Since my days of running my own PR and Marketing Consultancy, VasMark Group, Inc., I have valued market surveys as a marketing tactic. Market surveys, if properly set up, can provide a wealth of information for your firm. A survey can actually generate sales leads, improve our brand awareness, help you gain knowledge about the competition, the market and buying criteria. They are an underused tactic in marketing from my perspective.

How To Set Up A Market Survey
A market survey has to be thoroughly thought through to be effective. It can't be too long and yet it needs to ask the right questions. Often, those dong a market survey miss the chance to truly add value by not asking the right questions or framing the questions wrongly i.e. they are open to interpretation on the part of the respondent.

The first question to ask is what information do you really require from the survey? You then have to construct a profile of the respondents you are looking to survey and frame the questions in a way that is not open to interpretation and yet provide the data that you are looking for.

Gaining Additional Information
What many forget when setting up a survey is that this is the chance to extract some real intelligence and data from the market. You need to make the most of it. Adding questions regarding buying criteria and buying habits can provide data that can be used to set up future marketing campaigns, decide where and how to advertise and what to emphasize in marketing collateral.

As stated above, surveys also generate leads. Talk to 50 companies and you will generate 1-2 real leads as well as arm yourself with 50 real names, phone numbers and email addresses to pass to your telesales folks.

Additionally, the survey will equip you with some competitive intelligence such as how active are my competitors from a sales activity standpoint, where are they installed/used, what do their users/buyers actually think of them and more besides.

Summary
Market surveys are an underutilized marketing tool that can offer much more than simple market data if planned and executed properly.