Driving between events Wednesday gave me a chance to catch up on some podcasts, and the latest episode of Happy Market Research totally rocked my world. Jamin spoke with Morgan Molnar of SurveyMonkey, and they did a great deep-dive into how people are using audience information lately. And one of the biggest challenges they talked about is in design and use decisions – customer experience surveys v. marketing intelligence v. a variety of other cases. That’s why I wanted to write a quick post on how to write a market research survey that performs for marketers. Surveys are incredibly useful tools, but like anything in our field, it takes practice and great processes do it right!
What do you want to know?
Before you get started, ask yourself these two questions:
What’s your goal for this project?
What’s the information you’re hoping to get from this project?
The answers to these questions will guide your survey question design, and steer the course. You want to make sure you’re working to achieve a specific goal, something you can measure that, if quantified and known, you can make better marketing decisions. The same is true for the latter, and that information should be the catalyst for your first goal.
Why will they take it?
With your overall intentions defined, you next want to build a scenario where people will actually take your survey. If you want quick answers, you can pay for a panel, which will get you exactly who you’re looking for in a surprisingly fast manor. Of all methodologies, it’s going to be the most expensive, but holy f does it work well!
Other options are to put survey opportunities into the path of your audience. You can run a digital campaign – email, URLs printed on signage or at PoP, etc. – or even have people intercept your customers in person. But whichever method you choose, you need to consider this: How likely are your customers going to be to complete this survey?
If you have a loyal audience or fanbase, you can probably get away with a digital reach and hope for the best. With a large enough audience, at 5%-10% response, you’ll be looking pretty good. Otherwise, you might want to consider incentives.
Give it to get it.
For the sake of engagement, you might need to offer some sort of prize, bonus, discount or other promotion to get your customers involved. It’s a cost of doing business, but its effectiveness is huge.
Prizes and drawings are good, but hardest to utilize – and they’re the method I see most often. Consumers truly don’t believe a winner is ever drawn. If you want to counter that stigma, do drawings more frequent, and promote your winners on social media and at PoP.
If you want to offer a blanket discount, you’ll again hit traffic. Most people forget to take the survey to get their bonus later on. You need to make this next-time-you’re-here offer tremendously intriguing – BOGO at a minimum. But your biggest challenge here is that the payoff is so far away. We all know that if they don’t engage immediately, they probably won’t engage at all. If you can make the reward more real time – earn a free drink at a restaurant NOW if you take the survey – then you’ll again drastically increase likelihood.
Promote. Promote. Promote.
No matter what, though, you have to ask frequently and you have to ask often – without being pushy. If you’re running a survey online, use follow-ups sparingly but effectively. Increase your efforts into copywriting, and definitely communicate how the information they’re giving will help you help them.
If you’re in a situation-gauging setting, like measuring ongoing restaurant or event audiences, you need to constantly promote your survey and its reward structure. Signage, language, messaging, etc. all need to be on-point, engaging and non-invasive.
Either way, keep it short.
Finally, your survey needs to be short, sweet, and to the point. Plan on three minutes to complete, tops, which means you need to dissect your questions into the most effective they can be. You can get away with something a little longer when you go the panel route, but even then you risk engagement slipping, which makes your answers that less genuine and meaningful.
Think about your two guiding questions that you asked yourself in the beginning. What specific nuggets of information can you mine for in your customers that will get you what you need?
Get into their heads.
It’s the hardest part – designing questions that grab real, actionable data. But pay attention, because it’s the same marketing process you already know.
What do they want?
What motivates them?
What challenges them?
What information is most pivotal in their decision to be your customer?
If this looks familiar, it’s because it’s already what you’re doing to design and develop your campaigns. Your copywriting asks the same questions. So does your PR, your media plan, your pricing strategy. All of it seeks to address the need-states of your audience. Your questions work the same way.
Kick the tires and light the fires.
Now it’s time to put your survey into the field, and see how it performs. Don’t be surprised if performance is low or uninteresting at first – just like Day 1 of Ad School wasn’t an instant slam dunk, this process will require some time and tweaks to make it great.
But slowly but surely, you’ll get the information coming in, and you’ll start to see where you need to make some edits. And eventually, you’ll get a usable set of data that you can do….something with.
Do something with it!
What does the information mean? What does it say? How does it speak to you as a marketer?
It’s time to put on your creative hat and ask yourself these questions. And the best frame I can think is to imagine you’re filling out a creative brief. You’re taking the information, and summarizing it into boxes and chunks, each of which tells the story of your campaign.
And just like that, your information has become the guide for your marketing. It’s in the same format you already use, and now you can go forth and conquer.
Go forth and conquer.
So, what’s next? Now it’s up to you to test out your new market research knowledge, and see for yourself how to build a great survey program for your business.
Need a tool? SurveyMonkey really does have a wonderful product to get the job done, and even access to Panels now – which I got to learn more about in the aforementioned podcast. There’s also a slew of other survey software, panels, and just about anything you could ever need to get going today!
Test out the power of great surveys yourself, and you’ll see why they’re an absolutely invaluable tool that should be within every marketer’s playbook!