Content Marketing Industry Hacks: How To Create & Use Surveys

Read Time: 4 minutes

Content Marketing can be easy when you understand one or two helpful tools, one of them being how to create and use surveys.

When you think about your content calendar topics, are you determined to make sure they will provide valuable answers for your target audience or do you write about whatever you think might be interesting?

If your answer to the above question is that you want to make sure your strategy serves your readers well, then you’re definitely on the right track. You ideally want your audience to believe that you understand them, and that comes by, well, actually understanding them and writing content that will interest and help them.

Content Marketing: What Is It?

Every audience niche is looking for something, they have needs, potential issues that need resolution and they face challenges. Great content marketing is about providing genuine solutions for the potential challenges or issues your target audience might be facing.

Your content strategy should be well-researched and directly related to a specific group of people who might be asking the questions that you have the answers to. Wouldn’t you be only too happy to reach those people through your targeted content marketing? When you write something that matters to your target audience, you can grab their attention, because they feel understood by you.

The best way to go about this is to investigate as thoroughly as possible and your go-to method to start with is a survey.

A survey is one of the best marketing research tools around because it engages your potential audience from the get-go and also feeds into your content strategy.  Isn’t it awesome when you have a group of people who genuinely buy into your brand because you made them feel that their opinion and input matter?

Reasons To Use A Survey

We have listed three helpful reasons for getting your marketing research going with a survey, as well as some simple, practical steps for building your first survey.

• Audience Engagement

  Audience engagement is the currency of good content marketing. Some of the most popular social media algorithms favor the amount of engagement you receive on the content that moves through your profiles.

  When you conduct a survey you ultimately allow your target audience to give you honest feedback on your products and services. With this kind of feedback, you can make sure you are serving your audience well through all you offer.

• Audience Understanding

  One of the main reasons a survey is so valuable is for you to gain a genuine understanding of who the people are on the other end of your marketing strategy and what their needs and struggles are.

  When you gain an understanding of your target audience, you will speak to them in the correct tone and you’ll address things that interest them.

  People are really smart and they can tell the difference between a brand who understands their needs and one who doesn’t through the quality of their content.

• Content Strategy Clues

  A survey can give you a collection of great insights into where your audience is moving and what some of their challenges and needs are.

  If you can ensure that you understand where an audience is coming from, these insights will give you clues as to where to direct your content strategy.

  When you create a survey, you invite people to express what they most need help with and you then have the opportunity to create content that speaks into those areas of need.

How to Create & Use a Survey

There are many ways to go about creating and using a survey, below are just a few vital steps you’ll need to consider, to begin with.

• Set up your database: One of the first things you’ll need to do before designing a survey is to set up your database – a list of names and email addresses who have either had contact with you in the past or who have shown interest in what you offer.

One of your marketing goals might be to grow this list through your content marketing strategy. You can grow your list through social media, newsletter sign-ups online, or by hosting and running events or webinars.

• Decide on your survey goals & questions: Create a list of some key insights you’d like to gain through running your survey and from these goals, you can formulate questions that will give you the information you need.

Some examples are, getting a real idea of what your target audience’s biggest struggle might be. Asking this kind of question allows your audience to speak honestly about what they are looking for.

Perhaps what you need is feedback on a product. SurveyMonkey has a few free survey question templates for you to choose from.

• Set up your survey, monitor & analyze your responses: Once you have a direction and a list of questions and a database to send them to, the best thing to do is set it up, send it and then be sure to monitor the responses.

Give yourself a set amount of time before pulling all the data from your chosen survey platform.

Once you have your audience insights, look for patterns and trends in their responses. Ask yourself if any particular trends are interesting and then make decisions as to how you want those results to influence your content strategy.

Overall, a survey is a great way to discover the way your audience communicates, as well as what they most need from you. Get in touch with Connectica today for help creating a bulletproof content marketing strategy for your unique brand.