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You can’t succeed based on your assumptions and gut feelings alone. You need tangible evidence and insights to guide your decision-making.
Acquiring this evidence takes some effort-almost like homework. If you aren’t taking the time to research and study your customers, you aren’t doing enough homework. Truthfully, your studying should extend beyond customers and include the market, your employees, competitors and more.
You’ll learn how to make a survey using Google Forms’ free survey maker.
As mentioned, a vital part of “doing your homework” as a business owner is conducting research. It’s a process involving multiple steps and tools, all with the same objective. The goal is to learn.
A research survey is one of these tools that asks your target audience a specific set of questions. The answers to these forms provide actionable intelligence about your products, strategies, experiences, etc.
There are many ways to conduct a research survey. Cold calling, door-to-door, and mail-in surveys are some traditional forms. These were rarely effective and highly costly.
However, online surveys fix these shortcomings. They are non-obtrusive and require little effort to send or analyze.
For instance, Google Forms allows you to create exceptional surveys in minutes and at no cost! Plus, responses and results appear automatically, requiring no manual effort. You can begin uncovering actionable insights straight away!
Thanks to Google Forms and online surveys, there are no excuses for failing to make research surveys.
Most survey research methods focus on extracting insights from customers. After all, your customers are crucial, they are like the lifeblood of your company! Using tools like a survey template in Excel can streamline the process, making it easier to gather and analyze responses.
However, that is only one of the many types of survey research you should perform. Businesses should gather feedback related to 4 critical audiences.
Gathering market research insights is a two-part process. You have to study both consumer trends and competitor activities. This will help you effectively map out what the “market” looks like.
For instance, consumer research will help you detect what’s “hot.” In other words, what the consumer wants, doesn’t want, cares about, etc.
You can compare these trends and insights versus what competitors offer. When you find gaps between the two, it’s a valuable marketing opportunity.
Keeping customers happy ensures they keep returning to your business. You don’t want them defecting to a competitor and becoming their brand promoter!
Naturally, audience attitudes are not set in stone. On the contrary, they change constantly! Customer satisfaction research surveys help you detect changes in perceptions.
You want to identify which elements are delighting the audience versus disrupting them. Then, you can use these insights to improve your experiences and overall customer satisfaction.
Your internal audiences (i.e., your employees) are also valuable resources for business intelligence. It is crucial to provide employees with opportunities to share feedback and concerns.
Maintaining a happy workforce translates to more positive customer interactions. It also means you retain employees for longer, reducing turnover rates (and their costs).
Employee feedback can also be a valuable source of suggestions for improving business. Many of these individuals know the company intimately. They also engage with customers daily.
This gives them a unique vantage point that management executives may not have. Thus, they are a vital element to your research survey efforts that you don’t want to forget!
Regarding different survey research methods, academic evaluation is an interesting one. There are a few ways to define it.
The most obvious format is what a teacher would give a student. A quiz or test evaluates their academic acuity.
Some businesses may find value in quizzing their consumers, especially regarding complex products or services. You can use your research survey to better educate customers on how to use your products.
Now that we’ve defined the different types of survey research, let’s return to Google Forms. Specifically, we’ll look at how to use Google Forms to perform survey research. Through this process, you’ll uncover the valuable insights we discussed earlier.
Getting started with Google Forms is easy. You can click the ‘Apps’ icon from any Google page. All you need is a Google account (also 100% free).
Alternatively, enter “Google Forms” into your search bar.
As you first open Google Forms, you have two options – choosing a template or starting with a blank form. For example, the Customer Feedback template is a great preset form for gaining audience intel.
You’ve completed your research survey form and want to send it to the target audience. Google Forms makes this step easy too. Just click the purple “Send” button at the top of the page to open the following menu.
As you can see, you have a few options for sending your research survey examples with Google Forms. You can share via social media, email, or with a direct link.
Google Forms free tool offers a basic overview of your response data. However, you may want to export the results to Google Sheets or Excel for deeper analysis.
Thankfully, the Google Forms free online survey tool makes it very easy to do this. Under the Responses tab, you can click the “Link to Sheets” link.
You’ll be able to create a new spreadsheet for the data or select an existing one.
For Excel users, the process is a little longer, but still very easy. Instead of clicking “Link to Sheets,” you’ll choose the three vertical dots next to it.
This creates a dropdown menu with the option to download your responses as a .csv file.
Choose the location on your device for the file download to go. Then, open up Excel, import the .csv file, and presto! Your Google Forms data is now in Excel!
With your results in the Excel environment, it is time to begin analyzing your survey research. This is the pivot table point where raw data becomes actionable insights.
In other words, it’s the stage where you find meaning behind your survey responses. This crucial stage isn’t as easy as the other steps.
The difficulty only increases the more survey responses you have. If your survey research methods have been extremely prosperous, you have heaps of data to analyze. This creates a more substantial challenge.
Your survey research spreadsheet may quickly span hundreds to thousands of rows. That’s far too much information to analyze with raw numbers alone.
Charts and graphs are the best tools for resolving complexity in analysis. It’s the classic expression, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ In data visualization, a chart is worth tens of thousands of numbers.
ChartExpo charts are available both in Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. Please use the following CTA’s to install the tool of your choice and create beautiful visualizations in a few clicks in your favorite tool.
Let’s say you want to launch a new mobile phone in market. But first you know what your customers want, you did online survey and collected all the data in Excel. Your data will look like below:
Below are the responses (feedback) that are associated with each question:
Finally prepared the data table as shown below:
| Responses | How important is the long-lasting battery for you while purchasing a phone? | How important is the crystal-clear display for you while purchasing a phone? | To what extent does camera quality factor into your decision? | To what extent does plenty of storage space factor into your decision? |
| Response 1 | Extremely Unimportant | Not Sure | Unimportant | Important |
| Response 2 | Extremely Important | Important | Extremely Important | Unimportant |
The above table is just sample data. In actual scenarios, you will be having a lot of responses and more questions as well.
Overall view, 64% of respondents think the different features are important for them. But 26% said phone features are unimportant for them. 11% of consumers said they are not sure which means sometimes features are important for them and sometimes they overlook features of the phone.
You can summarize the benefits of the various research survey examples with just a few items. The primary advantage is learning things about key audiences that you didn’t already know.
For instance, you may uncover that your target audience prefers quality products over cheap ones. That critical information will change how you market and develop your goods and services.
You can also use surveys to confirm long-held beliefs. You may assume that a particular product is the favorite among your customers. You can use multiple types of survey research to prove this assumption.
Similarly, you can use survey research methods to test hypotheses or find answers to critical questions. Through these efforts, you’ll gain insights into how to make your strategies and experiences better for your customers.
Survey research is the result of creating questionnaires and feedback forms. These tools allow you to acquire information from lots of individuals. Pulling these results shows you a collective attitude or perception.
For example, a business may ask for customer satisfaction feedback from shoppers. This form would allow participants to rate their satisfaction with certain products, sales, campaigns, etc. The company can use these ratings to discover what’s working versus what is not.
When most people think about survey research examples, their minds immediately go to customer feedback.
However, several other types of survey research are equally valuable, such as:
Utilizing these survey research methods will broaden your understanding of your business. More importantly, you’ll discover ways to improve your performance and grow.
Employee surveys will provide useful suggestions for improving business and maintaining a satisfied workforce. Similarly, market research will help you detect emerging opportunities that competitors may have missed.
Considering how time-consuming research can be, we encourage you to use tools to shorten the process.
For example, Google Forms is the best tool for creating research survey examples to send to your target audiences. This free survey maker allows you to send unlimited questionnaires to your contact lists.
Your results and responses are saved automatically and you can easily export the data to Excel or Google Sheets.
Within these programs, we recommend visually analyzing your survey research examples using ChartExpo.
The tool’s extensive library of survey charts will simplify even your most complex datasets. ChartExpo provides the clarity you need when analyzing survey results!
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