Marketing | A New Online Approach to Using Consumer Surveys to Reach Your Target Audience

Have you ever wondered if your packaging or logo will produce the right results? Have you ever been uncertain about whether creating a new feature or enhancing an existing feature for your product will be better? Have you ever got frustrated not knowing if you’re making the right investment with marketing strategy? Have you ever pondered whether your product name or business name will strike a chord with your targeted customers? Whether you need to gauge a reaction about the name of your new product or business, obtain proof-of-concept for a new product or idea, test an idea for a marketing campaign, prioritize product offerings, or even ascertain about a recent product launch, sponsoring event, or promotion, online consumer survey with fast results may be the answer to your prayers.

You understand the value of market research, but you don’t have the time or the budget to invest in labor-intensive, costly focus groups or poorly representative sample of survey research that takes too long to get results. Like many others, you are uncertain that they will give you the right information or the right ROI within a reasonable time period. The tools that exist today may be too biased, too costly, or too labor-intensive because of the length of time needed to obtain sufficient survey participants, the recruiting methods, and the incentives that inherently introduce bias.

You may also be familiar with online research tools that are historically known for intercepting web traffic on your own website and offering respondents incentives for responding to long-form surveys with self-selection bias. Or, you may feel restricted with what you can work with.  Using your gut instinct, consulting with other retailers, asking feedback from friends, or using social media to ascertain general feedback from users may not help you reach a representative sample of your target audience. Is there a way to easily conduct quantitative research and obtain usable results?

There’s an alternative that you can use to easily conduct market research. A new online market research approach such as Google Consumer Surveys can deliver a validated, representative sample fast – within 24 hours with Google. Google recently launched this new consumer survey service that utilizes “inferred demographics” with general assumptions based on an individual’s demographics (age, gender, region, income, and interests), online behavior and browsing history.

If your business caters to a specific set of customers within a particular age range or gender, for example, you may want to target your products to this audience because they’re more likely to provide you with insights into your products or services. This is where Google comes in with their easy-to-use, simple online interface that gathers consumer’s insights, track trends, and model consumption behavior in real-time by segmenting and targeting customer base demographically.

How it works

Google Consumer Surveys provide you with real-time access to your target consumer. You write your own survey questions online and choose your desired demographics – whether the entire US Internet population or an audience customized to your need. In exchange for high-quality content access such as news, entertainment, and other interest-based sites, participants across the internet respond to your one or two questions. Perhaps you have questions about your customer’s online versus offline purchase behavior. Maybe you want to know how they view daily deal sites. You may also want to ask more specific brand and merchandising questions to help you with this year holiday promotions based on inputs from last year’s holiday trends. You may want to use this new online market research platform as a way to test your product name or logo because you want to be sure it will convey the right message to your customers.  Or, perhaps you want to target a custom audience who shop at luxury brand retailers and want them to evaluate different versions of your package because you want to rest assured that your package design would outperform a previous design on multiple dimensions, customized to your brand.

Whatever your reasons are, you will find that Google Consumer Surveys can meet your business need and help you make informed decisions faster and cheaper than other expensive traditional methods. For $0.10 per response to general population survey or $0.50 per response to target demographics or screening question, you will get aggregated and analyzed results with better response rates and more accurate data while providing your audience a better respondent experience. The data is shown through interactive histograms, clickable demographic segmentation, and comparisons across customized dimensions.

The results

Brands like Lucky Brand uses Google Consumer Surveys to help them determine their marketing strategy by asking customers a series of questions related to their online and offline purchases. They discovered that, through their representative sample, customers are still not as comfortable buying clothes online as Lucky Brand originally thought. As a result, they reinvented their promotional emails to drive their customers not only to their online commerce site but also to their retailers, and learned that their marketing campaigns should always have not only an online presence but also an offline component.

The bottom-line

So, why should you and your brand invest in an online consumer survey like that of Google’s? Publishers such as news sites, video producers, and even app developers also get paid as their visitors answer your questions. Google run surveys across sites that are part of their diverse publisher network. As a result, they can get sufficient, relevant respondents who are willing to answer quick questions without any effort. Online consumers browsing the web will come across your questions when they visit a site and want to view premium content for free. The next time you want to gain consumer insight, consider utilizing an online survey platform that will provide you with fast, usable, and unbiased data from respondents that are catered to your need.