Peek Inside Your Customer’s Mind
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008As marketers, it’s really easy to fall in love with our events, services and products. But just as when we fall in love with our human sweethearts, we tend to focus only on the positive aspects of our objects of affection … sometimes to a fault. WE can see the value in attending our seminars, buying our products or hiring our companies … and it’s easy to forget that our prospects are not necessarily wearing the same rose-colored glasses.
That’s why it pays to get periodic reality checks. Especially before launching (or even starting the development of) a new seminar or product.
Surveys are a great tool for soliciting customer feedback. You can be blatant about the purpose of your survey — “I’m planning to hold a seminar about XYZ. Is this something you’d be interested in attending and if so, when?” Or you can conduct a more traditional type of survey to get insight into how your audience thinks and feels about the topic.
I’m in the midst of conducting the latter type of survey on a topic that I’ve become more and more interested in over the past few months. I sent the survey to my opt-in list, and although it’s too early to draw any conclusions, the information I’ve collected so far has been really fascinating. Some assumptions I had made have been validated; others have been shot down. And I’ve received loads of detailed comments in the “Other” field. 
I’ll share more when I have more data.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES: I used SurveyMonkey.com for the current survey. Awesome tool! Very intuitive to use (a huge plus for people like me who don’t want to fiddle around with learning new technology) … and one usage plan is free.
Another tool that’s popular among the Internet marketing crowd is the ASKDatabase.com. This tool is a smart choice if you like to ask open-ended questions and/or if you get a lot of comments in the “other” field on your standard survey questions. Rather than reading and trying to make sense of a huge list of comments, you can use the ASK(TM) Database to analyze the feedback and draw conclusions.