In the process of conducting marketing research, marketers should allow for

Market research surveys are one of the most well-known market research tools. But ‘when to actually use a survey’ is often a matter of debate among the actual marketing community.

• Campaign Setup?

• Brand Awareness?

• Customer Satisfaction?

• New Market Research?

All of the above are actually excellent survey opportunities. And several more super common marketing situations can be just as enriched with the use of a great market research survey tool.

Which is why I wanted to share a list of 10 common marketing situations that hit marketers every day, and when and how they can use a market research survey to benefit themselves and strengthen their marketing. If you’ve ever asked yourself how to do market research with surveys effectively in your marketing, then you’ll definitely want to read this article!

I’ve even included a few links to some market research survey examples, to help you understand a bit more about what we’re talking about!

FOR THOSE IN A HURRY: The 10 Marketing Situations When Marketers Should Use a Market Research Survey (in List format!)

1. When marketers need to measure brand awareness.

2. When marketers are creating a new creative campaign.

3. When marketers need to measure ad lift.

4. When marketers need to map the customer journey.

5. When marketers are marketing to a new audience.

6. When marketers need to measure customer satisfaction.

7. When marketers are pitching a new client.

8. When marketers are conducting market segmentation.

9. When marketers are conducting a SWOT analysis.

10. When marketers want to rebrand.

A lot of people liked the summary in my article a few weeks ago, so I figured I’d follow suit here too. Keep on reading for much more info on each of these situations.

1. When marketers need to measure brand awareness.

With brand awareness being such a hot topic in marketing today, it’s amazing how often marketers forget that measuring that brand awareness is one of the most important parts of the branding game. That’s why I wanted to list this as the first marketing situation where marketers should use market research surveys.

A brand awareness survey is an extremely effective method to determine if your brand awareness strategy is working.

Using a survey, we’ll reach out to a subset of our total audience or customer base, and ask several questions relating to the brand, the vertical, and the competitors.

• Which brands come to mind when you need to purchase XYZ product-type?

• What are your overall feelings about Brand X?

• If you had to purchase a widget today, how likely would you be to purchase from Brand X?

• How would you rank the following brands from Favorite to Least Favorite?

When your marketing strategy is working as a brand awareness campaign, you’re working to ensure your brand has the highest top of mind awareness and brand affinity possible, especially from within the vertical.

When your customers need an attorney, they think of your legal brand. When they need a plumber, they think of your plumbing brand.

Surveys help marketers establish initial brand awareness benchmarks, and then measure changes to those baseline brand awareness levels over time.

2. When marketers are creating a new creative campaign.

Creating captivating creative campaigns is a key component of almost every critically-acclaimed communications company. And marketing research surveys are a fantastic tool to help the creative minds behind those creative campaigns unlock the cleverest ideas they’ve ever concocted.

Using a customer survey or market survey, marketers and creatives can measure, gauge, and understand more about the audience they’re reaching.

• How big are the most important market segments?

• What does the customer journey look like?

• What pain-points and values matter most to the audience?

• Where are the important touchpoints on the path to purchase?

Your market research then just needs to be converted into creative language. While translating market research is sometimes a challenge, surveys allow us to get clearer information and insights, especially when the whole marketing team has input on the survey design.

What is an insight? Marketing insights are strategic bits of information that help you connect better with your audience.

With insights in-hand, craft your market research findings into the briefs and memos that creative teams are already using to kick-start their creative thought processes.

• Creative briefs

• Buyer personas.

• Messaging briefs.

• Customer journey maps.

• Strategy outlines.

3. When marketers need to measure ad lift.

Advertisers are often tasked with measuring the value of their advertising work, and surveys are a solid tool to help them get there.

Just like how we measured brand awareness through a brand awareness survey, we can use ad awareness surveys to gauge the market size that’s been impacted by our advertising.

If we’re talking traditional advertising techniques like out-of-home, print, or even broadcast, we can run a benchmark survey prior to our campaign in the designated markets or zones. We then follow that up with additional surveys over time to determine which ads are working and not.

For digital advertising measurement, we can also use surveys to measure ad lift. Same process – we locate a subset of our targeted audience pre- and intra-campaign, and gauge our success based on the change.

If you want to see even more useful results, conduct additional surveys in nearby but untargeted markets, using this as a control group. You’ll be able to weed out any changes, positive or negative, that might have come from external factors outside of your advertising as well.

4. When marketers need to map the customer journey.

I mentioned using surveys for customer journey mapping in our creative campaign development section above, but since so many marketing teams outside of creative often use customer journeys, I wanted to give them their own use-case.

Customer journey maps help marketers understand how a customer goes from awareness, to interest, to decision, and continue to be a customer from then on. And a survey lets us dive deep into that path to purchase.

Using a great customer survey, we can extract information from the total audience. We’ll then derive our key market segments, and look further into each of those audience segments’ individual path-to-purchase details.

• Why do they engage with the vertical?

• Why do they prefer one brand over another?

• How do they become aware of different brands?

• How many touchpoints do they encounter before they make a purchasing decision?

• What makes them become a raving fan of a brand?

By asking the right questions in a market research survey, we can quantify, analyze, and more fully understand the customer journey of each of our main marketing audiences.

5. When marketers are marketing to a new audience.

If you’re trying to reach a customer base that’s different than anyone you’ve ever reached before, a market research survey is a strong strategy to set yourself up for success.

Let’s say you’re an ad agency that mostly works with healthcare clients, and you land your first legal client. Do you know what makes this audience different from your previous clients’ customers?

A survey of existing legal customers across the market, or even a customer experience survey with some deep-dive questions given to your client’s existing customer base, can help you get to where you need to be.

When you’re communicating with customers you’ve never encountered before, it’s important to understand how they think and feel, and a survey will get you there.

• What are their feeling toward the brand and industry?

• What are their overarching attitudes and beliefs?

• How does the current market differ from the average?

• What are the primary market segments that need to be addressed?

You can see a market research survey example in the S2 Research Survey of Marketers. Click here to check it out.

6. When marketers need to measure customer satisfaction.

Right now, marketing firms and business owners alike are beginning to truly understand the importance of the customer experience throughout the buyers’ journey, especially if we’re talking about anything that has a repeat customer base. As a result, many modern marketers are taking the customer experience component in-house.

Customer satisfaction surveys are a great part of an ongoing customer experience management process. As marketers, we want to know if the brand lived up to the promise, and customer satisfaction surveys help measure if the customer service aligns with the brand’s expectations.

• Does the product meet or exceed the expected value?

• Does the purchasing process navigate how the customer expects?

• Is the entire process – staff interaction, product use, etc. – what the customer wanted?

As marketers, we need to know the truths behind the answers to these types of questions. They help us understand how our customer service and our brand align, so our marketing teams can create the roadmaps necessary to get to the brand they’re working to build.

7. When marketers are pitching a new client.

“Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.” – W. Edwards Deming

In marketing, one of the best ways to help secure a new client is to tell them something they don’t know about their customers. That’s where surveys present a powerful opportunity for marketers.

Using an online survey panel or similar method, you can reach nearly any customer base and conduct a short brand awareness survey, customer service survey, market survey or a hybrid of any and all.

From this, you can derive some important marketing insights!

• Why does the customer engage with the vertical? How often?

• Why do they prefer one brand in the vertical to another?

• How do they become aware of different brands?

• What is the overall attitude toward Brand X?

• What does the customer journey for Brand X look like?

Still wondering ‘what is an insight?’ Be sure to read this article for more information!

Measuring these types of marketing thoughts by survey is a great way to have a strong knowledge about your potential new clients’ customer base, and you can almost definitely tell them something they don’t know that can help you win the business.

I wrote an article recently with even more ideas to win new marketing business and help grow your marketing agency. Click here to give it a read.

8. When marketers are conducting market segmentation.

Market segmentation is a hot topic in marketing right now, because it helps to maximize marketing dollars and increase the effectiveness of marketing reach. And market research surveys are an excellent way to lay the groundwork for your customer segmentation journey.

To make it work, mix some demographic or psychographic questions into your brand awareness or market research survey. This will allow you to create cuts – areas where you’ll divide the data – and identify the audience segments that have the largest marketing opportunities.

• Gender

• Age range

• Income

• Zip code

• Ethnicity

• Goals and aspirations

• Values and beliefs

All of these have the potential to be critical characteristics of your end market segments. The marketing data from your market research survey – average annual vertical spend, average frequency of purchase, etc. – can then be analyzed by these individual segments.

In the end, you’ll be able to more easily identify the groups with the most bang-potential for your client’s bottom-line.

Take a look at a market research survey example I’m conducting right now. I’m trying to learn more about the total audience of marketers out there, and the first few questions in this survey are going to help me develop some great audience segments!

Not sure what is market segmentation and how it applies to your marketing? Be sure to read this article!

9. When marketers are conducting a SWOT analysis.

Market research surveys can help us gather a lot of incredibly useful information for a SWOT analysis.

SWOT analyses force us to look at our brand and evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and compare and contrast those four quadrants to map out our next steps. They’re a useful tool in the market research and marketing worlds.

Using a great market research survey, we can reach out to our customers, as well as any lapsed customers, prospects, or even the market at large. We’ll use their responses to gain insightful information and evaluate the brand on each of the four SWOT quadrants:

• Strengths – What do you like about the brand?

• Weaknesses – What don’t you like about the brand?

• Opportunities – What more do you want from the brand?

• Threats – What other vendors already provide the services you’re looking for?

Note: I just listened to a great episode of the Happy Market Research Podcast that talked about designing good questions and cautioned leading ones. I felt compelled to point out that you don’t want to specifically ask in your survey what the participant likes or dislikes about the brand. Instead, you’ll want to ask them to describe the brand itself, and extract the strengths and weaknesses, etc., from their responses.

I feel that SWOT analyses are one of the most under-utilized tools in marketing. But they present incredible value to marketers, especially when you’re looking to evaluate a brand and/or a potential rebrand, especially when a great market research survey is involved!

10. When marketers want to rebrand.

Rebranding is something many marketers face today. The decision to build a brand, develop the brand, and ultimately have to recreate a brand can be a whirlwind of an experience.

Fortunately, market research surveys are here to help!

A great market research survey can describe two of the most important information-sets of your rebrand:

• What’s working with the old brand that needs to stay?

• What needs to be part of the new brand that isn’t already present?

As we’ve seen above, market research surveys let us dive deep into the minds of our customer segments and learn more about how they connect with brands. Now, we’re using this same approach not only to evaluate the current brand, but to brainstorm on what needs to be present in the future.

• Design characteristics, both in marketing and at point-of-purchase.

• Specific customer experiences they’re looking for.

• Unique products or services.

• Different messaging and stories to drive them to action.

By conducting market research surveys, you bring the customer’s mind directly in to the brand-development process. This helps to ensure your new brand is completely on point for what it’s trying to achieve.

Market research surveys for marketing.

Many marketers haven’t had a chance to utilize a market research survey in their marketing. While it’s not a strategy that needs to be implemented in every situation, surveys do have the potential to provide some pretty insightful information, as well as develop critical KPIs and meaningful marketing measurement milestones.

Something to consider for the marketers out there! There’s plenty of tools to experiment with, like SurveyMonkey or even Google Sheets, so feel free to let your mind start racing and your ideas start to flow.

Give surveys a try the next time you find yourself in any of the above 10 common marketing situations!

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