Marketing Through Surveys: How Your Business Can Benefit
Businesses need to act with confidence. They do that by making decisions based on sound reasoning and thorough research. But where does that all come from? The reasoning should come from an in depth understanding of an audience and target market and that is achieved through that second ‘r’ – the research.
That’s where surveys come in. All businesses need to know what their customers – and target customers – think. A great, and direct, way to find that out is to ask them. You can easily do that through an online SMS platform like Message Media. When starting to market your company one of the most important things is to hire a successful market research company to make sure your company is in safe hands.
Rounded view
A survey gives you the opportunity to get a rounded view of what makes your customer tick. By building up a full picture of who they are, what they like, where they shop,etc, you can make a much better decision on the products and services they need and the way to market these to them. Make sure you ask the right questions that serve to build up this ‘bigger picture’. Kissmetrics has written a useful piece about the need for simple questions and a mix of multi-choice and open-ended questions to get the balance just right.
Reaction
While surveys are great for finding out ‘who’ your customer is, you also need to gauge their opinions on your existing products and services. Find out why they bought them and what they thought was good and bad. Without understanding the reaction and opinion to your output you’ll struggle to know what to do next. Surveys give customers the chance to give you this reaction in a format that encourages an honest appraisal, filled in at their leisure.
Track trends
Opinion isn’t a fixed concept. Views and tastes change. This is where surveys help, though. Issuing the same set of questions annually, say, can help you to gauge how opinions have changed and spot trends over time. Compare results, spot the differences and use the information to enable you to understand why changes in your business have occurred.
No paperwork – or legwork
Technology has moved on and so has the humble survey. Don’t allow your viewto be clouded by images of annoying people wielding clipboards – this is now just the action of street ‘chuggers’ and isn’t the way for a modern business to conduct itself. Savvy businesses have embraced the technology that plays such an important part in our lives to deliver surveys in a quick, easy and less obtrusive way.
Companies such as Global Messaging can fire out thousands of text messages direct to the mobile phones of customers in seconds, with surveys over SMS an increasingly popular way of reaching a device that almost everyone has to hand. Web-based surveys, too, are fast and effective with companies such as Survey Monkey able to offer them to businesses.
Both of these more modern survey techniques are able to deliver the sort of data that can give deep insight into the views of recipients with easy – and near-instant- analysis of responses for businesses looking to listen and and react quickly.
Essentially it all boils down to the need to make well-reasoned business decisions. Through surveys, a business will be able to conduct the research required to ensure that this happens as often as possible.