How to Make Your Surveys Work Harder for You

Joey Green, creative director, is one of the team at our research partner, Censuswide. Joey had 10 years’ experience in PR and marketing, before specialising in market research, where she has now worked for over six years. Below, she shares her best practice tips on how to make your surveys work harder for you.

A successful survey can be a game-changer for any communicator, but it needs to be designed with creativity and careful consideration.

A great survey is multifaceted – even the simplest tweaks to a survey can:

• Provide your marketing/PR team with owned and earned content
• Equip your BD/sales team with insights to engage existing and prospective customers
• Help you understand your audience more deeply and measure brand perception

Survey projects should be approached with a multi-purpose, cross-functional mindset to maximise their value.

Below are three key things to consider during a survey project.

You might commission a research project with one team or purpose in mind, but it’s worth exploring whether other insights could be gathered at the same time.

For example, your PR team might need some insights for news generation, and they want to survey Brits. They’ve got a press angle in mind and that’s covered off in ten questions, but you have budget to stretch to 20.

It might be worth thinking about other insights you can glean from this audience. Would it be useful to explore brand awareness or sentiment? Would learning where different generations discover brands help you to reach a new audience? Would assessing attitudes to your mission, purpose and values, or a perhaps a new logo you’re considering, help to inform and shape your brand strategy?

The point is, don’t stop at a single objective. Think across teams. The more outcomes you plan for upfront, the more return you’ll get from the project.

A common pitfall when it comes to identifying the sample is deciding who to poll before deciding on the narrative of the survey. For example, if your topic is cybersecurity, it may be tempting to survey CISOs. But if your narrative is about poor security habits, office workers might be the better choice to tell that story.

Deciding who to poll is a strategic decision. It should be thought about with the outcome in mind – is storytelling and media coverage the primary goal? Then keep your sample broader. This will help to achieve larger respondent numbers and also provide an easy way to refer to the sample.

Is it for business development? Then instead of insights into your target audience, perhaps you want to survey the people your client sells to.

To use myself as an example, I am a market researcher – what my fellow researchers think is interesting to an extent. However, I am not selling services to other market researchers. I sell to PR/marketing leaders and am therefore much more likely to engage with content that explores this group’s attitudes as it might help me to tailor my offering and shape my sales strategy.

Similarly, if I (as a researcher) wanted to engage PR and marketing leaders, more often than not I would want to provide them with insights about the audiences they want to influence as opposed to their peers.

It’s a subtle shift in approach but it yields more actionable data.

Questions really can make or break a survey project.

Simplicity and clarity are key when designing a questionnaire and I believe the best way to achieve both is by thinking like a respondent.

Always think to yourself – can a respondent realistically answer this question? For example, I often work with clients who are keen to know specific figures such as what percentage of their business’ revenue can be attributed to AI generated job ads. However, an accurate response to this question relies on both the company tracking that figure and the respondent knowing it when they take the survey. Instead, perhaps it’s better to ask a respondent how much time they feel they have saved from using AI and then look to assign a monetary figure to that.

It’s also important to consider bias. There are a few types at play, but the main one to bear in mind is acquiescence bias. Also known as agreement bias, this refers to the tendency to agree with statements or questions, regardless of actual beliefs or opinions. To avoid this skewing your data, you might wish to shift the sentiment of what you’re asking. For example, if my hypothesis / desired outcome is that people want better benefits at work, I would focus the question or statement on what could be improved / what would be better, rather than asking the respondent what they think is working.

The most successful surveys are not just well-structured but are strategic from the outset.

By considering multiple use cases across teams, selecting your audience thoughtfully, and crafting your questions with clarity and bias in mind, you can create survey projects that serve marketing, sales, and strategic objectives all at once.

In short: if you’re going to invest in research, make it work hard for you – and then some.