What You Can Learn from a Business Survey 

You have a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips…

What’s working in your business? Which products are selling? What do your customers want? How do they want it?

With this information lies your strategy for more client conversions. 

So, as a business owner and creative, how do you retrieve it? 

A simple business survey. 

In today’s video, we’ll discuss why we surveyed our audience, what we learned, and how we’re using the results. 

Watch the video tutorial, and then dive into our survey question examples and suggested tips below. 

So, why did we do this survey in the first place? 

The Backstory

Earlier this year, our team enrolled in Ashlyn Carter’s Copywriting for Creatives Course. 

It’s been a game changer.

Ashlyn Carter has been a friend since she entered this business. In fact, you may remember her as a guest on our Brands That Book podcast episode: How to Cut Through the Noise.

We knew Ashlyn was smart, but her course content is pure brilliance. 

As we make major shifts in our business this year (more on that soon) and with Davey recently taking on a new role as CEO of BDOW!, I (Krista) am handling more content strategy. 

Use the code DAVEYANDKRISTA for 50% off BDOW!

Working through Ashlyn’s course has been so helpful as we update our voice and give our website a much-needed overhaul. The cobbler’s kids never have shoes, right?

One key element of the course is conducting customer research. Ashlyn offers several ways to do this, but we chose to put together an audience survey. 

We used Typeform to poll our audience and walk them through several different aspects of our business to help us determine what’s working and what needs a refresh. 

I’ll be honest – I was nervous about reading through the answers. Aside from one or two outliers, the overwhelming majority was positive, and it felt like a reassuring hug. If you took our survey, thank you! – Krista

Related: Saying Yes and Doing Things Scared

Survey Questions + Goals

Let’s dive into a few of the survey questions we sent out and how we’re using the answers. 

Do you have a business? If so, what do you do? 

This one is probably pretty obvious. We want to know more about who is in our community. Learning who we’re speaking to helps us tailor both products and content to our audience. 

If you’re curious about who is in this community, we serve a pretty equal mix of photographers, designers, and general business owners. 

Where are these business owners in their business journey? 

We asked our audience to let us know if they’re experienced business owners, building their business, or just getting started. Again, this helps us tailor our content to individual business owners. 

Tell us 3 brands you enjoy buying from or following.

As brand designers, this was fun because we love looking at what other brands are doing. We asked this question to try to figure out if there are any patterns among our audience. We also used some of these brands as inspiration for our own brand’s voice. 

Related: How to Create Brand Guidelines 

What personalities (business or otherwise!), podcasts, blogs, magazines, authors, etc. do you enjoy learning from?

We wanted to know who else our audience appreciates learning from and look for opportunities for new collaborations or cross-promotions.

If we could wave a magic wand (a la Hermione) and make a problem in your business go away, which one would it be?

This question generated many ideas for content that we could create. It also helped us figure out which messaging will resonate most with our audience and aspects of our products/services we should emphasize on our sales pages. 

What 3 words would you use to describe the Davey & Krista brand?

This helps us ensure that our brand and messaging are communicating the right feel. 

Are there any products you would like to see us add to our shop lineup?

We wanted to allow people to request specific products. We likely won’t create every single product listed here (some would be super niche), but it’s helpful to look for commonalities among the answers. 

Which of our products have you purchased? 

Yes, we could have manually gathered a lot of this data, but it was helpful to look for trends among the answers. 

What made you choose our business?

This question helps us determine which aspects of our messaging are working. We will likely focus on the aspects mentioned in the answers to this question. 

Were there questions you needed answers to but couldn’t find any? | When comparing options, what were you looking for? 

We wanted to know if there were things people were unsure about before choosing us. We’ll call these “messaging gaps.” As we restructure our site, we’ll make sure we don’t leave any of these unanswered.

Tips for Conducting a Survey:

Here are a few ways we set up our survey for success!

Set a time period + offer a reward

We emailed our list about the survey and gave them 10 days to complete it. We reminded them a few times about the survey and offered 5 – $100 Visa gift cards as a thank you to those who completed it. At the very end of the survey, we asked for names and email addresses to ensure that people completed the entire thing.

Related: How to Get Your First 1000 Email Subscribers

Make it annual

We’re planning to conduct this annually to see how answers change as well as to continue to dial in our messaging. It will also be beneficial to make note of how our audience changes over time. 

Don’t make it longer than it needs to be

The longer it goes, the more people will trail off. Find ways to keep it short and punchy. Use checkboxes and lists when you can to make it easier for people to answer.  

Use a form system like Typeform

We loved using Typeform for this survey because the conditional logic allowed users to skip ahead of questions that weren’t relevant to them. 

Wrap Up

As you conduct your survey, remember to give yourself the bandwidth to process the responses. Take the helpful feedback and apply it to improve your service, product, and process.

Conducting a survey takes humility and intentionality. The fact that you’re even seizing the opportunity to improve your business is a huge step. 

If you have questions about conducting your survey or interpreting the results? Send us a message or leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!