How To Create An Effective Content Marketing Survey

Customers’ opinions matter when developing an effective content marketing plan. It’s hard to create meaningful content that builds brand loyalty and creates sales leads unless you know your consumers’ desires. The greater the influence of your content on the bottom line, the better.

However, research does emphasize that information must be regarded as helpful and valuable for it to operate. So, how do you get the data you need from customers? Via Surveys.

If done correctly, surveys can bridge the gap between the content you now put out and the information your clients are seeking. They can be a valuable tool in developing content marketing effectiveness that can lead to the creation of engaging content that your consumers will like.

What is a Content Marketing Survey?

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A content marketing survey is a type of interactive content that allows your audience to participate in it. It helps gain a greater understanding of your audience and clients.

Consider this. Most of your website visitors and social media followers are women aged between 24 and 40. What does this stat mean for your business? Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell you anything about what these women want or why they’re interested in your company.

A survey can help you answer these pressing questions. As a bonus, doing a successful content marketing survey may assist you in capturing the attention of your target audience. 

According to Time, research shows that a typical individual loses interest or quits paying attention to a piece of content in about eight seconds. Thus, a well-designed survey is important to draw respondents in and encourage them to continue to the next question. The clock on the attention span restarts every time a new question is presented.

Why Should You Do a Content Marketing Survey?

People’s activities may be tracked using website analytics and marketing management analytics. For example, it is the number of people who have seen your video, the number of people who have read your email, the number of times your content has been shared, and so much more. This data is crucial, but it has a limited ability to generate insights. Data on behavior, for example, is often limited in its ability to inform you on:

• Knowing who is utilizing or seeing your content.
• What do people think of your content and brand?
• What people were expecting from your content, and if it delivered.
• What do individuals plan to do when they come to your site or use your content.
• People’s decisions as a consequence of interacting with your content.
• People’s offline actions as a consequence of your content.

Specific behavior insights are only of limited benefit and cannot be implemented. It’s essential to understand your content’s impact on your target audience if you want to know how successful your content is at building a company’s brand or promoting a product. Here’s when surveys come in handy.

Benefits of Conducting Content Marketing Survey

Content marketing surveys are more than a list of questions; they’re an interactive experience. An excellent survey is like Goldilocks’ porridge, which she ultimately sat down to eat. It’s neither too lengthy nor too short. You don’t have to be an expert to answer these questions, but they’re not so simple that no one wants to do it.

The surveys you develop should have objectives, just as your content marketing plan. What are you hoping to achieve by having individuals complete the survey? Do you want to learn more about how to better communicate with your audience or what else you can do to fulfill their needs?

Generally speaking, the most successful surveys concentrate on a single topic area. For example, if you own a shoe store, you may send a poll to your consumers to see what styles they like to wear. If you own a restaurant, you may conduct a poll to discover more about your patrons’ favorite cuisine.

If you try to cram too much into one survey, it will become disorganized and unfocused. It’s also going to be too lengthy. Keep in mind that you only have a short period to capture and hold people’s attention.

Tips To Conduct Effective Content Marketing Survey

Assuming you’re acquainted with the fundamentals of survey design (if you aren’t, simple survey tools provide excellent instruction in the fundamentals), we’d like to suggest the below tips for making your surveys help in effective content marketing.

1. Keep it brief

Unless you have a unique reason,  it is recommended to restrict your survey to ten questions or fewer. It’s preferable if it’s brief. Don’t ask too many questions or provide too many alternatives. Avoid repetitive questions.

It has been proved that providing too many options leads to decision paralysis. Those who can skip or click on anything to move forward are more likely to do so. It means your results will be off. Limit the number of header choices to five and use just one or two matrix queries in a single survey for a complex topic.

2. Make your point clear

Avoid ambiguity in your terminology by using plain and precise language. People misunderstand, speed read, and misinterpret the meaning of the text. Your responsibility is to convey your request as clearly as possible. 

Continue to review your queries until you can condense them down to their bare core, removing any extraneous language. Don’t forget to double-check your spellings; it truly does matter.

3. Ask fewer open-ended questions

Use closed-ended questions, such as multiple-choice or matching ones, that allow you to specify answer criteria. Another advantage of closed-ended questions is that they are less likely to be answered incorrectly. Because your data is organized, you can analyze them quickly. Thus, you or your analysts don’t have to spend hours sifting through open-ended comments.

This will help you have access to actionable information promptly. 

4. Don’t ask people what they’ll do

Asking individuals what they would do is a risky proposition since they will not provide trustworthy responses. A person’s willingness to purchase a product and their actual purchase of that commodity are two very different things—request information on what individuals did instead of asking about their opinions. 

5. Learn to publicize the survey

Incorporate a call-to-action on your website that will drive them to the survey. It’s essential to make this information readily apparent, whether in a blog post or an email. When it comes to requesting consumers to participate in a survey, the Content Marketing Center emphasizes the significance of timing. Avoid approaching them too soon, before they’ve had a chance to get familiar with your company’s name and logo.

6. Don’t send out surveys at an incorrect time

If you bring people to your survey at a convenient time, they are more likely to finish it and respond meaningfully. When it comes to website content, please don’t ask them to participate in a survey before they’ve had a chance to read it. On the other hand, sending out surveys to recipients who have read your email newsletters or drip campaigns may be an excellent way to gauge the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.

You demonstrate your commitment to content to prospective clients, which may help you establish your status as a reliable source of information. Use your survey skills the next time you’re looking for actionable feedback on a piece of content you’ve created. The findings will supplement your data about what consumers do, allowing you to fine-tune your content marketing plan.

7. Consistently update content

Schedule a visit to this content every year in your editorial schedule to maintain it, which may involve amending the title, meta tags, and content itself. 

Remember that if you do decide to apply an optimization approach, you mustn’t change the URL of your website. Since the URL would not change, you won’t have to worry about re-establishing backlinks. It is also not desirable to generate any unwanted redirects on your website.

8. Provide a monetary reward

Fortunately, you are not required to do so. However, if you offer your audience something in exchange for their participation, they may be more inclined to finish the survey. 

For example, according to Social Media Today, PaperSource offered clients 10% off on their next purchase in exchange for participating in the poll. 

When it comes to persuading individuals to participate in a survey, even a modest discount or a small gift can make a significant difference.

9. Have a strong viewpoint

We all want our content to be found in Google searches. However, there is a limit to how far you may take that game. Many websites, sadly, do. 

As a result, the SERPs are filled with content that looks identical. The rating is just one factor to consider. The reader must eventually devour your content and believe in what you’re offering. There’s no incentive to join your email list, attempt a free trial, or buy your product if you’re simply one among many. It would help if you made an impression.

10. Reach out to bloggers

By sending targeted emails to relevant bloggers and journalists, you may place your product or information in front of them. Persuade those who have access to enormous audiences to speak about you and connect to your website. Outreach to bloggers is no longer considered spam. 

However, it’s not okay to go through everyone in your industry’s emails and ask them for a link. Instead, it’s a long-term project. The reason for your contact is apparent: you need something from them. In addition, you’ll want to keep in touch with the people you’re interested in. Instead of burning bridges for the sake of a tweet, you should work to strengthen the connection so that it might lead to something more significant in the future, such as cooperation or partnership.

11. Analyze your content’s success using data

When it comes to content marketing, one of the most popular fallacies is that merely by writing blog articles, your company will miraculously take off, and you will be besieged by hordes of enthusiastic potential consumers yearning for anything you offer. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. The most effective content marketers don’t simply create unique content; they know how to track and analyze the effects of their efforts as well.

12. Start remarketing your content

A lot of work and effort goes into creating content, and then you read a blog post or a whitepaper, and you’re left unimpressed. Along with the actual costs of generating the content, the (often unavoidable) low return on investment convinces newbies of content’s worth to their organization, a misconception that even bigger firms and seasoned marketers may fall for. 

However, content remarketing is a guaranteed approach to ensure that more people view, connect with, and react to your content.

In Conclusion: Keep Creating Content 

Your content marketing campaign may begin after you get effective market survey replies. You should have a list of topics you want to cover, a plan for protecting them (for example, infographics, webinars, and blogs), and a sense of what tone of voice to utilize. Remember that surveys are only a technique to understand what a small group of your consumers desires. 

It would help if you kept developing content as you have in the past but better understood what will benefit your consumers and prospects. Investing in time to survey your consumers will assist you in creating shareable content that not only presents you as a leader in your field and encourages your customers to return to you for knowledge and guidance regularly.

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