Business Surveys

I read a great post by Paul Dunay over at Marketing Prof's Daily Fix blog last week: Is Real Time Marketing in your future? Paul made a great point, a few years ago marketing was allowed some ramp up time for strategic shifts, today that's not the case. We've moved into the era of Real Time Marketing where we are expected to plan and react quickly - not in 45 days.

So where do survey questionnaires fit into this new age of marketing? I think it's clear paper surveys and paper survey software is not the way to go anymore. Paper surveys take entirely too long to send out, collect survey responses and do the required data entry before you can even begin to analyze survey responses. On the bright side, there is great online survey creation software to help you get a web survey project of the ground quickly. Online marketing survey software cuts down the time to create online survey questionniares with the right survey questions, send email invitations, collect feedback and analyze survey data.

But wait, creating business surveys isn't instant, neither is collecting responses or presenting survey findings. This is true, but your marketing team also can't fly blind when making instant decisions. Even though we need to react instantly, we also need to have the data on hand to make informed decisions.

Paul shares one of his boss' sayings with us, if you had a leak in your basement would you wait 45 days for a consultant to put on a webinar on How to fix your leaky basement? The answer is of course not, you're going to start getting quotes to fix the leak immediately. Same thing with marketing surveys, you need to collect data to be able to make decisions. I would recommend not waiting until you have a leak to begin collecting customer feedback or conducting client satisfaction surveys.