Customer surveys are an invaluable and often underutilized method of gaining insight into the mind of the buyer and the overall buyer’s journey. Data collected through surveys can shed light on what’s working well and what may need to be adjusted in a company’s growth marketing strategy.
Using Customer Surveys to Promote Growth and Drive Revenue
While surveys are useful, they’re not something you can simply slap together and send out to a handful of contacts in a database. Crafting a survey requires a strategy all of its own. You must determine who you want to talk to, how you want to reach them and what you’re hoping to learn.
Tyrel Johnson, VP of Digital Marketing at Evercast, teamed up with us for this episode of Growth Marketing Chat to peel back the layers of leveraging surveys to benefit marketing and sales teams.
He reviews:
- The benefits of conducting surveys to receive customer feedback
- Different tools and platforms to assist with the creation and distribution of surveys
- Overcoming barriers and avoiding common pitfalls in the surveying process
- Incentivizing audiences effectively to participate in surveys
His experience exemplifies how survey results can inform future marketing and sales decision-making that will have the power to positively impact the bottom line and drive revenue. Tune in now to learn more.
Video Transcript:
CAROLINE: Hi, today I am here with Tyrel Johnson. He has a really, really cool background. He started several companies. He has run sales. He has run marketing, and I'm sure I'm missing some. And now who is the Vce President of Digital Marketing at Evercast. Tyrel, thank you so much for being with us today.
TYREL: Thank you, Caroline. Yeah. I appreciate you having me on the podcast and love to talk more about surveys.
CAROLINE: Right. In this podcast I always try to tackle something very specific. And today I wanted to talk about surveys because you've had really cool results with them. And I think it's something that is not really leveraged to its full potential, where especially in smaller companies. Right. Because when as marketers, we think of surveys, we think of huge companies that hire these big firms to run multi-million dollar surveys or whatever. But there is a way to do a survey at a reduced scale where you can still get a lot of good results.
So, I wanted to ask you, how do you go about choosing surveys? How do you find the right questions to ask? And how do you make sure that people participate?
TYREL: Sure. So, there's a lot of different ways, obviously, within a company that surveys could be utilized in marketing and sales and product, for the most part, help with research, help guide product decisions, help guide marketing decisions. There's a lot of interesting things you can gain specifically to marketing, understanding competitors and where you fit in the market, understanding the buying process of your key personas, what marketing materials or methods you should be using.
For example, you may learn by surveying your audience that they prefer to learn about a product like yours through a trial or an in-person demo, or maybe a webinar with a Q&A section. So, there's so many different things you can learn. A few other things is understanding what exactly they want to learn about the product. When it comes to the marketing that you're doing, you can ask questions about branding and positioning. You can ask questions about... One of my favorite to ask is, “what would you type into Google to find a product like ours?” And you can gain some really interesting insights into the exact words people are using and oftentimes at least in my experience, I've learned phrases and keywords that I never thought of prior to that.
CAROLINE: Right. I think this is brilliant. This is brilliant because there is no way you can sit in a room for as long as you want by yourself and do a bunch of research. I'm still probably going to miss a lot of keywords that people are looking for.
TYREL: Absolutely. And something that I think I'm just trying to put myself in somebody else's shoes whether they have a startup or some kind of small company and not a lot of resources they may have especially early on when you're starting out, you may not have the benefit of a big audience or a lot of customers or a waiting list to survey.
And so, one of the one of the big barriers with surveys is having an audience to survey. And I don't have a ton of experience. And obviously the different ways you can pull together an audience. However, I do know of a few resources that might be worth looking into. And one is the Survey Monkey audience panel that they've developed, which is over 140,000,000 people. There's a lot of different demographic and psychographic and different characteristics that you can filter by within that audience.
There's Quick Surveys Marketplace. They've got over 50 million people. And then, of course, Google Surveys. They've got Google Consumer Surveys product offering. And so, I've used that for consumer brands as well. Like, for example, running a survey to people that are interested in fitness and a certain age range in cities in the US and asking them about a consumer app that was fitness based and learning all about that audience that they have never heard of, the company that I was a part of. But there are some really interesting things you can do with those audiences.
CAROLINE: Something else that I've used in the past that is pretty interesting in any kind of market is that you can run that kind of surveys for price purposes, because general is really like data, and then also your prospects usually really like data and really like understanding what is the market doing. You can use this for PR. You can use this for enhancing your product and enhancing your messages. So many ways to use surveys.
TYREL: Yeah. And two other things that I thought about recently were incentivizing people to complete the survey. And the big one there is just kind of seeing the value in what you're learning. You can incentivize it with free product usage. If it's a consumer product, you can give away the product. If it's a SaaS application, you can give a free month or a free year or some kind of usage. You can also give away a product like computer. A MacBook Pro goes a long way. And even if you whether you're incentivizing per survey completion or a couple of companies that I've interacted with, that paid at the end of the survey, they would give you a gift card for completion.
But you can also do giveaways. So if you participate in survey, you're entered to win X Prize and you kind of spread the cost out and you can give away something really, really exciting and get a lot of people to participate in the survey and end up if the numbers work out, it can actually be more cost effective to do it that way.
And then you also have to think about what things you don't want to do when you're running a survey. And I think you don't want to ask people questions of what they would or will do. Like, you want to ask questions that touch more on things that people have done, because the reason is you're not going to get reliable answers. And asking, for example, if you ask someone whether they will buy a product or not, versus have they actually bought something similar is a completely different kind of question to ask for that first one. If you're asking something, if you're asking someone if they will do something in the future, it's not a reliable answer, right? You don't know what they're actually thinking versus asking people what they've done in the past, how they've come to conclusions, what they have planned in the past and really just not asking tons of open ended questions. Multiple choice, usually far better in terms of getting actionable data.
CAROLINE: I love your point of not asking where you do this in the future, because especially if it's kind of phrase away. Like, will you? I don't know. Oh, yes, of course I'm gonna do this right. Of course. But have you done it ever in your life? Oh, no, I didn't. You know, if you ask something that is like, oh, yeah. Like, potentially, I can bring me improvement that can help my life. Of course, I will do it. But this is not like this is not real.
TYREL: And also, and you can ask a question. Have you used a landing page builder? Yes or no? And if they say yes or you can even say it more specifically, have you used a landing page product or have you paid for a landing page product in the past twelve months, we kind of narrow down the focus. And if they say yes, then it's a logic tree question where you followed that up with? Okay. How did you find what method did you use to find that product where you hit with a paid ad? Did you find it through a blog? Did you find it through an influencer? Like, how did you find it? You could ask questions like, what did you pay for it? Because you've already qualified that. Yes, they have purchased a product.
CAROLINE: Yeah, they are in your target market.
TYREL: Definitely. And I think that's my experience with the Google survey product is you do these filtering questions? I think there are ways to set up multiple filtering questions before the person actually takes the survey, which is really interesting, because then you're not paying for those survey completions.
CAROLINE: Yeah. Alright. Well, I think that was great. Thank you so much, Tyrel, for coming.
TYREL: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
