If you know anything about business, you understand that few things matter more than marketing if you want to reach your preferred customer base. Your marketing strategy can easily make or break your company, especially if you have not established yourself very well within your niche yet. You also must try to be extra careful that your marketing efforts are not duds because you probably only have a limited amount of money to dedicate to them.
That’s why you might choose to focus on surveys as a way to figure out what your customers want. You’re trying to identify pain points, a marketing term that means the needs your customers have or problems they want to solve.
We’ll talk a little bit more about surveys in this article, and we’ll give you some tips on how to craft and administer them.
How Can You Get People to Take Your Surveys?
Before we dive into how to write good survey questions, we should first address how you can get someone to take your company’s survey in the first place. Incentivizing taking the survey in some way is the most logical way to do it.
You might decide to approach the issue from a guerilla marketing standpoint. You can take to the streets, setting up a booth in a heavily trafficked area where there are constantly people walking by, especially at lunchtime. You then need to hire someone outgoing to engage with the individuals walking past.
Your employee can tell the people they can get some free swag if they answer a few questions. You don’t want to make the survey longer than a few queries, or else people will probably not want to take the time to answer them.
You can have a prize wheel each person can spin once they complete the survey. The prizes might be hats, mugs, tee-shirts, or anything else you can give away that won’t cost you too much.
How Else Can You Do It?
This is a way to get some answers from a broad population segment. That’s useful, but you’ll probably also want feedback from those who have already bought your products or wish to do so.
You can send an email to anyone who has bought products from your website before. You can ask them to answer the questions in the five-minute survey and send you the answers. In return, you will give them 25% off their next order, or you might enter them in a weekly drawing to win a $100 Amazon gift card.
What Kind of Questions Should Be on the Survey?
As for what queries you should have on the survey, that depends on the most urgent answers you want. You might use a simple yes or no format, or you might ask the people to answer the questions in their own words.
Each method has its benefits. For instance, if you ask in the survey whether someone would buy a particular product if your company started making it, yes or no, that can reveal whether you should point your R and D department in that direction.
If you instead ask the people what kind of products they would like to see your company make in the future, you might get a wide variety of answers. That form of open-ended question is what’s likely to reveal a potential customer’s pain points.
What Do You Do Once You Have Your Survey Results?
After you’ve compiled your survey results, you can write a brief report on your findings and turn it over to your marketing department.
You can use the answers to create new products, discontinue current ones, or modify some of your existing product’s features. However, your marketing team can also craft a new ad campaign that directly uses the answers your customer base or the public provided.
For example, maybe you make running shoes, and your survey indicates that your would-be customers dislike running shoe styles that give them blisters. Your marketing campaign can stress that your new shoe line has extra insulation that prevents friction. You might also start making socks to go with your shoes that specifically address this issue.
Surveys rank right up there with focus groups as one of the most sensible ways to interact directly with the public and pick their brains to get ideas. Your marketing, products, and your entire business strategy can improve if you get direct consumer information that you utilize to your advantage.