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By Bash Sarmiento

When building your ad campaign, optimizing effectiveness is a crucial action. You want to connect with your intended audience without creeping them out in the process. One of the best ways to get ads that work is by creating an effective customer feedback survey.

Surveys can point you in the right direction if your ads fail to convert or you simply don’t know what people want. Here’s how you can use consumer surveys to boost your ad effectiveness and connect with your picky audience.

How do consumer surveys work

Surveys are a tried and tested method of gathering data about potential consumers. It’s an effective way of enlisting their feedback and finding out what they like, dislike, and need. It’s also a non-intrusive way of soliciting their opinions.

You can do several kinds of consumer surveys, depending on the type of data you’re looking for. When launching your advertising campaign, you can use direct feedback or indirect surveys.

If you have a website, direct feedback from your customers is vital to improving your customer ad experience. You can use tools like Google Forms to send customers a short, simple, and branded questionnaire. If they complete the survey, you can offer them several rewards or engage them within your community.

For more comprehensive information, indirect surveys are best for longitudinal and high-volume markets. This information lets you know what your audience is thinking beyond the moment they answer the survey. Such data is essential for developing your ad campaign strategy.

So, how do you improve your ads through surveys?

-Use surveys to establish baseline data

One of the biggest challenges for advertisers is building effective campaigns. You need to understand what your customers want and how they behave and respond to your ads. But how can you do this if you don’t know what your target audience wants?

Before you even start your ad campaign, it’s important to set how you do your advertisements. The best way to gain this insight is by creating baseline data from your advertising campaigns.

When you send out a survey, ask your respondents questions about your branding, what types of ads they like to respond to, and gauge what ads resonate for them. If you had previous ads, ask them to rate your ad’s performance. This will tell you whether the product or service you’re offering is meeting expectations.

You can also use your survey results to form the basis of your social media strategy. You can get a good idea of how engaged your followers are and what topics they care about.

-Build trust through surveys

Building trust with potential customers is one of the most challenging aspects of advertising. Sure, you have a great product and service, but your potential customer base may be wary. This is where your reputation matters.

Your reputation is based on several sources, including your reviews, customer service, and social media presence. These all contribute to your brand recognition. However, to build brand loyalty and increase sales, you need to earn the trust of your existing and prospective customers.

This is where surveying comes in. When asking your survey respondents questions, make them open-ended. This will encourage them to give you honest answers while ensuring the responses are relevant to your advertising and brand.

Asking for positive and constructive feedback about your brand is essential. It shows that you care enough to contact them. It also shows that you value their input. GDPR-proof your customer satisfaction surveys to show that you value their privacy.

As your base of loyal customers grows, your credibility increases. Your target audience sees you as serious and willing to do the necessary work. They see you as trustworthy, which helps you market your products and services.

-Build a targeted audience from your survey results

When you build your marketing strategy, you want to reach the right audiences. You don’t want to waste your time and money on people who aren’t likely to want your products or services.

You can tailor your campaign accordingly when you know the audience you want to target. You can test different demographics and see which appeals to your specific group of people. This makes it easier for you to understand who will respond to your marketing campaign and who won’t.

Using your survey data, you can determine which of your marketing campaigns is most successful. You can then focus your efforts on making this document even better.

Once you know your target market, you can split them into different groups. You can then focus on each demographic individually, based on profile, age, location, gender, behavior, and interest. For example, different age groups may prefer specific videos. You can cater your tweets and videos to younger and older generations.

You can categorize your audience based on their interest in specific products. You can use this information to personalize your user experience. All this can show up in your survey results if you do it right.

-Include an ad effectiveness survey in your campaign

Once you have your list of targets, you can start your ad campaigns. Once you complete your first campaign, it’s important to serve an ad effectiveness survey to those who responded to your campaign.

Find out what your existing customers think about your adverts. You can ask them what they liked about the advertisement, what they didn’t like, and why they responded the way they did. This can help you create better, more engaging, and more effective pieces of content in the future.

You can also ask new customers why they responded to your advert. Did they see it while browsing? Did they stumble upon it on social media? Did they click on a link in your email? You can gather this kind of information from your email campaigns.

Testing ad effectiveness should be based on campaign goals. To ensure your brand message is “sticky,” let a little time pass between exposure and testing.

However, the days of setting up testing four weeks in advance are over since some survey platforms have dramatically cut lead times. It is advisable to discuss testing early on as part of the campaign rather than as an afterthought to assuage fears within the team.

The bottom line

Advertising is so much more than throwing a few promotions at people. It’s the art of making a connection. Your ad strategies can make or break your business when done right.

Use key marketing strategies like creating online surveys. Your customers are a valuable resource, and you need to know what they think before reaching out to them. Work with a top-rated marketing and advertising agency to help power your advertising strategy.

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Bash Sarmiento is a writer and an educator from Manila. He writes laconic pieces in the education, lifestyle and health realms. His academic background and extensive experience in teaching, textbook evaluation, business management and traveling are translated in his works.