Survey Says... If you've often wondered understand what your target prospective buyer really looks like or where you can find more of them or what your current customers think about you or how you improve my products and services to better keep up with their needs or any other seemingly unanswerable questions, have you ever considered conducting an online survey to get direct answers? Recently, as part of the research I conducted for an article I was writing about women and online advertising for my bi-weekly ClickZ.com column, I decided to do just that – produce and run an online survey. Since my agency has oftentimes been asked to do likewise for our clients, I thought our CityBizList readers might like to learn from my insights.

Step One: Developing the Survey Strategy & Questions

The initial idea for my article and survey came from recent studies that show that women are commanding a larger and more powerful online market share. Since one of my agency’s specializations is advertising to moms, these statistics were particularly interesting, but I wanted to understand the context of how women online interact with online ads. After seeking the kind of research I wanted and finding nothing, I decided to undertake a survey of my own.

I had my initial motivations for conducting my survey (gathering data for my article), but I also knew that if I generated enough responses, I would have something even more robust to work with: marketable industry data in an industry hungry for such data. So I developed a strategy to make further use of this survey, like publishing a white paper, generating a press release to distribute to the media, using the white paper to solicit new clients, posting the findings to our web site, sharing them with our partner companies, and all sorts of other ways in which we can distribute this information.

Writing the kinds of questions that yield you useful responses is the most critical step in executing surveys. How to develop survey strategy and survey questions?

Tips:

• Develop a solid set of goals for your survey. Ask yourself: What do you want to learn from the answers? How will you respond / use the results? Your answers will determine the type of questions you will be asking.
• Estimate the necessary size of your respondent pool. Having a statistically valid survey vs. just getting a general sense of trends will determine how many respondents you need to get.
• Once you know how many respondents you need to get, determine how long you're willing to run your survey. If you don't get all the respondents by that date, you need to decide whether or not you're going to close your survey as planned regardless.
• Keep your audience in mind – avoid jargon, replacing terminology with words your common survey respondent will understand.
• Write up your draft questions – ask yourself, Will the answers to this question really give me the information you will need?
• There are multiple formats of survey questions: multiple choice, select any/all, true/false, ranking, matrix and open-ended are the most common. Selecting the proper formats for each question can make a total difference in the depth of and ability to analyze survey responses.
• Recruit a survey tester (or two) who best meets your survey audience target and have this person take the survey – this will you edit confusing questions and/or add additional relevant ones.

Step Two: Selecting Your Online Survey Tools

For our survey, we used the online survey tool, Survey Monkey, which we’ve used in the past and is inexpensive ($19.95/month for unlimited surveys up to 1,000 respondents each survey) and user-friendly. There are, however, a large number of survey tools to choose from depending on the volume of surveys and respondents, and budget, reporting, and analytics needs. A few others include: QuestionPro, SurveyGizmo, and Zoomerang. These tools make facilitating, delivering and measuring your surveys quite easy.

Tips:

• A must is to select a survey tool that allows you to build survey questions in multiple formats.
• Custom brand your survey pages by uploading, via the survey's tool, your logo and/or other custom branding; alternatively, you can embed the survey within your own website pages.
• Take advantage of survey logic tools. Many survey programs offer the ability to take a respondent down a particular path of questions, depending upon the way each question is are answered. For instance, a pre-qualifying question for our survey determined if the respondent was male or female – people who selected "Female" were admitted to the rest of the survey; men were taken to a page that told them they were ineligible. In the case of a client survey, you could use survey tool logic to separate those who buy product A from those who buy product B.
• Use the survey tool's distribution features: most survey applications provide different distribution methods like email blasting, survey URLs to distribute on your own, and code for website popup windows. Take advantage of these services to get your survey in front of your audience in as many ways as possible.

Step Three: Recruiting for Your Survey

You've set up a great survey. Now you have to have people complete it. Large research companies maintain regular panels of respondents, but for those of us executing sporadic surveys – particularly those that are not for existing clients – you need to come up with a way to get your survey out there and get responses so you gain enough critical mass to have results worth analyzing. This can be the hardest part of survey execution.

Tips:

• Consider using a compelling incentive. For our survey, we made a promise to respondent candidates that if we reached our response goal, we'd make a donation to a women’s issue such as breast cancer or domestic violence, which respondents voted on. In our case, our cause-related incentive was the way to go, but for you it might be a freebie (t-shirts, free download, gift cards, etc.) or credits (for existing customers).
• If you use an incentive, it's a good idea to have shorter deadline to close the survey. People tend to act more immediately when they know there's a looming deadline.
• Plan to market your survey in one capacity or another. The most common way is to email it to existing email lists, but you might also want to consider an online ad campaign or a grassroots/viral marketing effort. In the case of our survey, we developed banners to post on a popular site for moms, we solicited blog posts on leading women’s blogs, and conducted our own friends-and-family email campaigns.

Step Four: Crunching the Numbers and Using the Findings

Once you complete your survey, the fun begins! It's time to crunch the numbers and understand your results. The analysis phase of conducting a survey is crucial if you want to be able to accurately make statements about the findings. Don't be surprised to find that your results are not what you expected, in which case you need to consider what this will mean to your post-survey strategy.

Tips:

• Analyzing survey data: the more you plan on using your survey results more formally, the more likely you might want to use a statistician to do so. If you don’t have one in-house, considering contracting one – you will get an unbiased point of view and expert insight.
• Use the data! There are numerous ways to leverage survey data, as Bill Pollock, a former Gartner analyst now with his own consulting firm, Strategies for Growth, advises:
• Improve internal processes (help desk, customer service, etc.)
• Refine your product and service lines
• Identify what respondents think are your most compelling selling/talking points - and build them directly into your sales, marketing and promotional collateral
• Predict future sales potential for your new or existing products and services
• Identify what your customers will be looking for from you in the future, and make sure you can deliver on what the market wants.

• Share your results. Don’t forget about the short-term publicity of your survey findings. Develop a white paper that users can download from your site, issue a press release with some key findings, pitch the media with your survey story, think about using video and audio to supplement your survey results. For instance, an interview with a key player from your company, discussing the survey results.

Online surveys are terrific tools to help you advance your business. They can be fast, inexpensive and easy to execute. I hope this post has been helpful. As a sidebar, if you’re interested in reading the results of my survey on “Women and Online Ads,” email me, hollis@webadvantage.net, and I’ll send you the results once we publish them.

Labels: hollis thomases, surveys, webadvantage

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