Branded Surveys: Why They Are Worth Running For Your Business

When it comes to the adage of ‘not judging a book by its cover’ this sentiment in many cases no longer rings true, particularly in business.

In fact, in today’s fast paced marketplace where people only have the briefest of moments to make a judgement about something, your brand which is essentially your company’s book cover is more crucial than ever. By communicating your company’s personality and value proposition through its verbal and non-verbal messaging, your brand is one the most powerful elements in influencing whether someone chooses to do business with you or not. And it’s also a key determinant in whether a customer stays loyal to you. So, it’s important to get it right.

But how do you know if your brand is perceived favourably?

Well, the only way you will know this for certain is by asking your customers directly. This is where the value of conducting a branded survey really comes to the fore.

Why branded surveys are important to your business

While a well thought out branded survey helps improve your understanding about perceptions and levels of awareness of your brand in the wider marketplace, there are many further ways in which branded surveys can benefit your business.

It helps improve customer loyalty and satisfaction

By giving them the opportunity to feedback about your products, services, or experiences with your organisation, the responses you get back from customers can be used to make changes that will improve their satisfaction and loyalty towards your business.

It enhances the marketing of your products and services

Similarly, knowing how your wider brand is perceived can be extremely valuable to your marketing strategy.

While a consumer survey helps identify any consumer pain points you need to resolve, the findings of a branded survey can reveal any brand values or messaging you need to reinforce, if you’re to improve the impact of a new product or service launch.

It enables you to track and measure your performance over time

Considering how important your brand is to your business success, the great thing about branded surveys if you’re running them frequently, is that you’ll begin to see whether your brand’s health is improving, worsening, or remaining consistent over time.

You can then use this feedback to make any necessary adjustments to your marketing and brand strategy, to improve your performance moving forward.

It helps you compare your performance with competitors

None of us operates in a vacuum, so if you're to identify how well you’re really performing you need to be able to compare your performance with that of others in your market space.

Fortunately, branded surveys can not only tell you how your brand is perceived, but that of your competitors too.

Knowing how you compare with your competitors can enable you to further differentiate yourself and strengthen your position in your market.

Questions you should be asking in your branded survey

Having explored the benefits of a branded survey and taken the decision to run one yourself, you’ll need to think about the survey questions you’ll be asking.

With any survey it’s important that the questions you’re asking enable you to get the answers you need to improve. So, in the case of a branded survey, if you’re to better understand how your brand is perceived and strengthen its impact in the marketplace, you need to be exploring the right areas with your target audience.

From how they would best describe it and how it makes them feel, to how they believe it compares with your competitors. Your survey questions offer a great opportunity to delve deep into the qualities and characteristics that your target audience associates with your brand. So, you need to ensure that you target your questions as effectively as you can.

Here are a few questions to help get you started:

“Select any of the following brands that you have heard of”

• Competitor 1
• Competitor 2
• Competitor 3
• Competitor 4
• Our brand

“What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of our brand?

“How does this make you feel?

“Which of the following best describes our brand?

• Safe
• Robust
• Dependable
• Quality
• Value
• None of these

“What do we do that makes us unique from our competitors?

“How would you describe our brand to a friend?

“How would you describe your last experience with our brand?

“Please share a few ideas with us about where we could do better?

Best practices for running your branded survey

Besides using the right survey tools, it’s wise to be clear from the outset how you will approach your survey, if you’re to gain the maximum value from running it.

Here are some best practice considerations you need to be thinking about:

1. Know what you want to measure

From brand awareness levels to customer satisfaction and loyalty towards your brand and more. It might sound obvious, but it’s important to be clear about what you want to evaluate, as there’s lots of areas you could potentially measure in connection with your brand.

If you can be clear about the objectives of your survey, you’ll be more likely to create survey questions that are appropriate and deliver the insights you need.

2. Identify who you need to reach out to

While in many cases you’ll want the latest sentiments about your brand from your existing customers, in other scenarios such as evaluating the awareness of your brand in the wider market or testing a new product brand name, you may need to extend your audience reach.

In such a case, it’s unlikely that you’ll have a representative sample of the audience you need from you existing contacts, and if you took a risk with these it could affect the validity of your research. Subsequently, you would be better off buying your responses through a consumer panels service. Not only would this provide a quick response, but it would also ensure your survey reached the exact audience for your needs and therefore maximise the value of insight that could be gained from your survey.

3. Ensure your branded survey stands out from more generic surveys

If you’re to get the most valuable results, you need to ensure that as many of your survey recipients complete it as possible. And to do this, it needs to stand out from the rest.

To achieve this a branded survey needs to be branded with the logo, font and corporate colours of the company that is running it. Extra reassurance and credibility for respondents can be provided with the inclusion of a fully custom branded survey template and a custom domain.

Why it’s never too soon to conduct a branded survey

No matter what stage you’re at on your company journey, it’s never too soon to conduct a branded survey. This is because without feedback from your customers and the wider market, you’ll never really know if your brand is communicating what you and your customers want it to. And this is crucial, because you if you’re not delivering what your customers want your business will stagnate or cease to exist altogether.

Fortunately, a branded survey will help you to keep a finger on the pulse of your customers’ perceptions. But not only this, by letting your customers know that you care about what they have to say and are willing to improve things based on their views, a branded survey provides another opportunity to improve your relationship with them and further increase your sales. So, there’s never been a better time to get started.