Surveys are probably one of the oldest marketing tactics in the book, but they can be incredibly powerful and extremely useful.

Today, I want to share with you 10 ways that you can use surveys to optimize your marketing to get better insights and better results.

Let's begin!

1. Feedback

Perhaps the most obvious is feedback.

You can use surveys to identify issues and opportunities for improvement.

For example, asking your customers what they think of your product, what they thought about their purchasing process, asking customers why they quit or why they churned, getting feedback from your website, etc.

Using surveys for feedback is probably the most obvious way to use a survey and it's incredibly effective. And the reality is that not enough people are running surveys frequently enough to get this feedback on a continual basis.

Make sure that you're constantly running surveys. I recommend setting up a feedback survey within your email automations so you can continue to collect this information on an ongoing basis.

2. Direction

You can use surveys to get information that's helpful for making important decisions.

For example, asking your audience what type of content they want you to create, which features you should prioritize, what other offerings or products you can create that people will be interested in, etc.

The types of decisions you're trying to make will dictate who you survey.

For example, you might ask current customers what other products or services they may be interested in or what other problems they have that you can help them solve. That would give you insight into other offerings you can create for them that will add value — and help you capture that value.

Another great idea is to use surveys to get direction on what content to create or how frequently people want to hear from you.

For example, if you have an email newsletter or a YouTube channel, you can survey your followers and ask them how often are they expecting new content, what type of content do they want, and do they want more in-depth content or perhaps more entertaining content.

In other words, use surveys to understand the type, quality, quantity, and frequency of your content marketing efforts.

3. Research

You can ask your target audience what they think to can get their feedback, but you can also do competitor research. You can ask your audience or your email list what other competitors that are aware of from a brand awareness perspective or what other products or services they've bought or used.

You could use this to get information about how they view competitors compared to your brand, or you could also use this to understand who your customers trust and then reach out to those people in the form of partnerships, influencers, and affiliates.

In addition, you can survey your audience or your followers and create unique research, which can then be combined into infographics or white papers. These can make great press opportunities and can get you earned media coverage through this unique research that you create.

4. Reviews & Testimonials

It's important to collect reviews and testimonials from customers, and surveys are a really easy way to do that. In addition, you can collect voice of customer data.

This means collecting and understanding the words and the language that your customers use to describe the problem they had before they purchased or to describe the solution as they see it.

Using the words and language of your customers is extremely powerful, and important, if you want to optimize the performance of your marketing and advertising.

5. Engagement

Using surveys on social media is a really easy way to get people engaged. Everyone has an opinion and people love to share their opinions. Plus, people like to see what other people think. So, by having a survey on social media, you'll get a lot of engagement very quickly and with very little effort.

6. Segmentation

Being able to segment your audiences is essential if you want to improve the performance of your marketing. And using surveys is one of the best ways to do so.

For example, you can run an ad that's a poll or survey and get people to answer it, then use that data to retarget them because now you know their preferences and which segment they belong to.

In addition, using email surveys you can create cohorts of your customers or identify brand advocates — the people who are most excited and most passionate about your brand.

7. Lead Generation

Lead generation is an essential part of any business. Using surveys, especially when they're designed in a quiz format, is an effective way to generate leads.

Users are afraid of lead generation forms because they often request so much information, and users know that completing a lead gen form is going to result in marketing follow-up.

By using a survey to disguise your lead generation forms it's not only less threatening to users but it's also more appealing because it seems fun and engaging.

If you're doing any sort of lead generation, I highly recommend testing a survey type format like a quiz or a wizard.

8. Retargeting

When you're doing paid advertising, retargeting is extremely effective. And using surveys in your retargeting ads is a smart idea.

This helps you better gauge if these users are very engaged or not. And you can also use the results of those surveys with your retargeting efforts to more specifically target users based on their survey responses.

9. Attribution

Attribution means understanding how and where users came from, especially when they make a purchase.

By using a one question survey and asking users, "How did you hear about us?", you can understand which of your channels are the highest performing, and which are driving the most conversions for you.

I recommend asking users this question as soon as they've converted.

The perfect place is on the checkout or purchase "thank you" page, right when they finished purchasing.

Otherwise, you can add this one-question survey to an email automation so that as soon as people get their receipt email, or "thank you" email, they can answer this question and give you that feedback.

You can correlate the answers of this question with the actual attribution data from your analytics platform to determine accuracy of attribution, and to evaluate the performance of different channels.

You'll see the trends of where most people are coming from or how most people are finding out about you, and that's extremely valuable information.

10. Departmental Review

Surveys don't have to be just for customers.

You can also use them internally, and this can be extremely valuable if you want to collect anonymous, honest feedback from your team or get suggestions for how you can improve.

At least once a quarter, it can be helpful to survey at your team to get feedback, to identify opportunities and suggestions for improvement, and to understand how your team is feeling and where they think they're struggling or need help.

There's no harm in doing this anonymously and the worst case is that you get no answers or no insightful responses.

Therefore, I recommend starting with an internal survey and scheduling one at least once a quarter to keep a pulse on how your team is doing and where you can help them improve.

Start Using Surveys to Improve Your Marketing

There you have it — 10 easy ways that you can use surveys to optimize the performance of your marketing.

Surveys are an extremely powerful tool and they're completely under utilized by most organizations.

Go through this list and pick one of them and act on it. Plan and schedule the time to create, launch, and review the results of the survey.

You'll be surprised by what you find.