A/B testing and measuring the performance of your marketing strategies is essential if you’re aiming for success. With plenty of tools, free and paid, it’s easier than ever to measure the behavioral data and see what your visitors do, read, and click on on your website. It is also easy to examine and optimize the performance of a particular piece of content. However, the metric that matters when it comes to the overall performance of your content is whether your visitors like it or not. One way to test it is to perform a survey.
Performing a survey on the overall performance of your website can open doors for more optimization, personalization, and conversions. After all, the number of readers on your blog is not the number of readers who liked your blog. Understanding what works and what doesn’t enables you to manage customer expectations, better understand what your customers want and provide the right material accordingly.
To fulfill your branding and marketing intentions, you need to understand what your visitors think, not what your visitors do, and performing a survey is one way to find that out.
The benefits of online surveys
Reliable
To gather accurate data, you need candid and valid answers. Your surveyees must feel comfortable and trust that the data they provide will not be used to their disadvantage. Surveys of such nature are anonymous most of the time. Knowing that the details of the surveyees will not be disclosed, your visitors will answer the questions more honestly and in a less ambiguous manner. Make sure it is clearly understandable if the survey is anonymous or not.
Flexible
Unlike paper surveys, surveys of digital nature do not limit you to one or two platforms. They are flexible to be created in more than one way, on more than one platform, and about more than one subject. You can create and share them through your email marketing campaigns, social media platforms, on your website, etc. this way reaching a much broader audience. You also, are not limited to surveying only your website’s content. Email marketing campaigns, videos, and many other mediums are open to being surveyed.
Cost-effective
The beauty of online surveys is that most of them don’t require any resources and can be created for free. Tools like free survey maker enable you to not only create and integrate high-performing surveys on your website in minutes but also share them on several different platforms and get real-time reports. With this tool, you can create as many surveys as you want and analyze any piece of content.
Bigger reach
Many marketers out there underestimate the meaning of the size of the audience chosen for the surveys. Paper surveys tend to reach a much smaller audience and provide inaccurate results, whereas online surveys are much more accessible and can reach a much broader audience. The accuracy of the results is essential if you want to make appropriate conclusions and perform actions, based on the results of your survey.
How to properly implement surveys?
These days, surveys have many potential uses and can be extremely easy to apply, so the hard part here is knowing exactly how to conduct them. On the side of positive outcomes, like accurate data about your website’s content, it can also provide harmful results. A few of such include wasting your resources and time to gather inaccurate information or frustration of your audience caused by unnecessary questions.
Reach
Surveys tend to be most useful when in question is the content in your marketing funnel or buying path of your website. Therefore, it is best to survey the content on blog or news articles, related to the product: white papers, case studies, product descriptions, comparisons, ect. and all your email marketing campaigns. You can gather information about the kind of audience this particular content is reaching. For example, if you’re running an online honey shop, you might want to know if the content is reaching people in the related field or area.
Reputation
Survey about the content in your marketing funnel and buying path should also answer to the questions about your brand’s reputation. From your visitors’ answers you should be able to see how they position your brand in the market together with your competition. Do they see your competitors as your competition? And does your brand have a more positive image than your competition? Conclusions drawn from such a survey may lead to big changes in your content.
Results
A well-performed survey will also answer the question of how influenced your readers are by your content and if it is converting at all. Conversion rate is probably the most critical metric any survey can reveal. If your content is not converting, unclear or hard to understand, you then might want to change your marketing strategy altogether. However, if it is highly converting you will want to produce more of it.
Where to improve:
Performing surveys on your content can create a huge impact. If you consider the results when rethinking your content marketing strategy, it can make it or break it. Here are a few tips on how to improve your current surveys:
Avoid open-ended questions
Open-ended questions not only result in less quantitative data but also customer dissatisfaction. To prevent your survey from inaccurate and irritated responses, it is best to stick with multiple choice, closed questions. Closed questions will also provide you with more measurable data, that will save you and your colleagues some time when trying to structurize open-ended questions into positive or negative responses. A quick survey and instant result analysis are also useful if you are thinking of performing the surveys more frequently.
The right timing is everything
When performing surveys, especially on the functionality of your content, timing is of the essence. Make sure you perform your surveys to people who have had a chance to interact with your content, for example, those that opened or clicked on your emails, commented on your blog posts, etc. as only they can accurately evaluate the performance of your content.
Keep your surveys short
No one likes to answer tons of questions about a single subject. Prioritize your questions for the survey, making it as short as possible. Prioritizing will let you decide which questions matter more and which ones don’t. Keeping the survey, sharp, precise, and to the point will maintain your readers satisfied and willing to answer to their best knowledge.
To sum up
Tweaking your content marketing strategy can be tricky and complicated. It’s often hard to determine which content is valuable and which isn’t. With the help of optimized, well-performing surveys and website performance analytic tools you will be on the right track.
