Are You Collecting High-Quality Survey Data?

Survey data helps create effective marketing strategies, positions your company as a thought leader and keeps your business on the cusp of breaking industry trends.

It’s important to determine what you want to achieve with survey data, based on the information that will be most relevant to your audience. Without clear goals and an engaging topic, your survey results will fall short and fail to connect with target audiences.

Surveys require a systematic, experienced approach. It’s easy to make mistakes that prove detrimental to your study, wasting valuable resources, time and money. If a survey feels too intrusive to the respondent, asks too many questions or gives too many choices, it won’t be thorough enough and will fail to generate any meaningful results.

How to Collect the Best Survey Data in 5 Easy Steps

The right survey can be a highly effective way to connect with your brand’s target audiences. Here are five tips to help you generate successful data studies for your organization:

1. Research. Before creating the survey, take time to explore what’s already out there. If an existing survey is too similar to your idea, you may need to reconsider your topic or build on the questions posed by an existing study. It’s important to find a unique angle to avoid repeating surveys that were already conducted.
2. Know What You Want to Learn. It’s crucial to know what you want to learn as a result of your survey. What information is valuable to your target audience and prospects? How can this help your audience? With a strong vision, you can work backwards to build a stronger survey and provide valuable content to your target audience.
3. Stay Focused on Your Purpose. It’s easy to get off track with your survey by asking too many questions and being too broad. Broad questions will not generate the results you need to appeal to prospects and reporters. It’s best to ask very specific questions with options that make sense to respondents.
4. Ask the Right Questions. It’s important to start out with qualifying questions and demographic information. That way you can sort your data later based on age, gender and other demographic indicators. You might find a particularly newsworthy nugget of data by cross tabbing and sorting your findings. You will also be able to immediately filter out unqualified respondents.
5. Utilize the Data Effectively. After you conduct a data study, use your findings as the basis for a variety of marketing materials. This includes an in-depth white paper, video series, landing page, social media posts, PR pitches, press releases and other collateral.

By collecting useful data and packaging it in meaningful ways, you can generate additional traffic to your website, receive coverage in top publications and establish your position as a thought leader in your industry.

At Walker Sands, we are adept at conducting survey data studies that achieve results and drive business leads. Whether you want to interview IT managers at Fortune 500 companies or consumers who are smartphone owners, we can help you execute and promote research studies. Call us at (312) 267-0066 and we can help get you started today.