Marketing surveys: Types, 70+ examples, and best practices

As a marketer, simply guessing what motivates and appeals to your customers and target audience won’t cut it. Whether launching a new business or managing an established brand, it’s critical to be guided by insights so you don’t waste time, resources, or your audience’s attention.

Let’s go over the different types of marketing surveys, with example questions, and how to use these surveys to strengthen marketing campaigns. 

Marketing surveys are a powerful research method used to gather data and actionable insights about customers and prospects so businesses can understand and meet their needs.  

Research experts commonly use marketing surveys for market research, but many different types of surveys can gather different kinds of quantitative and qualitative insights, such as:

No matter the type of marketing survey, the results help businesses make data-driven decisions by illuminating what customers or potential customers want, need, and expect. Marketers can use that information to shape their strategies and better engage their audience. 

Related reading: Why are surveys important in research?

Marketing surveys are essential for conducting market research and keeping up with customers. They can gather customer feedback and market research data to inform product development, marketing strategies, ad campaign development, customer touchpoint improvements, competitive analysis, and more. 

When it comes to the process of gathering feedback, marketing surveys tend to be:

Companies can use marketing surveys in any industry to gain critical business insights and market research data. While the focus of market research surveys often overlap, here are the most popular types, along with example survey questions.

It can be helpful to think of market research surveys as an umbrella category since marketing surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS®), price optimization, usage and attitudes, competitor analysis, and more are all considered market research surveys. 

Marketers conducting general market research tend to focus on getting survey data to boost their brand, build better products, understand consumers’ habits, and improve experiences.

Related guide: The 6-step market research process

Example questions from market research survey templates: 

Success story: How Kajabi builds brand strength with competitive insights

The whole point of a customer satisfaction survey is to understand whether your customers are happy, unhappy, or somewhere in between—and a good survey will collect that feedback and build trust between you and your customers.  

Example questions:

Related: 50 customer satisfaction questions to strengthen CSAT

An NPS survey is a simple way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty so you can inspire more brand advocates. Any NPS survey template focuses on a central, closed-ended question; marketers often include a follow-up open-ended question to collect more context and information from respondents. 

Example questions:

Success story: How Point of Reference gets more out of NPS surveys

Product feedback surveys collect the information you need to create products that go above and beyond your customers’ expectations. This will boost customer satisfaction and help your teams innovate with intention. 

Product surveys are useful throughout the product lifecycle, from product development to maturity, and collect an array of insights about current products, product concepts, and even product packaging. 

Example questions:

Success story: How Together Labs boosts product development with user feedback

A brand awareness survey uncovers an important aspect of your overall brand health: whether your target market is even aware of your brand, products, or services. These market research insights help focus your marketing efforts on your market position and how you stack up against competitors.

Example questions:

Success story: How Tweezerman grows its global brand

Are you clear on your ideal customer profile? What about your buyer personas? Customer persona surveys give you a deeper understanding of who you’re marketing to, including demographics, consumer attitudes, and purchase drivers. You can use these market research insights to refine your messaging, targeting strategies, and more.

Example survey questions:

Success story: How Sakura gains a deeper understanding of evolving customers

Whether you’re launching a new product or reconsidering the price of existing products or services, you want to make sure you don’t leave money on the table—or turn customers off with too high of a price tag. Pricing research surveys, or a price optimization solution, are a kind of market research that allows you to find out exactly what people are willing to pay so you can price your products with confidence.

Example survey questions:

The best way to understand and improve your customer journey is to use surveys to check in with your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. This feedback can help you see if new customers are having a better experience than long-time customers or if certain touch points are causing friction.

Example survey questions:

It’s one thing to know who your competitors are in an abstract sense—it’s another to know how you compare in the eyes of your target audience. Competitor research surveys are a great way to gauge your brand reach, spot market gaps, and make sure your competitive differentiation is based on market research.

Example survey questions:

There’s a lot that goes into brainstorming, organizing, and delivering stellar events. Event feedback survey templates are popular with marketers precisely because they simplify all that work. 

Pre-event surveys will show what will make people attend and what will generate positive buzz. Post-event surveys will help you understand what went well and what can be improved. You can even use surveys and polls during the event to capture leads and boost engagement in real time.

Example survey questions:

A customer service survey allows you to quickly follow up with customers after they’ve interacted with your customer service team and get insights on whether that support hit the mark and positively impacted the customer experience (CX). 

This is important because a customer’s call for help (sometimes literally, in the form of a phone call with your customer service team) can make or break their relationship with your brand, affecting brand reputation and long-term customer loyalty.

Example survey questions:

Do your customers think your website is modern, visually appealing, or clunky and challenging to navigate? Does your site do everything it’s supposed to, from speeding customers through the checkout process to creating an enjoyable browsing experience? A website feedback survey and user experience metrics will help you uncover what’s great about your website and online presence and what’s not. 

Example survey questions:

Here’s why you should add marketing surveys to key stages in the customer journey and your market research process: 

Your audience’s likes, dislikes, and habits can change on a dime—and when you don’t keep up with those changes, it’ll cost your company much more than that. 

Using marketing surveys to conduct market research on consumer behavior and preferences means you’ll know how to create stronger emotional connections and actually meet their needs.

Is your target audience adjusting their spending to support companies that align with their values? Are Millennials and Gen Z consumers doing all their product category research on social platforms? Trends move fast, and brands with rich market research insights can adapt early and gain a competitive advantage. 

Feedback from customers and your target audience can improve your product development, product updates and feature releases, and customer satisfaction. When you build things with careful consideration of what your customers say they want and need, it demonstrates that you’re a company that listens to and values its customers.

Your marketing strategies are only as strong as your insights. For instance, you might transform your social media investments after learning which social media influencers hold the most sway with consumers or which social platforms consumers consider the most trustworthy—two insights uncovered by SurveyMonkey research. With data from marketing surveys, you can establish more strategic goals and make the right moves faster. 

Customer satisfaction can impact everything from your brand equity to your revenue, which is why customer satisfaction insights are particularly valuable. They help you identify and address customer pain points, the key drivers of satisfaction, and how to cultivate a loyal customer base. Not to mention, CSAT metrics are vital for benchmarking performance and setting future goals.

Success story: How Ryanair collects CSAT insights at scale

Imagine you’re planning to launch a new product or service to your existing market. Without market research, you won’t have a clear idea of the optimal price, the best distribution plan, how your audience will receive the product, or even whether the product will actually sell. 

Investing time and effort in the market research process means that you can minimize risks and make data-driven decisions that will grow your business.

Okay, so how do you kick off your own marketing survey? We’ve broken down the process into six basic steps:

As we mentioned, there are lots of different types of marketing surveys and reasons to conduct them. You should always start the marketing survey design process by knowing your survey objective: what you aim to learn through your survey(s). 

Here are a few examples of research goals:

Keep in mind, specificity is important for your goals. For the best results, you should know who you want to hear from, what you want to ask about, and why.

Do you want to hear from existing customers or target customers? Are you aiming to look closer at your target market to understand specific demographics or customer segments? To reach your target audience, you need to know your target audience; refer to the work you did on your research goals and let that guide your targeting.

For example, if your goal is to optimize your ad spend on social media platforms, you may target people who follow your brand’s accounts or spend a certain amount of time using social media per week. Or, you may want to segment your target customers based on age to see how different generations view your ads or your social media presence in general.

Outlining timeline expectations for your survey will support your survey goals and help you ensure stakeholders are clear on the next steps. At this point in the process, you should determine:

Here’s yet another moment where your research goal can guide the way. That objective will shape what you ask and how you design a marketing survey, including the question types you use. 

Here are just a few best practices for writing survey questions:

Remember, you can always use an expert-written survey template to make sure you’re asking the right questions the right way. (They’re also customizable, so you can include more or different questions.) Or rely on AI to craft survey questions for your specific target market. 

Time to get your survey out the door! One of the many benefits of online surveys is that there are lots of ways to send your survey. 

For instance, if your survey is meant for existing customers rather than a market research panel, you can send it via email, SMS, web embedding, or a combination of those options. 

Ready to dig into data? Here are some best practices to help you smooth out the market analysis process and get actionable insights:

Marketing surveys can unearth all kinds of opportunities for your brand and business, from gaps in your customer experience or retail trends to simple ways to reach more target customers.

Find out why marketers rely on SurveyMonkey to collect market research insights and customer feedback that help them do their jobs better. Start with our general market research survey templates or explore connected to your specific use case or industry, and start asking the questions that’ll guide your strategies.

NPS®, Net Promoter® & Net Promoter® Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, and Fred Reichheld.