One of the main challenges for every marketing manager is to design a precise strategy that allows the company to uncover and reach the market. This includes also to define how the brand is going to be positioned in the mind of their clients, the strategy behind the marketing mix (price, product, promotion and place) with which the company will try to satisfy the needs and desires of their potential market, and last, analyze the budget for the area to execute that strategy.
During the last years, the digital ecosystem has placed the user in the center of the scene. Everything that brands make is thought for and even by the users, who does not only consume, but also produces the content with which companies interact with. The client moves in a terrain where companies dance around and even it defies these companies to rethink their value propositions.
This is way now a days it extremely important to have a marketing plan adjusted to the clients needs. So now, how can we know what the user feels, thinks and does?
The answer to this is closer than we think. How about if we ask these questions to them? And if we get our clients to work for us on our marketing plan?
After understanding all of these, online surveys make a powerful tool that generate the necessary inputs for a company to be able to create a precise strategy adapted to the needs of their users. It will not only be a tool that by itself will be part of the marketing plan and it's execution, but it will also be the producer of the content for it's development.
Here are 4 useful tips to use an online survey platform to involve your client in the development of your marketing plan.
Know your target
One of the main starting points from every marketing plan is knowing your target audience. Where is it? What's their age? What do they do for a living? What are their hobbies, education level? And much more.
All of these social and demographic information allows the plan to move further and new and more complex questions appear: how can we help these users? What problems do they have? How can we make a solution that satisfies there needs?
Online forms are useful tools to gather all of these information and more and to draw a profile about our target audience. Many platforms have advanced features that allows you to segment and filter all of these information in order to create a more precise target and ideal customer.
NPS
Once we know about our customers, the next steps is knowing what they think about you. Reputation is crucial to understand the value of our brand for our customers.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key tool to understand this important metric. This score is based on one simple question, "How likely are you to recommend this brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?" and is followed by a scale from 0 to 10, being 0 "not at all likely" and 10 "extremely likely". These scale separates users under promoters, neutral or passives and detractors depending on the numbers they have selected.
Online survey dashboards give access to easily see and understand the NPS of a company in a simple and visual way which is crucial to follow and or to adjust the marketing plan.
One important thing about the NPS in our marketing plan is that this metric allows you to track in different periods and with one same measurement.
Analyze your competitors
What are the strategies of your competitors? How do they communicate with their customers? What do these customers value from the competitors? The information that benchmark gives you is pure gold for managers that needs to develop the marketing plan because it shows spaces to exploit.
Online surveys help you gather this information that consumers gives us about the market. For example questions such as "What are the tree first brands that come to your mind when you think about...?" helps you understand brand awareness in your market and see what brands are top of mind.
Analyze all the information
All of the information that you gathered, what users say about you, from your competitors and about the market won't be useful if it isn't correctly processed and analyzed. Survey tools allow you to analyze results and big volumes of data that are going to be transformed into information and conclusions to develop your marketing plan.
In some other opportunities we've talked about how to get valuable results when you analyze your surveys. We recommend you to be the most methodological as possible in the development of your forms as well as in the analyzes of it to extract useful outputs.
Online surveys are a powerful tool that generate the necessary inputs for a company to be able to create a precise strategy adapted to the needs of their users
As it obvious as it might sound, is worth to say that online surveys won't do the marketing manager's job. This plan needs to have the strategy developed, the actions need to be planed and needs to be executed.
But without a doubt it will help to make this complex job much easier and clear when decisions will have to be made.