Businesses can use surveys to better understand their target market. Here’s how to use surveys for your business.
Surveys provide small businesses with feedback and information about customer wants and needs.
Surveys can have different purposes. For example, one survey may measure your target audience that is familiar with your brand, while another may be used to bring in new leads.
Choose the right type of survey for your purposes. This guide contains nine types of surveys that can help your business.
This article is intended for entrepreneurs who want to improve their marketing and sales efforts by implementing data obtained from surveys.
Companies across all industries gather data from different sources to help improve operations, rise sales, reduce costs, and increase product development opportunities. Surveys are a type of tool for gathering information from customers and employees.
Why surveys are important to businesses
Small business surveys enable the company to effectively gather honest feedback, opinions, and responses from customers and use this information to improve various aspects of the company.
Survey responses can confirm or spark discussions about strategic business decisions and offer incredible data for decision-making.
Getting feedback from small business surveys can also tell you what customers think of your brand and products, and also provide a basis for comparison over time.
Small business survey techniques
There are two main types of survey techniques:
The questionnaires consist of a list of questions that respondents can answer alone.
Small business surveys consist of several questions being asked to the respondent and further questions being followed based on their answers.
Types of surveys
The following types of surveys can help your business in different ways:
Market research survey
A marketplace research survey enables you to acquire information that approximates your market, which includes how and wherein your products are bought, your customers’ desires, your degree of competitive positioning within an industry, and your client demographics.
You can use this method of the small business survey to know a specific target market, measure brand awareness, communicate with a direct audience, and identify product and pricing opportunities.
You could analyze a market research survey if you have no records of approximately an audience or a product. You could additionally build upon marketing data you’ve got already gathered and gauge it towards a benchmark.
Market research surveys assist you to develop your business by using doing the subsequent:
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- Supplying immediate data on what customers think about your products or services
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- Allowing you to accumulate data in a structured way so your business enterprise can increase strategies based on informed decisions
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- Revealing the strengths and weaknesses of your products or services
Lead generation survey
A lead generation survey allows you to gather contact records and some options from your audience. It permits you to gather a list of potentialities who might be inquisitive about purchasing your services or products.
A lead generation small business survey must be targeted, as you don’t want to show off respondents with too many questions. It ought to encompass a minimal wide variety of form fields for collecting contact data (e.G., first name, email address), an opt-in checkbox that offers you permission to contact respondents with the use of email, and a question associated with their preferences concerning your products or services.
Lead generation surveys let you develop your commercial enterprise by way of doing the subsequent:
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- Supplying you with leads by small business survey, who have an interest to your service or product
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- Permitting you to qualify those leads via asking questions about their choices and allowing you to determine their interests and the way geared up they may be to buy
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- Getting permission to contact potentialities, as they’ll have opted in to fill out the survey
Brand awareness survey
A brand knowledge survey can help you find out how well your customers know your brand, the meaning of your name and logo, and what your brand means. It’s significant to make sure customers think of you when they’re looking for products or services.
Use the following metrics when developing a brand awareness small business survey:
Brand loyalty: how in all likelihood your audience is to go back whilst making their next purchase
Brand identification: your target audience’s opinions towards our logo and branding sign language
Brand image: what your audience associates together with your brand
Brand reputation: how your target audience acknowledges your emblem after they see it
Brand recall: how well your audience recalls your brand
Brand trust: how trustworthy your audience unearths your brand
Growing logo recognition is critical for constructing a target audience. You may use an emblem recognition survey, as well as market research records, to create advertising that communicates your brand name and the related products or services.
Brand awareness surveys can help you grow your business by using the following:
Measuring the effectiveness and overall performance of advertising and marketing techniques and investments
Permitting you to perceive respondents’ institutions along with your brand to uncover new business opportunities
Verifying that your brand is both perceived in a way that suits how you’ve got been positioning it or demonstrating that there may be room for improvement
Customer satisfaction survey
A customer satisfaction survey enables you to gauge your customers’ satisfaction along with your business and your products or services. It may also help you to increase sales. Different customers will respond to positive opinions from other customers, particularly if the opinions are published online. However, you can’t pressure customers to mention they may be happy or to fill out a customer satisfaction survey. Ask the right questions, and make it amusing and welcoming for customers to fill out.
Customer satisfaction small business surveys let you grow your business using doing the following:
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- Ascertaining whether or not customers are loyal to your brand and intend to repurchase your product
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- Figuring out whether or not customers are satisfied, increasing a customer’s lifetime cost, and reducing churn
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- Measuring customers’ satisfaction to cope with poor feedback, with a purpose to assist reduce the number of terrible comments posted on social media
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- Allowing you to preserve customers, which costs much less than acquiring new ones
Event evaluation survey
An event rating small business survey allows you to get customer feedback on your activity. It also measures the success of follow-up, which can help you improve future events.
An event rating survey can also help you determine how participants view the event differently than you do. Some participants may not have liked some aspects of the event. While you must inspect each section, keep the survey as short as possible; some feedback is better than none. Match the tone of your event rating survey to the tone of the event.
Event evaluation small business surveys will let you develop your business by using doing the subsequent:
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- Gathering attendees’ sincere reviews and present perceptions of the occasion
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- Offering your customers a chance to interact along with your brand
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- Allowing you to accumulate information to enhance future occasions
Employee satisfaction survey
An employee delight survey permits you to determine whether or not employees are glad about the work environment. It involves asking employees for remarks on exceptional elements of the task and letting them list worries or frustrations with the small business. The small business survey needs to encompass questions about the company’s working and how employees sense inside the team surroundings. Tremendous small business survey responses can display that employee motivation is high and that there may be a sense of sturdy team spirit.
Conduct an annual employee satisfaction survey and monitor sentiment on an ongoing basis. Inform employees before completing a survey that will result in honest answers.
Worker satisfaction surveys allow you to develop your business using doing the subsequent:
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- Gathering insights and suggestions that will help you improve the employer
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- Identifying areas of your business that would need development
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- This includes personnel inside the system of enhancing the company, on the way to raise morale
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- Allowing you to sense the employee satisfaction over time
Job satisfaction survey
The job satisfaction survey makes it possible to evaluate the perception of individual employees of the company and determine how satisfied they are with their work. It is similar to an employee satisfaction small business survey but focuses on specific tasks. Conducting job satisfaction surveys can directly affect employee morale, thereby protecting employee confidentiality.
Job satisfaction surveys can help you grow your business by doing the following:
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- Revealing direct look into how employees within their team
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- Presenting actionable objectives for employees to gain primarily based on the input, a good way to improve their communique capabilities, teamwork, and ambition
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- Gathering data to aid extra training or guidance
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- Connecting employees’ task pride to the quality of their work and the manner they constitute your business
How to design a good survey?
The quality of your online content ought to be every one of your top priorities. Not best can packing your pages complete of high-value posts improve your presence within the natural search results, it can also pass a protracted way in the direction of enhancing customers’ experience on your website.
One manner you may determine which styles of content you must work on is through customer surveys. Follow those 5 steps to lead effective surveys that turn up the most perceptive results:
1. Do preliminary research.
To create a powerful small business survey, you need to be as centered as feasible. Honestly asking readers, “What subjects do you need me to put in writing about?” may not flip up as many correct ideas as asking them approximately particular topics.
To determine your topics, first, visit your Google Analytics account and examine your top 10 content pages. In case you see any similarities among these articles in phrases of their subjects, ask your readers which of them they’re maximum inquisitive about.
2. Draft your questions.
For exceptional results, include no more than 5 to ten questions for your small business surveys. Consumers normally have quick interest spans, so in case you bombard them with dozens of quick-fire questions, your final touch quotes can drop extensively.
As you are writing your small business survey questions, try and permit participants to make bigger on their thoughts. “Yes or no” questions may not come up with as a great deal of information as unfastened-form text responses.
3. Offer an incentive for completing the small business survey.
At the same time as your small business survey is still in the planning degrees, you may want to come up with an incentive to inspire readers to reply to all the questions. Many websites offer a small cut-price or a downloadable white paper to inspire human beings to participate.
In case you do decide to offer an incentive, think through how you’ll distribute it to readers. Sending incentives to individuals can be time-consuming, so search for a small business survey program like SurveyMonkey that helps you to automate the follow-up procedure.
4. Set up your small business survey.
Now is the time to set up a program, which is a great way to record your answers. If you are a professional programmer, you can code and embed your own small business survey reaction form on your website. Alternatively, you can look at information-gathering applications such as SurveyMonkey or KwikSurveys if you can use an automated method or want to use features that you can no longer encode yourself.
Both of these gears allow you to set up simple client comments paperwork at no cost. SurveyMonkey additionally offers paid plans in case you’re inquisitive about greater advanced functions, such as the automatic follow-up described above. SurveyMonkey’s plans start at $17 a month for a “choose” membership.
5. Publicize your small business survey to readers.
Once your survey is prepared to launch, get the word out to your readers with the aid of advertising and marketing it on:
• Your website
• on your blog posts
• within your email marketing messages
• on your social media profiles
• for your email signature
Keep in mind that readers may not have time to complete your small business survey until they see a discussion about it. It is important to advertise it in multiple places to ensure the highest possible level of completion.
When entering your responses, review them and make changes to your website or digital marketing plan if necessary.
By responding to this feedback, your readers will show that you value their insights, and it will be great to achieve your search engine optimization goals.
3 Popular Small Business Survey Tools
There are dozens of appropriate reasons why you would possibly need to host a small business survey at your small business. Maybe you’re looking to solicit customer remarks on a brand new store. Perhaps you’re seeking out enter from your employees on which health plan is first-class. Or, maybe you just need to increase engagement on social media. Irrespective of the cause, right here are a few famous small business survey tools that make it easy to create, ship, and analyze custom questionnaires.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular online small business survey tools with many features and levels, from basic to corporate. The cheapest SurveyMonkey option is free, allowing you to conduct unlimited small business surveys. Each questionnaire can contain a maximum of 10 questions and get a maximum of 40 answers.
Google Forms
Google Forms is every other free, basic manner to get feedback out of your employees, followers, or customers. Google forms are very user-friendly and can customize your questionnaire with photographs, trademarks, and brand colors.
Forms provide small business survey results in a format that makes it easy to view your data: view form responses or export your data to Google Sheets for more detailed analysis.
Typeform
Users love Typeform’s fine, minimalistic design and capability to work on virtually every device. The tool comes with the capability to optimize question paths and make endless logic jumps. It’s a purely versatile platform for small business surveys that can be accustomed to build both forms or surveys…
With their built-in templates, you can create quick and easy order forms, feedback surveys, satisfaction surveys, and even job application forms.
Like SurveyMonkey, Typeform offers you the ability to conduct surveys with 10 free questions and get a maximum of 100 answers per month.