How to Survey Your Audience with a Market Research Platform

Any research endeavor will leave you wondering how to survey your audience properly so that you can collect quality data from the correct survey subjects. 

While surveying your audience shouldn’t be a daunting chore, it should also not be brushed aside as something requiring little to no thought or structure. Instead, a quality survey campaign requires taking certain actions to ensure you’re studying the survey audience you need, with the correct questions and more. 

Online surveys provide the strongest conduit to your target market, a must when conducting market research. In fact, one of the top reasons businesses fail is because they don’t invest in their target market. 

This article explains how to survey your audience, including the major aspects to pay attention to and advice on how to achieve your survey campaign goals. 

The Major Aspects to Observe When You Survey Your Audience

There are a few chief considerations to consider when surveying your audience. A few of them were mentioned in the intro of this article. But there are several others that are key to work towards when setting up any survey campaign.

The following major aspects show how to survey your audience:

1. Targeting the correct survey audience
2. Setting the purpose of the survey campaign
3. The best time to send a survey
4. How to set up your questionnaire
5. How to incentivize your respondents

The following section will explain how to survey your audience while keeping these considerations in mind and working towards a campaign that includes all of them. 

How to Survey Your Audience

Let’s take an in-depth look at how to survey your audience via the five major aspects identified above. These provide the makeup of any survey campaign. 

Reaching Out to the Correct Survey Audience

First, you’ll need to reach out to the correct survey audience. You’ll need to understand who your target market is, and for this, you ought to conduct secondary research. Refer to all the available information on your industry, your specific niche, its customers, its peak sales periods and more.

There is a vast amount of information available online. You can learn more about the different market research techniques and how to perform them.

To understand your target market, you should also consolidate your secondary market research with your own internal documentation. Do you have any customer audits or documents on customer personas? 

If not, you should consider creating them by conducting survey research. Surveys allow you to understand the makeup of your customers via market segmentation. The right online survey platform will allow you to target your customers in a granular way, as it will enable you to filter your survey audience through a variety of demographics and add screening questions.

Setting the Purpose of the Survey Campaign

Next, you’ll need to set the purpose of the campaign, if you haven’t done so already when you’ve decided on running a survey campaign. In the realm of market research, it is best to tie your campaign to a particular business goal.

For example, do you need survey insights to strengthen your content marketing strategy? Or, do you need more insights onto who your target market consists of? You may also need to run a campaign to A/B test your advertising. The insights surveys derive are virtually limitless, so you’ll be able to use them for a variety of business matters. 

Whatever the case may be, you’ll need to have an overarching campaign or particular goal under which you’ll set up your survey research. This will help you form a well-organized survey and help you put together your questionnaire. 

To do so, ask yourself, what is it that you’re looking to gain from the survey and how can it help immediate business needs. Use the following characterization of survey insights to form the basis of your survey campaign:

1. Validation of an idea, product or campaign
2. New ideas
3. Feedback 
4. User insights

The Best Time to Send a Survey

After you’ve targetted your survey audience, contemplate when you would like to send it. 

But first, in order to determine the right time to deploy your survey across a wide network, or by sending the link via specific digital channels, you’ll need to consider the following:

1. The point of your survey campaign
2. Whether it is tied to other sub-campaigns
3. The target audience of the campaign and their habits
   1. For example, you would target different times to send a survey to the unemployed younger generation, than you would to parents who work a full-time job.

After you’ve consolidated all of these matters, you ought to infer when the best time to send your survey is for different demographics of people. If you seek to send your survey abroad, consider the difference in time. 

For example, Monday at 6: 30 PM may be a good time to send surveys to younger, unemployed individuals who enjoy playing video games. But Monday, at 6:30 PM in New York, isn’t the same time in other parts of the world, and even the country.

If you need more help on deciding the best time to send your survey, click on the link to the best time to send a survey, which you’ll find in the “Major Aspects to Observe” section above.

How to Set up Your Questionnaire

There are various routes you can take when it comes to setting up your questionnaire. First, consider the larger campaign or purpose of your survey. Then, consider the curiosities you have and the insights you’ll need. 

If there are too many, it is apt to separate the survey into two or more surveys. This is a general best practice for surveys, as no one enjoys filling out long questionnaires. 

Then, choose from the following approaches for creating your questionnaire:

1. Coming up with your own preliminary questions
2. Using survey templates 
3. Using survey templates, then customizing them to your liking
4. Conducting secondary research on survey questions
5. Considering using the 6 main types of survey questions

Make sure to personalize your questionnaire, especially if you intend on sending your survey to specific individuals. Even if you’re going to deploy the survey to a massive network, it is best to personalize the contents of it to your target market and customer personas.

Did you know that a whopping 90% of consumers in the US find the idea of personalization appealing? This makes sense, given that no one likes to feel marketed to; nobody wants to see generic content or the kind that does not appeal to their interests or sensitivities at all.

How to Incentivize Your Respondents

Incentivizing your respondents will depend on how you’ll send your survey. If you’re going to distribute it through a massive network of digital channels, opt for a survey platform that partners with publishers that offer survey incentives. These may take many forms, including mobile game incentives.

If you’re going to send your survey to specific individuals, such as via email, or to a slightly broader audience — although not as broad as via a publishers’ network — you’ll need to offer your own incentives. These can be monetary or non-monetary.

Often, they’ll involve your products, services or unique promotions. In this way, survey incentives are a potent marketing initiative, as they bring more exposure to your offerings. Moreover, if you incentivize your respondents with your products or services, you can then send a follow-up survey asking them to rate their experience via a product satisfaction survey.

All in all, survey incentives are useful, as they motivate your target market to take your survey, and to do so quickly. After all, the sooner they’ll complete your survey, the sooner they can get their reward.

Successful Survey Campaigns

All business and non-business entities ought toa conduct their own research via a potent DIY market research platform. How to survey your audience ceases to become an intimidating task when you have a strong survey platform powering the entire process.

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

Opt for 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 include advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. 

Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone.  As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of individuals, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. 

This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of just deploying them across a network. 

With a market research platform that grants you all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to survey your audience and run quality research campaigns.