Attracting a Survey Audience the Right Way with Market Research Software

survey audience

When it comes to attracting a survey audience, you’ll need more than just a well-built questionnaire and an idea of your study’s primary targets. You’ll need to incorporate the proper methods and tools to attract your target market —  or your target audience, if you’re not a business.

After all, your target market makes up the core of any market research survey campaign and most notably, the heart of virtually any business matter. You should never lose sight of who comprises your customer base and what their preferences are.

When you attract the proper survey audience to your survey, you’ll glean crucial insights that can help you optimize your entire customer experience. This is a must, as improving customer experience creates up to an 80% increase in revenue for businesses.  

Moreover, understanding your target market provides key data for decision-making, the kind that informs a wide breadth of campaigns, from content marketing, to advertising, sales and more.

This article explains how to obtain the proper survey audience and how to do so on the Pollfish online survey platform. 

How to Begin: What to Do Before Reaching Out to Your Survey Audience

Before you reach out to your target audience, you’ll need to take a few considerations into account and act on them. You wouldn’t want to end up surveying the wrong people. This will cost you money, create wasted efforts and fail to reach those who are interested in your offerings.

Many companies fail on this front, as 80% of marketing initiatives are aimed at the wrong target audience

While gaining insights on different segments of a population is important for different research pacticies, when it comes to market research, you should stick to following your specific target market and its different segments and customer personas

What to Do Before You Attracting Your Survey Audience to Your Survey

As aforementioned in the previous section, here’s what you ought to do before targeting your survey audience:

    1. Determine the primary needs of your market research campaign.
      1. Determine the main findings you seek to take away from it.
      2. For example: do you need insights into customer behavior
      3. Or, are you looking to conduct market research for advertising?
    2. After identifying its primary concerns, create a title and theme of your market research campaign.
    3. Determine the efforts you’ll need to carry out your campaign.
      1. This includes choosing various methods to accompany your survey, such as conducting secondary research.
    4. Then, identify a preliminary amount of survey research you’ll dedicate towards your campaign.
      1. This includes determining how many surveys you’ll need to conduct, their primary subject matters, their questions and a timeframe.
    5. Choose a strong online survey platform to host your market research campaign.
      1. The is a wide range of criteria when it comes to decking on the best survey platform.

How to Choose the Best Survey Platform to Reach Your Target Audience 

Piggybacking off of the last point in the previous section, you’ll need to find a potent market research platform before reaching out to your survey audience. That’s because this platform will be the centralized space for all your survey campaigns, which includes attracting the correct audience.  

It plays a major role in dealing with your survey subjects throughout the entirety of your research campaign. That’s because you’ll need it prior to reaching out to your survey audience and while you target them, as their responses get filtered out via a cycle of quality checks.

survey audience platform
The following explains what to consider when choosing the best survey platform for attracting your desired survey audience:

  1. A platform that deploys surveys across a wide network of publishers
    1. Ideally, these are highly trafficked websites, apps and mobile sites
  2. One that procures respondents where they naturally exist online 
    1. This can be done via RDE sampling or random device engagement.
  3. One that allows surveys to be formed in a wide variety of languages
    1. Ideally, one that offers a feature for survey translations 
  4. A platform that quickly gathers all responses
    1. A strong platform will have turnover rates of no more than 2-3 days maximum.
  5. Easy to use and create
    1. One that allows you to make your own survey in 3 easy steps.
  6. An interface that allows you to screen respondents based on their demographics, psychographics and geolocation.
  7. All the data you collect is proprietary to you, as opposed to the provider of the market research platform.
  8. Software that doesn’t charge extra to conduct global market research.
  9. One that partners with publishers that offer survey incentives.
  10. A platform that offers a multitude of question types, media files and survey templates to build a custom and engaging questionnaire 
  11. One that offers the option of sending surveys to specific people or via a link you can place anywhere.
    1. This can be done via the Distribution Link feature.
  12. A platform that offers 24/7 support, so that you can conduct market research from anywhere, at any time.

How to Reach Your Survey Audience on Pollfish

To reach your survey audience on Pollfish, you’ll first need to decide how you’re going to distribute your surveys. You can opt for the RDE method, in which your surveys will be automatically distributed through our vast network of publishers.

Or, you can use the aforementioned Distribution Link feature, which allows you to send a link to specific individuals who you’ve identified or have the email of. This route also allows you to send surveys to a more narrow scope of respondents. 

Usually, these are people who are familiar with your brand, as they will have clicked on your survey through a link via your brand’s web page or social media account. Or, they may have been directly emailed the link, in which case, they’ve provided their email address to your brand.

reach your survey audience

After you’ve chosen your distribution method, you can then hyper-target your survey audience. 

The following provides instructions on how to reach your target audience on Pollfish:

    1. Create a new project on the survey dashboard by hitting its designated button.
    2. There, you‘ll be asked: How would you like to collect responses to your survey?
    3. Choose between the two distribution options of buying responses or send your survey your way.
      1. Buy responses: This allows you to use the Pollfish global survey network to reach your audience, in which you pay $0.95 per complete response.
      2. Send your survey your way: This allows you to send your surveys via the Dsitvition Link feature. As such, you can choose whether to send the link via email, social media or a web page.
      3. If you opt for the latter, offer survey incentives to attract your audience to your study. 
    4. Then, you’ll be taken to the Audience section of the platform. 
      1. Here, you can target your audience as you see fit.
    5. You have the option of using Multiple Audiences in your survey, or just one.
      1. Find it on the lefthand panel, which is automatically titled Audience 1.  
      2. You can add another audience by clicking on the + symbol at the bottom of this panel.
    6. In the lefthand audience panel, you can choose the number of respondents who will partake in the survey/ will be targeted. 
      1. Do so near the pencil icon beside ‘Survey completes.”
    7. Then, you can select the gender of the audience, along with quotas that dictate how many of each.
    8. After that, you have the option of adding up to three screening questions and choosing the answers that will disqualify people from your survey.
      1. This allows you to target respondents via a psychographic and behavioral-based approach.
    9. Next, add and filter all your demographic, geolocation and device requirements.
      1. Here, you can be very granular, as each type of criterion allows you to include various subcategories and quotas.
      2. For example, under the employment category, you can add quotas to a variety of employment types, such as employed for wages, out of work and looking for work, military, retired, etc. 
    10. Review all of your survey respondent requirements.
      1. Make sure you are targeting the correct audience, ie, your target market.
    11. In the questionnaire section of the survey, add 1-5 questions.
      1. Keep your question count short and your questions relevant and interesting to your audience.
    12. Add different media elements to keep your audience engaged throughout their survey experience.   

Constant Access to Any Target Population

With the right online survey platform, you will have instant access to any target population, no matter who it comprises and how far it spans geographically.

To reach the correct survey audience, you’ll need a platform that deploys surveys within a mass network of publishers, ones that account for major websites, apps and mobile sites, along with one that also grants you the ability to send surveys your own way.

A strong market research platform will also attract your survey audience with an appealing digital element that leads to your survey and easily grabs users’ attention. In addition, it will partner with publishers who gamify surveys, allowing respondents to gain incentives while playing a game, making the experience far from boring.

You should also opt for an online research platform that makes buying survey respondents a quick and simple process. This way, you’ll collect all your necessary data from the right respondents in a short space of time. 

Additionally, use a platform that features artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

It should also include advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. 

When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to reach any survey audience and run quality research campaigns at any time