Surveying your target audience to help you make business decisions may not cross your mind. But there are some big benefits to doing so. For starters, you may want customer insight into an ongoing situation or upcoming event. In this case, customer feedback can be an excellent tool to gauge which direction you should take.
You can’t expect all of your clients to respond or submit feedback. However, any observations you receive could be constructive. Google found that less than 40% of marketers use surveys to help make business decisions. This means it’s an overwhelmingly unused resource for a business owner to take advantage of. Aside from getting customer feedback, surveys have many other benefits as well.
6 Benefits Of Surveying Your Target Audience To Make Business & Marketing Decisions
Ideally, you want to talk to each and every one of your customers. By doing so, you can find out where their head is at and how they feel about your services. However, the reality is that this is pretty impossible to accomplish. But there is another way to reach the insight you’re looking for. For example, online surveys can ask questions you may not be able to ask in person.
In addition, digital surveys can:
- Be easy on your budget
- Cast a large net all at once, reaching your target audience
- Be simple to create yourself
- Managed easily through software like SurveyPlanet or SurveyMonkey
1. Get A Gauge On Current Conditions
Events beyond your control can dictate how you conduct business. But you can use surveys to get ahead of the curve. As an example, the pandemic left many business owners stuck on figuring out their next steps. Because there is so much controversy surrounding the pandemic, it can be hard to read an audience. This makes it that much more difficult to make smart decisions that can help expand your business.
Nevertheless, proactive businesses took it upon themselves to send email blasts surveying their customer base. They asked questions regarding the pandemic to get a feel for their audience’s current wants and needs. And then tried to offer a solution.
Ultimately, digital surveys helped businesses think about their availability, remote and delivery services, and more.
2. Keep Customer Feedback In Mind
Help Scout says that for every customer who complains, there’s 26 more who feel similarly but don’t say anything. However, you should keep in mind that 95% of customers share their bad experiences with friends, relatives, and acquaintances. As a business owner, you don’t hear every complaint. But many potential customers are hearing more than you know.
These findings may not seem fair. Nevertheless, there is a way to reach out and hear more from customers who may be dissatisfied. That’s where surveys come in. Keep a pulse on your audience and check up by sending surveys every once in a while. This way, you can find gaps in areas such as your:
- Business model
- Marketing tools
- Management or employee service
- Wait times
- Repetitive problems
- Poor customer service or resolution
Getting feedback in these areas can help you decide what needs to be addressed. In addition, it can tell you where you’re doing well. From here, you can make changes in management, operations, and other departments as needed.
3. Surveying Your Target Audience To Reorganize Priorities
Additionally, surveys can help you rearrange your priorities and get to the root of what really matters to your customers.
You may find that certain products or services are more popular than others. You might even find you have an untapped potential by offering something else you didn’t think of before.
Say you’re a nutritionist and personal trainer who offers packages geared mostly towards healthy eating advice. However, you might get survey results that say people would rather pay more to get additional workout and exercise programs. Even more so, you find your audience isn’t all that interested in one of the packages you offer. This may be the ideal time to consider realigning your priorities and focus less on nutrition by balancing those services with exercise options. Doing so shows you’re capable of listening and allows you to offer something new to current customers based on direct responses.
Adaptation is key to a business’s long-term success. Your priorities shouldn’t remain the same every month or year. By often surveying your audience, you won’t run the risk of falling behind the market. Or losing customers by not actually offering the services they most want.
4. Manage Your Reputation
It’s important to maintain your online reputation the best you can. You may not agree with every survey response you receive. But there is always a way to respond with professionalism.
Say you’re hearing a ton of negative comments about your production times. However, you know that your company works as fast as it can to get products to your customers. This may be the time to create a marketing campaign that gives customers an inside look at production, why it takes so long, and the value in not cutting corners.
Your audience will value their feedback being addressed and come to better understand how your business operates.
5. View Your Business From The Customer’s Perspective
Surveying your target audience is an opportunity to see your business through someone else’s eyes. Responses can shed light on an idea or opinion you may not have ever thought of before. There may even be additional opportunities to do some good like making charitable donations or offering discounts to essential personnel. You might find out you can make a certain aspect of your business even stronger.
6. Give Management And Employees A Chance To Adjust
You’ve conducted a survey and see that perhaps you’ve been focusing all of your efforts on delivery services. If most of your customers say delivery is seamless, but a few of your staff are poorly trained, rude, or make continual errors, it may be time to make some tough decisions.
Getting both positive and negative feedback helps your ability to come up with a game plan. In this case, you may want to congratulate your team on amazing delivery services. However, you will also need to transition and spend more time and resources on training. If necessary, you may need to let go of workers who are unwilling to learn, adapt, and alter their work style. But by doing so, your client base will see you’ve improved and potentially become repeat customers.
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