Uncover Industry Trends with Online Surveys
In last week’s post I talked about how audiences drive any content campaign. Now let’s dive into a great example of how to actually talk to your audience to set the foundation to a campaign.
Today we are going to dive into online surveys.
What is an Online Survey?
An online survey is a questionnaire that the target audience can complete over the Internet. Online surveys are usually created as Web forms with a database to store the answers and statistical software to provide analytics. People are often encouraged to complete online surveys by an incentive such as being entered to win a prize. (Techopedia)
Why use an Online Survey?
Online surveys are simple, easy and if done right can be fast to execute on. An online survey can reveal insights into how an audience views a product or can provide industry insights as to a problem that is happening thus revealing an opportunity for a company to swoop in and provide a solution.
Showing a solution to a problem provides opportunity for a content campaign and new dollars for a company with the right product and/or services.
An easy question to add into a survey is simple asking the audience “how they would prefer to consume this kind of content going forward?”
This is a question that can help lay the foundation of any content campaign or product launch that not enough marketers ask. Be open with what your looking to get out of the data and your responses will surprise you.
How to Start an Online Survey
Let’s start off by assuming you work for a software company with a product that can help streamline communication from directors/front office staff to plant managers and workers via an app on phone or tablet and you are looking to break into the manufacturing space.
If you don't own a database or want to get into a different market, you should consider approaching a manufacturing media company that has a database full of those that fit your target audience.
Rather than diving in specifically to how your product can help those working within the manufacturing space, you should work with the media company on crafting a survey to manufacturers on how their overall communications are working or aren’t working.
Then by understanding what the problems are they are having you can begin to craft a content strategy to show how your product/app can help solve the overall communications issues within the target audience.
Target audience should be management on down to the workers on the floor.
A great media company will not only have the target audience you want to go after but will be able to craft the survey for you.
Identifying the Problem - The Results
Now that you have gathering data from the target audience you are able to Identify the problem. By knowing what the problem your target audience is having you can then show the solution and help to understand the value that the product is adding to their company.
Being able to extract the information out of a survey to identify a market wide issue and then show how your product can be the solution is what I like to call “golden” when it comes to developing a content campaign.
Hopefully you have someone on staff that will be able to analyze the data but if not this is where a great media company can also help with filling that gap.
By identifying the problem via the online survey you now have the ammo to go and sell your product not as a “want” but as a “need” for potential clients. There is a market wide issue and here is how your software company can fix it.
