What Could A Survey Do For Your Business?
WHAT COULD A SURVEY DO FOR YOUR BUSINESS
UNLOCKING CUSTOMER INSIGHTS: SURVEYS AS PART OF YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY
EPISODE 032 | APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY
A huge welcome, today I’m taking you behind-the-scenes, into a strategy that worked really well for us a few weeks ago, and I wanted to share each detail with you, as I think it might be something you’d like to use within your own business.
A few weeks ago, we sent out a survey, and the responses we got back were both surprising and incredibly insightful. It’s shaped up a lot of what we’ve been doing lately, especially with our Goal-Getters Masterclass and within some of the recent elements I have shared here on our podcast and across our other channels.
Today, I’m going to walk you through that whole process. I’ll share why we did it, how we did it, and the hugely valuable feedback we found. But this is not at all about us patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. I want to share all the steps, giving you the knowledge on how you can run your own survey. I’ll be including all the details on creating, sending out, and then sitting down to really understand what your audience is telling you.
“The goal from this episode? Is to give you the tools and the know-how to gather those insights that could steer your business in directions you hadn’t even thought of yet, all while boosting the hugely important customer service. So, if you’re curious about how a simple survey can begin some big changes, you’re in the right place.”
THE SETUP
Alright, let’s kick things off with the first steps we took. Choosing the right tool and designing the survey were important to help us get the insights we were after. Let me break down how we approached this and what worked for us.
We landed on Typeform for our survey, and there were a few key reasons for this choice. First off, the user interface is neat and straightforward. It’s intuitive for both you as the creator and your audience filling it out. We wanted something that felt professional and engaging, and Typeform ticked those boxes. Its customisation options allowed us to brand the survey to feel very much "us," which we loved.
But Typeform isn’t the only tool. We also looked into SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, and JotForm. SurveyMonkey is great for its robust analysis capabilities—really handy if you need to look at the data in detail. Google Forms is super straightforward and integrates well if you’re already using Google Workspace, plus it’s free, which is always a bonus. And JotForm? It’s a strong contender for those looking for a lot of customisation options and integrations with other tools.
“The takeaway here is to choose a platform that feels right for the kind of survey you’re running and the level of insight you need. Consider how easy it is for your audience to use, how well you can tailor it to match your brand, and how it’ll help you analyse the responses you get.”
OUR SURVEY IN DETAIL
Once we had our tool picked out, it was time to create the survey itself. This step is more creative than science, but there are a few principles we stuck to. First, clarity is important. We made sure each question was straightforward and to the point. No one wants to decipher what you’re asking while they’re trying to give you feedback.
We focused on making questions that were easy to understand and answer but would give us actionable insights. It’s tempting to ask everything under the sun, but we narrowed it down to what we really needed to know. This made the survey shorter, which helped in getting more people to complete it.
A good question does two things: It’s easy for your respondent to answer and gives you the kind of data you can actually use. For instance, instead of asking something vague like “How do you feel about our content?”, we asked “What are your top 2 questions about achieving your goals that we NEED to answer in this course?” The survey’s main purpose was to ensure there were no glaring gaps that we had missed in our upcoming online masterclass. This type of question is specific and the answers helped us to understand if there were key elements we needed to include, to ensure we would really support our students throughout every chapter and lesson inside the course, but it also provided information that we were able to use beyond the course, which I’ll also talk, including content strategy that we knew was directly based on our audience needs.
Creating this survey wasn’t just about gathering data for us; it was about opening up a conversation with our audience. We wanted to know exactly where we could add more value and how we could help them succeed. That’s the power of a well-designed survey—it gives you a clear overview of the audience you are looking to support.
Understanding exactly what your audience needs from you is crucial, no matter what your business offers. Whether you're changing lives with transformative offerings or brightening days with entertainment or something feel good, at the heart of it, you're solving a problem or fulfilling a need. This isn't just about improving customer satisfaction; it's about ensuring your offerings resonate deeply and effectively with your target audience. As a side note, I’ll be talking more about how you can align your business with your target audience in an upcoming episode.
A well-crafted survey opens the door to this understanding by providing direct insights into the challenges, desires, and priorities of your audience. By asking the right questions, you not only uncover how to enhance your current offerings but also how to innovate or introduce new solutions that align perfectly with your audience's expectations. Essentially, it bridges the gap between guessing and knowing, allowing you to tailor your brand and offerings to become the key solution provider in your niche. This alignment is what sets successful businesses apart, turning casual customers into loyal fans and advocates.
Diving deeper into our survey, we focused on questions that would provide us with actionable feedback and encourage our audience to share their experiences in depth. Here’s how we structured it and why:
We centered our survey around two main questions:
ONE: "What are your top 2 questions about achieving your goals that I absolutely NEED to answer in this course?"
This question was designed to unearth any missing elements in our Goal-Getters Masterclass. It’s direct, asking our audience to pinpoint exactly what they needed to learn from us, ensuring we covered the most critical aspects of goal achievement in the course content. And the second question:
TWO: "What are the 2 biggest challenges you have with achieving your goals?"
Here, we sought to understand common obstacles our audience faced. This insight allows us to tailor not just our course, but also our broader content—be it podcast episodes, journal posts, or social media—to address these challenges directly.
If you are looking to create your own survey, adapting these questions to your context can be incredibly powerful. If you're offering a service or product, ask directly how it can solve a problem or fulfill a need. It’s about getting to the heart of your audience’s pain points and aspirations.
Let’s look at two examples that are very different from what we do. Firstly, let’s say you run an online bakery. Adapting the survey questions to fit this context could look something like this:
“What specific baked goods or flavours are you looking for that we currently don't offer?”
This question invites your customers to share their desires directly, allowing you to expand your menu in line with customer cravings. It's a direct approach to uncovering gaps in your product line that could be turning potential sales into missed opportunities. And secondly:
“What are the biggest challenges you face when ordering baked goods online?"
Here, you're digging into the operational side of your business from a customer's perspective. Is it delivery times, freshness upon arrival, or perhaps the ordering process itself? Understanding these challenges gives you details to help refine your operations, ensuring that your service is as delightful as your cakes.
And secondly, let’s use an interior design studio as an example, one that is looking to better understand their clients' needs and preferences. The adapted survey could include questions like:
“Which two aspects of your home do you struggle with the most when it comes to design and decoration?”
This question aims to identify the common challenges faced by your clients, such as spatial planning, colour scheme selection, or styling for functionality. By pinpointing these struggles, you can tailor your services and advice to directly address the most pressing needs of your clients. And secondly:
“What are your top two priorities when redesigning a space in your home?”
Here, you're looking into the values and goals of your clients. Are they looking for a more aesthetic appeal, improved functionality, maximising small spaces, or perhaps sustainability? Understanding these priorities allows you to align your design proposals with what matters most to your clients, ensuring your services resonate deeply and provide meaningful solutions.
By framing your questions around your audience's specific needs, you not only gain a clearer understanding of your target market but also position yourself as someone who listens and responds to client needs with precision and creativity, and you’re building a business that’s deeply aligned with your customers’ desires and expectations.
We also included a request for testimonials within our survey, which was very purposeful. We framed it by acknowledging the newness of our course and our desire to build trust with potential students through the words of those who’ve already benefited from our content. We asked, "Could you please share a testimonial about the weekly ideas, strategies, and methods I share through the newsletter or podcast? It doesn’t need to be long. And to make it easier, we shared a few examples of recent testimonials.
This approach turned out to be incredibly effective. Not only did we receive detailed and heartfelt testimonials, but we also gained deeper insights into where our strengths lie in providing support and value. These testimonials have also helped to give us a clearer direction on where to focus our efforts to continue delivering support.
To help you, when requesting testimonials, be clear about how they’ll be used and why they’re important. This transparency builds trust and often results in more detailed and meaningful responses. Testimonials of course help in two ways, they show both your impact and areas for improvement, so integrating such a request in your survey can provide both benefits, enhancing your service or product while also marketing it authentically. If you would love to understand more about testimonials, I have an entire episode dedicated to this, it’s episode 028 and it’s called How to Grow Your Business With Testimonials.
ANALYSING THE RESULTS
After collecting the responses, the next step was to sift through the data and pull out meaningful insights. I found ChatGPT brilliantly helpful for this.
I fed all the survey responses into ChatGPT, asking it to help us identify common themes, patterns, and specific areas of interest or concern among our audience. We received a lot of replies to the survey and the beauty of using ChatGPT for this task lies in its ability to quickly process large volumes of text and extract significant insights. It helped us break down the feedback into actionable categories, highlighting what our audience truly cared about and where we could make improvements or introduce new ideas.
An important note if using any online tool to analyse customer responses, make sure you anonymise your data, remove all customer details to ensure you are protecting everyone’s privacy.
Going back to the methods, by analysing the responses to our questions about goal achievement challenges, ChatGPT helped us identify a recurring theme around the need for more personalised guidance. This wasn’t just about general advice; our audience was looking for specific, actionable strategies tailored to their unique situations.
“As we look at the analysis of our survey data, it’s clear that the right tools and approaches can support a wealth of insights. Speaking of tools, I’ve put together a free guide filled with tips on using ChatGPT to decipher your audience’s feedback. I’ll share more on that at the end of this episode.”
IMPLEMENTING THE FEEDBACK
Now, let’s look at how we turned these insights into action in our offerings.
Once we had these insights, we introduced a couple of extra resources within the Masterclass that focused on personalised goal-setting strategies and overcoming common obstacles, directly addressing the feedback that our audience wanted more specific guidance.
Insights from the survey also led towards several new podcast episode topics, including deep dives into overcoming specific challenges mentioned in the feedback and we have also pinpointed guest experts in areas our audience expressed interest in. Some of these have already aired and some will be coming up over the next few weeks.
We were also able to start creating more content around the themes of personalisation and overcoming challenges, including a step-by-step guide, a free workshop we hosted a few weeks ago and shared specific examples from individuals who successfully achieved their goals in the ways we knew would most relate to our audience.
These changes weren’t just guess work, they were informed by direct feedback from our audience, ensuring that our content was more aligned with their needs and interests than ever before.
The process of gathering and implementing feedback definitely doesn’t end with one survey. We've come to see the immense value in establishing ongoing feedback loops for our growth strategy. Reaching out to our audience through surveys will become a staple of our approach, not too often though, but perhaps once or twice a year, ensuring that we remain aligned as need and preferences change.
I of course want to make sure our content and offerings are fresh, and alongside this, I really want to build a stronger, more connected community. It's a way to show our audience that we're listening and that their input directly shapes what we do. This level of responsiveness and adaptability is what I think helps to set any business apart and moves you towards growth in a meaningful direction.
BEST PRACTICES & TIPS
Now, let’s talk about how you can make your surveys as effective as possible. Here are some best practices and tips we learnt:
Ensure Anonymity: People are more likely to provide honest feedback if they know their responses are anonymous. Make sure to communicate this clearly in your survey introduction.
Be Mindful of Survey Length: Keep your survey concise to respect your respondents' time. A good rule of thumb is that it should take no longer than 5-10 minutes to complete. For our survey, it could easily be completed in less than 2 minutes.
Time Your Send-Out: Think about when your audience is most likely to be checking their email and schedule your survey send-out for those peak times. Also, avoid sending surveys over weekends or holidays when people are less likely to be online.
Follow Up with Non-Responders: A gentle reminder email to those who haven't completed the survey can boost your response rate. Just make sure not to overdo it – one or two follow-ups are enough.
“Creating your own survey is an incredibly powerful way to connect with your audience and gain insights that can drive your business forward. Think about what you could learn from your audience. What are their biggest challenges? Their most desired outcomes? Surveys give you a direct line to this helpful information.
To get you started, I’ve put together a comprehensive one-page guide on analysing surveys. This guide includes a quick overview of best practices and prompts for analysing the responses using ChatGPT. It’s packed with actionable insights and practical tools to help you unlock the full potential of surveys in your business.”
As we wrap up today’s episode, it’s clear that surveys are more than just a tool for collecting data—they’re a bridge to deeper understanding and connection with your audience. The insights you gather can transform the way you approach your offerings, tailor your content, and even how you communicate with your audience. It’s about going beyond the surface, actively listening to what your customers are telling you, and letting those insights guide your business decisions.
Remember, every piece of feedback is an opportunity to improve, to innovate, and to better align with your customers' needs and expectations. It’s this cycle of listening, adapting, and improving that can set your business apart in a crowded market.
Now, I’d love to hear from you. Have you conducted a survey recently? What did you learn? How did it impact your business? Or maybe you’re planning one and have some questions or ideas you’d like to share. Drop me a line, either send an email to news@philippacraddock.com or you can find me on Instagram. I would love to hear from you.
Surveys are a powerful way to give your audience a voice. Let’s use that voice to create businesses that are not only successful but are truly resonant with those we aim to support and help.
Philippa x