2020 Marketing Survey Options

With many businesses and organizations being forced to pivot their operations or change their product offering this year, now is a great time to review some options to collect user or customer feedback in the form of surveys. We understand that many of these decisions need to be made quickly and can in many instances be business-critical.

We believe that the best decisions are made when informed by data. Because of this, we wanted to review some survey options available to small to medium-sized businesses.

Google Surveys:

Google Surveys is a paid service that offers a quick, cost-effective way to get valuable insights into the minds of your target audience. They primarily target internet users reading content on a network of web publisher sites using Google Opinion Rewards for Publishers. These are the surveys you are asked to take before reading an article on a news website.

Google Surveys are also a great opportunity for web publishers to further monetize their websites.

Surveys can be up to 10 questions long. When designing a Google Survey, marketers can choose between 13 different questions options and can even use screener questions to ensure they are collecting responses from their desired audience.

Surveys are priced on a price per completed response basis, with the price based on the audience you want to reach and whether or not a screener question is used. In our experience, we recommend a minimum budget of $250 for a Google Survey. You will be billed for your survey once it begins.

A great application for Google Surveys can be measuring the effectiveness of an awareness or reach campaign, where a marketer is mostly focused on reaching and leaving an impression in a large audience. Running a Google Survey pre- and post-campaign and comparing data between the two surveys can answer valuable questions, e.g. did name recognition increase in the post-campaign survey compared to the pre-campaign survey?

Google Surveys are a great option for marketers who can dedicate some budget to access a large number of respondents and ask a variety of questions.

Facebook & Instagram Story Polls

Facebook and Instagram story polls offer a quick, easy, and free method to poll your existing social audience for low-level insights. Story posts remain public for 24 hours, so this method can offer a quick turn around on insights. Results can be accessed in the “Insights” section of your Facebook or Instagram profile.

Marketers can make data collection quick and fun by using exciting/engaging creative in their story posts. VIA Studio recently leveraged story polls to conduct a tournament of breakfast foods that was intended to run in parallel with the 2020 NCAA basketball tournaments.

This tactic is limited to just your social audience and others who may access your profile so its reach is limited. Additionally, Facebook and Instagram story polls do not offer much demographic information on respondents.

This tactic is easy, simple, and free. However, with data collection being minimal, it should only be used for a simple, single question poll.

Google Forms

Google Forms offer a great, free option for collecting both quantitative and qualitative feedback from a known audience. Responses to Google Forms surveys are neatly and automatically collected in the platform, with real-time response info and charts. Google Forms data can also be exported to Google Sheets or a .CSV file to use in Microsoft Excel.

Google Forms are free to use and offer a variety of question types. However, where Google Forms differs from Google Surveys is the distribution of the survey itself. Google Surveys will handle distributing the survey via their publishing network. With Google Forms, you are largely on your own in terms of distribution.

Google Forms can be a great survey option if you know from whom you are looking to collect feedback. For example, internal use or an email or customer list are good examples of opportunities to use Google Forms to conduct a survey. If you need assistance in distributing and collecting results however, Google Surveys may be a better option.

Drip Campaigns

Another great method of data collection, especially for post-purchase or post-service related queries is to use an email drip campaign. A drip campaign is typically an email campaign that sends, or “drips,” pre-determined email messages to customers or prospects over a set period of time.

Drip campaigns can be used for a variety of reasons, to sell add-on or related products following a purchase, to encourage customers to leave a review or rating on your product or service, or they can be used by marketers to distribute a targeted survey.

A drip campaign can be a good use of a Google Form survey, specifically targeting initial responses right after purchase. Drip campaigns are also a good tactic for collecting data regarding a user’s purchase path or experience, determine user satisfaction with a product or service, or used as an opportunity to ask “what can we do better?”

Most major email marketing platforms offer some sort of drip campaign feature. Drip campaigns can be an ongoing tactic that you can let run in the background without much updating but collecting valuable information over time.

If your business is in need of market research at any level, the options provided above can be a great start. These options employed together or in tandem can provide even more valuable data. Regardless of your company’s current position, we can all make more informed decisions using market data from surveys!