Diving Into PR Surveys to Boost All PR Campaigns

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:

  1. Blog posts
  2. Press releases
  3. Industry, consumer or current events reports
  4. Whitepapers 
  5. Infographics
  6. Webinars
  7. E-books
  8. Resource pages on your website 
  9. Social media content
  10. Guest posts on other media websites 
  11. Video content 
  12. 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:

  1. 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. 
  2. 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.
  3. 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. 
  4. 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. 
  5. 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. 
  6. 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. 
  7. 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. 


How to Properly Kick Survey Lead Generation into Gear

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

  1. What are your prospects’ biggest pain points? 
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
  2. What kind of content do they prefer to consume? 
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
  3. 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
  4. How do you typically work to resolve this problem?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. 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

  1. What are your biggest pain points in [industry, niche, needs, etc]? 
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
  2. What kind of content do you prefer to see, read or consume? 
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
  3. What kind of issues do you experience in regards to [industry problem, lack, need, etc.]?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
  4. How do you typically try to resolve this problem?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection, open-ended field option
  5. What kinds of products do you use for this problem?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
  6. What brands do you typically use to solve this problem?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-selection
  7. 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.
  8. 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
  9. 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:

  1. 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.  
  2. 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.  
  3. 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.
  4. 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.  
  5. 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.


Discovering the Correct Survey Sampling Size for Your Market Research Study

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 levelZ-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. 


Driving Demand with Market Research Software

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:

  1. 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.  
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. 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.
  5. 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. 
  6. 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.
  7. 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. 


How Surveys Help Make Critical Business Decisions

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.


Creating the Ultimate Brand Advocate through Survey Research

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.


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

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

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. How do you usually go about fixing this problem?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
  4. What have you considered to fix/ tackle this problem?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
  5. 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 

  1. What are your biggest concerns about [the problem]?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection, with an open-ended field option
  2. What is the easiest way for you to solve this issue?  
    1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, with an open-ended field option
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Which company are you most likely to buy from to fix your problem?
    1. Answer type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection, 
  4. 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.
  5. 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. 


How to Build Brand Trust With Surveys

How to Build Brand Trust With Surveys

Businesses must reach a sense of brand trust, as it reflects customers’ expectations of a brand being able to fulfill its promises about its products, services and experiences.

As such, all businesses must work towards securing a strong sense of brand trust, as no business is immune to customers who don’t trust it. 

Although large companies carry high brand equity and therefore seem to be at an advantage when it comes to brand trust, 76% of consumers trust small businesses more than large.

However, this doesn’t mean that small companies automatically have more brand trust and can reap all of its benefits. All brands have to establish this concept for themselves, as lacking it has dire consequences. 81% of customers say that they will only buy from a brand they trust, which leaves the brands that they don’t trust at a major disadvantage, one that will undoubtedly harm their revenue. 

This article explores the notion of brand trust, its importance, benefits, how to achieve it through five common ways and how survey research helps brands attain this consumer confidence.

Understanding Brand Trust

Brand trust gauges how much confidence a target market has in a business. Customers exhibit their trust in a brand as a kind of willingness to rely on the ability of a brand to perform its key functions and the other promises a brand makes, whether they are in the form of advertisements, social media, their website, their marketing content or otherwise.

Brand trust typically arises after customers evaluate companies' offerings. However, there is much more involved in trust-building. Customers, therefore, don't merely assess offers; rather, they weigh a company’s promises against their products, services and experiences. 

This involves CX (customer experience), the total of all the feelings that customers undergo throughout their customer buying journey

The concept of brand trust is rooted in a brand’s reputation, as such, it carries all the important aspects of maintaining a good reputation with customers and the general public. It should thus come as no surprise that brands with poor reputations struggle, while brands with good reputations strive. 

It may take longer for brands to establish a healthy level of brand trust when it is new, virtually unknown or untested, or in times of reputational crises. As for the latter, it can emerge during scandals, significant bad reviews, poor social mentions and more. 

The Importance of Brand Trust

This business concept is important for various reasons, most prominently because the way consumers, especially a target market, feels about business matters. Trust is important, as it is one of the most positive feelings that customers can have towards a brand. 

Brand trust brings value to a target market. While some situations may prompt customers to buy from a brand they don’t trust, these are nothing but one-off instances of need and lack of other options. Trust, on the other hand, fosters consumer loyalty, the bedrock of repeat sales, aka customer retention. It is no wonder that an increase in brand trust correlates with a higher customer retention rate

As such, when brands build trust, customers reward them with ongoing loyalty, a long-lasting relationship in which customers don’t merely buy from the same brand, but choose it over competitors time and again. In this way, the continuous support brands attain with brand trust yields a higher CLV, or customer lifetime value.

CLV denotes the total monetary value a customer will bring to a business during their relationship with the business across their lifetime. Given that brand trust incites customers to continuously purchase from the same brand, it positively ties in with customers’ CLV. Thus, the longer relationships present in retention spur more monetarily valuable customers.

Aside from valuable customers, brand trust is crucial to a company's livelihood, as it softens the blow of a reputational crisis. This is because customers who are loyal will continue to engage and purchase with a company they trust, as opposed to a company they have little or no trust in. As such, brand trust serves as a kind of security blanket, enabling companies to take more risks. 

Brand trust also forges brand advocacy. When a happy customer becomes a recurring customer, they tend to speak out about their positive CX, therefore becoming a customer advocate. Customer advocates help brands obtain brand awareness and augment their brand visibility, reputation and overall branding efforts. 

They do this by spreading rave mentions about the brand they trust on social media, forums, review sites, brand websites’ comment and review sections, along with via word of mouth. This is tremendously important for a business, as customer advocates do many of the things that salaried marketing and PR employees do, but for free.

Finally, when a brand reaches high levels of brand trust, it is not only setting itself up for a better reputation and higher sales, but it is growing in its potential to be a key player in the cultural trends of an industry. Sometimes, this potential may carry over to greater cultural relevance, such as being a household name of a product that represents an entire country. 

The Benefits of Brand Trust

brand trust

There are several benefits to brand trust, which complement its importance, as laid out above. These benefits also bring new ideas that support the need to establish and maintain brand trust. The following lists the key benefits of securing a strong sense of brand trust within your business:

  1. Brand trust drives new business, making customer acquisition more feasible.
  2. It makes consumers more receptive to marketing campaigns.
  3. It fosters connections with consumers and drives loyalty.
  4. It allows brands to innovate more, since consumers trust what they.
  5. It makes those who write or speak negatively about a company lose credibility.
  6. It helps brands achieve cultural relevance when strong enough. 
  7. Key benefits such as brand loyalty, advocacy and goodwill allow businesses to overcome various challenges and obstacles.

10 Ways to Build Brand Trust 

There is far more to building brand trust than simply executing a strong product experience. Consumers have growing concerns about the customer experience (CX) that brands promise, along with other promises brands make in their marketing messages, such as their impact on society. 

As such, businesses need to pay attention to other key facets to work towards strengthening, solidifying, and in some cases, establishing brand trust. The following lists include 10 pieces of advice for brands to build trust among their target market and the general public.

  1. Create quality products and services.
  2. Establish optimal omnichannel CX, including digital experience, in-person, over the phone, etc.
  3. Charges reasonable prices.
  4. Offer promotions, sales and customer rewards programs.
  5. Include a generous return policy. 
  6. Treat customers well, whether on a chat, on phone support, etc.
  7. Handle customer service issues quickly.
  8. Keep up your end of promises.
  9. Establish clear communication with customers.
  10. Create consistent content; content is king for many reasons.

How to Forge Brand Trust Through Surveys

Survey research is a proven method of accurately measuring consumer sentiment through customer feedback — when used with the correct online survey platform, that is. Surveys allow businesses to probe as deeply as they wish into virtually any business matter, from product satisfaction to customer effort. When it comes to building trust, surveys allow market researchers and business owners to understand their target market’s needs, desires, expectations and aversions, which essentially tells them all they need to know to build trust. 

Researchers can set up surveys with questions that are as granular as they need, allowing them to zero in on a topic, so that they can identify and apply the proper course of action, whether that entails correcting something, creating a new product feature, changing an existing experience and much more. 

Additionally, researchers can make their sampling pool as granular as possible in the screening section of a survey. In this section, researchers can filter respondents as precisely as they need, setting eligibility requirements on demographics, psychographics, device used and more. 

Researchers can even set restrictions based on how respondents answer additional screening questions, permitting only those who answer in a certain way to take part in the survey. That way, only the qualified respondents will be able to take the survey. 

By providing precise information and quality data, surveys enable businesses to extract only the information that they need to build brand trust. Businesses can deploy as many surveys as they deem necessary. By iterating surveys, brands can gather as many perspectives as possible from their target market, paving the way for new ideas to build and improve trust and maintain statistical accuracy in the findings.

Heightening Your Brand for the Long Term

Brand trust is critical for the survival of any business. Whether you seek to increase sales or customer loyalty, remain relevant or simply to stay afloat, you need to build brand trust for your business.

When your brand consistently delivers on quality, reliability and credibility, it will yield significant benefits, as customers will go to your brand first and repeatedly when they look for products and services in your niche. 

To build brand trust, you must understand your customers as precisely as possible, cater to their needs and form marketing campaigns and promises to begin with. Survey research has transformed businesses' access to consumers, allowing them to reach a wide swath of their target market and extract their feedback and other necessary customer data. 

However, not all online survey platforms are built the same, therefore, they don’t all offer the same capabilities and reap the same benefits. To gain the most quality customer data, businesses must use a strong online survey platform, the kind that offers random device engagement (RDE) sampling to engage respondents in their natural digital environments, uses

You should also use a platform that offers advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions, one that implements quality data checks via artificial intelligence and machine learning and much more.

When an online survey platform offers these capabilities, businesses gain the most relevant and high-quality consumer data, the kind that allows them to accurately understand their customers’ preferences, expectations and virtually all else. In turn, it allows businesses to feasibly build and improve their brand trust. 


Optimizing the Customer Buying Journey with Surveys

Optimizing the Customer Buying Journey with Surveys

To properly execute their strategy, businesses need to study their customer buying journey, adapt to it and optimize it so that customers experience a quicker path to purchase.  

Marketing and market research departments, therefore, need to actively engage in their sales cycle to optimize their customer journeys. 

Given that shoppers today have a wealth of information within reach, it affects their customer buying behavior and in turn, their buying journeys. 67% of the customer buying journey takes place digitally. Businesses can take advantage of this digitized shopping, by nurturing and studying their target market online. 

Surveying customers as they meander through their buying journey is a solid technique to better understand them, their thought process and their buying journey.

This article delves into the customer buying journey, explaining its importance, its three main stages, how survey research can help optimize this journey and more.  

Understanding the Customer Buying Journey 

This concept refers to the customer’s path to making a purchase. The customer buying journey is a process in which customers become aware of, examine evaluate and make the decision to purchase a new product or service.

This occurs, as most customers do not suddenly decide to purchase something on a whim; rather they consciously wade through three main stages that make up the typical customer buying journey. These stages are the awareness, consideration and decision stages. 

The customer buying journey is essentially an active kind of research process that customers participate in before they make a purchase. During this journey, they encounter both customer and brand experiences, both of which impact the course of their journey, along with the customers’ final decision. 

In a nutshell, this process involves everything that a customer would need to do before deciding whether or not to purchase from a business. 

The Importance of the Customer Buying Journey 

The buying journey holds an abundance of importance for businesses and customers. Businesses can take advantage of it by providing value and answers to customers at each stage. By doing so, they can successfully nurture customers to decide to buy from them. 

By mapping out a customer journey and studying it, businesses can avoid making mistakes, such as those that come from traditional approaches, including waiting for customers to be ready or using a hard sales pitch. 

Businesses can instead take the approach of giving customers all that they need based on the stage in their journey and steering them towards the business. Businesses can also use the buying journey stages to build trust with customers, rather than forcefully egging them on to buy. 

This is important, as trust has a massive influence on customers. Nurturing potential customers according to their position in the buying journey gives brands a high potential to build trust, thereby later converting their prospects into customers.

Additionally, the customer buying journey is important because it offers a strategic approach to better understanding customer needs and expectations. When market researchers map out and study this process, they are far better equipped to provide their customers with a good customer experience (CX). CX alone is largely important, as 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience.

However since customer expectations are constantly shifting for all businesses, regardless of their size, all businesses must pay attention to their customer behavior in their buying journeys. Becoming attuned to this journey enables businesses to understand their target market better, giving them the advantage to optimize their customer buying journeys and win over leads

Mapping the customer journey also includes the benefit of allowing businesses to improve and accelerate their customer onboarding process. This will allow new customers to get acquainted with and begin using a new product more efficiently and with ease. A quickened customer onboarding process delivers value to customers much sooner, granting them more fulfilling product satisfaction

Moreover, studying the buying journey enables brands to understand the key differences in their customer personas as they move through the stages of the buying journey. Not every persona can feasibly convert from a prospect to a paying customer through the same efforts. As such, businesses should be aware of their customer journeys within all of their customer segments. 

All in all, the buying journey is an increasingly important framework that all businesses should use to outline their marketing and strategic planning process, as it can improve sales.

The Three Stages of the Customer Buying Journey 

As aforementioned, this journey is composed of three main stages: awareness, consideration and decision stages.

When planning out marketing strategies, businesses need to lay out this process for each of their customer personas. That way, the content and other marketing collateral they produce will be useful for each persona at every stage. 

The following explains the three stages of the buying journey:

The Awareness Stage

In this stage, customers become aware that they have a problem. As a means of addressing the problem, customers will search the web for resources. These include consuming content on the cause of the problem. 

While reading through this kind of content, which can include blogs, videos, infographics and articles, the customers identify the source or core of their problem. As such, at the end of this stage, customers often leave with a new sense of their true problem, meaning that it may be slightly or entirely different than their original problem. 

To adapt to this stage, brands ought to focus on content that addresses customer pain points, which can help customers extract more issues related to their problem (that your business can solve). 

Brands should implement industry-focused content and social media to grant an authoritative point of view. Advertising and PR that make mention of the customers’ problem is also necessary for this stage. 

The Consideration Stage

In the middle stage, customers define their problem after narrowing it down in the previous stage and consider their options to solve it. In this stage, customers become solution aware, as they evaluate specific products and services and consider different buying criteria. 

To adapt to this stage, businesses should show prospects what it is like to use their products and services specifically, focusing on how they provide solutions. 

As such, they should use the following marketing collateral and content to nurture prospects in this stage: webinars, case studies, demos, vendor comparisons and trials, along with offers to entice customers to a brand, such as free samples and trials. 

The Decision Stage

In the final stage, customers understand the solution they need and just have to decide on which provider, product, or service to use to carry out their solution. It involves customers deciding on their purchase; as such, it often includes speaking with a salesperson, especially in B2B industries.

In this stage, customers are provider-aware; for brands to adapt to this stage, they need to understand the objections that their prospects may have and handle them immediately. 

They also need to provide their customers with a unique selling proposition. This will show customers how a business offers value to them and what sets the brand apart from its competitors. 

By this stage, the potential customers will have done all the research to be well informed on the services that will fit their needs best, along with the companies they believe are most suitable. As such, businesses must prove their superiority through customer reviews, testimonials and case studies

Additionally, any content that posits a business as the better choice over a competitor is necessary to persuade potential customers to buy.

How Surveys Optimize the Customer Buying Journey 

Optimizing this journey involves understanding your customers at a granular level, especially as it concerns their purchasing behaviors, as every customer persona, let alone an individual customer, is different. 

No matter how well a business understands its customers — whether it involves their lifestyle, demographics, opinions, wants, or needs — these aspects are subject to change. With new technologies, innovations to products and changes to services, customers acclimate and change alongside them.

Businesses must follow suit by keeping up with not only the changes within their industry but also their customers’ reactions and subsequent behavior in light of those changes. Surveys are the most equipped tools for garnering granular and up-to-date customer insights. 

That’s because, with surveys, businesses can obtain customer feedback within all the stages of the customer buying journey. Moreover, surveys equip businesses with a deep understanding of their customer segments, allowing them to perform market segmentation and identify customer personas. 

With these insights in tow, businesses can map out the customer buying journey for each of their customer segments and personas, creating a more personalized experience, which is key to a good CX. 

Businesses can also survey their customers on their experience and expectations in each stage of their customer buying journey. This will ensure that they are properly marketing to them, answering key questions and setting themselves apart in a competitive setting.   

Surveys also provide insight into customers’ specific problems, showing businesses how they can innovate and perfect their existing products, services and experiences. As such, surveys are the lynchpin to understanding a target market, allowing businesses to optimize each stage of their buying journey.  

Being Attuned to Customers in an Omnichannel Setting

Customers seek highly personalized experiences as they wade through their customer buying journey. They reach a particular brand through various channels in their buying journey, which is known to brands as using the omnichannel approach.

To deliver a viable omnichannel approach, businesses must map out their customer buying journeys for various customer segments and personas. To do so aptly, they need to use surveys, as explained above. However, they must decide on a robust online survey platform to obtain valuable results.

To do so, they ought to use an online survey platform that offers a user-friendly interface for creating and deploying surveys to a massive network across websites, mobile sites and apps.

A strong survey tool offers advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions, implements quality data checks via artificial intelligence and machine learning, offers a wide range of filtering data options, engages respondents in their natural digital environments via random device engagement (RDE) sampling and much more.

With such an online survey platform, businesses can easily glean insights into their customer preferences and buying habits, allowing them to accurately map out their customer buying journey and optimize it to increase their revenue


Acclimating to Market Research in a Post-Pandemic World

Acclimating to Market Research in a Post-Pandemic World

The COVID-19 pandemic has upturned the world in many ways, including the world of market research. However, the post-pandemic world has been gradually emerging, with mass vaccine rollouts, reopenings, office returns for certain workers and the lift of various pandemic-related restrictions.

There are still many market changes that market research constantly seeks to better understand, such as customer expectations, customer behavior, expenditures, loyalty and all other consumer-related factors. 

One such change involves customer shopping behavior; three-quarters of Americans changed their shopping behaviors since the pandemic began, with 40% of customers switching brands. The percentage of brand-switching is double that of 2019, showing that customer loyalty is not permanent and many customers will patronize new businesses, should those businesses meet their demands more effectively. 

These customer buying behavior changes along with the market at large, have incited even further alterations in market research, several of which entail adapting or getting left behind. This article discusses the new changes and challenges of market research in a post-pandemic world, along with how to conduct market research in this post-COVID world.

Acclimating to a Post-Pandemic World

As we steadily wade into a post-pandemic world, there are many changes and challenges that market researchers and business owners alike must address and adapt to. Many of these deal with changing customer behaviors, along with their behaviors in relation to the market research campaigns they partake in. 

The post-pandemic world has been making motions in technologies, approaches and methodologies, many of which were applied during the pandemic, carried over to a post-COVID world. In this way, it is clear to see that the market research industry was not spared changes that need accommodating as the pandemic eases off. 

For example, there is a heightened need to use ethically sourced and smart market research, as consumers become more aware of the impact and security that goes with sharing their information. As such, there is more concern over data privacy and certain jurisdictions have enacted changes accordingly

For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been updated, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has been established, along with newly emerging antitrust laws.

On the business end, there have been cuts to both marketing and market research budgets, with some market research cuts being as high as 71%, despite the scope of market research needs not being in decline. Although it may appear to be reasonable outwardly, businesses should avoid market research cuts, as slow sales periods (such as those induced by the pandemic) point to the importance of studying a target market and understanding the causes behind customer attrition and customers who switch brands.  

Businesses and market researchers should keep track of these shifts, as many of them signify the need of making changes to their business in order to adapt to the malleable market research space. 

In order to stay updated on market research changes in a post-pandemic world, researchers should conduct secondary research, such as staying on top of industry news within their niche, along with reading authoritative market research websites, such as the Pollfish market research content library.  

The Post-Pandemic Changes in Market Research

There are various instances of observable and measurable changes to the market research sphere in the wake of the pandemic. These include changes in consumer behavior, challenges to data and research collection, increased digitization, automation and the market research shift to mobile.   

In this section, we explore each of these changes, their ensuing challenges, methods of adaptation and more.

Consumer Behavior

  1. Brand switching and loyalty changes
    1. 45% of consumers say that COVID-19 changed their brand preferences, and 62% of them expect permanent shifts.
  2. Consumers have discovered the convenience of getting all of their needs met at home, whether through digital services or contactless delivery.
  3. There is a greater desire for convenience, as consumers continue to make many purchases online.
  4. Constant consumer change is part of the new normal, as only 16% of US online adults say they will revert to a pre-pandemic sense of normalcy after the pandemic ends, 75% say that the pandemic will create long-term changes in their behaviors and preferences.

Data Collection

  1. Several developments that have been unfolding since 2020 will force the digital ecosystem to brace itself for changes, especially those that deal with privacy. 
    1. For example, to improve consumer privacy and mitigate excessive data collection, Apple now uses an opt-in consent to its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), so that iOS owners can choose whether to allow their IDFA to be collected and shared across apps. 
    2. Google is going to remove third-party cookies from its browser by 2022. 
  2. These changes will usher in a digital upheaval that will be felt across industries, especially in online market research.
  3. In response to these changes, market researchers will need to find ways to get first-party data, since they won’t have access to tracking cookies.
  4. This involves making personal and direct connections with online consumers.
  5. Market researchers need to be more careful and select the correct digital solutions to the adjusting digital ecosystem.

Increased Digitization 

  1. The digital economy grew since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, as digital sales increased across all industries.
  2. The rise in digitization will continue during the recovery phase of COVID-19.
  3. There has been an ongoing digital transformation across all industries, with many finding novel ways to cater to consumers online.
  4. Internet traffic in some countries rose by up to 60%, as consumers took to the internet in lieu of making in-store purchases, and using in-person services. 
  5. In order to survive, companies must adapt, reorganize and implement new digital technologies.

Automation

  1. Routine and repetitive tasks, including taking surveys and analyzing data can be automated by machines, a boon and a bane for the market research industry.
  2. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can easily parse and process large amounts of data. 
  3. Chatbots are being employed in online market research studies as a means of getting respondents.
  4. Market research and online survey software will soon be widespread and available to clients, removing the need for agency-based syndicated research
  5. Consumers and market research workers alike will have quicker expectations of turnaround.

The Shift to Mobile

  1. As mobile traffic continues to rise around the world, market researchers must take advantage of this landscape, as it provides another medium to extract consumer data. 
  2. This involves creating and deploying surveys online and conducting studies purely through mobile. 
  3. Mobile market research costs are lower than that of a research panel.  
  4. With the shift towards ethnographic research, researchers can observe their participants in their natural environment, as people use their mobile devices voluntarily. 
  5. The medium of mobile helped improve this methodology with observational research apps allowing researchers to examine behaviors in natural settings.
  6. RDE (random device engagement sampling) is necessary to tap into ethnographic mobile research, as it reaches respondents through randomization, in a wide swath of mobile apps and websites. In this way, it gains data from consumers in their natural mobile environments.  

Conducting Post-Pandemic Market Research

With all the ongoing changes the pandemic and its post-pandemic era have brought about, it may appear murky if not extremely difficult to conduct a market research campaign

However, market researchers who pay heed to the changes, build a solid agile research strategy and use the market research correct tools will be able to both survive and thrive in the post-pandemic world of market research. 

There are several best practices to conduct a solid market research campaign post-pandemic. Researchers ought to perform the following steps to maintain a useful market research study during the post-pandemic age.

  1. Conduct secondary research by visiting industry-specific websites and blogs.
  2. Read market research blogs and resource pages, such as the aforementioned Pollfish resource center. 
  3. Consider the changes you’ve observed from conducting secondary research and ideate on how you can acclimate to those changes, whether they involve new customer desires, preferences or needs,  methods pertaining to research. 
  4. Conduct primary research. The most efficient way to go about this is with a DIY online survey platform.
  5. Use an online survey platform that offers a mobile-first design. Test it before choosing the correct platform, as many such platforms claim to be mobile-first, but offer surveys that lack in the mobile experience. 
  6. Conduct various market research studies, from brand tracking, to product satisfaction, to VoC (voice of the customer surveys). 
  7. After analyzing your survey individually, consider all of your studies collectively. 
    1. What are the recurring patterns and actions that you notice across studies?
  8. Create a strategy to address the concerns you discovered in the primary research stage.
  9. Test the strategy through the 6 main types of research, along with survey research and A/B testing. 
  10. Iterate, test, discuss findings with your team members and take the necessary actions to improve your research, along with serving your customers.

Acclimating to a post-pandemic World

While 2020 has been a time to pause and reflect on changes, 2021 and the rest of the post-pandemic period require studying and implementing new market research strategies

After all, with changes to customer behavior and preferences, there have also been changes and innovations to technologies, strategies and methodologies. As such, market researchers must stay on top of emerging trends, market research techniques and most importantly, their target market, to properly execute their next major action.

Thus, businesses and researchers need a strong market research tool to accommodate all the post-pandemic changes. A strong online survey platform offers a mobile-first design, random device engagement (RDE) sampling, AI and machine learning to conduct quality checks on the data and effortless deployment across mobile and other digital properties to lure in a diverse set of respondents

When researchers use such an online survey platform, they are well-equipped to study their fickle consumers in a constantly changing post-pandemic world.