The Benefits of Using Surveys in Marketing
Surveys are a great way to gather valuable information that you can use in your marketing campaigns. Read about how to use surveys in marketing and become more successful in your efforts to attract clients.
Seemingly, conducting surveys is quite easy– you ask people some questions, record the answers, report the results and you’re all done. Surveys have been around for a long time now. Even Emperors polled their citizens in Ancient Rome but modern surveys did not emerge until the Industrial Revolution when researchers started asking factory workers and slum dwellers about their working conditions.
According to the Prairie Research Institute, social reformer Henry Mayhew was the first person to conduct sophisticated surveys. He interviewed the citizens of London about their living conditions in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Survey research has come a long way since then, with new techniques emerging every couple of months. Now, one of the most important aspects of market research is defining your market. This means that you need to get to know your industry, the target demographic, and product down to a science.
For instance, if you want to have a successful campaign and produce effective content, you need to have feedback about it. The more information you gather about your audience, the more you will be able to cater to their specific needs and keep them coming back.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is extremely important to your business; it provides you with an essential metric that you should use to improve it. According to a recent study published in the IOSR Journals, 71% of senior marketing managers believe that the customer satisfaction metric is extremely useful in managing their marketing campaigns and monitoring their businesses.
And if you conduct a customer satisfaction survey every three to six months, you will show your customers that you care about them. You also need to take what you learn from it and put it into practice.
Researching the Industry and Creating Content
While online studies can be much pricier than you average survey, independent research can help you position your company as a thought leader in your specific industry. However, that’s not all. An in-depth study will provide you an abundance of stats, facts, and insights that you can later use to create fresh content.
For example, you can use all of that data to create a number of white papers and infographics. Usage of infographics has increased by 60% in the past 122 months which is not that surprising since according to statistics compiled by HubSpot, infographics are shared on social media three times more than any other type of content.
Tweaking your Content
The number of downloads, likes or clicks can only tell you so much about how your clients and potential customers are responding to your content. If you want to see any improvement you have to survey the people that are consuming your content on a regular basis.
One way of doing this is to offer paid surveys such as this one to your customers. You will attract a great number of people and gather a ton of new information which will enable you to tweak your content strategy and produce more relatable material.
Improving your Strategies with Employee Feedback
Finally, let’s talk a little about your coworkers because they are some of your best resources. If you want your feedback to be completely honest, make sure that the employees from other departments fill out the survey anonymously. Some people may have interesting suggestions or even concerns about your marketing strategy, but they may not know how to share them with you. As soon as you start taking their suggestions into consideration, your employees will start to feel more appreciated, which is a bigger deal than you might think it is.
According to a recent Globoforce study, around 40% of workers report that they don’t feel appreciated at work. Once you start listening to their ideas, your employees will start to feel more respected, which in turn will raise their morale and boost their productivity.