How Online Surveys Can Fuel Your Content Marketing Plans

 

​​Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This ancient riddle has kept scientists busy for quite a long time, and still, there isn’t an exact answer. Similarly, content marketers are riddled with this; which comes first, the content or the feedback?

All content marketers know the secret to creating effective, original content and building a solid readership is to understand your customers. And what better way to understand your customers than asking them directly using online surveys. 

Surveys are like a blank canvas allowing you to ask a wide variety of questions to understand your customers’ experiences with your published content. You can also utilize surveys to validate the ideas brewing on your whiteboards. 

But even with the availability of better tools to create, send, and track surveys, marketers end up under-utilizing online surveys. This is why we are exploring the contribution of online surveys to the overall content marketing strategy.

It won’t be an exaggeration to say that surveys go hand-in-hand with content marketing, and by the end of this blog, you will agree with us.

But before we dive into the role of surveys in content marketing, let’s explore the different types of marketing surveys available to understand customers and get their feedback.

2 Types of Surveys for Content Marketing

There are probably hundred different types of marketing surveys you can run to test your hypothesis, gauge market share or customer attitude towards your brand. Still, the following three can be specifically used to get feedback on your content.

Customer Expectation and Attitude Surveys

Usually, these surveys are utilized to understand the gap between customer expectations and the current product. Or to understand their attitude towards the product or the brand, their commitment, and loyalty. But you can also use them to get a perspective into how they like your content.

One of the easiest and effective ways is to add this question at the end of your article: Was this article helpful? This question is usually accompanied by thumbs up and down signs for your readers to give their feedback. 

You can also add this question: How did you like this article? Such a question is usually followed by 3 emojis for customers to react to your article.

Net Promoter Score

 

If you are a marketer, you don’t need to introduce what NPS is and how it helps understand customers’ experience with the brand. 

But did you know that it can also be used to know how your customers feel about your content or if it is pushing your readers down in the sales funnel?

The same NPS scale can be used to understand your readers’ loyalty towards your blog. 

If you are getting a negative NPS score, that means you need to invest in creating evergreen and educational content. 

If it comes to 0%, it’s safe for you to experiment with different content formats to understand your customers’ needs. 

And if it’s positive, you need to keep repeating your recipe to create content that resonates with your audience.

Pro Tip: You can always send a survey with an open-ended question to your regular readers to get their feedback on your published content or future content ideas and strategies.

Now that we are equipped with the right types of surveys, let’s explore how surveys can help you create effective content.

How Surveys Help Create Effective Content

Understanding Customers’ Challenges

The secret ingredient to effective content is customer resonance.

Resonance with their challenges, experiences and expectations.

Using online surveys, you can directly ask your customers to share their current pain points, challenges, and questions they have. You can also collect similar data from other sources like social media and market intelligence companies to build your content strategy around answering their questions and providing solutions to their pain points & challenges.

Even if you don’t have all the answers and solutions, you can always acknowledge and empathize with their struggles which goes a long way in building customer loyalty.

Customer Segmentation

If we can build detailed customer segments to create ads, then why not for content creation? In all fairness, organic traffic garnered from content is way more valuable than paid traffic which lasts for about a minute.

You can use online surveys to bifurcate your audience into small meaningful segments and create hyper-targeted content for better conversions.

Such surveys will have questions depending on your customer segmentation strategy. For example, if you are a food-based website, then you might want to segment your audience into two groups: vegetarian and non-vegetarian. Maybe you can use these segments to distribute veg and non-veg recipe-based blogs among the right segments for better targeting and conversions.

Gather Data

Use surveys to gather solid, original data, which your writers could use to build evergreen, pillar content for your blogs.

Moreover, the same data might be useful to other writers, publishers, and websites which means they might link your original article and study in their blogs. This will help you garner more backlinks with lesser efforts than usual. And if the research topic was an evergreen topic, then you can rely solely on backlinks to generate organic traffic for your blog.

Surveys for Internal Content

You build a brand externally among your customers and internally among your employees. And one of the best ways to build your brand among your employees is to cultivate a culture and a culture of easy exchange of ideas and a culture of building solutions.

Employee handbooks and other process-based content are the pillars for creating such a culture. To make such content more effective and easier for employees to understand, conduct surveys regularly, and keep them open-ended for in-depth, actionable feedback.

You can also use surveys for effective change management. So, any time there’s a major change happening in your culture or any process, you can get your army on the same page or maybe get feedback for the same.

Build a Brand with Better Insights

Surveys provide useful insights into your audience, which is a staple for creating effective and resonating content. And with an increasing number of platforms and elaborate forms of content, having such insights becomes a non-negotiable.

If you are creating content just for creating content, then maybe you can skip this step in your content marketing strategy.

But if you want to build a brand, then online surveys will go hand-in-hand with your content marketing strategies.

Author Bio

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.