Introduction to promotion surveys

Whether you’re looking to launch a new product or service to market and want to identify the best promotional method for your needs, or just want to better understand levels of consumer sentiment towards your existing promotional activities and your wider brand. Carrying out a promotion research survey is essential if you’re to reach more of the right people with your brand, product or service.

Whatever promotional channels you’re using, whether you’re concentrating on marketing and advertising, or sales and lead generation, or a mix of these. It’s essential to know how effectively they are working for you. It’s critical, because even if you have the best priced/performing/designed product or service in your market, it won’t be enough if not enough of the right people know about it and are able to buy it.

It’s also important to note that different promotion channels can work more effectively for different products and services depending on the sector you operate in, and whether it’s a broad and generic, or a more closed niche industry that you’re working within.

By running a promotion survey, you can get a better idea about where your target audience is most likely to hear and gain information about similar products and services in your industry. And the great thing about this, is that as well as helping you to evaluate any existing promotion channels you may be using, the insight from your survey can in some cases enable you to push forward with promotion channels that might otherwise have gone untapped and untested by you.

However, it’s also important to appreciate that different promotional channels will have different costs and outcomes associated with them. So, you will also need to evaluate each channel in terms of the overall cost to acquire customers, so you can balance the efficiency of each approach against the volume of the right customer types you’re most likely to reach.

How promotion surveys fit into market research

While a well-developed and implemented promotion survey can deepen your understanding of how well your existing channels are performing and what might work even better for you, the insights from this survey can also benefit other areas of market research such as market, consumer/audience and brand.

Market

While market surveys are a great way of better understanding the characteristics, expectations and requirements of the market and target audience that you’re looking at, to help maximise your success you also need to know where the highest numbers of your ideal audience go to get information and makes purchases. Fortunately, by running a promotion survey alongside it, you’ll have a better understanding of where your ideal target audience resides and the best channel to reach them.

Take this further with a market survey.

Consumer

Better understanding what your audience is thinking, as well as their motivations and desires is essential to any market research. But this needs to be done quickly with a large enough survey sample, if you’re maximise its validity and use in moving forward with your wider objectives. A promotion survey can help, by enabling you to quickly identify, reach and engage your desired audience through channels where they’re most likely to reside.

Take this further with a consumer survey.

Brand

Knowing how well your brand is perceived and compares with others in your industry is essential if you’re going to move your business forward. But once again if you’re going to get the most accurate picture of how your brand is perceived, you’ll want to swiftly reach out and survey as many of the right people as you can. The promotion survey can help you achieve this, by helping you to identify the best promotion channel to reach the audience for your industry.

Take this further with a brand testing survey.

Types of promotion surveys

While a promotion survey can help you to better understand how effective your existing promotion channels are, or whether you need to be using different ones to improve audience engagement, you may already have a fairly good idea about your best promotion channel, but just want a bit more information about it and its benefits. We look at a selection of some of the most popular promotion channels:

Lead generation surveys

Whether they are looking for content around online security or support to grow their business. Whatever it is people want, lead generation surveys can be a great tool to generate their interest in your content and solutions and drive more prospects to your website.

Through the questions you ask, it can reveal essential information about any pain points they are trying to overcome currently, what budget they may have available and consequently how your solutions could help them.

Sales surveys

These can cover areas such as how they found you and why they bought from you, to how much they typically have to spend on products/services like yours and their preferred method of communication.

Similar to the lead generation survey, the insight from a pre-sales or post-sales survey can also provide a lot of valuable information, which can improve the efficiency of your sales teams going forward.

Advertising surveys

Whether it’s more traditional TV and billboard advertising, or digital advertising, while the impact of an advert can be extremely beneficial, it can also be costly if you get it wrong.

Fortunately, through an advertising survey you can measure and get a better idea of how your messages are being received, so you can maximise the objectives of what you’re looking to achieve going forward.

Marketing surveys

Whether it’s your email and content marketing, to your social media, or wider digital marketing strategy. Whatever mix of channels you use to reach out to your audience, you’ll want to know how your brand and wider marketing messages are being perceived.

Through a marketing survey, you can get a better idea of how different campaigns and channels are performing, as well as improving your understanding of your target audience, so you can improve the effectiveness of future marketing efforts.

Promotion survey best practice

From lead generation and sales, to marketing and advertising surveys. With the many types of promotion surveys, you could potentially want to run, it’s prudent to be clear from the outset how you will approach it, if you’re to gain the maximum benefit. Here are a few best practice considerations to think about:

1. Objectives

Consider exactly what you need to measure?

From knowing which advert under which promotional channel was best received by your audience, to the types of content that most resonated and gained leads for your sales teams.

There are potentially a lot things you could be looking to evaluate in connection with your promotion survey, so it’s important to know exactly what you’re looking to measure from the outset, if you’re to develop the right survey questions that will deliver the insight you need.

2. Audience

Reach out to your existing customers or find your ideal target audience

Depending on what you’re looking to achieve, you could either be looking to increase the success of your promotion efforts with your existing customers or with a relatively untapped audience, such as in the scenario of launching a product or service into a new market.

For existing customers, it could simply be a case of researching the channels you’ve previously used to communicate with them and identifying what worked best. In contrast, to reach new audiences, secondary research could enable you to view studies of other businesses in similar industries and the channels they’ve used to reach the largest volume of their ideal audience.

As an alternative option to reach your ideal audience, you might also opt to buy survey responses using a consumer panels service, which can quickly provide you with the sample you need. With our own consumers panels service we’re able to provide instant access to more than 20 million respondents globally. So, whatever you’re looking to survey and whatever demographic you want to target, we can get you the responses you need within your required timeframe (find out more).

3. Tools

Have the right survey software in place

Whatever type of survey you’re looking to run, it’s also important to have the right survey software in place if you’re to maximise its success. From user-friendly software, an extensive library of questions, customisable templates, advanced features and wide-ranging distribution channels, that make it quick and simple to create and send your survey, to powerful analysis and reporting tools, that enable you to quickly draw actionable insight from your data. It’s crucial to have the right solution in place, if you’re to reach more of the right audience with their most favoured promotion channel going forward.

Having supported a rapidly growing userbase of 300,000 users, our survey software can do all of this. And with the ongoing development of our survey platform, we’re making it even simpler and quicker to create, send and analyse surveys, with tools that will maximise recipient engagement.

Promotion survey questions

If you’re to better understand how well your existing promotion channels are performing and whether they are effectively engaging your audience, you need to be exploring and asking the right sorts of survey questions, which will also depend on the type of promotion survey you’re running.

So, to help you, we’ve detailed some sample questions you could you potentially use below.

Given that in today’s commercial world most businesses will have a website, and many will also have an inbound marketing strategy, you may want to start with survey questions that will help you with lead generation. Suitable questions could include:

Could you tell us about any pain points you’re currently trying to overcome?

Are you responsible for your department’s budget?

In the next quarter, how likely are you to purchase a new solution?

To help you to further qualify your leads, you may also want to explore some pre-sales or post-sales survey questions with respondents. For example, if you were a vendor of back office software, and you were using a pre-sales survey to help qualify leads, you may want to ask respondents questions such as:

Could you tell me about the back-office software you’re currently operating?

Please list up to 5 reasons why you are looking to change this software?

In contrast, post-sales surveys can help strengthen your relationship with those who have already bought from you, through questions such as:

Where did you first hear about us?

Why made you buy from us?

Do we have any further products that we might be able to support you with, and when do you think you might be looking to invest in them?

To measure the effectiveness of any advertising you’ve undertaken, including which channels most resonated with your audiences, you might like to ask questions such as:

Do you remember our (insert name) advert and if yes, can you recall where you saw it?

Can you recall the advert’s main message?

Which of the following words best describe this advert? (Select all that apply)

For a more generic marketing survey, and to find out what channels your audience prefers most and what resonates with them the greatest, you might like to ask them questions such as the following:

What social media channels, if any, do you use and how many times a week do you use them?

What’s your preferred method for acquiring new information and learning (reading, listening and watching)?

What promotional channels would you like us to use more of moving forward and why?

Some pitfalls to avoid

When you’re putting your promotion survey questions together, it’s important to consider how you’re structuring them, if you’re to avoid questions that could otherwise prompt an automatic response or skew your data. Here’s some considerations that you need to think about:

Don’t use leading questions

While in some professions such as the legal industry questions are purposely formulated to get the recipient to answer in a specific way, in the context of a survey, you’ll want respondents to provide as accurate an account of their experience as you can. Subsequently, you’ll need to draft objective questions that you know won’t lead to a specific response.

Don’t include assumptive closes

Try to avoid writing questions that assume an answer at the outset. For example, “How much will marketing budgets increase next year?” Asking this question won’t capture or help a recipient whose marketing budgets are actually decreasing.

Don’t imply answers

You should also look to avoid questions that could lead people towards a specific cause-and-effect response. For example, if you crafted a question to read, “If you were to boost your email marketing output next year, how much percentage improvement would you expect from your efforts?” Given the preceding clause, very few people would be likely to provide a percentage figure towards the lower end of that scale.