Simple But Powerful Ways to Use Surveys For Your Business

Listening is a simple, yet often forgotten way to find out exactly what your customers are looking for. According to TopRank Online Marketing, social media communities like Twitter with over 100 million accounts and Facebook with over 500 million present an attractive opportunity for research, engagement and marketing. Surveys are a great way to engage your targeted audience through social media, and conversely social media is a great way to make your surveys more successful. In order to implement any effective marketing strategy, you have to be able to focus your efforts on the needs of your clients. There is a lot to be learned from incorporating a survey with those you interact with on social media.

There are multiple options for adding social media based surveys into your marketing mix. Depending on your specific business, you may want to include a posting with a survey url link on your Facebook fan page(s). You can also promote your survey in a Facebook advertisement, so that users who click on the ad are directed to your survey, or create a separate tab on your fan page and embed the survey on the page itself.

The following are some survey best practices outlined by Survey Builder Plus:

• Design the survey questionnaire keeping the target audience in mind.
• Keep the survey questionnaire short with concise and clear questions and choices.
• Inform the participants clearly about the objective or purpose of the survey and how the results will be used.
• Incentivize the respondents; but be clear about it upfront.
• Do not collect Facebook profile information; if required, ask questions and get it explicitly.

To maximize the impact of your survey, you can also rent a photo booth for marketing at your next event, convention or trade show that is designed to combine feedback management capabilities with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. When integrating your survey as a part of the fun and entertaining ‘photo sharing’experience for your guests, you create a powerful opportunity to build brand awareness, deliver promotional messages and conduct onsite market research. Through an interactive online survey connected to your chosen social media network, Keshot Photo Booths offers the ability to ask users questions directly about your brand with feedback sent directly to your marketing team for review.

With ever-increasing technological advances, it has become possible to design, conduct and analyze surveys in many more ways than in the past. In the running of your day-to-day business operations, it can be difficult to stay in touch with what your target market really wants. And even when you think you are succeeding in meeting your customers’ needs, things can change almost overnight. Online marketing surveys can keep your business on top of the evolving marketplace.