Arm Your Marketing Campaigns With Opinions That Matter

By Lakshmi Hari On Dec 6, 2017

Arm Your Marketing Campaigns With Opinions That Matter

While there’s a proliferation of data for marketers and communicators today, the time for analyzing them has shrunk tremendously. And then, there’s the human factor. Individual reactions can sometimes be very different from what the data says, making it critical to capture voices and opinions of people that matter most to your business (existing customers, prospects, peers, employees) before launching any marketing campaign.

We call this ‘market-powered data’—combined with the stats that you already have from various tools and sources, it paints the full context you need to make decisions quickly and confidently. And getting it could be as simple as asking the right questions to the right people at the right time.

As it turns out, many businesses aren’t doing that, missing on the opportunity to validate their ideas and assumptions and better connect, engage and stand out with their marketing efforts. The majority of small business owners (62%) say they “never” conduct surveys of their customers, according to our recent CNBC| SurveyMonkey small business survey.

Sometimes, you can get away without asking. Other times, the lack of curiosity can lead to epic marketing fails—like the ones that happen around us every day, blowing up on social media and generating countless unfavorable headlines. These were the inspiration for the Shoulda Used SurveyMonkey ad campaign. The situations we show are humorous and exaggerated, but they’re based on real-life business cases where asking questions could have prevented costly mistakes.

No matter your industry, the stakes are high: 95% of new products launched each year will fail. In the hospitality industry, it only takes one bad experience for 25% of customers to defect to competitors. And, prevention is far cheaper and sometimes easier than cure. Whether it is fixing a product after development, replacing a bad design, or addressing negative publicity in the marketplace. This campaign is a reminder that asking questions can be the difference between a good idea and a terrible one, or sometimes a proud moment and an embarrassing incident.

So, what are some easy ways for you to arm your marketing with market-powered data and increase engagement and effectiveness —

Identify high-value use-cases for your product/service. Surveys are a great tool to understand how exactly your products/services are being used and what value you deliver to your customers. With the Shoulda campaign, surveys of existing customers led us to focus the campaign and media spend around dominant use-cases where the perceived value of asking was the highest.
Ask for feedback from the people that matter most to your business. Once the ads were created, we tested them with our own employees, agency personnel, and an external panel of business professionals through SurveyMonkey Audience to get real-time feedback. Getting this feedback becomes even more crucial for companies like GoPro who have a global and diverse customer base. Especially, if they can gather customer opinions in hours or days in over 100 countries, and without involving an expensive 3rd party consultant or market research partner.
Incorporate your customers’ voices into your campaigns. Reflecting your customers’ opinions and voices in your marketing content is not only a powerful endorsement but also a more engaging way to showcase your value. There are great tools that allow you to deploy short surveys to get third-party validated customer testimonials and easily transform them into shareable and engaging content assets.

Fortunately, with most business endeavors, you’ve got an opportunity to be curious, ask questions, and get feedback before you launch anything new.

In fact, 10 years of research show that companies who put human-centered design methods at the core of their growth strategy see a 228% higher ROI than the S&P 500. The great management guru Peter Drucker once said, “My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.”

I second that: staying curious and arming your marketing campaigns with market-powered data will not just prevent mistakes but will also ensure that you have a holistic view, embrace diverse perspectives, and foster innovation.