Using questionnaires and surveys to help your marketing

Questionnaires and surveys have the potential to be incredibly influential in helping you to make wise marketing decisions.When designed correctly, a questionnaire or survey is a very direct way of asking your existing customers and potential customers what it is that you can do to make you happier with their product or to convince them that they should buy your product.There are also surveys that you can have your own employees do.These types of surveys can give you a better idea for problems that may exist internally and can give you insight into your employees' moral and attitude about the company.Good marketers know that if the employees are unhappy or think poorly of the product, those sentiments could spill into the public.

The first thing that needs to be done in order to create a survey or questionnaire that is really going to help your marketing is to specifically identify what it is that you are hoping to look for in the survey and determine whether or not a survey is capable of obtaining such information.Surveys are only as useful as the questions that are asked.You cannot distribute a survey asking for the public to simply tell you what it is that you are doing wrong and what you need to do to change that.You need to have researched well and only ask questions that are not only easy to answer but can be answered quickly and then calculated to produce conclusive answers.

Most surveys that are done ask questions about satisfaction.These surveys can be presented to the individual mean to take the survey at the point of sale or to an employee to fill out at their leisure.Online surveys are becoming very popular as they provide the individual with the convenience of going online and completing the survey on their own time.Web addresses and key words or number sequences are used to connect the survey taker with what they actually purchased in a given transaction.There is also commonly an incentive in place that motivates the individual to take the time to complete the survey.An example of such an incentive would be to add the survey taker to a pool of others who have completed the survey and draw one winner out of that pool to receive a monetary prize.People are rarely willing to take time out of their busy schedules to complete a survey unless there is something in it for them.

Helping your marketing through conducting surveys can also be a very delicate matter that must be approached with caution.You want to make sure that you are very cautious when asking your loyal customers or even potential customers to do something for you.Surveys conducted over the phone may yield immediate answers and allow the one conducting the survey to ask for clarification the responses that are given, but conducting surveys over the phone is also perceived as rude during certain times of the day and an overly persistent or ill trained survey conductor may not have the skill set to treat your customer with the kind of respect that you would.

No matter the type of survey you are doing, the survey will help your marketing strategies best when they can yield the most useful answers possible.This is done by narrowing down your main points of interest to a few topics and writing the questionnaire properly.Take time to understand the process of survey and question writing so that when it comes time to actually start asking your questions, the answers that you receive will be worth the effort and financial investment that it took to get the customer to participate.