How to Survey Your Audience with a Market Research Platform
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:
- Targeting the correct survey audience
- Setting the purpose of the survey campaign
- The best time to send a survey
- How to set up your questionnaire
- 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:
- Validation of an idea, product or campaign
- New ideas
- Feedback
- 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:
- The point of your survey campaign
- Whether it is tied to other sub-campaigns
- The target audience of the campaign and their habits
- 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:
- Coming up with your own preliminary questions
- Using survey templates
- Using survey templates, then customizing them to your liking
- Conducting secondary research on survey questions
- 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.
Attracting a Survey Audience the Right Way with Market Research Software
Attracting a Survey Audience the Right Way with Market Research Software
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:
- Determine the primary needs of your market research campaign.
- Determine the main findings you seek to take away from it.
- For example: do you need insights into customer behavior?
- Or, are you looking to conduct market research for advertising?
- After identifying its primary concerns, create a title and theme of your market research campaign.
- Determine the efforts you’ll need to carry out your campaign.
- This includes choosing various methods to accompany your survey, such as conducting secondary research.
- Then, identify a preliminary amount of survey research you’ll dedicate towards your campaign.
- This includes determining how many surveys you’ll need to conduct, their primary subject matters, their questions and a timeframe.
- Choose a strong online survey platform to host your market research campaign.
- The is a wide range of criteria when it comes to decking on the best survey platform.
- Determine the primary needs of your market research campaign.
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.
The following explains what to consider when choosing the best survey platform for attracting your desired survey audience:
- A platform that deploys surveys across a wide network of publishers
- Ideally, these are highly trafficked websites, apps and mobile sites
- One that procures respondents where they naturally exist online
- This can be done via RDE sampling or random device engagement.
- One that allows surveys to be formed in a wide variety of languages
- Ideally, one that offers a feature for survey translations
- A platform that quickly gathers all responses
- A strong platform will have turnover rates of no more than 2-3 days maximum.
- Easy to use and create
- One that allows you to make your own survey in 3 easy steps.
- An interface that allows you to screen respondents based on their demographics, psychographics and geolocation.
- All the data you collect is proprietary to you, as opposed to the provider of the market research platform.
- Software that doesn’t charge extra to conduct global market research.
- One that partners with publishers that offer survey incentives.
- A platform that offers a multitude of question types, media files and survey templates to build a custom and engaging questionnaire
- One that offers the option of sending surveys to specific people or via a link you can place anywhere.
- This can be done via the Distribution Link feature.
- 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.
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:
- Create a new project on the survey dashboard by hitting its designated button.
- There, you‘ll be asked: How would you like to collect responses to your survey?
- Choose between the two distribution options of buying responses or send your survey your way.
- 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.
- 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.
- If you opt for the latter, offer survey incentives to attract your audience to your study.
- Then, you’ll be taken to the Audience section of the platform.
- Here, you can target your audience as you see fit.
- You have the option of using Multiple Audiences in your survey, or just one.
- Find it on the lefthand panel, which is automatically titled Audience 1.
- You can add another audience by clicking on the + symbol at the bottom of this panel.
- In the lefthand audience panel, you can choose the number of respondents who will partake in the survey/ will be targeted.
- Do so near the pencil icon beside ‘Survey completes.”
- Then, you can select the gender of the audience, along with quotas that dictate how many of each.
- After that, you have the option of adding up to three screening questions and choosing the answers that will disqualify people from your survey.
- This allows you to target respondents via a psychographic and behavioral-based approach.
- Next, add and filter all your demographic, geolocation and device requirements.
- Here, you can be very granular, as each type of criterion allows you to include various subcategories and quotas.
- 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.
- Review all of your survey respondent requirements.
- Make sure you are targeting the correct audience, ie, your target market.
- In the questionnaire section of the survey, add 1-5 questions.
- Keep your question count short and your questions relevant and interesting to your audience.
- 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.