The Most Effective Marketing Questions in Surveys

The market research industry in the UK is continuing to grow despite a slight slowdown due to the pandemic. As figures from Research Live have found, more than half of the companies involved in the area grew in the past year.

It shows just how key of an industry it is to grow through what has been an unstable time for businesses right across the country and the world.

Companies all turn to organisations that specialise in market research to gain knowledge for many reasons. It could be to keep up with current trends, find a target market, maintain a competitive edge over competitors, or better understand your customers’ needs.

Therefore, if you’re considering conducting a marketing survey to gather information about your business, you need to ensure its effectiveness. The only way to achieve this is by asking the right marketing questions.

But how do you go about do this?

Have a clear strategy

This is the fundamental part of any survey; you need to ask yourself one critical question before you start. What do you want to achieve from the survey?

It’s worth pondering the principles of marketing multiple choice questions and answers before you start writing questions. Understanding how customers interact with certain types of questions is essential to writing effective marketing questions.

If you don’t have a marketing strategy, why are you even spending time going out into the world for your research?

Therefore, with a plan to refer to, elements of your questioning will already be dictated. For instance, if you aim to improve your product, then a simple question for customers is how well the product suits their needs.

The responses could provide vital information into potential development opportunities in the future.

Build relationships

It’s essential to consider the psychological characteristics of your customer base. If you ask questions that involve feelings and attitudes towards your business or products, you can understand more about what they want from you.

In the book ‘This is Marketing’ by Seth Godin, he states one of the basic principles of marketing is building a relationship with your customers.

So, phrase your questions in an emotional manner, such as which of the following is important to you? Or, what interests you?

By doing so, you can understand more about the customer and cater to their needs. Plus, they get a sense of you caring for their needs, which earns their trust and increases customer retention.

Target audiences with marketing questions

You should also consider the target audience for your marketing questions. Sending out blanket surveys to all your customers very rarely produces useful data and may alienate people from responding to future surveys.

Respondents have to be motivated to provide feedback and the best way to do this is to send a survey at certain milestones or touchpoints. For example, you’d send a product feedback survey after a customer has made a purchase.

If you want to cast a wider net, a great way to find survey participants is to create interesting content to attract them, then ask for feedback related to the topic. For example, a killer blog post or personality quiz.

Address pain points

To improve customer experience, it’s important to ask questions about negative experiences to find out where you can improve.

Don’t be afraid to ask what bothers or frustrates them about your product or service? How can you better meet their needs? It can be prudent to ask such marketing questions even if you haven’t experienced an awkward or challenging moment; remember you’re learning about your customers.

Generally, there are four types of pain points you should aim to address in customer surveys: productivity, processes, financial, and support.

There are many other things you can do to keep your customers happy but asking them directly eliminates any guesswork.

Conclusion: Writing effective marketing questions

Regardless of whether you’re collecting feedback from existing or potential customers, asking the right marketing questions is essential to getting quality data.

Overall, a well-planned survey built around your overall marketing plan can help with your company growth and constant improvement.

Surveys can inform your strategies as we advance, build relationships and trust, help you avoid pitfalls, and hopefully ensure your business continues to thrive no matter what obstacles lie ahead.

With Shout, you can run long term surveys to collect data over time and continue to improve your understanding of your audience. Knowing your audience as well as you know yourself is the only way to create effective digital marketing campaigns and increase your return on investment.