How to Use Surveys to Gather Actionable Insights

Presently, over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices (Perficient). Therefore, it is important to cater to mobile when planning your page's layout and design to increase engagement. Responsive design is an optimal solution, as it retrieves information from the respondent's screen resolution and orientation to automatically rearrange elements for a better user experience.

Furthermore, visual appeal can be an efficient tool to keep respondents engaged and reduce bounce rates. It is also important to evaluate your audience's reception to different visual elements, for example, as with A/B testing.

Online surveys are particularly well-suited for the inclusion of images and video, due to the inherent plasticity of the medium. It is important, however, to pay attention to loading times of the embedded elements, so as not to frustrate the survey’s respondents.

Implementing these practices helps boost engagement and the time on page, ultimately leading your campaign to maximize its data gathering potential by encouraging survey completion.

Social listening is an efficient method to gather data on your audience’s perception of your business, based on discussion related to your brand across different social channels your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) engages with. Monitoring mentions of your brand, its products and competitors, as well as keywords relevant to your services, are some of the possible actions you can take to leverage this method.

However, social listening often requires you to make educated assumptions from the gathered data. Conducting anonymous surveys targeting broader audiences can offer valuable input that enables you to verify the data collected via social listening and prove the validity of your assumptions.

Because social listening provides insight on your audience's perceptions of your competitors and the industry as a whole, informing you on possible pain points and problems your product could resolve to gain competitive ground, it can be readily employed to formulate relevant questions on your surveys, guiding your strategy with data. Therefore, surveys and social listening are two complementary strategies that can offer each other pertinent data, boosting one another’s efficiency and resulting in a better understanding of your audience.

Surveys can target leads at different stages of the sales funnel, providing you with relevant and timely feedback regarding their brand perception during each stage. Depending on the medium where you action your audience to take the survey, clicks and click-through rates can inform you on engagement with your campaigns.

This input will be valuable when structuring your campaign's cadences, as you get client insights on your audience's preferred channels, content topics, and frequency of communication. This will allow you to rethink and optimize content drips for your email marketing cadences, in order to better engage leads and drive demand.

Paired with other data gathering methods, such as the aforementioned social listening, marketing surveys can be a powerful tool to collect input from your audience on their most relevant pain points and interests.

This data can be leveraged in content marketing strategies to create high-performance pieces that will cater to your audience's needs, drive client trust, and establish your brand's authority. This ties in perfectly with demand generation campaigns built to create long-lasting awareness and interest.

Subsequently, you can measure the performance of your content and repurpose the most successful pieces into eBooks, webinars, and other gated content to maximize lead generation.

The dark funnel is an often underlooked aspect of marketing that aims to promote client behavior insights untrackable by analytics tools. Gaining insight on the dark funnel is a surefire way to improve your nurturing strategies, as well as to gather information on the sources of your audience's traffic and the actual progress of leads throughout the buyer's journey.

Surveys can help you shed light on the dark funnel. Simply by asking untracked leads seemingly innocuous questions in your surveys, such as “How did you find us?”, you can gain data that, when cross-referenced with tracking information gathered from other platforms, may identify sources of traffic that are going by unnoticed.

Plus, if your survey offers some reward on completion, such as access to an eBook, chances are it is going to be forwarded on typically untrackable channels such as private messengers. Implementing Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes on these assets will allow you to gain visibility on incoming traffic from these platforms.

As the socioeconomic value of data continues to grow, many governments around the world are revising and updating their policies on data privacy. Comparably, users are becoming more aware and careful about sharing their data online. Solid data protection practices are thus becoming a must within businesses to comply with these regulations and maintain user trust.

This scenario makes it important to be mindful of data privacy in your business practices. This obviously concerns the planning and application of marketing surveys, both when formulating the questions as well as when handling the acquired data.

An easy-to-find, clear, and readable privacy policy may dispel concerns from preoccupied leads. However, since few people actually read these cumbersome documents, it is important to showcase your data safety practices in your homepage, content, social media, and other promotion methods. Alongside demonstrating care for your audience, such good practices will garner you reputation and trust; ensuring that, in the long run, your campaign maximizes its efficiency, providing you with opted-in data—which is increasingly important in this privacy-compliance scenario.

Demand generation campaigns, which focus on building long-term brand awareness, can benefit greatly from data acquired via surveys. The unique insight offered by survey respondents into your audience's major challenges and pain points can inform discussions that contribute to community building, as well as content that addresses these questions and drives trust, such as thought leadership.

Consultants (both internal and external) can provide valuable advice to help you plan a B2B survey, which consequently will help you make more informed decisions based on your audience's responses, and ultimately enable you to extract the most value from your campaign.

For example, you can partner up with a demand generation provider that can conduct surveys on your behalf and optimize questions to gain the most accurate client insights. You can then continue this partnership by utilizing the survey results to plan a long-term brand awareness campaign.