Marketing
Surveys.
What
can they do for you?
When people hear of "marketing surveys," they usually think of psychology and "subliminal messages".
Yes, this was done in the past and, for all we know, today. But this is a rather corny approach to what is essentially a communication issue.
What
can marketing surveys do for you?
A well-done
marketing survey can tell you what people are looking for, what they expect
to find, what they might expect to pay for it, and other information pertinent
to the design and promotion of a website — or offline business.
For example, you want to get as many people to your website as possible. But the possibility — before much promotion has been done for your website, is that their main avenue of finding your website is through the search engines.
A marketing survey designed for this purpose can tell you.
As an example, many years ago we conducted a series of surveys of ex-patients of a medical professional (they got well, it seems!) Although this data was to be used in printed promotion, when it came time to design his website, we re-studied the surveys intensively and fit the information seamlessly into his website. A later study of his website logs revealed that people were using the exact wording provided by the surveys in their search engine searches.
Put another way, we knew exactly how to draw people who were interested in his services to the website in the exact language they used at the search engines — and we incorporated this into his website so that the search engines would list his pages under those terms.
I should say here that we also knew that he provided an excellent service for his patients. And we learned the same thing from them!
Another example is the friend who owned a private school. He had a survey conducted to determine what he should name the school — with the result that enrollment rose to an all-time high.
Pretty neat, and well worth it, wouldn't you say?
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