Are you one of the companies that spend countless hours on target market research, but end up with no tangible progress?
Well, the process of finding the target audience isn’t straightforward.
It’s crucial that you learn about the moving parts involved in the machinery to crack the secret code and reach your target audience. One of the most useful and precise tools to figure out the target audience is a targeted survey.
Wonder how a targeted survey functions? Well, we will cover every nook and corner of target surveys in this extensive post.
So, let’s cut to the chase and dive right in!
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What is a targeted survey?
A targeted survey is essentially a market research tool that facilitates specific audience research by utilizing a survey audience panel provider or a paneling service.
The service is important to the targeted survey as it contains information about the survey respondents, helping us screen the responses through targeted attributes like age, gender, region, income, job category, and more.
How to create effective targeted surveys?
Regardless of your company’s size and capacity, you can capitalize on targeted surveys by following these crucial tips to develop highly targeted surveys.
Let’s discuss them in detail, shall we?
1. Double down on uniqueness and relevance
Ensure the uniqueness of your surveys by developing a unique set of questionnaires. This can be done if you keep your products and services in mind when drafting the questions.
If you have a wide range of products and services, we suggest you create feedback forms for each of them.
What if the same product caters to different customer groups? Then you will have to create queries unique to the customer niche.
2. Only ask relevant and focused questions
The idea is to extract valuable information through the targeted survey. This can only be achieved if you lead with questions that are relevant and highly focused.
Open-ended questions will not take you anywhere.
So, stay crystal clear about the information you are trying to extract about your target market. A long and boring targeted survey will not generate much interest in your respondents.
3. Create engaging targeted surveys for survey user id
How can you develop engaging targeted surveys? There are several ways you can do that. The most effective way to do that is by giving the surveys a personal feel.
A personal touch coupled with user-friendliness and easiness will make participating in the targeted survey a nice customer experience.
We suggest you make use of a survey platform that is robust and reliable and can send surveys on respondents’ mobile devices. More importantly, cut to the chase and avoid all unwanted queries.
4. Promote the targeted surveys correctly
There are so many ways you can promote your targeted surveys. Some of the most used ways of communication are email, social media (Linkedin and YouTube), Facebook Ads, surveys as opt-ins, and other forms of online promotion.
Not just that, you should come up with incentives to entice your audience and encourage them to participate in the targeted surveys. The incentives can be anything from limited free access to your product to free eBooks, discounts, and much more.
How targeted surveys help achieve excellent customer service?
But, why invest in targeted surveys? Well, there are several advantages of reaching a target audience through surveys. Let’s discuss them all in brief.
1. Targeted surveys are inexpensive
The cost attached to targeted surveys is quite nominal. The relative expensiveness makes online surveys a go-to tool to learn about target audiences. This is because the cost per respondent attached to targeted surveys is quite small.
Even the companies willing to provide respondents with incentives will find the cost per response negligible compared to the cost of administering the traditional forms of survey.
Moreover, the number of responses generated through targeted surveys can easily reach thousands.
2. Targeted surveys are extensive
The extensiveness of targeted surveys helps companies determine the characteristics of a target audience, regardless of the size or population.
The ability to easily plow through a large population and describe the characteristics makes targeted surveys a winner as it helps develop precise survey results.
This makes targeted surveys the best option for companies to make highly informed decisions about their products and services and deliver excellent customer service.
3. Targeted surveys are flexible
Since targeted surveys can be conducted across different mediums like online surveys, email surveys, social media surveys, mobile surveys, paper surveys, and more, companies find it easier to capitalize on the opportunity that matches their budget.
We suggest organizations use a mixed approach to reach remote respondents to ensure an adequate number of responses, which is crucial to jump to definite conclusions.
4. Targeted surveys are reliable
When it comes to dependability and reliability, targeted surveys are second to none.
The anonymity attached to the respondents helps the audience answer the survey screening questions in the most candid way — allowing companies to generate valid and reliable responses.
Here’s what you should always remember — regardless of the means of targeted surveys, you should always prioritize accurate data, which is only possible if the survey user stays true to their experience.
Such confidentiality gives respondents the opportunity to share more honest feedback.
5. Targeted surveys help prioritize issues
Targeted surveys not only help identify areas of interest of the target audience or offer insight into what and how people think but also give companies the power to identify issues that require attention on a priority basis.
This makes targeted surveys an efficient tool that can reach a much wider audience, generate automatic responses, and help figure out issues that are troubling customers in general.
How many responses are required for targeted surveys to work?
How many people should you survey? Well, this is quite a debated question. However, we want you to follow a simpler method to figure out the number of responses required to render targeted surveys successful.
Let’s take an example of a cohort of 40 million female customers aged between 20 to 30 years. This is a large group of customers that enjoy eating chocolate cookies.
But, as you can see, surveying all of the 40 million customers is quite a tedious job. It might not even be possible in some instances.
This is precisely where you will have to move forward with a sample size that accurately represents the large 40 million female customers with the same demographics and characteristics.
You will have to consider the margin of error, preferably +/- 4 percent in this case.
In other words, you will have to share the targeted survey with 600 female customers of the demographic. As you can see, the more you reduce the margin of error, the more customers you will have to survey.
We highly recommend you brainstorm and come up with a margin of error and confidence level to figure out the right number of people to survey.
How much does a targeted survey cost?
This is one of the most asked questions related to conducting targeted surveys. Well, the cost of a targeted survey largely depends on the platform you use and the specific screening criteria. The average cost of a survey for a completed response is $3.
This is when the company chooses not to apply any multiple criteria.
Here’s the rule of thumb — the cost of targeted surveys for completed responses will continue to rise as you add more specific profiling criteria.
Why? This is mostly because you are trying to generate responses from a more specific audience, an approach that will lead to fewer respondents participating in the survey.
To ensure high survey completion rates, it will be crucial to increase the reward for respondents.
To understand the concept better, you should learn about the “incidence rate.”
What is the Incidence Rate?
The incidence rate helps companies determine the number of people that are qualified for the survey after attending the screening questions.
How to calculate the incidence rate, you ask? Since you want to determine the incidence rate of your survey, you will have to come up with a sample survey delivered to the maximum number of participants possible.
People answering the sample survey are the ones that are genuinely interested in your company, the target official site, products, and services. In other words, these are the people you should send the well-detailed targeted surveys to.
Another way to figure out the incidence rate is by searching online for a similar research topic to see how many people actually respond.
Final thoughts!
You are on a quest to unearth the target market for your brand. Believe us, it won’t be an easy road. But with the right knowledge and action, you will certainly figure out your target audience through targeted surveys.
However, you will have to develop highly effective targeted surveys. Not just, you will have to choose the best ways to share the targeted surveys with your potential audience.
We highly recommend you follow the tips mentioned in the post to take giant strides in the right direction. Did you find this extensive guide helpful? Also, don’t forget to check out other informative posts on the blog!