Data is a plentiful resource for most businesses today; if you are willing to collect and analyze it, you can use it to make more informed and calculated decisions. As well as the data generated over the course of routine operations, businesses can also gather additional data in a variety of ways. One of the most effective yet underappreciated data collection methods available is consumer surveys.
Below are four ways that these surveys can turbocharge your business decision-making processes.
Test marketing ideas before you commit to them
Developing and executing a marketing campaign is a delicate process. One misstep can cost your business dear; the ramifications of a mismanaged marketing campaign can be enormous. You can’t know for sure how your audience will respond to a marketing campaign before you launch it. But by surveying a small section of your audience beforehand, you can make an educated guess.
With the benefit of additional data and feedback from surveys, your marketing team can take more creative risks with confidence. If their initial concepts land well with your sample audience, your marketers will know they are on the right track. On the other hand, if your audience gives their proposals a lukewarm response, they have an opportunity to refocus their efforts.
A well-designed survey will tell you a lot more than just whether respondents like your concepts or not. With the right combination of questions, you can dig beneath the surface and understand why respondents feel the way they do. The more granular the feedback you elicit, the more helpful it will be in helping your marketers to develop their campaigns and refine their approaches.
Identify key trends early
The online world moves fast. New trends are constantly emerging, growing, and flaming out. Identifying new trends before they emerge and which emerging trends have staying power is notoriously difficult. However, for businesses that do bet on the right trends, the payoffs can be enormous.
Intuition will only get you so far when trying to decide which trends are likely to bring the biggest returns. You might have some success with this approach if you have the right people on your team. But a data-driven approach is much more reliable. In fact, with the right data and analytical methods on your side, you can potentially spot new trends early, before they are apparent to your competitors.
Surveys are one of the best tools for identifying new trends because they give you control over what questions you ask and what data you get back. Observing how your audience and market behaves can enable you to identify trends. But this approach restricts you to using data generated incidentally by your audience. With a survey you’ve designed yourself, you can ask for whatever information you want and gather the data you find most relevant. Using surveys, you can hone in on the specific areas you are most interested in and that you think are most likely to generate significant returns for your business.
The control that surveys give you is one of the main benefits of using them over passive or observational data collection methods. However, the flip-side of that is that surveys are only as good as their design; a poorly designed survey isn’t going to generate high-quality data. Creating effective surveys is much easier with tools like tapapp. Tapapp is a multi-platform app that enables businesses to build forms quickly and easily, thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Adding new elements is simple and straightforward, leaving you free to focus on ensuring that you’re asking the right questions. Surveys can either be administered in-person by your staff, or customers can follow a link to view and complete the survey online.
Gain deeper insights into your audience
You can never know your own audience too well. The better you understand how they think and feel, the easier it is to tailor your marketing messages and your product design to them. You can learn a lot about your audience using passive data collection. For example, data from your website will tell you which products and services your users spend the most time looking at and reading about. Similarly, if your website contains a blog, the content that users gravitate towards will reveal a lot of useful information about their interests. Any sudden changes in user behaviour could indicate the emergence of a new trend.
But there is only so much you can learn from simply watching your users. If you want to know how they feel about specific topics, the best method is simply to ask them. As well as learning more about your audience as a whole, surveys can also tell you a lot about the different groups that make up your customer base. Identifying the commonalities and differences in the ways that these groups think and feel means you can ensure you are catering to everyone appropriately.
Gain an understanding of how your customers perceive competitors
As well as polling consumers on how they feel about your business and products, both online and field-based reporting are also excellent ways of gaining insight into how they feel about your competitors. This information can be just as valuable in informing your decision-making and your corporate strategy. If you want to learn more about how your audience views your competitors, a well-crafted survey is one of the most effective ways of doing so.
As with evaluating responses to your own business and products, granular data can help you to understand exactly what your audience thinks and why. Knowing what they like and dislike about your competitors is potentially very powerful information to have on your side.
A well-crafted survey is a potent tool for gathering data and gaining insight. If you deploy them the right way, you can use them to learn more about your audience, your business, and your competitors with minimal effort. Just remember; a survey is only ever as effective as its design. If you want to get the most out of your surveys, you need to use the right tools to build them and make sure that you’re asking the right questions. We can’t tell you what to ask respondents, but Tapapp makes building surveys as straightforward as possible.
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