Do you consider your own interests when brainstorming for content topics or do you aim to identify the issues which most affect your audiences to make a deeper connection?
You know what isn’t content marketing?
Posting a blog entry on a weekly basis that reflects your business’s ideas or activities. You should not write about things that interest you. If you want to establish a successful content strategy or spice your existing content plan up, survey taking is the solution.
The responses from your audience will provide you with the insights into their:
- Pain points.
- Challenges.
- Needs.
This serves as the foundation for constructing and organizing your content conception and agenda.
A Survey Helps to Better Understand Your Audience
Biggest Challenge
A survey can provide you with an understanding of what encourages your target audience. What is the greatest difficulty they face?
If you are able to recognize and resolve an obstacle that your intended audience is having, then you will be able to gain their attention. Data from analytics and social media provides an abundance of information related to what people do while they are on your website and the way they interact with your company.
But you want to get in their head. The only solution is to inquire them.
When you comprehend what your viewers’ issues and interests are, then you have a great platform from which to form your plan and content headlines.
It is important for every piece of content produced to be focused on helping to address an issue or difficulty. The more niche a title is, the better.
Set up an Auto-Respond on Email Sign-Ups
Gaining insight into someone’s experience can be achieved by inquiring with them when they are engaging or making a purchase. Once a user has filled out an email, sign-up, or contact form, an automated response email with one or two queries to answer should be sent.
For example:
- What is the biggest challenge you face?
- What one product would make a major difference to you right now?
These insights will provide you with data that you can use to focus on other individuals in comparable circumstances that confront the same difficulties. The finest pieces are very precise and offer practical data that helps improve someone’s existence in some manner.
Segment Your Audience
You can pinpoint content more accurately by incorporating a survey into your email registration form to divide your readership.
With MailChimp, it is effortless to use the Groups feature which automatically adds preselectable checkboxes to your registration page. If your target market includes members of the European Union, then you must conform to the GDPR regulations.
For example, if your sign-up form is for a content marketing newsletter, you can ask:
- Do you work for a brand in-house?
- Do you work for a content agency?
- Do you work at a startup?
- Do you have your own business?
After breaking your viewership into different categories, you can deliver the regular content marketing messages to everyone or you can also deliver especially pertinent material to every particular subgroup considering the singular challenges they confront.
The experiences of a content manager who works within an existing organization are distinct from those of a proprietor of a startup or a small business.
A Survey Will Feed Your Content
To Inform Your Content with Unique Data
A writer should include references when composing their work, backing up their statements or perspectives with facts and figures. If you provide exclusive investigations, information, or details related to your field or area of specialization, then you possess something that can be easily attached to other websites.
One strong set of data and research can be applied to several channels of content to gain maximum value:
- A webinar and/or industry talk
- A gated whitepaper/eBook download
- A data visualization
- A SlideShare deck
- An in-depth article on-site
- Quotes on social media
- Promotional printed marketing material
Generating Data for My Brand
The Content Marketing Institute carries out a survey regularly to assess what the current situation of the industry is. BuzzSumo also regularly produces in-depth industry research.
Analyze your customer information and search for patterns in purchasing habits. An index or map that illustrates a regional tendency can be utilized to create a widely-appreciated resource for spreading awareness, particularly to nearby media outlets.
Come up with a list of possible hypotheses or data sets that would be of interest to your audience as the starting point of your project. For example:
- Where in the UK is it easiest/hardest to gain planning permission?
- What are the best/worst restaurants in the UK when dealing with gluten intolerance?
- What are the job titles that get paid the most in your industry?
- Do the early birds at the gym earn the most money?
If your information is able to provide an answer to your queries, then you can create your content revolved around this and you then possess a noteworthy story to present to reporters.
Journalists are likely to disseminate stories which are original, data-driven, and have an attention-grabbing element that their readers will be interested in. This is the key to securing top-tier media links.
Depending on the info you possess, you can make an interactive graph/map, a white paper, an infographic, or a website page with moving visuals. Once you have grabbed their awareness, having robust illustrations to supplement your evidence is the next step to elicit the response you desire.
How to Create a Survey
Customer Database
It is preferable to have a contact list of customers in a database, which can then be used to find out what they think and observe, providing you with their feedback, views, and knowledge.
I favor utilizing SurveyMonkey or Google Surveys when conducting customer surveys. Establishing both of them is straightforward and both of them offer free versions with a limited number of inquiries and styling choices.
Paid Responses
You can use laser targeting and classification to make sure you don’t spend money on answers from people who do not meet the criteria.
I have found a successful strategy to save money is to ask myself a pre-qualifying question before I purchase something.
If you make an inquiry (for example, if you have obtained approval from the government for construction in the past year?), it is unlikely you will get an answer from minors. Therefore, you don’t need to eliminate them from the initial target audience group.
Asking a pre-screened question is more cost-efficient than dividing up the viewers.
Social Media Polls
Having an ample amount of followers on your various social media accounts permits you to use these platforms to elicit a wide variety of responses through running polls and inquiring questions.
Set a Specific Goal
It is preferable that your survey attempts to address a general inquiry. It is essential that your efforts must be focused on achieving goals that concern reach, reputation, or results.
What kind of people is your content appealing to and is that the target market you had in mind? Are you sure that your content marketing is displaying your brand correctly? Is your content influencing customer decision-making?
Choose a Tool
You should select a platform for conducting your surveys that is simple and well-suited to your requirements.
Using online services such as Google Consumer Surveys or SurveyMonkey can be beneficial when designing detailed questionnaires; they give you the ability to reach a specific target audience and collect the responses. Google’s tool is a bit more bare-bones. SurveyMonkey is comprehensive, but may require a significant financial investment.
If you haven’t prepared a questionnaire yet, you don’t have to use conventional methods. It is unnecessary to stick to a conventional style when conducting a survey.
For example, you could pose a query to your followers on social media to initiate a dialogue in a style similar to a forum. Here are some basic ideas:
- Informally query your followers on Instagram
- Pose a question to your Facebook followers
- Throw out a question for a specific Facebook group, or create a Facebook poll
- Quickly ask your audience one multiple-choice question using a Twitter Poll
You could also opt to be more informal and finish a blog post with a question, thus generating dialogue in the comments section. Moreover, make sure to request your email subscribers’ perspectives on any issue.
No matter what your preference is, or the type of knowledge you are interested in obtaining, you can acquire it by using the correct apparatus.
Keep It Short and Sweet
When carrying out a survey of your audience you are requesting not only their opinions but also their commitment of time. Show courtesy by making sure your surveys are brief and straight to the point.
Formulate questions that are effortless to respond to, and don’t provide too many surveys within a brief period of time – otherwise you could end up discouraging your readers instead of acquiring beneficial insight.
Ask Closed Questions
Gather information that is simple to categorize and amount to by asking closed-ended questions rather than open-ended ones.
Rather than requesting, “What is your opinion of our business?” – which may produce various feedback – inquire, “Which reply most accurately corresponds to your thought of our company?” and furnish a handful of choices for the respondent to pick from.
It is possible to reduce the amount of information one needs to analyze by specifying a certain range of answers. This makes the responses easier to analyze.
Ask About Past Behaviors – They’re More Quantifiable
It is impossible to guess what actions individuals will take – and, indeed, they are not able to anticipate their own behavior either. It is only possible to judge the reactions of your audience based upon their prior activities; the solitary practicable response is one that has been accomplished.
Queries that delve into prior conduct are simpler to reply to – it is much more manageable to consider what you have carried out instead of declaring confidently what you will do in an unpredictable future event.
Seamlessly Incorporate Surveys into Your Content Marketing
It has been made clear that obtaining feedback from customers does not require lengthy surveys filled with a multitude of questions and answers. You are now aware of the possible ways to request customer opinions.
Having established the best action for you to take, what steps do you need to take to put it into practice?
1. Use a CTA
If you’re wanting your audience to complete a longer survey, you should direct them towards it with a call-to-action. It is advisable to add a call-to-action (CTA) at the conclusion of a blog post, social media post, or in the closing of one of your newsletter emails.
If you do not take the initiative to advertise your survey and draw attention to it, no one will know that it is available.
2. Send an Email
We’ve talked about this in the past, however, it is a great way to capture answers. It is worth attempting to forward your poll by means of an email to those who have subscribed to your newsletter.
Why? These are individuals who have already put money into your organization in some capacity. They desire to stay informed of your current happenings. It is sensible to distribute the survey to them, which is not unreasonable and likely to be profitable.
3. Offer Survey Incentives
Rewarding people with something is a great way to motivate them. Offer up something in exchange for taking your survey. It’s possible you will receive more attention and responses.
For example, provide survey participants with a discount code at the close of the survey, or enter their name into a lottery or drawing. This demonstrates to your patrons how much their time and input are esteemed.
4. Post the Results
It is advantageous to include surveys as part of your content marketing efforts.
Gather the data, review it, and compose an article or blog post that outlines the conclusions and numbers that were achieved. Create an infographic, a slide presentation, or an eBook.
Observe how HubSpot translated the results of their inquiry relating to the sphere of content marketing into a captivating infographic.
This content is excellent due to its originality and it elevates you to an expert in your field. In addition, you will advance the progress of the industry by communicating your findings to other prominent individuals.
If there is a large amount of people that give their opinions in your survey and you have obtained a lot of useful information, it is honest to disclose it. That doesn’t only build authority – that builds trust.
Conclusion
Contemplate this situation: You have many pieces of information collected from sources such as site visits, ad presses, Facebook likes, weblog comments, and email subscriptions.
Gaining insight into your audience’s behaviours, such as how they interact with your brand and content, is possible. You just don’t know why.
Why is that one post so popular? Why does one ad work while another fails? Why is there a marked difference in the number of conversions achieved by two versions of the same landing page?
That’s exactly what surveys are for. Surveys provide an explanation to the figures, numbers, and statistics. For instance, they tell you:
- Why customers make purchasing decisions
- Why customers like you
- Why a particular ad, piece of content, or something similar works (or doesn’t work)
Surveys can also give you an insight about who the people are.
Surveys can be a major part of your marketing plan. The information they provide is priceless. In order to be successful, one must possess the requisite queries, implements, and plan of action.
This is a beneficial move economically, while its impact on your reputation will be monumental.
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