Can Online Surveys Help You Formulate A Winning Advertising Strategy?

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Photo Credit: iStock.com/Artist's pressureUA

What exactly do we mean by advertising? At its bare essentials advertising is the means employed to compel people to buy your products/ services by getting your brand out there. Because lets face it, those who don’t market or advertise well are consigned to the dustbin of failure. The proper messaging for consumers by business can do wonders in making your brand larger than life, therefore many businesses invest a lot in formulating the perfect advertising strategy for their brands.

Only one problem here. How do businesses know what their customers want and are willing to pay top dollar for?

Online Surveys can help you out

Online surveying capabilities have come a long way, with many businesses relying on this modern technological feature to gain a robust understanding of their market. It essentially gives you a peek and then some more with regards to the consumer mindset. Online surveys also offer mission-critical statistics and data that would make Don Draper green with envy, offering advertising insights that can prove instrumental in tugging at the buyer’s heartstrings. We did say online surveys are something else now didn’t we?

Doug Warner

So without further ado, let’s take a look at how survey research can help you plan the best advertising strategy for your brand.

Know Thy Consumer and why they want your wares

The first plank towards creating a superb advertising strategy is to know who your clients and customers are potentially. Knowing this would help you come up with a better idea of the target demographic that’s likely to buy your wares. Surveys can help you determine demographical factors such as age, income, gender, marital status, race, education and more. And thanks to online surveys, you can reach out to a large audience via social media and other online channels without possessing the resources of an established business.

Robert Half

This is just the start. You can use the data you gain via surveys to know what people are saying about your company. This can prove helpful in knowing how much customers are willing to pay and for what features? Which customers are still undecided about taking the plunge and what you can offer them so that they invest in your brand? Questions like these can also be asked via online surveys that can give your advertising a solid game plan to win over those customers.

How does your company stack up in public perception?

Now that you’ve identified consumers by varying degrees of loyalty and value towards your company, it can prove instrumental in developing your targeted marketing strategy. You can make adverts based on which group of consumers you want to target first and later on. Maybe you want to cater to the loyalists. Maybe you want to dispel negative notions about your company based on the data you’ve received via online surveys.

Bill Gates

You can send some follow up online surveys to your customers based on the demographic they belong to. This way you can gain more insights into how to ‘fix’ or ‘enhance’ your business image. It’s a good idea to send open-ended questions in your survey to those customers such as:

  • What do you like about our company?
  • What improvements would you like to see in our products?
  • How can you describe our company in 3 adjectives?

These are just a sample of questions that you can ask, tailored to what type of products you offer as a business. The answers to these questions would give you all the tools and ammunition you need to craft an advertising campaign that allays the concerns of your target demographic.

Advertising Strategy and Decision-making

Now that you have an idea or two about the kind of concepts you’d like to use in your adverts over internet, tv, newspapers, etc. However, it is prudent to take a step back and clinch the argument about which type of advertising content will give you the best results. To know how your adverts can potentially perform, it’s a good idea to send one last survey to your different customer groups, gauging their reaction about the presented ads. That way you really know for sure that your advertising strategy won’t end up as a damp squib and that customers have helped you realize your goals and objectives.

About The Author

Kelvin Stiles is a tech enthusiast and works as a marketing consultant at SurveyCrest – FREE online survey software and publishing tools for academic and business use. He is also an avid blogger and a comic book fanatic.