As a business owner with an in-house marketing team, you may sometimes feel like you’re making marketing decisions without a clear sense of direction. You’re not alone. Many marketers are left to guess how their customers feel, lacking the real insights needed to truly understand their audience. This is when market surveys feel like a secret weapon.
In our recent webinar, Researchscape’s Chief Research Officer Jeffrey Henning and Customer Success Officer Tony Cheevers joined KWSM Founder & President Katie Wagner to discuss how businesses can use surveys to illuminate the customer journey and boost marketing success.
Building Buyer Personas That Truly Resonate
Surveys are a goldmine for gathering information that goes beyond basic demographics.
They allow you to craft detailed buyer personas that reflect your target audience’s needs, pain points, and motivations.
To elevate your buyer personas, dive deeper with questions about lifestyle, values, and behaviors to understand the “why” behind your customers’ actions. Instead of just finding out their ages, explore their interests and how they spend their free time.
Open-ended questions can also uncover hidden needs by giving respondents the freedom to express themselves in their own words. This can reveal frustrations that you might not have discovered otherwise.
Finally, surveys provide the data-driven reality check marketers need to stay aligned with customers’ needs — and avoid relying on assumptions or ‘educated guesses.’
Henning spoke to the power of surveys to collect meaningful data instead of trying to figure out what your customers are concerned about yourself. By using surveys in this way, you can dial in campaigns and, ultimately, make them more effective.
“Surveys can be incredibly illuminating when building buyer personas and crafting messaging,” Cheevers added. “One thing we do all the time is look at whether the message is going to be the same for the whole country or world, or if you need to localize it more and test it regionally, even by city. This ensures you get good data to really segment the audience and speak to them. Different segments care about different things, and surveys will reveal what each segment prioritizes the most.”
The Art of Asking the Right Questions
The way you frame a survey question dramatically influences the quality of data you gather.
Think of it like this: most people will probably say “yes” if you ask them if they like ice cream. But if you ask them to rank ice cream against pizza, steak, and salad, you’ll get a much clearer picture of their preferences.
“Just because you ask people something doesn’t mean that the answer they give is exactly what they’re thinking,” says Henning. “Don’t look at things in isolation — have respondents compare different things to get a more accurate answer.”
Here’s how to refine your survey questions:
- Stay neutral: Avoid leading questions that push respondents towards a specific answer. Instead of asking, “Don’t you think our product is amazing?” – ask “How would you rate your satisfaction with our product?”
- Prioritize ranking and comparison: To understand what truly matters to your audience, have them rank factors in order of importance or compare different options. This reveals their priorities more accurately than simply asking if something is important.
- Be mindful of question order: The sequence of your questions can impact responses. Start with broader, easier questions to build rapport before delving into more complex or sensitive topics.
Testing Your Marketing Messages for Maximum Impact
Verifying that your messaging will resonate with your ideal prospects before launching and investing in marketing campaigns is crucial. Before you launch, you can use surveys to test different messaging and creative concepts to ensure they hit the mark with your audience.
You can determine whether your messaging works by developing and testing multiple angles in your content and A/B testing different headlines, calls to action, or even visuals to see how they impact your campaigns.
Also, always refer back to your audience segments and buyer personas. Tailor your messaging to speak directly to each segment’s unique needs and interests. What works for one group might not work for another.
“You never want to make predictions based on what a star player thinks, or even what the CEO thinks,” says Cheevers. “You want to make predictions using data from the people who are going to buy or invest.”
Unearthing Hidden Opportunities in Customer Insights
Surveys are also powerful tools for uncovering emerging trends and identifying new market opportunities that might have gone unnoticed.
Here’s how to use surveys for discovery:
- Ask about unmet needs: Encourage respondents to share their challenges and frustrations. These pain points can spark ideas for innovative products or services that address those needs, as well as highly specific content that speaks to those pain points.
- Read between the lines: Pay close attention to the open-ended feedback in your surveys. Often, hidden gems and unexpected insights lie within these responses.
- Embrace the unexpected: “We see it all the time when an engineer has built something that they think is cool, and they have a very specific use and purpose in mind for it,” says Cheevers. “But data from surveys can help you uncover the actual uses and pain points. If you’re developing something, you know what you think it should be, but that’s not always the case, and overcommitting to those assumptions can be fatal for companies. Surprises can be opportunities, so don’t ignore them.”
Measuring the Customer Experience
Surveys are essential for tracking customer satisfaction, pinpointing areas for improvement, and understanding how customer experience impacts your bottom line.
If you want to use surveys to elevate the customer experience, you have to start by making it a habit. Survey your customers regularly to track satisfaction levels and identify any emerging trends. This allows you to proactively address issues and continuously improve.
Identifying and analyzing key drivers can also pinpoint the factors that impact overall customer satisfaction most. This helps you prioritize your improvement efforts and focus on what truly matters to your customers.
Context is also important. You can combine survey data with behavioral data like website analytics and purchase history for a 360-degree view of the customer experience. This holistic approach provides a richer understanding of your customers’ journey and highlights areas for optimization.
Proving the Value of Your Marketing
While it can be tricky to measure the direct ROI of your marketing campaigns, surveys offer valuable clues about brand awareness, customer perception, and purchase intent.
Here are three ways that surveys can help demonstrate the impact of your marketing:
1. Monitor Brand Awareness
Conduct regular brand tracking surveys to measure how your marketing efforts influence brand awareness and perception over time. This helps you understand whether your campaigns are making a lasting impression.
2. Gauge Customer Sentiment
Track how customer sentiment and attitudes towards your brand shift after you launch a campaign. Are people more excited, more trusting, or more likely to consider your products or services?
3. Combine Data for a Complete Picture
Integrate survey data with website traffic, sales figures, and other key metrics to better understand your marketing ROI.
This multi-faceted approach helps you tell a compelling story about the value of your marketing investments and where additional investments can be leveraged in future campaigns.
“When we’re measuring ROI in the short term, we look to see if there was an immediate action or an influx in website traffic from certain demographics or geographic areas,” says Wagner. “Measuring customer sentiment through research is more of a long-term play because you have to cement your message into customers’ hearts and minds for a longer period.”
Unlocking Customer Insights
In today’s dynamic market, understanding your customers is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity.
Making surveys part of your marketing strategy can unlock a treasure trove of customer insights, discover new opportunities, and make data-driven decisions that fuel your success.
