NewsBusiness

How surveys can drive your business – giving you news material for your PR and allowing you to make better business decisions.

A number of internet-based services now make conducting a survey either free or very low cost, and very easy to put together. If you’re not familiar with the tools, check out SurveyMonkey or Constant Contact.

And it’s also pretty straightforward to send an invitation to take part in the survey via email, or to invite visitors to your website to participate. These online tools also collate the data for you, so you can access results instantly, without having to laboriously compile a report.

So – what’s a survey good for and how do you maximise your chances of getting a reasonable response rate?

What’s a survey good for?

• find out what your customers really want
• find out what your customers really think of you (you might be surprised)
• find out what influences your customers (eg what media they consume – great if you’re wondering who to target with your PR efforts and news releases)
• share the results of your survey with your clients/your mailing list/the media
• set a ‘benchmark’ against which to measure the effectiveness of your promotional activities (and run the same survey afterwards to measure the effectiveness of your promotion/PR)
• use survey results in your marketing/PR to promote the need for your product or service

Maximising response rates

If you’re persuaded it’s worth running a survey, how do you make sure you get a reasonable response rate? After all, if you’re planning to announce survey results to the media you’ll probably need more than 1,000 responses to be ‘statistically valid’ if it’s a national ‘consumer’ survey, or at least 100 if it relates to a local, niche or specific business sector.

Here are a few ideas:

• keep the survey short (eg less than 10 questions) and state how long it will take to complete the survey upfront
• be open about the purpose of the survey
• state clearly what’s in it for them if they complete the survey eg ‘go into a draw to win…’ and/or ‘all participants will receive a copy of the final survey report’ – this one is particularly important if the survey findings will be useful to those businesses/people surveyed
• make the questions as clear and unambiguous as possible (this will minimise survey abandonment)
• minimise the number of questions where you ask participants to write anything – give them the option if they want but make as many questions as possible ‘tick the box’ type (again for survey abandonment reasons)
• if you are looking for honesty in the answers (eg you want to find out true market perception of your product or company) consider using an outside agency* to conduct the survey – guaranteeing anonymity to participants
• state when the survey will close, odds of participants winning the prize (if you offer one) and send at least one email reminder a day or two before the survey closes
• if you are primarily inviting business people to participate via email, send the invitation out early (eg 7.35am) on a weekday morning

Even the best crafted surveys don’t often hit response rates greater than 5%-10%, so make sure your list is big enough to get the number you need.

Do you have any survey tips we have missed?

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*it would be remiss of us not to mention that News Equals Business offers this service to clients!

Seth Godin, the marketing author and guru, recently posted an article on his blog, ‘Things to ask before you redo your website’. He thinks people are generally asking the wrong questions (or at least not the most important questions) when they are contemplating a website revamp. Perhaps the most important question he says is “what is the goal of the site” ie what exactly do you want the website to do?

Read his full post here:

Things to ask before you redo your website

Back in May Sydney academic Jim Macnamara put together an analysis of more than 70 local and international studies published over the last 80 years.

He concluded that a lot of media content is derived from PR material – although not surprisingly some publications and media are more reliant than others on news releases and PR information. ‘Quality’ newspapers and broadcasters relied the least on PR material and suburban and rural newspapers, trade press and specialist publications relied the most.

What is really interesting is that journalists tend to say that they do not rely on PR – how can this be in the face of the evidence? The answer is in their perception of their sources – once they get to know a PR person, they then regard them as a ‘trusted source’ rather than just another PR channel.

Here’s the full article from The Australian:

PR driving up to 80pc of content

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear this from any of the latest horde of pop stars? But of course they never say it, and so ensues the normal round of gossip columnists, radio DJs, TV interviewers etc trying to wheedle interesting comments out of the celeb in question.

I suppose it makes you wonder what an interviewer would actually say in reply to a pop star if they really said this – they’d probably be dumbfounded and be prompted to ask something like “Well, why don’t you want to talk about your music?” Which then might lead to the conversation the musician wanted to have in the first place.

It really does go to show that the grass is always greener on the other side – there are plenty of business owners who would die to get some good media coverage. And those (mainly celebrities) who are getting tons normally complain massively about it!

The publicist Max Markson summed it up beautifully when he said that newsworthiness is all about “Ordinary people doing extraordinary things or extraordinary people doing ordinary things”.

So how does this relate to getting media coverage for your business? If you take Mr Markson’s quote at face value, you need to see what you – or your business – is doing that is truly extraordinary. If we assume that getting on to the front cover of New Idea is not your aim, then this relates as much to your industry media (or your niche media) as it does to mass media. A positive story in ‘Widget Fancier Monthly’ might be all you really need to start your climb to celebrity status – in the world of widgets anyway!