surveys

One of the best ways to figure out what your customers want is to ask them. Don’t get me wrong – looking at numbers and statistics gleaned from various sources is helpful. This includes comments on posts, Facebook likes, click-through rates, newsletter subscriptions, and more. But, you’ll never learn more than when you hear the truth straight from your audience. This “ask the audience” technique isn’t difficult to carry out, either. It doesn’t require going “door-to-door,” so to speak. You don’t have to approach individuals directly through email or chat and query them. Instead, get direct customer feedback the simple way – through surveys. Why Are Surveys Valuable for Content Marketing? Surveys give you the chance to collect data you may not be able to glean through any other method. Here are a few more reasons to invest time and resources into them (we’ll go into the “how” soon). 1. They Foster Conversation and Engagement These days, more than ever, content marketing is about engagement and community building. It’s about keeping up a dialogue with your audience. You do this in a few ways: You answer questions and offer information. You learn what their problems or pain points are, and then you see how you can solve them. Marketing is a continual conversation with your customers. However, you don’t want it to be one-sided. You can never assume how your audience will respond to your content, and you can’t assume what they want from you. You have to keep the dialogue open if you want to know. You have to ask! Surveys are one of the best ways to ask, hands-down. 2. Surveys Offer Valuable Insights Not only do surveys keep that all-important dialogue open — they give you an avenue for insights. According to Content Marketing Institute, asking your audience provides priceless data. This is information your carefully collected statistics can’t tell you. Yes, your stats give a picture of what your customers are doing. However, one factor it can’t address is why they’re doing what they’re doing. For instance, perhaps your stats tell you certain posts are more popular than others. Lumped together, these blogs don’t have much in common. Their popularity is confusing rather than enlightening. No matter how you look at the numbers, they’ll never give up the secret behind why some of your posts land and others fail. Surveys can. With this tool, you can acquire useful information such as: Impressions your brand has made, along with expectations and perceptions How your content may or may not affect a customer’s decision-making process Demographic information about your audience that may/may not affect purchasing decisions Real world example: when I personally asked my audience for feedback about Express Writers’ services, we learned: Pain points our products/services didn’t solve (but could, with a few tweaks!) Exactly how we could serve our customers better, straight from their mouths Pain points our customers experienced with our competitors (giving us the ability to know exactly how we were winning – which allowed us to use those direct points in home/sales page copy) We never would have garnered these vital bits of knowledge without utilizing a survey. It allowed us to change tactics, hone our strategy, and give our customers exactly what they want. How can you beat that? Now that you understand how integral a tool surveys can be, here are some easy ways to implement them. How to Create Effective Surveys An effective survey will depend on a variety of factors. You have to set a goal, choose the right tool, and ask the right questions. You also need to ask your questions at the right time. 1. Set a Specific Goal Ideally, your survey should set out to answer a broad question. This should have to do either with reach, reputation, or results. Who is your content attracting, and is it the audience you want? Is your content marketing representing your brand in the right way? Is your content influencing customer decision-making? 2. Choose a Tool The tool you use to carry out your surveys should be a platform that’s easy and suitable for your needs. Google Consumer Surveys or SurveyMonkey are good tools for in-depth questionnaires. They let you target an audience, ask away, and collect the results. Google’s tool is a bit more bare-bones. SurveyMonkey can be exhaustive if you’re willing to shell out the funds. An example of question formatting from SurveyMonkey. If you’re not quite ready to put together a formal survey, you’re not limited to traditional tools. You don’t have to carry out a survey in a standard way. For instance, you can directly ask your readers a question on social media in a forum-like strategy that opens up the discussion. Here are some basic ideas: Informally query your followers on Instagram Pose a question to your Facebook followers Throw out a question for a specific Facebook group, or create a Facebook poll Quickly ask your audience one multiple-choice question using a feature on Twitter called “Twitter Poll” Other options: You can go more informal and add a question to the end of a blog post, opening up the comments for discussion. While you’re at it, ask your email subscribers for their opinion on a matter, too. Whatever your style, or information you’re looking to glean, you can gather it with the right tools. 3. Keep It Short and Sweet When surveying your audience, you’re asking for their time as much as their input. Be respectful of that and keep your surveys short and sweet. Make questions easy to answer, and don’t overwhelm your readership with too many surveys in a short timespan. You’ll end up turning them off altogether instead of gaining useful feedback. 4. Ask Closed Questions To collect data you can quickly sort and measure, keep your questions closed versus open-ended. For example, instead of asking, “What do you think of our company?” – which could elicit any number of opinions – ask “Which answer is closest to your impression of … Read more