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.