Growing your business is hard work. If you are not taking advantage of ways to learn about your market and buyers, then it becomes a much harder task than it needs to be. You could also be risking your business by not knowing who your consumer is and if they want to buy and can afford your product.

A correctly executed survey can greatly reduce that risk.  It can also help you gain the valuable insight you need to convert those potential buyers into buyers who gladly open their wallets. The biggest hiccup for most people is knowing what questions to ask on your survey. You also may wonder how to get people to answer your survey.

For your business success, you want to learn how to go from looking for answers in all the wrong places, to finding and getting the right answers from the right places. This is why today’s article is so important. The author is Jeanne Hurlbert PhD from MySurveyExpert.com.  Jeanne is the expert in surveys that “Connect, Create, Convert and Cash in,” which is what you want for YOUR business.

Her article will help you use social media to reach the right people for your survey. Finding the right people for your survey is very important; otherwise you don’t get an accurate reading of people who will buy. Use these techniques she provides and you can make every aspect of your business more efficient and profitable.

Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC

“Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.”

~ Andrew Greeley ~
Research Associate with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC)

Use Surveys for Leads, Lists, and Loot

By Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD

I talk all the time about “how to make surveys pay off.”  That raises some eyebrows among some of the survey “purists,” who somehow seem to think that there’s something sinister in that statement.

But you know what?  Surveys WILL pay off for you and you don’t have to do ANYTHING sneaky, unethical, or underhanded to make it happen!  I adhere to one of the strictest codes of ethics of anyone using surveys and I make surveys pay off – every day.

How can YOU make that happen? Make surveys a conversation with your customers and prospects.

If you start to think about surveys as a two-way flow of information, two things happen:

• First, you’ll recognize the power and you suddenly realize how important it is to make it feel like a conversation to the folks who take your survey.  The more effectively you do that, the more moneymaking information you’ll get.
• Second, you’ll realize how you can link surveys to another powerful conversation – social media.  And if you do that effectively, you can really leverage the power of both social media and surveys!

Today, I’m going to show you how to use social media to drive traffic to a survey.  It doesn’t matter what kind of survey—it can be a survey to create a product, a customer satisfaction survey, or a testimonial generator.  Any of those surveys will make money for you, but the trick is getting people to your survey.

How to Start the Conversation

To teach you how this works, I’m going to tell you about some surveys we’ve been running lately. Let’s start with one that I just did for one of the top online marketers.  He’s about to introduce a new iPhone app and he wasn’t sure which icon his folks would like.

So we took 5 of the graphic images they were considering for the app and put them all together in a question within a survey (you can do this easily in a system called Qualtrics), so we could simply ask his folks which one they liked.

Now just think about the power of that for a minute:

• He’s creating buzz and interest in his new iPhone app, before it’s introduced, piquing people’s curiosity.
• He’s giving them a chance to participate in the creation process, which means they’ll be way more likely to buy his new app.
• He’s showing his folks that he values their expertise and opinions so much that he’s turning to them to get advice on how to market his new app.
• He’s building the bond and trust with his community!

That’s a LOT of value from a simple survey–AND he’s getting priceless information that will ensure that he picks the icon that his folks will LIKE and BUY!

That, my friends, is why surveys are absolute gold.

But, what if he didn’t have a list yet?

Or what if you want to get input from people outside your list?

Or what if he you’re trying to enter a new niche?

That’s where the power of leveraging social media and surveys together comes into play. In addition to sending the invitation to your list, we could go into social media to invite people to take your survey. But here’s the problem:  How do we get targeted traffic to the survey?

To answer that question, I’m going to show you some techniques we used in another survey that we recently completed.

Social Media Strategy #1:  Using Twitter Hashtags

We recently finished a survey for a client about back pain.  We didn’t have a list, so we had to get creative about how to find the right people to take the survey.  We relied on social media to solve that problem using several different strategies.

First, we went to http://www.Search.Twitter.com and searched for “hashtags” related to back pain.  You see, when people want other people who are interested in a particular topic to see their tweets, they use a “hashtag,” like this:  #back #pain.

So if I search on #back #pain, I’ll find all the tweets that have been posted with that hash tag.  You get the idea:  If I want to find people interested in back pain to take my survey, I just need to identify the relevant hash tags and use them!

So we found 4 different, relevant hash tags and tweeted regularly with those hash tags, to drive relevant people–our population, in survey geek terms–to the survey.

Strategy #2:  Facebook Ads

In addition to the Twitter hashtag strategy, we also used Facebook ads.

The cool thing about Facebook ads is that you can target them in so many different ways: You can limit the age of the people to whom they’ll be shown, gender, marital status, interests (like you can show them to people who belong to particular Facebook groups)–there is a wide range of factors.

And as you go through and change the different parameters, you see the size of the potential audience change. So as you limit it to men or women, for example, you’re able to see exactly how big the potential audience is.

Pretty awesome stuff!

For this project, we’re going after people with back pain in any age bracket and any gender.  But we still targeted the ads by gender:  We created 1 ad that showed a woman bending over in pain, which we targeted at women, and another that showed a man bending over in back pain, targeted at men.  We thought this would increase response.

The ad is simple:  We created a clear headline, a call to action, and gave the URL for the survey.

And here’s a tip on the URL for Facebook ads:  Create a short URL.  For this project, we bought a domain (www.Research4BackPain.com) and forwarded it to the survey link (which was a very long link generated by the Qualtrics survey system).  (If you’re a MySurveyExpert member, we just created a document for you on exactly how to buy and forward a domain–it will be in the members’ site).

You can set the ads up so that you pay either “per impression” or “per click;” we paid by the click.  (You can set a daily budget to control cost.)  The stats let you see easily how your ads are doing.

What’s interesting about this ad is that we got WAY more response on the ad targeting women than on the ad targeting men–about 3 times as many women as men clicked on the ad to take the survey.

So this is another awesome technique for finding people in your niche to take your survey.

If you haven’t tried Facebook ads yet, check them out!

But How Do You Convince Them To Go?

Well, these strategies are great, but I can pretty much guarantee folks aren’t just going to hop over and take your survey unless you give then an incentive.

In this survey, we gave away 5, $100 Amazon gift cards.

But here’s the cool part:  Instead of giving away all of the gift cards at once, when the survey ended, we “dribbled them out” over a week, so that we could build buzz with Facebook fan page posts like, “We’re giving away another $100 Amazon gift card today, go here for your chance to win,” with the URL.

And each time we gave one away, we took the opportunity to tweet, post on our fan page, and post on the blog.

That built buzz and interest in the survey, which is very cool.  But it also gave us legitimacy, because we showed people that we really were giving the gift cards away.

But Will This Work For ME?

Can you do this in YOUR business?  ABSOLUTELY!

Here’s a dead simple “twist” on a survey that will help you build your content and your list:  Put an optin and a simple, one-question survey on a “lead page” or “squeeze page.”

You can ask people what their #1 question is about back pain, or whatever your product relates to, with an optin on the page; find relevant hash tags, build some Facebook ads, and drive traffic to the lead page!

These are just some simple examples of how you can team social media and surveys to ramp up the power of both techniques!

When you team the conversation you’re having in social media with the conversation you’re having with surveys, you make everything in your business more powerful:  you can

• jump-start the conversation on your blog
• create products to order that your customers will love to buy
• produce the referrals that reach deep into your target market at virtually no cost
• generate testimonials that will convert your prospects in droves
• find joint venture partners to promote your products

Once you start the conversation, you’ll have the power to transform every aspect of your business.  And isn’t that what StomperNet is all about?

Video

Using Surveys to Generate Content
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Secret Sauce Checklist

How to leverage surveys for leads, lists and loot:

• Use Social Media
• Twitter Hashtags
• Use Facebook ads
• Give people an incentive

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