Can You Use a Survey to Market a Product?

Often when a business does research they go overboard on the amount of self-promotion they place in the survey. Surveys are about finding out answers, not selling a product or company, and if you are constantly promoting your business, you risk irritating the customer and getting inaccurate responses. Ideally, surveys will be completely marketing/promotion free, so that you can find out your answers and use them to your financial gain.

But creative uses of surveys are always encouraged. So it may be possible to use your survey to market a new product – especially if you expect that product to be well received, and even more so if it has innovative features that you strongly expect to impress your potential customers. To do this, though, you need to be very careful.

First, you need to avoid the appearance of marketing. Don’t use promotional words, don’t try to sell the customer on the product. Make sure that your survey looks and feels like a research survey, using toned down language to encourage participation.

How you proceed from there depends on the product, but let’s say you’re introducing a new cell phone to compete with the iPhone and Android, and it’s loaded with features that make it a better choice than those two popular brands. You can start by introducing the product (without sales language, simply explaining how this survey is about finding out how the new product will perform against the competition. You can choose an attractive and professional image of the product to make it look “cool” along with some basic details.

From there, you can ask questions about the amazing new features you have, forming them something like: Q: The PHONENAME comes standard with a video projector. With this knowledge, are you ________. a) More likely to buy PHONENAME over the iPhone 5. b) Less likely to buy PHONENAME over the iPhone 5. c) The video projector will not affect my purchasing decisions. You can continue to ask questions in this format, focusing on only your best features.

Continue to show professional marketing imagery, but still avoid anything that gives the appearance of sales. You want this survey to look like a real survey, even though the questions are designed to improve the status of your upcoming product. Once the survey is over, you can close out the survey with release date information, but once again make sure that you don’t sound like you expect the customers to buy the product.

You can also request that the individual send the survey to others for further research, or simply try to reach as many people as possible as a “sample” so that your survey get a great deal of exposure. If you do this type of survey correctly, you can successfully create a buzz about your product long before it is released, and you may have potentially influenced the purchasing decisions of your entire sample. Once the product is released, the sample will also feel as though they contributed to your product’s success, which could help your company even further.

It’s not a perfect method, and certainly is not right for most companies. But marketing your company in your surveys when you need actual research performed is a bad idea. Using a survey as a subtle marketing ploy, on the other hand, may have some very valuable benefits.