the needle for all kinds of business campaigns. But in order to reap the most benefits out of your survey, you’ll need to opt for the strongest online survey platform.

After all, this platform dictates your DIY survey’s capabilities. When you’re deciding on the best market research tool for your business, use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and you ideally need one with the best mobile experience.

The platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types, provide an estimated survey completion time, offer various viewing options of post-survey data, disqualify low-quality data (such as the aforementioned gibberish answers and flatlining) and more.

Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone. We suggest a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature, so that you can not only deploy your survey to random respondents, but to specific people via email, social media, etc.

When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be getting the most out of your DIY survey. As such, the cons of this survey will be easy to overcome.

by lorraine

How to Collect Customer Feedback with Surveys

You won’t be able to understand your target market and cater to its needs without collecting customer feedback. Relying solely on secondary market research is a thing of the past, with the accessibility and speed to insights that many online market research tools provide.

It’s now more important than ever to gather customer feedback, as there are so many digital outlets for customers to voice their opinions, be they frustrations or satisfaction.

72% of customers will share a positive experience with a business with 6 or more people. However, 13% of unhappy customers will share their experience with 15 or even more people.

At face value, this disparity may not seem so caustic, when you compare 72% with 13%. However, the challenge lies in the fact that, in most cases, customers don’t share their dissatisfaction with businesses. In fact, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers will complain.

As such, it is up to businesses to extract customer feedback from their customers.

This article provides an in-depth glance into customer feedback and how to collect it with survey research, using the correct methods and the correct tool.

Understanding Customer Feedback

Customer feedback refers to all the information that customers provide about their experience with a business, whether it is in regards to a product, a service, a specific experience and virtually everything else in their customer buying journey.

Customer feedback can be either verbal or written communication from your customers, expressing how they feel when dealing with your business in any capacity. As such, aside from giving feedback on the main issues listed above, customers can sound off on other matters concerning your business, such as advertisements, sensory influences (think taste and smell) and your brand in its entirety.

The purpose of customer feedback is to reveal customers’ degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a business across touchpoints and offerings. This kind of feedback is used to help product, marketing, customer service, customer success and sales teams understand how to improve, ultimately to make their customers happy.

Companies can collect customer feedback through a variety of means, such as interviewing customers over the phone, using VoC programs, asking for reviews, speaking with them in-store and through other means.

You can also passively collect feedback for your team by providing your customers with a place in the product where they can make comments, complaints, or compliments. This is usually facilitated via SaaS and other cloud-based services.

The most potent way of obtaining customer feedback is through polling software, which allows companies to survey the masses belonging to their target market. It can also target specific individuals by sending surveys to them via the Distribution Link feature.

The Importance of Obtaining and Studying Customer Feedback

All businesses, whether they are B2C or B2B, must work towards collecting and studying their customer feedback. This is because, in order to improve your product, service and overall customer experience, you’ll need to understand how your customers feel towards all of these matters.

Customer feedback essentially serves as a guiding source for your business’s growth. It allows customers to express exactly what they appreciate and dislike about your company; this is invaluable information for improving your business and taking any action. After all, you wouldn’t want to launch campaigns that drain your funds while yielding little to no ROI.

In addition, feedback is powerful, as it grants your leadership team insights from the customers themselves, which allows your team to forge a path forward in every part of your business — from product to marketing, through UX and customer support. These insights are especially critical for building and maintaining customer satisfaction.

By gaining customer feedback, your business will be able to sustain a customer-first model that prompts customers to buy from you continuously. As such, using customer feedback is also a key towards building customer retention.

Additionally, customers tend to favor marketing personalization, as no one likes to be sent generic and stagnant messaging and offers. Marketing personalization, as its name suggests, allows businesses to communicate in a hyper-personalized way to customers. But without collecting their feedback, it is nearly impossible to create personalized experiences for them.

Moreover, without customer feedback, your company will never know if customers are reaping value out of your offerings. This presents a major lack for product and go-to-market teams, since without feedback, they’re wasting time and resources on offerings that customers may draw little value from. Remember, as per the intro, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers complain.

When customers draw little to no value from a product, or are unhappy with other business-related interactions and issues, they will leave, increasing a company’s customer attrition rate, while lowering its customer lifetime value.

Needless to say, your business will see an exodus of customers and plummeting sales if it lacks customer feedback.

Despite the importance of gaining customer feedback, customers themselves don’t believe that companies are using this feedback to make any improvements, as 53% of shoppers believe their customer feedback doesn't go to anyone who can actually take action on it.

As such, the three main concerns for your business are to properly obtain feedback from customers, especially the segments on which you seek to run a campaign, to collect feedback at the most appropriate times and to analyze it correctly.

When to Collect Customer Feedback

The pertinent question to ask now is: when should you collect customer feedback? In order to answer this question, you must first mull over WHY you need to collect feedback. There are a few opportune times to collect feedback from your customers. Sending them surveys during this time will be beneficial for your campaigns.

The following lists the most apt times to gather customer feedback:

Immediately after customers interact with your content, no matter what stage in the funnel they are in.
Before you begin working on any marketing, branding or advertising campaign.
1. There is a slew of sub-campaigns for each three of these major categories. You ought to survey your target market on their feedback before working, let alone, launching any of them.
2. These insights will let you know how to form a campaign, what to include and what to avoid.
3. Customer feedback in the pre-campaign stage allows you to avoid snafus and faux pas, including in relation to cultural trends.
After customers encounter obstacles in their customer journey.
1. Whether they have difficulty finding what they need on your website, checking out or signing up for something, you should ask for their feedback to unearth exactly what’s troubling them so you can fix any obstacles quickly.
After customers checked out (successfully).
1. Even if customers were able to check out without issues, you should still get their feedback as a means of checking up on them and your digital experience/ how well your site functions.
After customers received their order.
1. You can obtain product satisfaction feedback after your customers have received their orders and used them. This is usually a few days to a week after customers have received their order, depending on what it is.
Long-term follow-up.
1. This is especially useful if you offer a subscription service or sell a long-term product, such
When you need to ask them to make a recommendation.
1. The most apt time to do this is a considerably long time following a purchase, or several purchases.
2. The most common way to test customers whether they would make a recommendation is with the NPS survey.

How to Gather Customer Feedback with Surveys

You’ll need to be strategic when it comes to gaining customer feedback in order to gain valuable data. Surveys provide many formats for obtaining customer feedback.

Once you have determined why you need to collect customer feedback, as the previous section examined and have an end goal, proceed to the next step by asking yourself how you will collect feedback.

An online survey platform offers the most efficient method of gaining customer feedback, as you can survey any demographic group you wish. Surveys grant you insights on all of the situations highlighted in the section that covers when to collect feedback.

To gather customer feedback, first choose the main campaign for the feedback. For example, let’s say your customers signed up for your newsletter.

You can send them a consumer survey to ask how they discovered your brand, why they signed up, what they’re looking for and what they like about your brand. This kind of survey will largely be based on customers’ first impressions and brand awareness.

If you’d like to understand how your customers viewed a recent event you held, whether it is digital, such as a webinar, or physical, such as a grand opening of a store or after they shopped during a promotional sale, conduct an event evaluation survey.

This survey is specifically designed to gauge the CX of your events and can help you see how you excelled, fell short and what to change/prepare fr for your next events.

If you’re dealing with long-time customers, you can send them the aforementioned NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey to determine if your consumers are detractors, promoters or passive customers for your brand. You can ask follow-up questions on how you can improve and take action from there. This way, you can master catering to their consumer preferences.

Connecting with All Your Customers

Customer feedback enables you to connect with customers on things that matter the most to them, allowing you to prioritize all the most necessary actions for improving your business.

The feedback you derive from customers will inform your company on crucial matters as it grows and evolves. This, in turn, helps your business thrive.

You should keep in mind that gathering customer knowledge is a continuous and important practice for any customer success manager or marketer. As such, it is important to choose a robust online survey platform to carry out all of your feedback campaigns.

A strong online survey provider operates via random device engagement (RDE) sampling, which enables you to reach respondents in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them. This stamps out social pressures to answer in a particular way and cuts back on biases.

You should also use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space, so ideally, you would need a survey tool with the best mobile experience.

The platform 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, aside from deploying them across a network. This is especially important for gathering feedback during the specific times mentioned in the section on when to collect feedback.

When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be getting all the quality customer feedback you need.

by lorraine

Busting DIY Market Research Myths

DIY market research has made waves in the market research space, which had at one point been dominated by market research panels and external research firms. Come DIY market research, which brought the entire operation in-house.

This form of research upended the industry, allowing all organizations to conduct and own their market research. In turn, businesses were able to accelerate their processes, gaining quicker results and cutting costs.

Throughout the last few years especially, businesses have had an increasing desire to use DIY research practices. This need has increased throughout COVID-19 with slashed budgets, upskilled teams and the need for faster customer intelligence.

In fact, 54% of companies that have used DIY market research experienced financial growth. Additionally, almost half of market research professionals conduct more DIY research today than they did six years ago.

Despite the convenience and prevalence of the DIY method, negative myths still abound in the space. This article lays out four DIY market research myths and debunks them while proving their value.

Understanding DIY Market Research

DIY research or DIY market research is the practice of conducting market research that any person or organization carries out themselves. As such, the party conducting DIY research can be either a professional or a non-professional.

A kind of primary research, the DIY method uses online research methods, which usually takes the form of online research software or online survey tool. This method provides an avenue to conduct both quantitative and qualitative market research.

A strong DIY research platform provides the following capabilities:

It can aggregate data from multiple sources.
It will reach specific demographics, locations and other category-based criteria as indicated by the market researchers.
It will provide an interface that allows market researchers to enter the stream and test their hypotheses for various types of research.
It makes it easy to analyze consumer behavior to identify trends and themes.
It allows researchers to deploy their surveys across a wide network of digital properties.
It permits researchers to send surveys to specific, targeted individuals.
It works quickly in extracting the correct data from the qualified population.
It allows for exports, post-survey data filtering and various displays of the data.

Despite all of its provisions and conveniences, various actors maintain that DIY market research is not for all due to several limitations and factors of inferiority when compared with traditional market research. Despite the pervasiveness of DIY market research myths, they do not prove to be accurate.

Read along to understand why, as we bust four common myths surrounding the DIY approach to research.

DIY Market Research Myths in a Competitive Space

There are long-held myths surrounding the concept of DIY platforms and research. Businesses and market researchers must understand that many of the myths surrounding the DIY approach and its effectiveness are just that, myths.

For online survey platforms such as Pollfish to truly realize their potential in the space, researchers and market research agencies should pay no heed to the myths and misconceptions about DIY market research and instead funnel their energy into finding a strong online market research tool.

Such a tool would facilitate DIY market research with little labor involved from its users, marketers, researchers and business owners. For researchers to overlook the myths about DIY tools, we’ve laid out four to debunk.

DIY Market Research Myth 1: Complexity

DIY tools have many moving parts in the backend, such as segmentation, profiling, filtering and managing projects. With these hurdles, there is therefore also a learning curve to being active users of the tool. As such, the first myth is that DIY market research platforms are more complex than they're worth using.

Although there are various components searchers would need to learn how to use, this couldn’t be further from the truth. This is because a strong DIY market research platform is made to be user-friendly, allowing its users to make your own survey in just a few steps. These aspects are the dominant traits of simplicity, diametrically opposing the concept behind this myth.

With various data visualizations such as charts, graphs, Excel files and more, researchers are in control of how they view and analyze their data. These are also easy to access, as they live on the DIY market research platform. This means businesses can cut through the middleman and access their data themselves, as opposed to using syndicated research, in which the market research firm you use owns all the data.

There is also no need to scout out research or survey panels, which are composed of pre-recruited respondents who agree to take part in a market research study. All researchers need to do is determine their audience, add in their questionnaire and launch the survey. That’s it. The DIY platform takes care of the rest.

This is a major reduction of labor, hassle and worry on the part of the market researchers using the DIY tool. As such, it is not merely a simple method, contrary to its myth, but it is one of the simplest if not the simplest way to conduct research.

Myth 2: DIY Platforms Favor Speed Over Quality

While it is true that DIY research platforms offer speed to insights and can empower researchers with an agile research strategy, they do not compromise speed over quality. Instead, these platforms offer both accelerated data collection and quality responses.

This will largely depend on the DIY market research platform you use. However, a robust platform often guarantees netting quality data only from researchers’ intended audience. It delivers this promise of quality data by preventing fraudulent responses. This involves using a series of in-platform mechanisms. These are powered by machine learning and require no effort on the part of both the researchers and the support staff of the DIY tool.

These mechanisms involve using a variety of quality checks that ensure there are no questionable respondents or faulty answers. Some of these quality checks include:

No tolerance for gibberish answers
Disqualification of VPN users
Banning rule-breakers
Barring respondents who provide one-word answers in open-ended questions that seek in-depth answers
No tolerance for bots
Avoidance of respondents with duplicated IDs via IP or MAC addresses, Google Advertising and mobile device identifiers
Technical layers of quality checks

With the above quality checks and more working to eliminate any subpar data and suspicious respondents, market researchers are not sacrificing the quality of their research for the convenience of speed. Instead, a DIY market research platform couples speed with quality data.

Myth 3: DIY Platforms are Only Suitable for Simple Studies

The myth that DIY platforms lack the sophistication found in traditional research methods, such as using syndicated research or a market research agency has been long-established. After all, DIY market research platforms have given these organizations a run for their money and positioned themselves as legitimate threats.

Full-fledged market research agencies do offer value in the market research ecosystem, as they offer high-grade expertise in research design and storytelling. This gives their consumer base of market researchers a high level of quality behind their services.

However, these services do not render DIY market research platforms inferior. They are simply another route for conducting research, ones that are older and don't offer all of the conveniences that market researchers have at their disposal by using a DIY market research tool.

One such convenience is building a multi-level survey campaign, the kind that offers various question paths via advanced skip logic, a mechanism that routes respondents to the appropriate follow-up questions based on their answer to a previous question.

This creates deep and multi-pronged question paths in the surveys that researchers create, allowing them to reap granular insights and deeply explore a topic, despite the different customer personas present and their varying answers.

They can do all of this in just one survey. Thus, this capability disproves the fact that DIY market research platforms can only be used for simple studies.

Moreover, DIY survey platforms allow market researchers to segment qualified respondents in an ultra-granular way. This means they would not simply tick off demographics, psychographics and location when profiling their qualified users in their screening section.

Instead, they can qualify and disqualify respondents from taking a survey based on their answers to specific questions in the screening section, which makes the segmentation process extremely granular. Researchers will never be left wondering if the right people are taking part in their surveys.

In addition, they can add multiple audiences to their surveys, which grants researchers the ability to include multiple groups of respondents with distinct characteristics to partake and be examined in just one survey. A tool that can do this isn’t lacking when it comes to conducting complex studies.

As such, DIY survey platforms are well-equipped to manage complex campaigns that require deep segmentation, multiple audiences and varied question paths.

Myth 4: Automation Sacrifices Business Impact

This myth is centered on the idea that using a DIY market research tool removes the human-led element of storytelling available in research agencies, thereby making this kind of tool less insightful and far less impactful on the overall research campaign. This is a myth as DIY research platforms are continuously augmenting their capabilities.

At Pollfish, for example, there are ongoing updates to the product which makes it more innovative, practical and adept at keeping up with changes in the industry.

The constant updates present in DIY market research include real-time analytics solutions and dashboards, which show the progress of a survey while it is still running. They also make it possible to access the data in various formats, visualizations and organizational styles, such as filtering post-survey data in the dashboard to focus on specific demographics and answers.

These automation-based features enable the DIY platforms to ensure data democratization, which entails all members of a business having easy access to insights, whether they are market analysts or in a far different department such as e-commerce, marketing, C-suite, etc.

These capabilities provide sufficient impact for businesses on a wide spectrum of efforts, such as marketing, sales, and advertising as they enable them to make data-driven business decisions, the kinds that are mission-critical.

Making All the Right Market Research Moves

Using DIY market research allows you to efficiently perform all the research you require for multiple projects. While it is clear as to why DIY market research myths are invalid and are just myths, it is important to understand that not all DIY market research platforms are built with the same interfaces and capabilities.

Market researchers should choose an online DIY platform with features that easily disprove these four myths and others. This way, they can safely carry out their market research campaigns, knowing that they’ll reap accurate and high-quality results.

To do so, they ought to look into a strong online survey platform, the kind that operates via random device engagement (RDE) sampling, which reaches respondents in their natural digital environments, which, in turn, cuts out survey bias.

Market researchers should also opt for an online survey platform that implements artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify survey fraud and poor-quality data, provide a mobile-first approach design and offer the Distribution Link feature, which allows researchers to send surveys to specific targets, as opposed to a random pool.

When you use an online survey tool of this caliber, you can rest assured that no myths, no faults or other market research issues stand a chance in marring your market research.

by admin

Diving Into PR Surveys to Boost All PR Campaigns

PR surveys provide companies with a lucrative way to bolster all of their PR efforts.

That’s because survey research provides businesses with exclusive findings, the kinds that allow them to differentiate themselves from other competitors in the field. Your business can use all the insights you’ve gathered from PR surveys to drive various PR campaigns.

As the public relations field continues evolving in the digital age, brands must evolve with it and use its innovations to their full advantage. 80% of PR professionals say that the future of PR lies in digital storytelling. Surveys provide the fuel for all storytelling content for a variety of media output, from press releases to journalism sources.

You can use these surveys to enhance brand visibility and positively shape the perception of your brand.

This article focuses on PR surveys, their importance and how to create and promote this kind of survey study to power your PR campaigns.

Understanding PR Surveys

PR surveys serve as the leading technique of PR polling, a method that blends PR with market research techniques, in which surveys are administered to a business’s target audience or a general population, for the purpose of sharing the results via branded content, press releases, company outreach, news, blogs and media outlets.

The questions in these surveys are created strategically, so that they do not merely obtain primary market research, but can be adequately used for broader communications purposes, such as attention-grabbing headlines and news stories.

With PR surveys, businesses can broadcast key messages of their organization while concurrently gathering public opinions of them, along with garnering original insights they can later use in PR campaigns.

As such, these surveys can touch on a wide array of topics, from current events, to things that are relevant to a niche and occurrences within a company. Given that much of PR is centered on gaining media placement and coverage, it is ideal to use a topic that will draw media attention, along with that of your target market.

The Importance of PR Surveys

PR surveys offer a wealth of benefits when it comes to PR polling and various other PR and marketing initiatives. In fact, these surveys can be the main factor behind success in today’s congested media landscape.

PR surveys allow you to craft narratives that get the attention of reporters, bloggers and their audiences. This is because these surveys are vessels to original insights on a swath of your topics of choice.

They provide businesses with exclusive insights, exceptionally important, given that 39% of publishers desire content with exclusive research. This means, you’re better off getting media placement by conducting PR surveys than you would be otherwise, including through less efficient means of conducting primary market research.

Further supporting media placement and wide dissemination, PR surveys put companies in charge of their narratives, at least at a high level. This is because you are completely at liberty to ask whichever questions are necessary and to apply any question formats, so long as the online survey platform allows it.

You should be able to freely choose from the 6 main types of survey questions and use them in your survey. You can structure your questions in a way that incites intriguing and unexpected insights. This way, your findings and their subsequent content release catch the attention and interest of news websites, readers and consumers.

As far as content is concerned, 9 out of 10 in-house communications team leaders struggle with content creation. Given that content is a major component of PR, your PR efforts are largely dependent on releasing content that draws in various key players, such as those aforementioned. PR surveys are content machines; aside from aiding your efforts with original insights, they provide narratives you can convert into stories for a wide variety of assets.

These surveys also give you a major edge in general marketing, especially when it concerns thought leadership. Rather than aggregating content or performing secondary market research, the insights you glean from PR surveys are entirely original and proprietary to your company — unless you use the syndicated research approach — in which you source a market research firm to own and conduct the study.

As such, you can power a wealth of campaigns with the original insights you extract with these surveys. This allows you to be considered a thought leader, as you can focus your studies on a particular topic of study that your competitors haven’t, or at least not with original insights.

These campaigns can include lead generation, allowing you to gain more leads by producing downloadable and gated assets such as reports, whitepapers, infographics and more. The press releases you send can link to the landing pages of these lead generation assets.

In this way, PR surveys can also boost SEO and site traffic. Since the main goal of a public relations study is to attain media attention by way of online news stories, you can lead more people to your website organically by link building.

An intriguing study will garner backlinks from other earned media placements, including bloggers in your niche and major new publications. Aside from generating attention, backlinks allow websites to rank higher in search engines.

The Content Benefits of PR Surveys

To piggyback off of the previous section, PR surveys provide a range of PR and marketing benefits, along with being strong market research tools. When it comes to content specifically, which PR is highly reliant on, there is a wide scope of content assets that your PR survey can yield.

These assets maximize the return on investment from your polling campaigns.

The following lists some of the various content assets you can churn out from your survey findings:

Blog posts
Press releases
Industry, consumer or current events reports
Whitepapers
Infographics
Webinars
E-books
Resource pages on your website
Social media content
Guest posts on other media websites
Video content
Downloadable assets

How to Create a PR Survey & Properly Promote It

When you’ve decided to use a PR survey, you should be strategic in how you carry it out. After all, the success of your PR survey study depends on the way you form the survey, along with post-survey factors.

The following is an in-depth, step-by-step explanation on how to effectively create and promote PR surveys:

Find a topic or issue that lacks information and would be interesting to provide insights on.
1. This study can be centered on any of the 6 main types of research.
2. Use topics that are timely and relevant to the public or to an industry to attract widespread media coverage.
Avoid subjects already covered by other survey studies.
1. Media outlets will ignore survey data that repeats what has already been made known in past campaigns.
2. Journalists and other media workers seek out research that uncovers contrarian answers or something people don’t already know.
Ask the right questions; when it comes to PR, ask questions that have a chance of extracting shocking answers, or those that are shocking in nature themselves. This is because controversial survey results often garner even greater media coverage.
1. Avoid being overly self-promotion in your survey, especially if your survey studies past PR campaigns.
  1. Surveys that heavily rely on self-promotion perform poorly.
Check for statistical significance and consider the presence of possible survey bias.
1. Make sure your study uses the proper survey sampling size before you conduct the survey. This will ensure your study carries statistical significance.
2. Consider that biases are likely to occur in your survey. That’s why you’ll need to use a platform that can keep them at a minimum.
Choose a potent online survey platform.
1. Choose wisely, as the capabilities of the platform will dictate the scope and results of your survey study.
2. Some platforms offer limiting features, those that won’t allow you to explore your subject as well as more well-equipped platforms can.
3. Your survey platform of choice should also allow you to make your own survey in only a few steps to save you the time and hassle often associated with market research projects.
Promote your survey.
1. Since this is a PR survey, you can maximize your PR efforts on the study at large by advertising it via PR methods, such as press releases or media placements.
2. Additionally, you can promote it via social media, direct mail or online ads. This should boost the online responses you’ll receive from the surveys being deployed across publisher networks.
Consider using survey incentives.
1. These will drive interest to your survey, allowing it to be completed sooner.
2. You can also use incentives as a marketing tool, framing your brand in a positive light if you mention it in the survey.
3. Incentives generally provide positive experiences and will allow your company to stand out from others.

Making Headway in PR and Beyond

The results from PR surveys can be powerful, convincing, and influential enough to go beyond securing media placements, but to live in the minds of your target market for a considerable subsequent period.

In order to execute useful PR surveys, you need to opt for a well-equipped online survey platform to carry out the campaign to its full potential.

This kind of online survey platform should field surveys locally or globally, use random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach respondents in their natural digital environments, deploy surveys to a wide network of highly-trafficked websites and apps, offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to spot survey biases and disqualify poor-quality data, provide a mobile-first approach and much more.

With such a survey platform in tow, you are in good hands for conducting PR surveys and raping all of their benefits.

by admin

How to Properly Kick Survey Lead Generation into Gear

Advancements in market research software have given rise to survey lead generation, boosting how companies gain new leads.

As such, the correct online survey platform grants businesses another avenue for gaining new leads, instead of solely relying on traditional methods.

Generating leads is a crucial part of the sales funnel, allowing brands to progress on kick off their customer buying journey. 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation, given the value of obtaining new leads. For example, leads are 9x more likely to convert when businesses follow up within a few minutes.

Despite the value that generating leads brings, along with the hefty spending that goes into it, 61% of marketers say generating leads and traffic is their top challenge.

This article explores how to establish survey lead generation with the correct online survey provider.

Understanding Survey Lead Generation

This concept is borne out of the marketing practice of lead generation, which involves initiating consumer interest and/ or inquiry into a business and its offerings.

The lead in this concept is a consumer of business who is a good fit for your product or service. Also called a prospect, this business entity can be a prospective customer or a consumer who your business has interacted with, either via sales, digitally, etc.

Although casting a wide net across your target market seems intuitive, companies shouldn’t pursue all of their leads, as they are not all marketing qualified.

Your business ought to focus on nurturing marketing qualified leads, or MQLs only, as they are the leads who have indicated interest in your brand’s offerings, based on your marketing efforts. They are also the leads that are most likely to become customers.

Lead generation involves using traditional methods, such as via cold emailing and calling, list building, e-newsletter list acquisition, events or any other sales efforts. Survey lead generation is one of the latest forms of lead generation.

This practice depends solely on surveys to spawn interest and inquiry into a brand. While it may appear to be high-flown and impossible at worst, surveys are potent tools for forming leads — when used with a strong online survey platform.

That’s because surveys allow market researchers to get to the heart of any and all customer concerns, needs, desires and aversions. This allows businesses to better understand them and cater to them.

What’s best, however, is that there are other ways you can use surveys directly for lead generation.

Using the Correct Survey Questions for Survey Lead Generation

Surveys allow you to quickly gain access to questions bent on determining whether a lead is an MQL worth pursuing for your business. There are strategic ways to set up your survey questions to successfully forge survey lead generation.

These kinds of questions can specifically gauge how useful of a lead your respondents can and will be for your company.

Your business can form these questions to use them with your B2B surveys, along with your B2C consumer surveys, in order to examine your respondents’ stance on your company, their needs and readiness to either use your product or move further down the sales funnel.

Use the following questions in your survey lead generation campaign to better understand your leads and classify them as MQLs or non-MQLs:

B2B Lead Generation Surveys

What are your prospects’ biggest pain points?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
What kind of content do they prefer to consume?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
What kind of issues does your company experience in regards to [industry problem, lack, need, etc.]?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
How do you typically work to resolve this problem?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
Do you make buying decisions at your company?
1. Answer type: Yes or no, scaled answers, ex: I make some decisions, I work with someone who does, I rarely make purchasing decisions, etc.
Have you heard of [your brand] in regards to [the problem]?
1. Answer type: Yes or no, use advanced skip logic to route them to the following question:
2. Would you consider purchasing [brand] that solves your issues? Or try to use it first?
  1. Answer type: Yes or no, scaled answer
Are you ready to make a purchase and when?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice such as this month, quarter or year

B2C Lead Generation Surveys

What are your biggest pain points in [industry, niche, needs, etc]?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
What kind of content do you prefer to see, read or consume?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
What kind of issues do you experience in regards to [industry problem, lack, need, etc.]?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
How do you typically try to resolve this problem?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
What kinds of products do you use for this problem?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
What brands do you typically use to solve this problem?
1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
Are you willing to try a new company for this problem/need?
1. Answer type: Yes or no, scaled answers, ex: I might consider it, I might consider it only if the price is right, etc.
Have you heard of [your brand] in regards to [the need/ problem]?
1. Answer type: Yes or no, use advanced skip logic to route them to the following question:
2. Would you consider purchasing [brand] that solves your issues? Or try to use it first?
  1. Answer type: Yes or no, scaled answer
How important is the price in your purchasing decision?
1. Answer type: Scaled answer with the range of not important at all to extremely important

How to Leverage Surveys for Survey Lead Generation

Aside from using the above questions to gauge whether your respondents would make qualified leads for your business, there are other techniques you should consider to establish survey lead generation.

You can hammer out your surveys in a way that makes your business appear more attractive to your target market, thereby allowing you to obtain more leads. There are several approaches to achieve this end. They include the following:

Fully understanding customer pain points.
1. Understanding customer pain points is crucial before customers begin their customer buying journey. If you don’t understand their basic needs and issues, you won’t be able to cater to them, whether it is in your messaging, product or experiences.
2. You can push your prospects further down the funnel faster by refining your marketing collateral. To do this, you can survey your target market specifically on their pain points. This will give you insight into what keeps your consumers from buying and how your company can help them.
3. If you mention your business explicitly in these surveys, you are positioning your brand in a good light, one that shows your customers that you care about rectifying their issues and fulfilling their needs.
Increase satisfaction
1. Surveys allow you to increase the satisfaction associated with your brand. To do so, you would need to directly mention your brand, including its logo, slogan, services offered, company news, etc.
2. You can increase satisfaction via surveys by offering either monetary or non-monetary survey incentives. Everyone loves perks and when it comes to your business, it’s beneficial to let respondents know that their incentives come specifically from your business.
3. You should also ask specific questions on what your respondents are specifically looking for from your company and what you can do to better serve them. This will show them that you care about them as individuals. This also allows you to use these insights to later take part in marketing personalization.
Improve your content strategy and nurture programs
1. Surveys allow you to refine your content marketing strategy by seeking out the following from your target market itself: how customers consume content, their content preferences and stage in their customer journey.
2. Being able to understand what kind of content drives more customers’ time on site and what kind resonates with them will ensure you create high-performing content each time. Additionally, it will help you form better nurture programs, from drip campaigns, to social media content, webinars and more.
3. By choosing the correct insights to inform your content strategy, such as the format, topics and more, you can establish smart lead nurture programs. You can do so by funneling your respondents into the appropriate content streams based on their responses, in turn sending them engaging, educational, and convincing content.
Identify the Best MQLs
1. You can conduct market segmentation with surveys to get more closely acquainted with the makeup of your target market. This allows you to identify and categorize your various groups of customers into customer segments.
2. You can also identify customer personas as a means of further organizing your consumers into distinct individuals.
3. When you segment your customers, you can also find the most ideal marketing-qualified leads. When analyzing your consumers, surveys allow you to find which customer segment and persona has the largest amount of MQLs.
4. You can also route MQLs to pages that used lead generation, such as landing pages, contact forms and more, but you would need an online survey platform that offers advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions and links.
Create referrals and build customer advocacy.
1. By using a survey type that asks respondents to rate their likelihood of referring your company to others, you can gauge whether your respondents are detractors or brand advocates.
2. Use a scaled survey, such as an NPS survey to discover how customers rate your company in terms of their willingness to recommend it.
3. You can create brand advocacy by having customers refer your company to others across media and outlets. Brand advocacy is an organic means of creating lead generation by having loyal customers refer your business.

Making the Most of Your Leads with the Right Market Research Platform

It’s more important to stand out among the crowd that is your niche in the present day of expanding ecommerce and phygital companies. Doing so will allow you to boost your lead generation and acquire loyal customers.

Lead generation is not without its challenges. In order to crack all these challenges, you ought to conduct market research on your consumer base to lure it to your brand. To conduct market research, you need to use robust market research software, the kind that provides high-quality data and speed to insights.

A good example of this is an online survey platform, the kind that offers a mobile-first approach for agile research, random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach respondents in their natural digital environments, artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify poor-quality data and fraud and much more.

This kind of online survey platform will augment all of your lead generation efforts, as surveys get to the heart of customers, allowing you to identify MQLs, better serve all your consumers’ needs, convert them and even forge brand advocates.

by admin

Discovering the Correct Survey Sampling Size for Your Market Research Study

Determining the correct survey sampling size is necessary for establishing a statistically valid survey study. A well-founded survey study must be correctly designed and feature accurate conclusions, those that properly reflect the views of its target audience.

Although it is impossible to survey every member of a target population, your survey findings should be an accurate representation of the studied population. That’s where determining the correct survey sampling size comes into play.

However, even with the proper sampling size in tow, all surveys will undergo some degree of the sampling error. This is because surveys don’t extract the thoughts of every member of a population. Therefore, some findings will be inaccurate.

This article explains how to find the correct survey sampling size, its importance and the sampling size in relation to the margin of error.

Understanding the Survey Sampling Size

The survey sampling size refers to the number of respondents that take part in a survey study, which is also called the sampling pool. Used in market research and statistics, this size is usually determined with regards to the estimated size of the entire population under study.

This sampling pool is composed of a random sample of respondents who represent the studied population at large, as opposed to making up the entire population being studied, as it is impossible to survey every single member in a targeted population.

Market researchers need to determine the proper sampling size for all kinds of survey sampling methods, including probability or random sampling and non-probability or non-random sampling.

Aside from being calculated to find the size most appropriate for representing a large population, the survey sampling size is also useful for reducing the four types of sampling errors.

To determine the correct sampling size for your study, you’ll need to calculate it using several variables. (More on this in a later section).

The Importance of the Survey Sampling Size

The size of your sampling pool should never be random or made at a whim. Otherwise, you’re risking the quality and accuracy of your survey study. The survey sampling size is crucial on a number of fronts.

It is critical to market research campaigns, in that the sample size influences two statistical properties: the precision of our estimates and the power of the study to draw conclusions.

The survey study you run will always have some margin of error in the study results. This influences the precision of the survey results and their use to make predictions. Although this error is inevitable, it can be reduced with the correct sample size.

Larger samples are usually associated with a smaller margin of error. This makes sense when you consider the thousands and even millions of consumers that can fit under one segment of a target market, which can be the target audience of a survey campaign. As such, the larger your sample size, the more insights you gain that represent this audience.

However, there is a point when increasing the survey sample size has no impact on the sampling error. There are also plenty of instances when failing to use an appropriate sampling size undermines the entire study.

You should therefore be careful when calculating your survey sampling error, as both a sample size that is too large and too small will have substandard results.

What Happens When a Sample Size is Too Small

When a sample size is too small, its results will be inconclusive and, in many cases, such as in experimental research, unethical. Thus, in these cases, you won’t be able to make accurate predictions or take actions that require testing, as they may be dangerous. For example, you can’t expose humans or lab animals to possible risks associated with research.

Additionally, the data from this kind of sampling size will yield a disproportionate number of respondents with anomalous answers. These will skew the results, so you won’t retrieve an accurate understanding of the entire targeted population.

What Happens When a Sample Size is Too Large

Using a sample size that is too large is wasteful on both time and resources. It relies on more respondents than is necessary to carry out the survey campaign for accurate findings. With surplus data, the study is not representative of its target population.

This kind of sampling size will also incur more expenses to run the study, which could and should have been avoided.

All in all, an appropriate determination of the survey sampling size for a survey study is an essential aspect of the design of this kind of study.

How to Find the Correct Survey Sampling Size

As aforementioned, determining the correct survey sampling size involves using four variables. These are the population size, margin of error or confidence interval and sampling confidence level.

Once you’ve gathered the information you’ll need to determine the value of each, you can then proceed to the survey sampling size formula and simply plug them in.

Population Size

This variable refers to the total number of people in the population that you seek to survey. When dealing with broad populations, this size will likely be an estimate. For example, the population size of New York City is about 8.419 million people. A much smaller population, such as that of employees, is going to be definite.

Margin of Error

Also called the confidence interval, this is a percentage that relays how much you can expect your survey results to reflect the views of the overall population you’re surveying. Market researchers ought to aim for a smaller margin of error, as the smaller it is, the closer you’ll be to the exact answer at a given confidence level.

Essentially, it answers how much error you’ll have, which dictates how far a percentage will stray. For example, if 70% of respondents said yes to a particular question, with a margin of error of +/- 5%, then the correct percentage is straying by 5% points in either direction. As such, the true percentage is between 65 and 75%.

If you need to determine your margin of error, use the Pollfish Margin of Error Calculator.

Sampling Confidence Level

Although it has a similar name to the previous variable, this is a separate input, dealing with how confident you can be that the population would select an answer within a certain range. For example, a 95% confidence level means that you can be 95% sure the results lie between two certain numbers. The three most common confidence intervals are 90% confident, 95% confident, and 99% confident.

Standard Deviation

This variable Is an estimate of how much your responses will vary from each other and from the mean number. It studies how much individual sample data points deviate from the average population.

A low standard deviation shows that all the values will be situated around the mean number. A high standard deviation means the values are spread out on a much wider range and have very small and very large outlying figures.

Use the standard deviation of 0.5 to make sure that your sampling pool is large enough.

The Next Steps

When you have determined the value of each variable, fill them into the calculation in the section below. The following is a breakdown of the variables:

N = population size

E = Margin of error (percentage in decimal form)

Z = z-score

P = standard deviation

The z-score is the number of standard deviations that a given proportion is away from the mean. To find your proper z-score, use the table below as a reference:

Desired confidence level	Z-score
80%	1.28
85%	1.44
90%	1.65
95%	1.96
99%	2.58

How to Calculate the Survey Sampling Size

Now that you understand each variable used to determine your ideal sampling size, use the following formula to calculate the correct survey sampling size for your particular survey study.

The formula is:

Sample Size = (Z² x P (1 - P) / E²) ÷ 1 + ( (Z² x P (1 - P)) / E² N))

Please refer to the following image for a more visual representation:

If you prefer a more efficient way to determine your sampling size, refer to the Pollfish sample size calculator.

Survey Sampling Size Tips

Calculating your sample size can be a complex process for those not familiar with statistical calculations or who don’t perform mathematics in their daily lives. There are a few key considerations that will help you make sense of the confusion.

Firstly, if you want a smaller margin of error, you will need to have a larger sample size given the same population. Next, if you seek a high sampling confidence level, you’ll need a larger sample size.

If your survey sample size becomes too big to handle, you can adjust the results by doing the following:

decreasing your confidence level
increasing your margin of error

Doing so will increase the chance for error in your sampling pool. However, it can also significantly decrease the number of responses you’ll need.

Optimizing Your Market Research with the Right Sampling Size

To optimize the findings of your survey study, you’ll need to use the correct survey sampling size. The correct sampling size will solidify the accuracy of your data and posit you as more of an authority figure in any of the six main types of research.

Additionally, it will give you peace of mind that the results you’ve extracted are accurate and can be used to take action, whether it is for a business or a research study in other fields.

In addition to an accurate sampling size, you’ll need a strong online survey platform to carry out all your survey campaigns.

We suggest using a strong online survey platform, one that offers agile market research and engages respondents in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling. It should also be designed via a mobile-first platform, as mobile devices dominate the digital space.

When market researchers use an online survey platform with these capabilities, they are setting themselves up for success in all their survey campaign needs.

by admin

Driving Demand with Market Research Software

Driving demand is a constant need for all businesses, whether you operate a fledgling startup, or a long-established company. As one of the central goals that ensure business success, driving demand through lead generation is a top priority for marketers.

That’s why you need to focus your marketing efforts on an agile research strategy, the kind that doesn’t merely provide consumer research, but enables you to take meaningful action. Ideally, the actions you take should be effective in heightening the demand of your business's offerings.

In fact, 44% of marketers say that measuring the ROI of their demand generation initiatives is their top priority for 2021. While it is important, driving demand has its fair share of challenges.

This article explains how the correct market research software can be used for driving demand, whether it is for a product, a subscription, a service, or an experience.

The Importance of Driving Demand

Driving demand goes far beyond merely mustering desire, as it involves all feelings of interest and attraction from the customers towards a company. When businesses drive demand, they are improving across other key marketing functions and strategies.

A business with high demand requires funneling less attention and resources to brand awareness, as a significant portion of its target market doesn’t just already know about the business, but desires it in some way.

Additionally, businesses that excel in driving demand have larger levels of brand equity, the idea referring to the value that a brand derives from the state of having a recognizable name. When brands have high brand equity, they are well-known and achieve success. Businesses with high levels of demand thus produce equity, since, the more consumers seek it and its offerings, the more prominent it becomes in its market.

Brands with high demand also have a symbiotic relationship with cultural trends, in that these brands are responsible for forming new trends, as well as supporting existing ones. This too, raises a business’s popularity and equity.

What’s more, is that when a business becomes culturally relevant, it becomes deeply ingrained in the minds of its target market, along with those who are outside of it, who may one day become customers. This is to say that this kind of brand becomes harder to forget, thereby springing to mind when a customer thinks of their needs or a cultural trend.

Finally, when a brand exceeds in driving demand, it is building a relationship with its customers, paving the way for consumer loyalty, in which a target market chooses one brand over others in the same niche. This is especially important when it comes to establishing customer retention, which is more profitable and less expensive than customer acquisition.

When a business secures its customer retention within its customer base, it is able to increase the customer lifetime value (CLV) of many of its customers. This value expresses the profitability a customer will provide for a brand within their entire relationship with a business. As such, brands must first retain their customers, so that they build their CLV.

Driving Demand Across Various Functions

Driving demand is not merely a product-centric concept. On the contrary, it deals with generating conversion-bent desires and interests within many company aspects across your target market.

For example, some sources of demand include those found in your digital experience, such as a webinar you host, your social media content or your general site content. Additionally, demand can spring from other aspects of the customer experience, such as an enjoyable on-site shopping experience or interactions with your sales representatives.

The more functions and aspects for which you summon demand in your business, the stronger the demand for your company will be.

Fortunately, the proper market research software will allow you to garner customer and general market intelligence that focuses on driving demand. Given that consumer surveys provide a wealth of insights into customer buying behavior, desires and much more, the key is to use a strong online survey platform that can easily draw out granular customer intelligence on demand in relation to your company.

Understanding the Conditions & Functions for Driving Demand

As the prior selection explained, businesses can drive demand across various business functions and conditions. Given that there are many options for driving demand, your business ought to take advantage of as many as possible.

This is not just for the sake of profitability, as one business function may not yield the intended results as might another. Since these are business functions and conditions, they also contribute to other areas of business, working hand-in-hand with driving demand, but this is not their sole function.

The following expresses all the different business functions and conditions that you can use to spike your demand. You can apply market research software to drive demand in all of these conditions:

Product development
1. Before launching a product, you need to assure that it satisfies current market demands for it to achieve any success.
2. This involves taking part in the customer development process, a framework that dictates how businesses should bring a new product to market.
3. You can also quiz customers on their needs by running a consumer survey that focuses on their needs and feelings about current market offerings.
Product innovation and enhancements
1. Brands must examine how their current products are perceived, where they are lacking and how they can be improved.
2. You can test the efficacy and all opinions of your current products via the product satisfaction survey.
Lead generation
1. Generating leads is a must, as they are the key actors in the sales funnel, allowing brands to acquire more customers.
2. You can use B2B surveys for generating business, vendor and partner leads.
3. As for B2C leads, there are various marketing campaigns you can run, alongside market research campaigns to support them. This includes conducting market research for advertising.
Customer experience (CX)
1. This involves all the feelings that your customers develop surrounding their customer buying journey, including the pre-sales and post-sales stages.
2. CX also involves individual interactions with a company, including individual experiences. For example, a grand opening in-store event, an interactive content asset, virtual tours, etc.
3. You can apply the customer experience survey to learn what customers seek and desire from their experiences with your brand.
Concept Testing
1. A crucial aspect of establishing and marketing a new product, service or experience begins with concept testing, which allows you to gauge different concepts in relation to your target market.
2. You can apply A/B testing to your surveys to directly test concepts, should the online survey platform you use offer this in-survey feature.
Marketing Personalization
1. Marketing personalization allows brands to connect with their target market, learn what best speaks to it and allows brands to cater to it more effectively, as opposed to taking the generic route.
2. This drives demand, as 80% of customers are more likely to purchase when brands offer a personalized experience.
3. You should rely on a market research survey to understand your target market on a deeper level, which will allow you to foster demand through personalization.
Advertising and Messaging
1. Advertisements and marketing collateral such as newsletters and website content propel consumers to make purchases.
2. These messages, especially advertisements, use sponsored content and persuasion to move the needle in demand.
3. Using market research software allows you to test ads before they launch, compare marketing messages and get a sense of what grabs your consumers’ interest.

Staying Ahead of Your Competition with the Proper Market Research Software

To secure your business’s success, you should never end your market research and marketing efforts with brand awareness and brand visibility efforts.

Instead, you must drive demand, as this concept doesn’t simply foster customer acquisition. Instead, demand powers your business by reinforcing the desires of your existing customers to continue patronizing your company and offerings.

Using market research techniques is an objectively potent approach to driving demand, as it allows you to study your target market and its various segments. Market research allows you to examine your customers’ needs and desires, so that you can effectively push demand in all areas of your business, from your CX, to content, to physical interactions to the products.

To conduct market research, you need to use robust market research software, the kind that provides high-quality data and speed to insights. A good example of this is an online survey platform, the kind that offers a mobile-first approach for agile research, random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach respondents in their natural digital environments, artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify poor-quality data and fraud and much more.

When you’ve implemented a market research tool with these capabilities, you will be able to obtain insights into all the functions and conditions laid out in the prior section, along with other areas of business that drive demand.

by admin

How Surveys Help Make Critical Business Decisions

Making critical business decisions often require lengthy processes, which involve referring to your strategic planning process and business plan, along with proposals, meetings and lots of persuasion.

Rather than basing business decisions on inferences, which can originate from business documents and the advice of others, businesses ought to consider using data for decision-making. However, businesses need to take heed of context, as data that’s blindly applied is worse than useless — it’s misleading.

This is a problem virtually all businesses will come by, especially those investing in Big Data and AI. In fact, a large number of firms, specifically 64.8% of businesses invest in Big Data and AI. However, only 14.6% of firms have deployed AI capabilities into widespread production.

Businesses should therefore use data with a clear purpose, contextual insights, data filtering and neatly organized so that it is digestible and easy to understand.

This article discusses the weight of business decisions, the confusion and inaccurate conclusions springing from big data and the five key ways that surveys help businesses make crucial business decisions.

The Weight of Business Decisions & Avoiding Wrong Ones

There are plenty of decisions that executives need to make on a daily basis, from taking HR and other internal actions, to relationship-building with partners and clients, to setting goals and budgets.

It is critical for every business decision, regardless of its perceived importance, to be made with the best intentions and for the primary goal of benefiting the company in some way.

When executives and other higher-ups layout fine-tuned goals for employees, their workers will run into fewer issues and make fewer mistakes. Employees will therefore execute all that your business needs more efficiently.

It is key to note that changing business practices on a whim or when you are in a bad mood can have grave consequences. Every business decision should be carefully considered, and gain input from other employees.

Given that all business decisions carry some degree of importance, they cannot be made suddenly. Such decisions must be informed by data, particularly customer data if you’re seeking to form or test new marketing campaigns.

But as aforementioned, many businesses incorrectly use their data, as big data can be misleading, resulting in key stakeholders making the wrong decisions. This is especially true in large sets of data, as it is common to make causal links that appear to be legitimate, but represent fake statistical relationships.

Data needs to be contextual and allow researchers to make accurate decisions. As such, businesses need to conduct market research, specifically primary market research on their target market prior to making any changes or decisions.

In the mobile-first age, your business needs to make business decisions to not only suit your business needs, but to acclimate with the current mobile-first world. This involves your mobile properties, such as your mobile site and app(s), along with the way you conduct market research.

Survey research provides a strong means of gathering customer data, the kind that can help your business avoid the problems from big data.

How Surveys Help Avoid Issues and Make Business Decisions

Conducting survey research is a critical move to make when it comes to using the correct set of customer data and adapting to mobile-first. The proper platform facilitates ease of survey creation, deployment and organizes your data in an orderly fashion.

Given that surveys allow you to ask any question, set the theme of a survey campaign and form qualitative market research via open-ended questions, this kind of data provides all the contextual information your business needs to avoid the common pitfalls of big data.

The following sections explain the five ways you can use surveys to make smart business decisions.

Testing creatives before launching a campaign

Marketing campaigns are often major undertakings that come with large price tags. To avoid any mistakes or issues, such campaigns need to first be tested before launching. Surveys steer all those on the creative side of a team in the right direction, as insights from these tools help creatives form and develop their concepts, making them crucial components of concept testing.

Surveys allow marketers and creatives to take more risks with content by first creating a survey to test different versions of a content idea. Then, they can understand the opinions and feelings of their respondents on a high level, along with examining their reactions more deeply, such as with open-ended questions, which are qualitative in nature.

Understanding different customer segments

Marketing endeavors — or any others — will never hit the mark when you don’t understand your target market, the broad group of customers that are most likely to buy from your business. In order to properly market to and serve your customers, you’ll need to understand them precisely, which includes understanding the segments that make up your target market.

Surveys make this possible, as they are a primary source of executing market segmentation, in which market researchers can divide and organize their target market into smaller groups based on their shared characteristics, such as demographics, location and behaviors. This makes it easier to form marketing campaigns, as you can design them specifically for each segment.

This technique is also ideal for market research, as it allows businesses to study their customers in a more organized and granular manner. If you don’t understand the nuances behind your customers, along with their preferences and aversions, you won’t be able to create messages or innovate on your offerings in a way that is relevant to them.

Understanding what consumers think of your competition

Surveys help you make critical business decisions by way of conducting competitor analysis. Although surveys are deployed to the masses, which includes your target market, you can use them to ask consumers for their thoughts on your direct and indirect competitors.

Whether it is about other businesses in a geographic area or other ecommerce businesses surveys allow you to understand the standing of other businesses in your market. Surveys unveil whether consumers are aware of your competitors, thus allowing you to gauge your competitors’ brand equity, along with what consumers like and dislike about those businesses and their offerings.

In this way, they can also educate you on your market at large, such as its key innovations, demands, movers and shakers, key events and more. As such, surveys are instruments for understanding both your competitors’ performance in the eyes of your consumers and their thoughts on your industry at large.

Spotting trends early

The latest trend may stay culturally relevant to your target market for a while, but it also may just be just a passing fad. Surveys help teams become attuned to cultural trends, current events and the general sentiment around them. With this tool in tow, your team can test their ideas in relation to trends and back them with data.

This includes data on where your industry and niche are heading. Surveys grant you these insights with the potential of spotting trends early on, so that your team stays ahead of the curve and can capitalize on them quickly. Surveys are the perfect tools for adapting to new trends and practices, as their results are available in nearly real-time. (This will depend on the online survey platform you use).

Get feedback on new product ideas

Innovating on products is often difficult; it would be especially unfavorable to launch a product without understanding how your target market feels about it. Perhaps the new product or feature will be useful to your consumers, but there is a chance of it disappointing them.

For example, you may think you’re adding a useful feature or removing an inconvenient feature, while your customers never needed you to take these actions, proving the adage of “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it.” After all, some features, like a USB outlet on a laptop are necessary, but brands may remove it, incorrect about their assumption that it is unneeded. In turn, customers have to hassle with finding the correct adaptor.

Thus, innovation is important, but it carries a lot of risks. As a business owner or market researcher, you need to be wary of these risks, how to minimize them and to innovate in ways that are truly beneficial to your target market. Surveys allow you to do all three, as you can assess product development by asking the right questions.

Surveys are key tools in customer development, a framework part of the lean startup concept, used to ascertain whether a product satisfies the needs of your target market. Surveys also complement an in-home use test, a market research technique that allows researchers to test a new product by way of sending it to a customer's home rather than sending the customer to a facility to try the product.

Making all the Correct Business Decisions

As a business owner or market researcher, you owe it to yourself and your team to make wise decisions to enable employees to trust you and to steer the company in the right direction. All business decisions are important, whether they involve customers, products, vendors or employees.

Surveys allow businesses to properly cater to all of these entities, whether it is marketing to a target market, innovating on products or serving your employees. This is because you can create campaigns centered on virtually any topic, allowing you to understand your target market’s opinions on anything you like.

However, not all online survey platforms are built with the same capabilities. Your business needs to find a strong survey tool that allows you to make your own survey in just three steps, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to weed out poor-quality survey data and implements random device engagement (RDE) sampling to engage respondents in their natural digital environments, as opposed to using pre-recruited participants.

When your business leverages survey software that offers these functionalities, you’re set to make critical business decisions without hesitation.

by admin

Creating the Ultimate Brand Advocate through Survey Research

All businesses should strive to create the ultimate brand advocate, or at least attempt to form some degree of brand advocacy.

This is because brand advocates play a major role in strengthening a business; they raise brand awareness, help brands acquire new customers, reinforce brand trust with existing customers and even vitalize brand equity.

Brand advocates influence 50% of purchasing decisions. In addition, a heaping 92% of online customers trust recommendations from their social circle; clearly, brand advocates are integral players when it comes to helping businesses achieve success, as they make word-of-mouth marketing possible.

This article explains what a brand advocate is, along with describing the importance of brand advocacy, what makes a strong advocate and how surveys help brands obtain a loyal brand advocate.

Understanding Brand Advocacy

A brand advocate is a person who shares positive feedback about their experience and patronage with a company across their network and through various means and media.

Unlike a partnership or an endorsement, brand advocacy doesn’t rely on influencers, though they too can become brand advocates. A brand advocate works without any incentive other than their appreciation for a brand. This means, they do all of their advocacy for free.

Although typically associated with word-of-mouth marketing, a brand advocate can support a company via social media channels, online reviews, forums, chat rooms, emails, and other electronic and non-electronic means.

A brand advocate can also express their satisfaction with a company through their own content, whether it is a blog post, images or videos of their using a product or interacting with a company.

This kind of advocate acts as a representative of a brand community, showing others how a brand and its offerings are valuable. Their support for a company is entirely voluntary, thus, they want to take part in advocacy but don’t have to, as they aren’t getting paid for it.

Brand advocates are usually enthusiastic, and outspoken ambassadors, that rank as promoters in an NPS survey. When businesses identify and leverage ambassadors to drive new business opportunities, they are using brand advocacy.

Examples of Brand Advocacy

Brand advocacy can include various actions. It works best when advocates do it authentically because, although brand advocacy can include influencers, this kind of marketing is unpaid and completely organic.

A few examples of the work that brand advocates can provide include:

Personal (word-of-mouth) recommendations to friends, family and colleagues
Social media posts
User-generated content (UGC)
Customer referrals
Reviews
Participating in (or building) customer communities
Mentions in forums
Link-dropping

What Makes a Good Brand Advocate

In addition to recommending a brand privately, a good brand advocate is anyone who doesn’t shy away from publicly supporting and praising a brand and its products and services.

A valuable brand advocate is one who proactively promotes your business through various outlets and media. Such an advocate is typically a customer but they can virtually be anyone, such as employees, executives, partners and influencers who are genuinely satisfied with your brand and are happy to publicly show their support for it.

The more ideal brand advocates are loyal, have a high customer lifetime value (CLV), have an online reach and closely represent your company’s values and personality.

As aforementioned, a brand advocate works best when they act authentically; no one likes being marketed to under the guise of genuineness. That’s why most advertisements and the like are marked as such. Ex: “paid partnership with…”

When your advocates’ values align with your brand, their advocacy appears to be far more authentic than it would otherwise. This also means that these advocates are in a better position for reaching your target market, as they typically have a network full of people with like-minded interests and views.

For example, if you are an activewear company, a strong brand advocate will have a fitness background, such as that of a worker in the space or someone who takes their fitness routine seriously.

It is especially important for your brand advocates to be real users of your product, service or experiences, as this kind of authenticity carries the core strength beyond brand advocacy: that of brand trust.

This concept makes a brand advocate much more useful and impactful than an influencer, as paid influencers promote products they wouldn’t normally use, making it easy to label their efforts as product placement.

When your brand advocate isn’t affiliated with your company, their support is seen as more genuine and influential to potential customers.

Finally, engaged employees can also be ideal brand advocates, as they are loyal to a company and share their workplace experiences and culture as employee brand advocates. They share these experiences on their social media and other outlets.

The Importance of Brand Advocacy

Brand advocacy is not merely an added benefit for marketing departments and their corresponding businesses at large. It carries major importance for businesses on several fronts.

First off, a successful brand relies on positive public perception, as this is the core of a business’s reputation. Brand advocacy contributes to this with positive messaging and other content that reinforces a brand’s strengths to the masses.

Secondly, customers who share their positive reviews and experiences about a brand on social media and other digital spaces can reel in new customers. As such, a brand advocate helps increase customer acquisition, which is often more expensive than customer retention.

In this way, a brand advocate positively influences your sales. In fact, as the intro mentioned, brand advocates influence a hefty 50% of all purchase decisions — that’s a significant amount of revenue brought in via free marketing efforts.

Brand advocacy is a must, as it renders a company to stand out in a crowd of competitors. This makes a brand seem more trustworthy than its competitors with few or no advocates. Brand advocacy operates as a powerful publicity machine beneficial for all types of organizations, from B2C retailers to B2B companies and even charities.

Brand advocacy also encourages consumer loyalty. This is crucial, given that customer retention costs companies less than acquisition and yields more profits than acquisition. Retention drives 52% of revenue, whereas acquisition drives about 45%.

Brand advocacy and customer loyalty have a symbiotic relationship, in that brand advocates influence existing consumers to remain loyal, while loyal customers can be so committed to a company that they too become brand advocates.

Brand advocacy also builds trust. When consumers trust a company, whether it is in its service, product promises or delivery of values, it will patronize it instead of its competitors. It will also remain in their minds as opposed to other companies in the same niche.

Why? Consider this: a brand with brand trust is valuable, desirable and therefore memorable, whereas a brand without it is seen as just another fish in the sea, another filler or placeholder for the main player. In this case, the evident key player is the brand with brand trust.

Brand advocacy is also important for content marketing strategy, as it boosts content creation. Whenever a brand advocate includes a brand in their social media, video or blog content, they’re providing free marketing. This becomes useful for SEO, when they include links to the brand, which can drive their readers and followers to your website.

You can also ask your brand advocates to contribute to your blog or other content assets, such as a testimonial. Content is king for a reason, as it keeps your website from becoming stagnant. A high content volume also contributes to brand awareness.

Finally, brand advocates can help expand a business’s target market. This is because advocates help convert members of audiences that are not part of a business’s target market. For example, a local gym may notice that most of its clientele are people ages 18-40. However, a brand advocate may encourage and convince a 60-year-old to frequent this gym.

How Surveys Allow Brands To Obtain Brand Advocates

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are brand advocates; rather they are cultivated personas that have to be assured of a brand’s excellence in products, services and experiences.

Brand advocacy is also built through connections. When customers experience strong connections, they connect with brands. Whether it is through brand messaging, values or their CX, when customers form a connection with a brand, they trust it, and brand trust is the gateway to brand advocacy.

But to build this trust, businesses need to first have a strong grip on their target market. As such, they need to study their consumers through easy and practical means. That’s where survey research comes into play as the key practice in primary market research.

Surveys are the most potent tools when it comes to studying a customer base, as they provide firsthand insights from the customers themselves. These insights include information on their customer buying behavior, their likes, hobbies, aversions, opinions, desires, needs, behaviors and virtually all else.

Surveys can be deployed to the masses, across a wide geographic area and tinkered so that only the respondent with the desired demographics, localities and even behavioral qualities are qualified to take part in the study.

That way, businesses only observe the most relevant respondents and gain answers to their most pressing inquiries.

Surveys provide brands with a window into the minds of their target market, allowing them to better market to them, serve them, and most importantly, understand them to cater to them properly and make them feel seen and heard.

Best of all, they are quick to complete, both in terms of deployment and completion of the surveys themselves, should you use the correct online survey platform, that is.

Forming Meaningful Connections with Consumers

Brand advocates are key players for businesses, as they not only posit them in a positive light, but sing their praises to their network of family, friends, colleagues and peers, along with third parties. All companies can therefore benefit from brand advocates.

Surveys are the go-to tools for learning about and fully understanding your customers. While there are many online survey providers, they are not all built with the same capabilities and functionalities. Businesses should therefore choose wisely by opting for a potent online survey platform.

This kind of survey provider should offer an agile platform, one that can easily allow brands to take part in an agile research strategy. It should be a mobile-first platform, as mobile use dominates the digital space.

It should also include advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions, use artificial intelligence and machine learning to skout out low-quality data, have a wide range of filtering data options and engage respondents in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling.

When brands use such an online survey platform, they are on the right track towards studying all their consumer segments and building the ultimate brand advocate.

by lorraine

How to Create a Customer Journey Survey for All of its Stages

Brands ought to create a customer journey survey to observe how their consumers traverse throughout their buying journey.

After all, 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, and It is the customer-centric companies that reap more profits, typically yielding 60% higher profits than companies that aren’t.

Understanding customers’ needs and expectations largely involves understanding their customer buying journey to properly cater to them, as no customer journey is exactly equivalent.

Some customers may undergo long customer journeys before converting. Other customers may detour and head straight to the checkout, while others may leave mid-journey without making a purchase or converting whatsoever.

This article explains the customer journey survey, why it’s useful and important, how to create one and the questions to use for all of its key stages.

Understanding the Customer Journey Survey

The customer journey survey is a kind of survey that examines consumers in relation to their customer buying journey, as its name suggests. It probes customers on the common things they experience and feel throughout their journey, including specific parts of it.

The customer buying journey is a path of all customers’ digital (and sometimes physical) visitations, behaviors and actions before they make a purchase.

This journey is a kind of process in which customers become aware of, examine and evaluate and make the decision to purchase a new product or service. In the digital space, these journeys do not always conclude with a purchase, as sometimes, they are cut short when a consumer decides to purchase elsewhere or not all.

The customer journey survey can be holistic, covering all parts of a customer journey that businesses either perceive or discover by previously surveying their customers or getting feedback via a voice of customer (VoC) program. This survey can also focus on a key aspect of the buying journey, such as one of its three main stages.

The three main stages of a customer journey are the awareness stage, the consideration stage and the decision stage. Businesses ought to deploy different tactics in their content marketing strategy, along with their ecommerce strategy so that customers stay engaged in each of these stages and are prompted to the next one, until they finally make a purchase.

The Importance of the Customer Journey Survey

This kind of survey is important in several ways. Firstly, it helps form the journey itself at a high level, serving as a tactic for customer journey mapping. This practice entails establishing a visual depiction of customer processes, needs & perceptions during their interactions and relationship with a business.

Customer journey mapping is as significant for small and medium-sized businesses as it is for larger enterprises.

Essentially, the customer journey survey allows businesses to map out the customer journey itself. Rather than forming one through assumptions or online templates, this kind of survey shows businesses exactly what customers are doing, thinking and feeling in their journey.

As such, the insights from this survey enable businesses to form their own customer journey maps which they can use for future marketing campaigns or for their strategic planning process.

By understanding the journey of your customers when they engage with your company, this survey type allows businesses to understand the steps customers take – which includes the steps that are easily accessible for brands and the ones that aren’t.

These steps are important for a number of reasons; they include triggers that incite customers to take some kind of action, whether that is clicking through an ad to its landing page, going further into their journey or finally making a purchase.

For example, these steps can include online review, in which 95% of customers read online reviews before visiting a business. 54% of shoppers comparison shop when they browse online, another crucial step in their final purchasing decision.

As such, it is important for businesses to understand the steps of a customer journey, as they shine a light on key customer insights, allowing brands to not simply map out their customer buying journeys, but optimize them.

In addition, being able to map out and improve the customer journey involves taking the proper steps towards making an impact. In this case, the customer journey survey is effective for configuring and optimizing budgets. This is because it shows businesses how customers are reacting to certain messaging, images, offers and other aspects of their customer experience.

In doing so, the customer journey survey is critical to improving your customer experience (CX), as it dictates how customers feel about a business and plays a major role in customers’ purchasing decisions. This survey helps improve CX, as it allows researchers to diagnose existing issues in their journeys, in turn, allowing businesses to tend to those issues, fix them and innovate more on their customer journey, products and CX as a whole.

Creating a Customer Journey Survey

Creating this kind of survey requires taking several key considerations.

First off, if it is your first customer journey survey, you may need to first form a high-level customer journey map that lays out your expected customer journeys. In order to map out this preliminary customer journey, use an analytics source, such as Google Analytics, or a specialized one, such as one that offers session replay.

These tools allow you to access key analytics on your digital traffic, allowing you to see how a customer made their way to a webpage — whether they clicked on an ad or arrived organically — the duration of their visit, how they traversed a site, how they engaged and more.

These insights will help you design your customer journey map and allow you to categorize your journey into the three aforementioned stages of awareness, consideration and decision. It won’t give you much insight into the kinds of customer personas and segments that are taking these journeys. That’s where the customer journey survey becomes incredibly useful.

Not only does this survey let you examine customers' stages and mindsets throughout their journeys, but to identify the kinds of journeys typical among your customer segments and personas.

After you parse through your analytics and other digital traffic tools, refer to your customer segments and their habits. If you do not have access to this, you should conduct market segmentation, another practice made possible thanks to consumer surveys.

Once you have studied your customer segments, consider the segments and personas whose journeys you intend to survey. It is possible that you may need to survey them all to get a clear picture of your customer journeys across personas.

Either way, begin your customer journey survey by organizing each sub-campaign by each persona type. You can also group sub-campaign based on journeys in a certain marketing campaign, such as a particular offer or landing page. The most important thing is to pin down the purpose of your survey campaign so that you have a central point of study.

Next, consider which stages you need to survey; having observed your analytics helps you determine this. If you need to study all stages, consider creating surveys in chronological order. Come up with some key inquiries you need to be answered.

Then, choose from the question examples to use in each step of the journey from the examples in the following sections.

Survey Questions for Awareness

What is the biggest problem you have with [something pertaining to your niche/products]?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection, with an open-ended field option
What bothers you the most about [completing an action, buying a product in your niche, etc.]
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
How do you usually go about fixing this problem?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
What have you considered to fix/ tackle this problem?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
Have you considered using [your brand] for this problem?
1. Answer type: Yes or no, followed by a follow-up question on whether they’ve tried competitors’ products/services and another question on what they like/ dislike about them.
2. Apply skip advanced logic to route your respondents to follow-up questions.

Survey Questions for Consideration

What are your biggest concerns about [the problem]?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection, with an open-ended field option
What is the easiest way for you to solve this issue?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
What would make you choose to try [your brand] if you haven’t already?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection, with an open-ended field option
What do you think of this selection? [Mid-funnel journey question for users of product pages, site menus, etc]
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
How would you rate our services based on the following? [Use image of an ad with a list of strengths relating to buying from your brand]
1. Answer type: Rating scale, stars, etc.

Survey Questions for the Decision Stage

When thinking about other companies that provide product X, which brands come to mind?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
If all of the brands that can fix the problem had different prices, which would you purchase from?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, Matrix question with options that mention price, capabilities and quality
Which company are you most likely to buy from to fix your problem?
1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection,
Have you considered switching brands for this problem?
1. Answer type: Yes or no, followed by a follow-up question on what would make them switch brands or try yours.
Does this ad make you want to buy from us? [Use a multimedia file, such as an image or video that features your brand’s strongest capabilities to fix the customers’ problem.]
1. Answer type: Yes or no, with an open-ended field option
2. Answer type:

Optimizing the Customer Journey Survey

Being attuned to the customer journey is important, as it lets market researchers and businesses understand what their customers go through before finally making a purchase, or cutting their journey short before converting.

The customer journey survey assures that businesses can both map out their customer journey and understand their customers’ decisions throughout it. This kind of approach is strategic to better understanding customer expectations and is therefore crucial for optimizing the customer experience.

Aside from setting up this survey, market researchers need to use a strong online survey platform to carry out this survey campaign.

The most potent online survey platform makes it easy to make your own survey in three easy steps, offers advanced skip logic to route certain respondents to the correct follow-up questions, uses random device engagement (RDE) sampling to engage respondents in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them, implements artificial intelligence and machine learning to disqualify poor-quality survey data and much more.

Businesses who use an online survey tool with these capabilities and more are well-equipped to create customer journey surveys, deploy them, map out their customer journeys and become well-adapted to their customers.

by lorraine

Let's get real

Company

Company

How it works

How it works

Features

Features

Researchers

Researchers

Respondents

Respondents

Publishers

Publishers

Follow

Follow