Ten Ways to Boost the ROI of your Survey Research
Surveys have become one of the most important items in a professional services marketers’ toolkit. When done right, they can help firms demonstrate their insights on important business topics and generate awareness of the firm overall. Yet many firms struggle to create surveys that provide sufficient return on investment.
What separates professional services firms whose surveys are powerful lead and awareness generators from those whose surveys fall flat? In our experience, 10 key practices make the difference:
1. Get all key stakeholders involved early
2. Conduct comprehensive secondary research
4. Devise four or five questions to probe each hypothesis
6. Create incentives that provide both business and personal value
8. Ensure the findings are consistently communicated
9. Maximize the marketing opportunity
10. "Institutionalize” the research
1. Get all key stakeholders involved early in the process—especially in the identification of the research topic and design of the research. The most successful research projects have strong participation from the head of the sponsoring practice or firm, appropriate subject-matter experts, account managers and business developers throughout design, analysis and marketing of the findings.
2. Conduct comprehensive secondary research on the broad research topic before designing the research. Doing so enables you to both identify material already published on the topic (and, thus, differentiate your research) as well as pinpoint aspects of the topic that have not been adequately covered by other organizations (and, thus, provide fresh new insights your clients and prospects will value).
3. Always use hypotheses to ensure the research generates useful data. Hypotheses should not be so broad that they can’t be covered adequately by a survey (“Leading companies attribute their success to a wide variety of practices and capabilities”), and not so narrow that new discoveries are difficult (“Senior management’s role is critical to successful change management”).
4. In crafting the survey questionnaire, devise four or five questions to probe each hypothesis. If a hypothesis needs more than five questions to probe it, it is probably too broad and should be narrowed in scope.
5. Avoid the “C-level trap”: Trying and failing to target top executives. In fact, surveys on business or management topics often are best taken by professionals at the manager, director or vice president level because these individuals have the most intimate knowledge of the topic at hand.
6. Create incentives for participation that provide both business and personal value. Topical incentives such as early access to research findings can be paired with items such as drawings for iPods or gift certificates to most effectively drive participation.
7. Don’t simply report interesting answers to questions: Take sufficient time in analysis (and use the hypotheses as a guide) to determine the most compelling “story” that the data is telling and use that storyline as the basis of the research report. Many companies spend considerable time and money collecting data, but then skimp on analysis—which can compromise the strength of the findings and squander the investments made in data collection.
8. To help ensure that the research findings are consistently communicated externally, sufficiently train all relevant personnel on the findings and methodology—including marketing and media relations professionals, as well as any client-facing professionals. Make sure these employees understand and can communicate the linkage between the research findings, the implications for clients and the services your company can offer to help.
9. Create and execute a full marketing plan around the findings. Within this plan, maximize the marketing opportunity the survey provides by releasing different sections of the results (such as specific industry or functional findings) in addition to marketing the overall findings. Consider online channels and discussion groups as mechanisms to continue the dialog on the research topic and further engage clients and prospects. And offer to prepare and deliver tailored presentations on the survey findings to the management teams of each of the companies that participated in the research (and which ceded confidentiality) and to target accounts (clients or prospects).
10. "Institutionalize” the research—make it an annual, semi-annual or quarterly initiative. In doing so, your firm ultimately will increase brand awareness, create anticipation for the research among target executives and be able to provide longitudinal comparisons.
To learn more about designing and conducting effective survey research, read our full white paper.
Do you have a particularly challenging, interesting or disappointing survey experience? Tell us about it. We may relate it along with others in a future issue of our newsletter.