Marketing surveys: A guide to learning what your customers want
Learn how to use marketing surveys to gather insights from customers and inform your marketing strategies.
- A marketing survey is a type of market research used to gather data and insights from a target audience about their preferences, behaviours and opinions.
- Surveys offer insights that help businesses tailor strategies, address pain points, improve products and make data-driven decisions.
- Turn marketing surveys into a feedback system by regularly collecting and acting on survey responses to enhance customer experiences.
Understanding what motivates your target audience is a challenge that every marketing professional encounters. Whether you’re launching a new business or managing an established brand, incorporating surveys into your marketing campaigns can be highly beneficial.
Marketing surveys are one of the most efficient and effective market research methods. With marketing surveys, you can gather valuable information about your target audience’s demographics, opinions and motivations. Use customer data from online surveys to guide your marketing strategies and drive business growth.
In this article, we’ll explain the different types of marketing surveys and how they can be used to craft better marketing strategies.
What is a marketing survey?
Marketing surveys are a powerful tool for gathering data and actionable insights from customers and prospects, enabling you to engage your audience more effectively. These surveys are often online, making them easy to send to customers via email or SMS.
There are several types of marketing surveys that are designed to gather information from different audiences.
The format and question types that you select for a marketing survey will determine the data you can collect: quantitative or qualitative. Together, these insights can inform your strategies for reaching more customers.
Why should I use marketing surveys?
Marketing surveys are essential for conducting market research. They can gather consumer data to inform product development, marketing strategies, ad campaign development and more.
The top benefits of using marketing surveys include:
- Cost-effectiveness: Consumer or market research surveys can be much more cost-effective and provide a broader reach than focus groups or panels. Although focus groups are great, the general expectation is that customers will be given some form of reward for participating in them. However, by sending a survey to existing customers, you can often gather valuable feedback cost-effectively.
- Agile research method: Marketing surveys are typically more agile than other research methods. With SurveyMonkey, you can launch them quickly using our survey templates and get results in minutes.
- Track trends over time: You can benchmark results and track trends to compare your performance with others in your industry. These trends can also offer valuable insights for product development and marketing teams, helping them to give a better service to consumers.
- Follow up with customers: A customer service survey is an effective way to follow up with customers after customer journey touchpoints, such as making a purchase, visiting your website or signing up for your newsletter. Follow-up surveys can gauge how customers perceive your organisation. This can help your business improve the customer experience (CX) to boost brand reputation and promote customer loyalty.
- Versatile distribution: Send surveys via email, SMS, website, point of sale (POS) pop-ups or offline on mobile devices at events. The opportunities to gather valuable data and insights from customers via marketing surveys are endless.
Needless to say, there are plenty of reasons to consider implementing these surveys into your marketing plans.
The 4 main types of marketing surveys
Marketing surveys can be utilised in any industry to gain deeper insights into the customer experience or to access market research panels for competitive intelligence about your target market. Although different types of marketing surveys often overlap, here are the four most popular types, along with some examples.
1. General market research surveys
General market research surveys empower businesses to make strategic decisions by providing precise data about customers, trends and competitors. Read our Ultimate Guide to Market Research for more in-depth information about market research.
You can perform market research with surveys in order to:
- Understand consumer usage and attitudes: Drive better marketing strategies by uncovering how your existing and potential customers feel about your products or services. Gather in-depth data about consumer preferences and spending habits to understand how to promote your business and products.
- Conduct pricing research: Conduct market research to discover how much your target market is willing to pay for your products. Optimise your prices to take advantage of untapped revenue potential.
- Gain customer insights: You can partner with teams across your organisation to collect information at different touchpoints, such as after a customer service interaction.
You can also use general market research and polling surveys to get to know your target market better by asking questions such as:
- How do you typically find out about brands in this product category?
- Are you the primary decision-maker in your household regarding purchasing this product category?
- Which factors are important to you when you decide which brands to purchase?
2. Product development surveys
Product development transforms an idea into a tangible product by evaluating its feasibility, marketability and potential performance in the marketplace.
You can use product development surveys to collect feedback and gather proof points about the following:
- Concept testing: Concept testing enables you to assess consumers’ thoughts about a product before it goes to market. The gathered quantitative data will provide the evidence that is needed to justify an investment in a product or service.
- Logo design: Logo design testing is a critical part of product development. Gather data about consumer design preferences by sending out logo design surveys showcasing different variations of a potential logo.
- Package testing: Package testing enables you to optimise your designs, planograms and concepts to ensure the greatest appeal possible. Test packaging designs to see what your target audience responds best to.
- Idea screening: Test early-stage products to obtain feedback from your target audience about design or ad concepts in order to determine which ideas have the strongest appeal.
- MaxDiff analysis: MaxDiff analysis surveys use an analytic methodology to gauge respondents’ preferences for different items and rank those attributes in a best-to-worst ranking. These surveys can help you make better decisions during product development.
- Conjoint analysis: Conjoint analysis is a statistical method that is used to understand the extent to which customers value different product features. It helps you determine the combination of attributes that have an impact on the product value perceived by your consumers.
What’s more, you can customise our product development survey templates to determine which products or services are most likely to succeed with your target market.
3. Brand tracking surveys
Brand tracking surveys help you measure and improve your brand’s perception by tracking changes in how consumers view different brands on the market. To build a stronger and better-received brand, you can utilise these survey types:
- Awareness: Get your brand name out there by measuring brand recognition via brand awareness surveys. These surveys tell you what is working and what requires improvement to help you determine your future brand strategy.
- Reputation: A positive brand reputation is vital for attracting new customers, retaining existing ones and driving sales for your business. Track your brand reputation using sentiment analysis and feedback to gauge whether or not customers have a positive opinion of your brand.
- Attributes: Identify what attributes set your brand apart by using a quick and easy customer feedback survey. Use this insight to fine-tune your messaging and home in on the attributes that matter most to your customers.
- Equity: Measure and improve your brand equity by asking customers about their perception of your brand and why they are loyal or disloyal.
- Loyalty: Net Promoter® Score (NPS) surveys measure customers’ likelihood of recommending your brand. These scores gauge customer loyalty, satisfaction and experience.
Our Brand Tracking Survey Template offers expertly crafted survey questions such as the following:
- Thinking about [COMPANY], what word or short phrase comes to mind?
- For your next purchase, which [CATEGORY] brand would you buy?
- When deciding on a [CATEGORY], how important are each of the following attributes?
4. Content marketing surveys
You can use surveys to help your content marketing efforts reach the right target audience. From planning an editorial calendar to finding messaging that makes a significant impact, content marketing surveys enable you to glean valuable insights.
The following content marketing surveys all play a role in making content sparkle:
- Lead generation: Learn more about your target audience to help you gain more customers.
- Website feedback: Gather feedback from website visitors to determine whether your site is user-friendly. Gauge how well your website is performing by asking website visitors what’s working and what’s missing.
- Ad testing: Test different ad creatives to see which stands out to consumers.
- Message and claims testing: Measure the effectiveness of slogans, taglines, value propositions, company positioning and more with SurveyMonkey.
- Name testing: Before releasing your latest product or brand, test out which names consumers like the most.
- Personalisation: Use content marketing surveys to monitor what information customers are looking for in content. Get details about how to personalise your content strategy to specific market segments and boost customer experience.
SurveyMonkey makes it easy to gather information from your target audience about what they want to see in your upcoming content marketing.
Use our Content Strategy Survey Template to ask questions such as the following in order to guide your content planning:
- When you share information about companies and their products or services, which of the following do you use? (Select all that apply)
- How often would you want to receive information from our company?
- What information would you like to see our company provide?
Best practices for analysing your marketing surveys
The following survey best practices ensure that you gather reliable data and that your analysis is accurate.
- Keep surveys brief. According to our research on survey length, keeping your survey concise should have a positive impact on the response rate and data reliability. To create a concise survey, set clear goals to focus your questions.
- Weight your surveys. Weighting a survey allows you to make the sample of respondents appear more in line with the broader population that you’re interested in studying.
- Know when to embrace relativity. Making sense of the numbers can be no mean feat. Learn when to use numbers and when to use percentages.
- Look at the raw number of responses. If you examine the ‘frequencies’, you will get a good overview of your data.
- Use comparison groups. See how your results compare to competitors or other organisations by looking into other data that is available.
How to turn surveys into a marketing feedback system
To improve, you need to actively seek feedback and iterate based on the results. This is why it’s crucial to transform surveys into a marketing feedback system.
Here is some helpful advice about turning surveys into a marketing feedback system:
- Build a survey research programme. Ad hoc surveys can be useful, but developing a holistic survey research programme will help to drive growth by collecting continuous feedback and data to inform your strategy formulation.
- Use surveys in your CRM. Integrating surveys into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software will enable you to automate feedback surveys at vital customer touchpoints. In addition, you will be able to automate triggers for targeted follow-up care.
- Use a single survey multiple times. To get repeated value from a single survey, consider benchmarking results and tracking changes, transitioning to a longitudinal study or replicating results to prove a theory.
Continual use of surveys can help you make targeted improvements that have an impact on brand awareness and customer loyalty while driving sales for your business. See the difference that implementing surveys into your marketing process can make.
Sample online marketing survey templates
Ready to find out what your customers want? Sign up for SurveyMonkey to start creating your own surveys or begin with one of our expert-written marketing survey templates:
- Brand Awareness Template
- Business-to-Business Template
- Customer Comments Template
- Customer Satisfaction Template
- Customer Service Feedback Template
- Customer Support Template
- Firmographics Template
- Market Research – Product Template
- Market Research – Service Template
- Market Research Template
- Media Usage Template
- Household Budget Template
- Net Promoter® Score (NPS) Template
- NPS and Brand Loyalty Template
- Online Content Strategy Template
- Online Social Networking Template
- Retail Customer Feedback Template
- Software Evaluation Template
- Target Market Analysis Template
- Target Market Demographics Template
- Typical Customer Analysis Template
- Typical Customer Demographics Template
- U.S. Demographics – Snapshot Template
- U.S. Demographics Template
- Website Design Feedback Template
NPS®, Net Promoter® and Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.
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