Are you Surveying Your Audience?

If you’re not surveying your audience, how the heck are you supposed to know what they want?

More often than not what you think your audience wants and what they really want are two different things.  The only way to find out for sure is to ask them.

This week I polled my networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and email.  It’s been almost a year since my last poll and I got some very valuable feedback.  Before I share the results with you I’d like to share some numbers.

Surveying Your Audience: The Numbers

I’m not going to BS you, surveying is a numbers game.  Fortunately I was able to get some screen shots of the survey I did on Facebook to share with you.  I used the status update on my page to ask for some advice.

This was captured before Facebook removed the analytics yesterday

So the first important number we see here is the impressions.  On this particular post we got 24,587 impressions which is slightly above average for this page.  The next number (or metric) that we need to see is how many people acted on this call to action.  Using bit.ly (a link shortening and tracking service) I was able to see how many clicks I got.

24,587 impressions / 153 clicks = 1/2 of 1%

Although the post was seen almost 25,000 times only 150 people acted on it.  Guess what, these are typical results online so you’d better get used to it.  To tell you the truth, those number aren’t as important or impressive as the next set.

153 clicks / 93 completed surveys = 60%

Amazingly 60% of the people that clicked actually completed the survey which gave me valuable insight into their minds (or your mind if you already did the survey.)

Why surveying your Audience is so important

It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind.  Social Networking and blogging is enough work, add surveying to the mix and you’ve got a second full time job.

The reason surveying is so important is because you get to know your audience.  You find out what they want, what they need, and most importantly what you can do for them.  By surveying you can get new content ideas that you may have never thought of.

What’s Next?

  • Go to SurveyMonkey and set up a free account
  • Create your first survey
  • Send a link to your audience and find out what they want
  • Send me a link I’ll I’ll take the survey too 😉
  • Analyze the results
  • Take Action on your research

The Results: Surveying My Audience

Interestingly enough out of almost 200 completed surveys I found that the most important thing to agents (in my audience) was to learn more about building buyer and seller lists.  If I hadn’t done this survey I would have never thought of that.

So here’s the deal, if you’ve made it to this part of the post I can assume one of two things:

  1. You skipped everything else just to get the results
  2. You’ve read the whole thing and you’re interested in learning more