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How to Conduct
an Audience Survey
An Interview with Donna Fabyonic, CMP Research Manager Welcome to Marketing2IT. This issue focuses on how to conduct an audience survey, with practical tips for getting the best results. There are many reasons to survey your customers (or prospects, readers, target market, etc.) A typical audience survey will help you gain greater market intelligence including: interest in your product, purchase involvement, job title, professional role, type of business, size of firm, publication readership, trade shows visited, and more. This data in turn will help you develop the strategy and tactics to achieve your corporate sales, marketing communications and branding objectives. Read on to find out how. With 10 years of market research expertise, Donna Fabyonic knows what works and what doesn't when it comes to running surveys. We asked Donna to share her tips on conducting successful surveys. Her most recent TechWeb Online Audience Survey got 3,560 responses and covered the entire TechWeb Network. M2IT: How do you define which audience you want to survey?
Donna Fabyonic: Typically that is dictated by the survey objectives. For our online audience survey it's important to get as broad a selection of the visitors as possible - ensuring we have an accurate representation of the varied visitor 'types' to our sites. From there you can segment the results to narrow it down. M2IT: What are some of the key ingredients of a successful survey?
DF: First, keeping the survey as brief as possible will help you achieve your response goals. Second would be a topic that spans the interest of several departments at your company (to get as much mileage from the results as possible) as well as the community you are surveying (to get them to want to participate in the survey). Then I would say obtaining as random a sample as possible to ensure the validity of the results. M2IT: What are some of the best practices for recruiting respondents?
Be upfront with the audience as to survey length, respect visitors' privacy, and offer an incentive that they are going to want to receive. And of course, a key element is a well-written survey invitation. It's also important to attach a cookie to prevent visitors from taking the survey more than once. M2IT: How many results do you need to be statistically significant?
DF: For any research study you want to try to achieve a minimum of 100 completed surveys. From that you can project out onto a larger universe. For our larger sites we try to get 250 or more to make it that much more significantly stable. At this level, you've got about a 6% margin of error. M2IT: What role do surveys play in the IT marketing process?
DF: Surveys can help tech marketers hone their messaging. If you know what your market wants to hear, it makes it a lot easier to build effective creative. Or, pre/post campaign surveys can help measure shifts in awareness. M2IT: Should surveys be multiple choice, yes/no, short answer or a mix?
DF: While simple yes/no questions are useful in any survey, I find them most valuable as a means to send respondents down different paths of questioning. Multiple choice and even rating matrices are my favorite. You can get a lot out of these depending on the question asked (select all that apply, select top 3, top 1, etc). Short answer questions, used in moderation, can be very informative. They allow the respondent to expand beyond a simple single or multi-select question. And depending on the respondent, you can get some great info. But mostly these open-ended questions tend to slow the survey-taking process down and when used too frequently, annoy the survey taker. M2IT: What are the potential benefits/risks of conducting a survey?
DF: Increased intelligence is the main benefit. One risk is that you don't get the survey results you were looking or hoping for. But that in and of itself tells you something. Another risk is that you don't achieve a projectable sample base. But that is something you can try and manage by monitoring recruiting methodologies. M2IT: How important is it that the survey be conducted by a third party (i.e.: not affiliated with the company)?
As long as you conduct an honest survey and deal with the results in an honest way, it is not critical to conduct a survey with a third party. If you are looking to get a lot of mileage in the press, want to sell your results, or are doing a large-scale industry-wide type of survey though, a third-party provider will bring credibility and eliminate any perception of bias M2IT: Can you describe the TechWeb Network reader profile?
DF: Our visitors are technology-savvy professionals heavily involved in purchasing IT products and services for their company or organization. They are responsible for large budgets and rely on technology information web sites to provide them with the tools they need to make smart purchasing decisions. M2IT: What kind of purchase involvement did you discover in the survey?
Not surprising, most of our audience (72%) is involved in the purchase process for their organization in one way or another with close to half of them (48%) responsible for their entire company or multiple companies within their organization. These technology buyers have influence over substantial annual purchasing budgets. Overall, each is responsible for an average annual budget of $21.8 million on technology-related products/services. | 
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