Guide Your Marketing Effort with Simple Customer Surveys

What one important aspect of marketing do many business owners overlook? Customer surveys. Your customers are walking around with so much valuable information about your business. They most likely know things about your business, that even you don't know. . .unless you ask.

When you do ask, they're usually more than willing to tell you all about your advertising, customer service and overall image.

Surveys Help You Plan

If you're like most small businesses, you have limited marketing and advertising funds. It's critical that you plan before you advertise. In the marketing plan section of this site, I discuss knowing your target audience. When you use customer surveys to gather demographic information, you can build customer profiles. Do most of your customers fall within a certain age or income range? On average, what education level have they attained? You'll start to see some common characteristics among your clients. Such information helps you target your advertising to your most likely prospects, a much wiser use of your limited ad dollars.

The sample New Customer Survey and Customer Profile Update (with links below) demonstrate how you can gather contact information, demographics and preferences from new and existing customers. Once you have this information, create a customer database and update it regularly.

---

---

Track Your Advertising Success

Along with using customer surveys before you market, use them to measure advertising effectiveness. The New Customer Survey and Customer Profile Update both ask a question to determine which advertising media are reaching customers. I've also included an edited version, called the Media Survey. Use it to track advertising effectiveness for limited-time promotions. It's short enough that customers can fill it out while they're at your business.

Use Surveys for Service Feedback

When businesses do use surveys, they seem to focus most on measuring customer service. Service is an important factor to measure. After all, your marketing efforts are scattered to the wind if employees treat customers poorly when they come in. Surveys should definitely measure service. Just don't fall into the pattern of using them only to measure service.

While we're on this topic, I do want to make one suggestion. In the sample customer surveys here, I include a section asking customers to rank what's important to them. Is it friendliness? Is it cost? Knowledgeable employees? When you survey customers about service, make sure to measure your performance in the areas they have told you are important. Don't assume you know what's important to your customers. Ask them. They may surprise you.

Sample Surveys

Sample Survey for New Customer
Sample Customer Profile Survey
Sample Media Survey