How can you create a survey that provides useful insights for event marketing?

1 Define your goals

Before you start writing your survey questions, you need to define your goals. What do you want to learn from your survey? What are the key metrics or indicators that you want to measure? How will you use the survey results to improve your event marketing strategy? Having clear and specific goals will help you craft relevant and focused questions that align with your objectives.

2 Choose your questions

The next step is to choose your questions that will help you achieve your goals. There are different types of questions that you can use, such as multiple choice, rating scales, open-ended, or matrix. Depending on your goals, you may want to use a combination of these types to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. However, you should avoid asking too many questions, as this may reduce the response rate and the quality of the answers. A good rule of thumb is to limit your survey to 10 questions or less, and only ask questions that are necessary, clear, and unbiased.

3 Design your survey

When designing your survey, you should keep in mind that the design can affect the response rate and the quality of the data. To make your survey easy to access, complete, and submit, you can use a responsive design that adapts to different devices and screen sizes. Additionally, a consistent and attractive layout that matches your event branding can help. When writing the questions, it is important to use simple and concise language that avoids jargon and ambiguity. You can also use logic and branching to skip irrelevant questions or show different questions based on previous answers. To motivate participants to complete the survey, you can use progress bars or indicators to show how much of the survey is completed or provide incentives or rewards.

4 Distribute your survey

Distributing your survey effectively is essential for getting a high response rate and a representative sample of your audience. You need to select the right channels, timing, and frequency to reach your target participants. Email is one of the most popular channels for distributing surveys; you can send your survey link before, during, or after the event, depending on your goals. Additionally, you can use email reminders or follow-ups to increase the response rate. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are also great channels for sharing your survey link and encouraging people to participate and share it with their networks. Embedding your survey on your website as a pop-up, banner, or dedicated page is another option for directing visitors to fill it out. If you have a mobile app for your event, you can integrate your survey with it and send push notifications or alerts to users to complete it. Finally, printing a QR code that links to your survey and displaying it on event materials such as flyers, posters, or badges is an effective way of asking attendees to scan it with their smartphones.

5 Analyze your data

Analyzing the data and extracting the insights that will help you improve your event marketing is the final step. To do this, you should use the appropriate tools and methods to process, visualize, and interpret your data. For example, spreadsheets like Excel or Google Sheets can be used to organize, filter, and sort your data, as well as create charts and graphs. Survey software such as SurveyMonkey or Typeform can be used to create, distribute, and analyze surveys, while statistical software like SPSS or R can be used for more advanced analysis. Text analysis tools like WordCloud or Textio can also be used to analyze open-ended responses and identify common words, phrases, or themes.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?