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.

 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 

. 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 

 and can even use screener questions to ensure they are collecting responses from their desired audience.

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?

“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.”

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 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 

 that was intended to run in parallel with the 2020 NCAA basketball tournaments.

“Marketers can make data collection quick and fun by using exciting/engaging creative in their story posts.”

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.

 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.

“Google Forms can be a great survey option if you know from whom you are looking to collect feedback.”

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?”

 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.

“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!

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2020 Marketing Survey Options

Console video game systems are a hotly debated topic. Users typically are extremely loyal to their preferred system and the internet is full of message boards and threads of fierce debate over which console is superior. These debates however, typically focus on the comparison of the latest Xbox or PlayStation console. Nintendo’s strategy to differentiate themselves from their competition has positioned them to succeed without having to compete directly with the latest consoles from Microsoft and Sony.

For the past 3 generations of consoles, Xbox and Playstation have competed mostly on hardware terms; lively debates over processing power, memory, storage and graphics between the two have been held for nearly 20 years now. The latest Nintendo consoles have, for the most part, been largely absent from these arguments. This is because following the Nintendo GameCube, the last Nintendo console to compete directly with Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo’s strategy shifted away from competing in hardware with the latest Xbox and Playstation.

The GameCube was not a failure by any means. The console 

 worldwide since its release in September, 2001 and It is also widely beloved in video game circles. However it was behind the original Microsoft Xbox, which 

. Both consoles combined couldn’t touch the Sony Playstation 2, the best selling console ever, recording 

Nintendo was able to flip the script 5 years later with the release of the Nintendo Wii. Launching in November, 2006, the Wii recorded 

 sold over its lifetime! The Nintendo Wii outsold its competitors from Microsoft, the Xbox 360, which sold 

. All three consoles were released within a year of each other between 2005 and 2006.

How did Nintendo go from last in sales in the previous generation of consoles to top of the mountain? Nintendo pivoted away from what their competitors and focused less on hardware specs and instead introduced a novel gameplay experience and catered more toward family gaming.

The Nintendo Wii was a novel system that did away with the typical two handed console controller and instead introduced the Wii Remote. The Wii remote was revolutionary in introducing motion sensing controllers as a core component of a console gaming system. Wii users played games using point and click and gesture controls with the Wii remote. For example, users could swing the Wii remote like a sword while playing the Legend of Zelda and simulating a bowling motion while playing Wii Sports. The Wii required users to physically engage with their game playing experience.

The Wii remote was a unique offering at the time and was hit with users and critics. Gamespot named the Wii “

” in 2006. PC World named the Wii as one of magazine’s 

The motion based game play experience was so successful that Xbox and Playstation both introduced motion based hardware following the success of the Wii. Microsoft released the Xbox Kinect in 2010 for the Xbox 360, nearly 5 years after the launch of the console. Sony, followed suit releasing PlayStation Move two years later in 2012.

In addition to its innovative game play experience, The Nintendo Wii focused on a different gaming demographic. Nintendo conceded the passionate hardcore gaming audience to PCs and its console competitors from Sony and Microsoft and shifted its focus to casual gamers and families. Just after its launch 

, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, said “We’re not thinking about fighting Sony, but about how many people we can get to play games. The thing we’re thinking about most is not portable systems, consoles, and so forth, but that we want to get new people playing games.”

This shift was reflected in Wii’s messaging too. “Wii would like to play” and “Experience a new way to play” were messages used in ads for the system at launch. Most Wii games were family oriented and carried E (everybody) ratings. Popular M (mature) titles at the time like “Grand Theft Auto IV” and “Red Dead Redemption” were not available on the Wii. Of its top 10 best selling games, only one (Super Smash Bros. Brawl) had a rating higher than E.

Nearly a decade after the success of the Wii and following its poorly received successor, the WiiU, Nintendo once again introduced a radical new product for its eighth generation console. The Nintendo Switch, released March 3, 2017, is a hybrid console that can be used as a home console connected to a television set or as a portable gaming device. The Switch maintained motion sensing as a part of its functionality.

The handheld/mobile nature of the Switch is a big draw for consumers. Nintendo has released handheld systems and dominated the handheld market since the launch of the original Game Boy in 1989. In fact, it’s only competition from its console rivals was the Sony PSP, which launched in 2004 but fizzled out within a few years. However, in the years prior to the Switch’s release, Nintendo was experiencing new competition in the handheld gaming market, smartphone mobile games.

The Switch however, was a completely new sort of handheld/mobile gaming system. Whereas previous handheld systems were separate from their console counterparts. The Switch merged the traditional console with a handheld system. Previous handheld systems had sacrificed hardware specs for portability, the Switch offered a true one-to-one experience between its console and handheld modes. Switch users can seamlessly pivot from playing the console on their television set to going mobile, simply by removing the console from its television dock.

The Switch eliminated the choice users had previously been forced to make between in home and mobile gaming. Additionally users didn’t have to settle for differences between their at home and mobile gaming experience. The hybrid nature of the Switch has allowed the Switch to appear in some pretty 

The Switch’s eighth generation competitors, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, certainly have the Switch beat from a hardware perspective. Xbox One and PlayStation 4, for example, both offer models that support 4K output, while the Switch does not. Additionally, the Switch has no native media player or video streaming apps currently available. Native media players and video streaming apps are both accessible on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Has the Nintendo Switch dominated eight generation video game sales like the Nintendo Wii did as part of the seventh generation consoles? It is hard to say currently. The PlayStation 4 has sold more than 100 million units as of January 2020. Meanwhile Microsoft announced a shift in focus to the amount of active users on Xbox Live as its “primary metric for success” rather than unit sales. 

 of the Xbox One are 47 million units sold.

 since its launch in 2017, surpassing the estimated sales of the Xbox One. While it still has significant ground to make up in order to equal or surpass sales of the PlayStation 4. One thing to consider is that the PlayStation 4 launched in 2013, nearly 4 years before the Nintendo Switch.

The lesson to learn from Nintendo’s strategy is sometimes you don’t have to compete directly with your competitors. Nintendo conceded the hardware arms race typically fought between Sony and Microsoft. Instead, Nintendo focused on introducing new game play experiences with motion based game controls and the hybrid nature of the Nintendo Switch.

Additionally, Nintendo has made a concerted effort in bringing in new users to their systems. An effort to focus on family gaming and making titles that appeal to wide audiences has helped keep Nintendo competitive in the market despite releasing systems that lag behind competitors in terms of hardware. Sometimes the best option is to buck the market and forge your own path.

Nintendo's Strategy to Fight the Console Wars

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2020 Marketing Survey Options

Nintendo's Strategy to Fight the Console Wars