How Surveys Improve Content Marketing Strategy
To survive in the modern age, your business needs a solid content marketing strategy. Content speaks volumes about a business — and not solely about business offerings. Rather, it gives marketers the chance to posit their business as a thought leader in their space.
Surveys help businesses on a variety of matters, one of which is enhancing content strategy, proving the vast extent of the aptitude of survey research. This is largely due to the ability to extract unique and concrete insights from your target market.
This article explains how surveys improve a business’s content marketing strategy and the various times most apt for using surveys.
Defining Content Marketing Strategy
Many marketers believe that content marketing strategy involves posting a blog every week — and that is where they are regrettably mistaken.
While blogs are key content components, they are far from the requirements of a content marketing strategy.
As its name indicates, content marketing strategy is a strategy designed for the subdiscipline known as content marketing.
Content marketing must always be strategic in its approach in order to yield any results. As such, the basis of its strategy includes creating and delivering valuable content. Moreover, the content must be relevant, timely, consistent and interesting to attract and maintain an audience.
After all, when your content allures your target market, its members are more likely to view your content, i.e., give you impressions. The more impressions you gain, the more likely you are to produce conversions.
But businesses shouldn’t focus on one-time conversions, as customer retention is more valuable than customer acquisition. For example, there is a 60-70% greater success rate in selling to existing customers than new ones.
A strong content marketing strategy allows brands to increase customer retention and surveys contribute to this. This is because it is favorable to use surveys for customer loyalty.
How Surveys Improve Content Marketing Strategy
As aforementioned, putting surveys to use can help businesses develop the highly sought-after objective of customer loyalty. But before you create enough campaigns and measure customer satisfaction with surveys, you need to build customer loyalty from the ground up (or enhance it if you are a seasoned business).
Surveys can help you do just that.
There are several ways surveys help aid your content marketing strategy. The foremost benefit of surveys is granting your business with customer data, the kind that comes directly from them, rather than being based on trends and other data you would extract from secondary research.
While the latter is useful and can help you form aspects of your content strategy, it is only a small aspect of building effective survey studies for valuable market research.
Surveys, on the other hand, empower your market research and by extension, your content marketing strategy, as they provide insight at virtually any stage in your overall market research campaign.
Although survey research is conducted following secondary research, it can be the starting point of your research campaign as well. For example, exploratory and descriptive research are conducted to lay out a problem and situation along with its hypotheses and details, before studying correlations, causes and solutions.
These early research surveys are useful in setting up your content marketing campaigns, as they provide you with the key problems and settings of your target market and niche.
Let’s pore over the specifics of survey benefits for content marketing strategy.
What Surveys Measure for a Content Marketing Strategy
Surveys are NOT the end all be all when it comes to market research for your content marketing strategy. They do, however, offer several benefits. These manifest in the kind of data you can extract for your content marketing needs.
The following lists the things that surveys help businesses measure:
- Key demographic, behavioral and geographic information of respondents. These help you perform market segmentation to understand the precise makeup of your target market and its individual segments.
- Opinions about your business. This is an encompassing topic that covers everything from their customer experience (CX), to perceptions about your ads and communications, to feelings about your customer support.
- Thoughts on your industry and niche. This helps you form content ideas. For example, let’s say you sell apartments in a particular area. A community survey can reveal the biggest qualms and desires your target market has about a particular neighborhood or real estate business (in relation to apartments) in general.
- Impact of your content: You can create surveys about particular content assets and content elements. This helps you learn which assets are resonating, which are lackluster and what kind your target market is most interested in reading/consuming.
- Reactions to competitor content: You can be discrete in these surveys, i.e., not mention competitors by name. Instead, you can create surveys that ask about specific content aspects, including comparisons with your own.
- Insights into customer pain points: Understanding the pain points of your target market is ideal for all business practices, especially for products/services, as you can market your offerings as anecdotes to customers’ problems. Additionally, you can use customer pain points as the foundation for various content assets.
- Ex: blogs, case studies, reports, etc. can all address pain points but their value lies in positing your business/product/service as the solution to those pain points.
- Social media reactions: Surveys allow you to inquire into the sentiment around your social media experience. You can be upfront in your questionnaire by asking respondents which posts are boring, which provide the least amount of value and which they enjoyed reading or viewing.
- Customer expectations: These can waver, especially as customers come and go. Surveys grant you direct insights into what customers desire, which you can later use in your content marketing efforts. Content that speaks to customer needs and feedback generally reaps positive results.
What Surveys Help You Discover for Content Marketing
Aside from the above section, which delineates the customer insights surveys can provide from your content marketing strategy, surveys can do so much more. Surveys animate your content, as they can provide you with original content, the kind your competitors won’t be able to reproduce.
Here are several ways surveys enliven your content marketing efforts:
- Building brand awareness: As aforementioned, when more people view your content, i.e, when you generate more impressions, the likelihood of netting converting customers rises. Additionally, the more content you create, the more you have to update your social accounts with.
- Branding: Branding is all about your reputation, brand image and presentation. As such, it is almost always present in content (think logos, company colors, taglines, etc.). Surveys provide market research for branding, so you can make any necessary tweaks to your branding based on customer feedback. These will thus naturally bleed into your content.
- Data-driven content: Surveys don’t necessarily have to be about customer feedback in relation to your business. Survey campaigns foster exploring a variety of topics within your niche. The best part is that no one can copy the data you extract for this content and claim it as theirs — they’ll have to give you credit and link to your content.
- SEO Benefits: Piggybacking off of point 2, when other companies, blogs and websites link their content back to yours as their reference, it is fruitful for your SEO. Gaining backlinks is difficult, but when you release original, data-driven content, others will reference your work and link back to your website or webpage that contains the insights.
- Additionally, search engines like Google admire long, insightful content pieces.
- Establishing thought leadership: Posting content with original insights is invaluable for establishing thought leadership and credibility for your company. Brands with thought leadership are fostering a strong sense of trust with their target market. It also keeps a company fresh in the minds of its target market.
When and Where to Use Surveys in Your Content
In order to master a content marketing strategy, businesses need to deploy them, well… strategically. You don’t want to bombard your respondents with surveys left and right; that will damage your digital CX. In order to sustain high survey response rates, you need to release surveys at appropriate times and places.
The following lists when and where to use surveys in your content to boost your strategy:
- Blogs, webzines, evergreen posts
- When: On a weekly basis
- On the homepage or first page a special user lands on
- When a user returns to your website after several visits OR
- When a user bounces but returns some other time or day.
- Landing pages
- When: On a weekly basis, so long as the landing page is live OR
- Once, if a user converts, i.e., signs up for a service, or joins a content list.
- Reports, whitepapers and other gated and downloadable content
- Just once for authorized respondents, those that leave their real names and emails.
- Publisher sites
- Daily
- This helps expose random users to your brand who may have otherwise not known about it.
Positioning Your Brand in the Way You Intend With Surveys
Your content marketing strategy is an opportune way to not only nurture your leads further down the sales funnel and grow brand awareness. Instead, it sets the tone and style of your brand, allowing you to position it in the way you seek.
Surveys are an apt means to support this end, as surveys allow your content to posit you in a desirable light, one that differentiates you from your competitors.
They show your customer base that you care and value their feedback, not just about delivering good products/ services, but for a productive content experience, one that offers value instead of thinly valued brand propaganda.
A strong content marketing strategy will ensure your brand is considered a trusted resource, the kind that draws continual interest and impressions from your target market. Surveys are auspicious tools to help you reach this end. The key to using surveys as a content marketing strategy conduit is to use the most robust online survey platform.
Frequently asked questions
Why is a content marketing strategy important?
The point of having a content marketing strategy is to create targeted, valuable content for the audience. This approach ensures that content is relevant, timely, consistent, and engaging enough to attract and retain an audience. Moreover, the more traffic your content attracts, the more likely it is to gain impressions.
How can surveys improve your content marketing strategy?
The primary benefit of surveys is that they provide marketers with accurate customer data that comes directly from them instead of relying on customer trends and secondary research. This collected data helps make a targeted content strategy that marketers know will interest their customers instead of adopting the trial-and-error method.
What information do surveys measure for a content marketing campaign?
Survey questions help measure respondents' behavioral, demographic and geographic information that enable marketers to segment their strategies and create targeted content. In addition, survey questions can be tailored according to what marketers want to know, such as their opinion on competitor's content, their sentiments regarding the launch of a new product, etc.
How can surveys help to bring your content marketing efforts to life?
Surveys can make your content unique, as all the information you collect is unique to your business, which your competitors won't reproduce. It can revitalize your content marketing efforts by building brand awareness, establishing your brand as an authority. It also enables marketers to gain data-driven content and create SEO-optimized survey questions that can expand your business's reach further.
Where should you use your surveys?
Surveys can be displayed everywhere, from blogs and magazines to your website's landing pages and newsletter. However, make sure you have different times for publishing your surveys on other mediums. For example, put up surveys on landing pages weekly, on evergreen blog posts almost daily, and on white papers and downloadable PDFs just once. This helps expose random users to your brand who may have otherwise not known about it.
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