Marketing surveys: Types, 70+ examples and best practices

As a marketer, simply guessing what motivates and appeals to your customers and target audience will not suffice. Whether you’re launching a new business or overseeing an established brand, it’s essential that you are guided by insights so you don’t waste time, resources or your audience’s attention.

Let’s explore the different types of marketing surveys, with example questions, and how to use these surveys to strengthen marketing campaigns. 

Marketing surveys are a powerful research method that is used to gather data and actionable insights about customers and prospects so that businesses can understand and meet their needs.  

Research experts often turn to marketing surveys for market research, but there are many different types of surveys that can provide different types of quantitative and qualitative insights, including:

Whichever type of marketing survey business choose to conduct, the results will empower them to make data-driven decisions by revealing what customers or potential customers want, need and expect. Marketers can use these insights to shape their strategies and engage their audience more effectively. 

Related reading: Why are surveys important in research?

Marketing surveys are essential for conducting market research and keeping up with customers. They can gather customer feedback and market research data to inform product development, marketing strategies, ad campaign development, customer touchpoint improvements, competitive analysis and more. 

When it comes to the process of gathering feedback, marketing surveys tend to be:

Companies can use marketing surveys in any industry to gain critical business insights and market research data. Although the focus of market research surveys often overlaps, here are the most popular types, along with some example survey questions.

It can be helpful to think of market research surveys as an umbrella category since marketing surveys like Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), price optimisation, usage and attitudes and competitor analysis, etc. are all considered market research surveys. 

Marketers conducting general market research tend to focus on obtaining survey data to boost their brand, build better products, understand consumers’ habits and improve experiences.

Related guide: The 6-Step Market Research Process

Example questions from market research survey templates: 

Success story: How Kajabi builds brand strength with competitive insights

The whole point of a CSAT survey is to understand whether your customers are happy, unhappy or somewhere in between, and a well-crafted survey will collect that feedback and build trust between you and your customers.  

Example questions:

Related: 50 customer satisfaction questions to strengthen CSAT

An NPS survey is a simple way to measure CSAT and loyalty in order to inspire more brand advocates. Any NPS survey template centres on a single, closed-ended question; marketers often add a follow-up open-ended question to gather more context and detail from respondents. 

Example questions:

Success story: How Point of Reference gets more out of NPS surveys

Product feedback surveys collect the information you need to create products that exceed your customers’ expectations. This will enhance CSAT and empower your teams to innovate with purpose. 

Product surveys are useful throughout the product lifecycle, from product development to maturity, and collect an array of insights about current products, product concepts and even product packaging. 

Example questions:

Success story: How Together Labs boosts product development with user feedback

A brand awareness survey reveals an important aspect of your overall brand health: whether your target market is even aware of your brand, products or services. These market research insights help you to focus your marketing efforts on your market position and how you stack up against your competitors.

Example questions:

Success story: How Tweezerman grows its global brand

Are you clear about your ideal customer profile? What about your buyer personas? Customer persona surveys give you a deeper understanding of who you’re marketing to, including demographics, consumer attitudes and purchase drivers. You can use these market research insights to refine your messaging, targeting strategies and more.

Sample survey questions:

Success story: How Sakura gains a deeper understanding of evolving customers

Whether you’re launching a new product or reconsidering the pricing of existing products or services, you need to ensure that you don’t undersell your product or service or put customers off by setting your prices too high. Pricing research surveys, or a price optimisation solution, are a type of market research that enables you to discover exactly how much people are prepared to pay so that you can set your prices with confidence.

Sample survey questions:

The best way to understand and improve your customer journey is to use surveys to check in with your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. This feedback can help you see whether new customers are enjoying a better experience than longstanding ones or whether particular touch points are causing friction.

Sample survey questions:

It’s one thing to know who your competitors are in an abstract sense, but it’s another to know how you compare in the eyes of your target audience. Competitor research surveys are a great way to measure your brand’s reach, identify gaps in the market and ensure that your competitive differentiation is based on market research.

Sample survey questions:

A lot of effort goes into brainstorming, organising and delivering stellar events. Event feedback survey templates are popular with marketers for good reason: they simplify all of that planning. 

Pre-event surveys reveal what will make people attend and what will generate a positive buzz. Post-event surveys will help you understand what went well and what could be improved. You can even use surveys and polls during the event to capture leads and boost engagement in real time.

Sample survey questions:

A customer service survey allows you to quickly follow up with customers after they’ve interacted with your customer service team and to gain insights into whether that support cut the mustard and had a positive impact on the CX. 

This is important because a customer’s call for help (sometimes literally, in the form of a phone call with your customer service team) can make or break their relationship with your brand, affecting brand reputation and long-term customer loyalty.

Sample survey questions:

Do your customers think your website has a modern feel, is visually appealing or is awkward and challenging to navigate? Does your site do everything it’s supposed to, from speeding customers through the checkout process to creating an enjoyable browsing experience? A website feedback survey and user experience metrics will help you uncover what’s great about your website and online presence and what’s not. 

Sample survey questions:

Here’s why you should incorporate marketing surveys into the key stages of the customer journey and your market research process: 

Your audience’s likes, dislikes and habits can change in a flash, and when you don’t keep up with those changes, it will cost your company dearly. 

By using marketing surveys to conduct market research into consumer behaviour and preferences, you’ll discover how to create stronger emotional connections with consumers and actually meet their needs.

Is your target audience adjusting their spending to support companies that align with their values? Are millennial and Gen Z consumers conducting all their product category research on social platforms? Trends change rapidly, and brands that are armed with robust market research insights can adapt early and secure a competitive edge. 

Feedback from customers and your target audience can improve your product development, product updates and feature releases, as well as CSAT. When you build things with careful consideration of what your customers say they want and need, it demonstrates that you’re a company that listens to and values its customers.

Your marketing strategies are only as strong as your insights. For instance, you might reconsider your social media investments after learning which social media influencers are most popular among consumers or which social platforms consumers consider the most trustworthy. These are two insights that are uncovered by SurveyMonkey research. Armed with data from marketing surveys, you can set more strategic goals and make the right decisions faster. 

CSAT can affect everything from your brand equity to your revenue, which is why CSAT insights are particularly valuable. They help you to identify and address customer pain points, the key drivers of satisfaction and how to cultivate a loyal customer base. It also goes without saying that CSAT metrics are essential for benchmarking performance and setting future goals.

Success story: How Ryanair collects CSAT insights at scale

Let’s suppose that you’re planning to launch a new product or service onto your existing market. Without market research, you won’t have a clear idea of the optimal price, the best distribution plan, how your audience will receive the product or even whether the product will actually sell. 

Investing time and effort in the market research process means that you can minimise risks and make data-driven decisions that will grow your business.

Okay, so how do you get started with your own marketing survey? We’ve broken down the process into six basic steps:

As we mentioned, there are many different types of marketing surveys and reasons for conducting them. You should always start the marketing survey design process by knowing your survey objective: what you aim to learn by conducting your survey(s). 

Here are a few examples of research goals:

Remember that specificity is important for your goals. For the best results, you need to know who you want to hear from, what you want to ask about and why.

Do you want to hear from your existing customers or your target customers? Are you aiming to take a more in-depth look at your target market in order to understand specific demographics or customer segments? To reach your target audience, it’s essential that you are familiar with them; refer to the work you did on your research goals and let that guide your targeting.

For example, if your goal is to optimise your ad spend on social media platforms, you may target people who follow your brand’s accounts or spend a certain amount of time each week using social media. Alternatively, you may wish to segment your target customers according to their age to find out how different generations perceive your ads or your social media presence in general.

Outlining timeline expectations for your survey will support your survey goals and help you to ensure that your stakeholders are clear about the next steps. At this point in the process, you should determine the following:

This is yet another time when your research goal can guide the way. That objective will shape what you ask and how you design a marketing survey, including the question types that you use. 

Here are just a few best practices for writing survey questions:

Remember that you can always use an expert-written survey template to ensure you’re asking the appropriate questions in the right way. (They’re also customisable, so you can include more, or different, questions.) Alternatively, you can rely on AI to craft survey questions that are tailored to your specific target market. 

Time to launch your survey One of the many benefits of online surveys is that there are lots of ways to send your survey. 

For instance, if your survey is intended for existing customers rather than a market research panel, you can send it via email, SMS, web embedding or a combination of these options. 

Ready to dig into data? If so, here are some best practices to help you make the market analysis process run smoothly and gain actionable insights:

Marketing surveys can unearth all types of opportunities for your brand and business, from gaps in your CX or retail trends to simple ways to reach more target customers.

Find out why marketers rely on SurveyMonkey to collect market research insights and customer feedback that help them do their jobs better. Start with our general market research survey templates, or explore based on your specific use case or industry, and start asking the questions that will guide your strategies.

NPS®, Net Promoter® and Net Promoter Score® are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.