How To Leverage Surveys For Small Business Marketing
Surveys for small business marketing are a great way to know more about what your customers are thinking. When executed properly, surveys can provide insights about your customers’ challenges, how to improve your products and services, and more. There are many survey tools available such as Fluid Surveys that can help you craft and send customized surveys. In this article, we discuss four ways to leverage surveys for small business marketing.
1. Learn About Your Customers’ Challenges and Complaints with Surveys for Small Business Marketing Insights
Regardless of your tenure with your current company, you should always be dialed into your customer base; meaning you should be aware of their challenges and complaints. Similar to how your company’s dynamics change overtime, so does your customers’ challenges and complaints which makes it impossible for you to know for sure what issues they are experiencing at any given time. As small business marketers, you should regularly poll your customers to ensure you are providing the right solutions to their challenges and complaints.
Send a survey to your customers and ask them what challenges they are facing, what consumes most of their resources or what’s preventing them from following through. For example, if you sell products or services online, a customer may wish to use their PayPal account. If this option is not available to them, it may be enough for some customers to leave the checkout and seek an alternative. Getting a deeper understanding of your customer needs will enable you to better address their challenges and complaints in your marketing messages and to adjust your tools for better inclusiveness.
2. Get Insights Into New Product Launch or Existing Products and Services
When you launch a new product there is always some degree of uncertainty and risk. It’s impractical to think that you can fully assess how well a product will perform in the market and that’s where customer feedback can lend helpful insights. Instead of speculating about what your audience will think based on your previous products or services, give your customers a sample or early access to elicit their opinions and collect feedback. Your survey results can be an instrumental tool to use to confirm business assumptions and future plans with the actual desires of your users.
3. Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy
Small businesses have limited resources and therefore limited room to take risks with fruitless or experimental campaigns. It’s useless to tweet all of your posts when your ideal audience only uses Facebook or Google+. Nor is it good time management to create tons of guides and ebooks when your audience prefers a series of easily digestible emails. So how do you find out what your customers want and how they want to receive it? You simply ask them, What type of content do you want and how do you want to receive it?
Through customer feedback surveys you can find how exactly (or near exact) the type of content your customers want, how and where they want it. This type of survey should be designed as a selection process where you provide them with options to choose from rather than making them think about it and provide additional field to write their own choice under each selection section. The survey results can enable you fine tune your content marketing strategy to help ensure your visuals, messages, topics and delivery methods resonate with the audience you want to reach.
4. Understand Your Weaknesses
When you try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, even stretching your imagination, you will not likely see your business from the vantage point of your customers without asking them for their perspective. In your customer surveys, ask for constructive criticism feedback, then use the results of the surveys to understand any business weaknesses you may not have previously realized.
With the right planning, implementation, and strategic direction, customer feedback can be an insightful and powerful business tool.
Wrapping it Up
And there you have it! 4 ways to leverage certain types of surveys to leverage you small business marketing strategy and engagement. Let us know how we can help you with your survey and marketing needs. Get in touch with our marketing team today at (858) 874-6528 or contact us online.
Hazel Burgess
FOUNDER/SEO DIRECTOR
Hazel is the Founder & SEO Director at Envisager Studio, a premier website design agency specializing in WordPress website design, development and internet marketing. In her spare time, she writes about search engine optimization, website design, and internet marketing.