Marketing in 2018 is a technical job as much as a creative one. Can you reach and engage your audiences? Qualify your leads? Tailor your messages to them? It usually involves building and/or working with a full stack of different types of software.
The way you use software can determine whether or not your team hits their goals for the quarter, whether you get the next job you apply for, or just how stressful your life is. So how do you ensure that you’re getting the most out of the tools you’re using?
Most marketers aren’t getting the most out of their fancy software systems (despite CMOs spending 22% of their budget on MarTech). Algorithms are only as powerful as the information that they know, and they can’t do their jobs without personalization and context. That’s where surveys come in. Adding People Powered Data to information that’s already in your marketing software can help marketers get more, quality leads, and improve engagement.
Here’s how you can get the most out of the solutions you already use by combining them with critical survey data.
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Check out more of our integrations and see how surveys might fit into your stack.
1. Use surveys + Salesforce to stay connected with your event attendees.
There are many ways that you can use SurveyMonkey with your CRM, but one of the lesser-known, and very effective, is for events.
During the event:
Events are a fantastic place to use surveys, because you have the rare gift of people’s physical presence and focused attention. With a tablet or two, you can get a ton of information from attendees in just a few minutes. (Hint: our offline capabilities are key here, because convention centers are notoriously tough on bandwidth.)
You can use event surveys to do market research, to measure sentiment about one of the topics related to the event, or to create leads. By getting your attendees contact information through SurveyMonkey in real-time, you can automatically add leads to your Salesforce campaign, without having to manually upload them (which should save you a lot of time!)
Here are some of the most popular strategies for distributing surveys at events and tradeshows:
- Offer free entry into a raffle for everyone who takes your survey (common prizes: Bose headphones, drones, Apple watches, Amazon gift cards)
- Exchange free swag (like pens, stickers, t-shirts, or coffee cups) for survey responses
- Send a very quick (1-5 question survey) following your demo or presentation
- Make your survey into a competition, and email participants their results and how their answers stacked up against their peers
- Keep feedback surveys available at kiosks so attendees can give you their thoughts in their leisure time
- Put the survey link as a QR code printed on event posters and swag
Bonus: If you’re the one hosting, check out our write-up of how to throw a polished event, even without event-planning experience.
Post-Event:
According to Salesforce, 80% of trade show exhibitors don’t follow up with their leads—a mind-blowing missed opportunity. Staying connected to prospects post-event is important for both improving future events and providing essential lead information to your sales team. Whether it’s a trade show, private event, or even a webinar, follow-up is key for keeping the relationship alive.
Salesforce and other CRM solutions can keep you connected with attendees when the event is over, whether it was your event or just one where you had a presence. Sending a survey through SurveyMonkey’s integration with Salesforce or another CRM takes only a few minutes, and it keeps the window of opportunity from closing in the aftermath of a busy trade show.
A few days after the event, send a survey with a few simple questions to further qualify your leads. Depending on your goals, you might ask:
- Do you feel that the event added value?
- What could have been improved?
- Which session did you find most helpful or informative?
- Was there a topic you wish had been covered further?
- Would you like to know more about our product or the topic of our presentation?
- Why did you decide to attend this conference or event?
In the mayhem before and after an event, it’s tempting to drop leads into your CRM without context or urgency, but taking the small additional step of sending a survey can be the difference between contextual, well-qualified leads and random contact details, or helpful planning insights and radio silence.
2. Use surveys + Marketo or Eloqua to tailor your marketing to specific groups, or to each individual person.
Irrelevant marketing is off-putting and ineffective. Everyone knows that frustration of answering a sales call for real estate 5 states away, or deleting emails about Android apps from their iPhone. According to Constellation Research, non-personalized content gets an 83% lower response rate than content that aligns with the audience’s needs or interests.
Combining surveys with your marketing automation systems can help you avoid spamming your prospects with irrelevant content.
Most marketers already work with solutions like Marketo, Oracle’s Eloqua, or Hubspot Adding surveys to the mix can help you fill the in the gaps with customer information that your original forms don’t cover. They can help you learn more about your prospects’ communication preferences, pain points, interests, and roles at their organization.
Instead of going in blind, you can use surveys get you the exact information you need about your prospects to give them the experience they want: 90% of customers say their marketing campaigns are more effective as a result of using SurveyMonkey through its Marketo Integration.*
Send a quick survey asking your prospects about their preferences and interests. SurveyMonkey Analyze lets you filter data by different responses, so you can see trends (do younger people prefer email over phone calls? Are people who are self-employed more interested in getting educational emails?) and create personas and marketing strategies that are personalized to each group.
You can divide prospects by their specific needs, or segment them by how they like to consume content. The result is a more seamless, enjoyable experience for the real people on the other end of your campaigns.
*Taken from a 2018 TechValidate survey of customers using the integration
3. Use surveys + MailChimp to connect with prospects, or customers, at scale.
Getting recipients excited about emails from brands is…tough. People tend to dislike having their inboxes cluttered, and it’s tough to stand out from the hundred other vendors. Winning over engaged email readers has become the Olympic sport of marketing. Luckily, you have surveys.
Surveys can help you by informing your email content choices, by acting as the content themselves.
If you’re using a service like MailChimp (our favorite primate-branded partner) you can create and send polished, you-branded surveys directly through the platform. Curious about what your listserv wants to read about? Ask them. Even reaching out to a small group of your subscribers could give you some interesting ideas—or help you validate the ones you already have, before you hit send to a few thousand viewers.
You can also surveys with MailChimp to check in on your customers’ satisfaction, get feedback about your product, and understand who might be a possible advocate for your business. This engages your customers in a different way by giving them a chance to ask for the features they really want, and feel connected to you as a brand.
Another, more fun option: Send your survey as a quiz. Interactive content is one of the few forms of marketing that consistently wins readers’ hearts. Assessments, quizzes, and other types of surveys get people interested in a way that static content can’t—83% of marketers get better results with interactive content, according to the Content Marketing Institute. SurveyMonkey has special templates that help you make fun, easy quizzes that capture your readers’ imagination and get them engaged.
Finally, you can use surveys that you send through MailChimp to collect data that becomes fodder for future content. Findings like “66% of people would cuss at work if their boss did,” can help you create viral content and get a ton of media attention. These type of findings can also support reports and infographics, or just help your business make a point.
4. Connect your with social media to reach and engage with people across platforms.
If social marketing is part of your strategy, there’s a good chance that you use Hootsuite. You can add surveys to your social platform to get your audience active and participating with your brand.
Do you want to know what your customers would like to see next from your product or which feature is the most popular? Want to engage them with a fun quiz? Surveys that you can send across platforms are an easy way to get information from your social audience, or to get them excited about your brand.
Surveys that you send over social can also give you interesting findings, which might come in useful for future marketing efforts. This might be a percentage of people who love something about your product, or just an interesting social finding.
Most marketing organizations are made up of dozens of moving parts, and software makes the job manageable, but it isn’t enough when it comes to connecting with real humans. Bringing surveys into these systems gives you more well-rounded information and clearer paths to staying connected.
