It’s interesting…asking people how they think or feel about certain topics…then actually listening to their answers. We’ve been taught how important it is to be a good listener since childhood. As it turns out there may have been something behind that lesson.
One of the simplest and most effective ways of listening is by surveying or polling an audience. These days those efforts are most easily scaled in digital formats. There are millions of vendors willing to offer you their surveying tools and resources for little or no cost. The reason is because they are now collecting all the results – seemingly for you, but also for themselves. The results are the gold mine – especially if there is contact information being collected.
It is important to be educated on which survey vendors you work with and what the relationship truly will be. Read the fine print, consider what the end of the relationship looks like, ask for an in-depth demonstration, check references and then check them again. Ultimately being able to collect your own survey or poll data would be the most ideal situation. But that takes resources. Time, money, manpower, skills, repeat.
But now to the good part. Once you are collecting responses from your audience, customers, clients, friends, neighbors – whatever you call them – the people whose opinions you care most about – now the fun begins. At my home at Trib Total Media, we run polls on almost all our digital properties. We get the highest volume of responses through our flagship site triblive.com. We ask all types of questions from silly to serious, fact & opinion, engaging and demographic. Because of the amount of information we have collected on folks visiting our website over the past several years, we are now able to answer many questions about how our site visitors think and feel about certain things as well as learn more about who they are and what their lives and behaviors as consumers look like.
For example, we launched this question on our site:
This is an example of a very simple engagement question – not a heavy news topic or controversial issue question. If necessary, we could create an infographic of these results or a quick story about the double-jointed population and use it as an option for sponsored content for a chiropractor or physical therapist in the area.
By comparison, here is an example of a different type of question that was launched on our site:
This question is a value question and could have been used in a sales presentation for Verizon wireless in our market. Using these responses could assist with marketing messages, determining marketing mix and helping businesses better understand perception of their goods or services within the local market.
Circling back to the beginning of this topic, while gathering and compiling survey/poll data that could be beneficial to your business can be cumbersome, Trib Total Media is available to help. It’s likely that we are already collecting data on our sites relevant to your customers and your line of business. We’re happy to poll our audience about your business or to share what we already know to enhance our advertising relationship with you.
Try our polls out for yourself – look for our surveys on any page of TribLIVE.com and many times, embedded right into our content! Here’s a recent example. And, if you are a person who loves answering poll questions, click the link at the end of the 4 questions to keep going – you can answer until the cows come home!
