Surveys & Forms

The results are in. You’ve written the questions, found the right people to ask, and got your answers back—now what?

Perfect surveys sent to insightful respondents can become entirely useless if the results aren’t coherently and comprehensively analyzed..

So, don’t run and hide.

We know the phrase “survey data analysis” sounds technical and exclusive, but it’s not as scary as it seems. By following a few simple guidelines on how to analyze survey data, you can draw insights from it yourself.

Survey data analysis is the process of turning survey responses into compelling insights. This includes taking all of your collected data and transforming it into something actionable. Whether it’s open-ended essays, multiple-choice answers, or other questions to ask, you can take this information and uncover patterns and helpful insights. 

Some survey data analysis methods include sorting data into categories and using statistical tactics to identify trends and patterns. The goal is to take these raw data responses and turn them into a clear story that answers your research questions to help you make informed decisions.

Before you get started crunching the numbers and performing a survey data analysis, there are a few pieces of information you need to gather.

First, you need to know the number of total respondents. This number will indicate how large your sample is and how much you can rely on your results. It’s always a good idea to gather people’s opinions, but if 5,000 people attended a concert and only five people answered your survey, you can’t really treat those five answers as representative of the whole group.

Secondly, you need to calculate your survey response rate. This is a straightforward percentage—calculate it by dividing the number of responses you received in total by the number of people you asked to fill out the survey. The higher your response rate and the higher your total number of respondents, the more you can trust your survey data to be representative of the sample as a whole.

The first step when analyzing survey data is to turn your individualized responses into aggregated numbers. This sounds complicated, but really, it just means you need to do some counting.

For every question in your survey, you need to know the total number of people who answered with each response. Take a look at this example question:

By aggregating your responses, you’re simply counting how many people answered a, b, c, and d, respectively. If 100 people took your survey, the aggregated results would look something like this:

In the last six months: 30

Six months to a year ago: 40

One to two years ago: 20

Over two years ago: 10

Total: 100

Now, if your survey was conducted through a survey host, your online survey results should be aggregated automatically, so there’ll be no need to add the numbers.

Qualitative vs. quantitative data

Once you have all of your aggregated answers, it’s time to start making some sense of the survey data.

Our brains can make sense of percentages much more quickly and easily than whole numbers. It’s also far easier to compare different percentages rather than whole numbers.

Say you wrote a survey asking 5-year-olds for their favorite colors. Just saying that 67 children chose red as their favorite color means very little. However, saying that 23% of the children chose red as their favorite color, compared to 50% who chose blue, gives you a much clearer indication of the relative popularity of one color.

If you’ve asked people to write feedback or long-form answers, leave these until the end.

You don’t want the qualitative data to bias your quantitative analysis. Focus on the numbers first, and hopefully, once you have a clear idea of what the sentiment is, the qualitative answers will be able to help you understand why that might be the case.

Cross-tabulating your data is where you can really begin to draw insights from your survey results instead of just statistics. It can help you add context to your numbers and explore how different groups of people behave or how different factors might affect a single outcome.

When you plan your survey, you’ll have considered the different comparisons you’d like to make. For example, maybe you’d like to know if older people are more likely to enjoy eating olives.

Your question might be something like this:

Now, in the first round of your data analysis, you might have already divided the respondents into two groups to work out the split between people who like and don’t like eating olives.

So let’s say the results of this olive question were:

Like olives: 542 people (46%)

Dislike olives: 630 people (54%)

To cross-tabulate your data, you’ll need to map another variable onto this one.

We’re interested in whether tastes change with age, so let’s use that age as our second variable and ask:

With these results, you can plug them into a Google Sheet and start to see if there are any correlations:

Imagine you have a client who is looking at marketing their olive brand directly to people under 35. You could ask these two questions and look at the split between olive lovers and haters just within this subgroup and see how it compares to the overall average splits.

Data means very little to us without context and meaning. Turning your numbers into percentages makes comparisons easier, but although proportionally, we can recognize exactly what 75% means, how can we know if that is good?

The answer is benchmarks.

Setting benchmarks is key to making sense of the data and working out what those percentages really mean.

Some of the most common benchmarking techniques involve comparisons between this survey’s results and the data from the last time the survey was collected. To do this effectively, you need to make sure that you are comparing the results of the same question from each survey.

Setting a benchmark using last year’s data is easy. You simply take the percentage splits of responses to a certain question and treat these as your starting point. Then, you can easily see if this month’s data is above or below that benchmark.

Year-over-year or month-over-month comparisons are an excellent way of tracking progress. They allow you to see whether trends are emerging or how much responses have changed in a given period. This is known as longitudinal analysis.

If this is your first time collecting data, no worries, you can still set some benchmarks. Instead of comparing your results to last month’s or last year’s data, you can calculate the overall total split between responses for each question and treat this as your benchmark or baseline.

Once you begin to cross-tabulate and break your respondents down into further categories, you can compare their results to your benchmark to place their statistics in context. 

If a value is higher than the average, we can say that this category is over-indexing, and if the value is lower, we can say that the category under-indexes. This gives some context to the statistics and starts letting you draw out some real insights from your survey data.

Quantitative data is extremely valuable when interpreting survey results. However, the numbers themselves are unlikely to provide a concrete answer as to why something happened or why people hold a certain opinion.

Understanding why respondents answered in the way that they did is when you can really start to address problems and make changes. This is where the real insight is born.

Sometimes, the “why” will be answered with direct questions in the survey and sometimes with multiple-choice boxes. Other times, it will be up to you as the survey analyst to determine causation, if possible. And this is where we need to be careful.

It’s easy to become sucked into a trap when analyzing survey data and start to see patterns everywhere. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as identifying a correlation between two variables is a key part of interpreting survey results. However, the danger is that we often make assumptions instead.

Assumptions about the data can be hopes or expectations, conscious or subconscious. However, realizing when we are making assumptions can help us avoid any problems further down the line and prevent us from wasting time.

Ultimately, no one wants to find out their assumptions were false after the survey analysis is complete. Similarly, you wouldn’t want a critical assumption to be false and never even realized.

Correlation occurs when two different variables move at the same time.

A classic example is the sale of seasonal products. During the summer, swimming pool and barbecue sales rise. When plotted on a graph, the two variables move in the same direction at the same time. However, there’s no direct connection between these two variables. People buying barbecues isn’t the reason the sales of swimming pools increase.

Causation, on the other hand, occurs when one factor directly causes a change in another factor.

For example, in the case of seasonal products, the weather is a key factor. As the temperature rises in the summer, so do barbecue sales. Barbecue sales here are a variable that’s dependent on the weather, and there’s a key link between them.

When interpreting survey results, it’s easy to mistake correlation for causation. Just because two variables move at the same time, it doesn’t mean that one is directly influencing the other.

This is where qualitative data comes in. If you’ve asked your respondents to fill in longer-form answers to explain why they chose a certain response, analyzing these answers can give you the insight you need to work out why.

When sharing your survey data analysis, remember that the story is what makes it interesting, not the numbers.

The percentages you’ve calculated are vital evidence for your argument, but your analysis needs a narrative to have a real impact on people’s thinking.

If you can, always provide context with your statistics, either comparing them to the same survey from last year or comparing groups of people in the same year’s data. Benchmark your numbers so that your audience is immediately aware of whether what they are seeing is positive or negative.

If you are unable to provide recommended actions based on your survey data analysis, at least signpost the key areas that need attention so the relevant parties can begin to tackle the problem if necessary.

When you visualize your data, remember that while long reports can be fascinating, most people won’t read them. Whoever you are presenting to is unlikely to want to listen or read as you walk them through your survey analysis methods step-by-step, so don’t feel like you have to include every single calculation you made in your report.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and determine their interests and priorities. Only give them the information if it is relevant to them, they will understand it, and there’s something they can do with this new information.

If a stranger came up and asked to borrow your phone, how would you react? You might give them a once over and think for a sec. Or maybe you’d just ignore them and keep walking.

But if a friend or family member asked you the same question, you wouldn’t give it a second thought. You have a relationship with that person, so you trust them.

Brands are no different: Make an effort to get to know someone and build a relationship, and you’re on your way to a loyal customer.

In this article, we’ll explain relationship marketing and cover:

• Tips on creating a relationship marketing strategy

• Examples of great relationship marketing

• How relationship marketing can help a company reach its goals

“Relationship marketing is about building relationships with people over time with the aim of converting them into loyal customers.”

It’s part of the longer customer journey, which includes nurturing brand advocates who encourage their friends and families to buy from your company as well. This is crucial, as more than half of people seek advice from friends and family about brands on social media.

Unlike traditional forms of marketing that mainly focus on immediate sales, the main aim of relationship marketing is ongoing customer satisfaction. You can also use event marketing to enhance customer relationships.

Relationship marketing can foster a loyal customer base to help drive growth. Here are some key benefits of relationship marketing:

• Increased customer retention: Relationship marketing fosters loyalty, which keeps customers coming back for more and reduces churn.

• Improved customer lifetime value: By building strong relationships, you encourage repeat purchases and potentially upselling or cross-selling opportunities, increasing the total value a customer brings to your business.

• Enhanced word-of-mouth marketing: Loyal customers are more likely to recommend your brand to others. Positive word-of-mouth marketing generates trust and credibility that can attract new customers organically.

• Higher ROI: Relationship marketing focuses on nurturing existing customers, which can lead to a better return on investment for your marketing efforts.

• Competitive advantage: Not all businesses prioritize customer relationships. By focusing on building loyalty, you can differentiate yourself from competitors and gain a significant edge in the market.

• Boosted customer satisfaction: Relationship marketing emphasizes understanding customer needs and exceeding expectations. Focusing on customer satisfaction leads to happier customers, which is essential for long-term success.

• Valuable customer feedback: Strong relationships open a two-way communication channel. Customers who feel valued are more likely to provide user experience feedback, allowing you to refine your products, services, and marketing strategies.

Many consumers expect brands to understand and care about them before they consider purchasing. And consumers are measuring your brand against big hitters like Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks.

That means you need a robust customer relationship marketing strategy if you want to keep folks coming back for more. Here’s how.

To build a relationship, you need to get personal. That means learning all you can about your customers without going to their house and peering in their windows.

Find out what products they buy, where they learn about brands, what TV shows they like—any relevant habits you can think of. Then take this knowledge and use it to create a tailored customer experience and communications plan.

Not sure where to start? Try asking your customers what they like and don’t like through social media or a market research survey.

Getting better answers also starts with more personal experiences.

Maybe they think your website’s great but your checkout process is complicated. Or they love your product but don’t care for all those emails you’re sending—when they were so close to reaching inbox zero.

Once you’ve used their feedback to improve your customer experience, let them know you did. They’ll love your brand even more.

Here are a few ideas for parts of the customer experience you can personalize.

Messages: Personalized emails have a higher open rate—and by personalized, we mean more than just saying “Dear Karen.” You could send a personalized thank you message if someone attended your event or provide product recommendations based on their feedback or preferences.

Send times: Focus on sending emails tailored to customers’ time zones. You can use data on past open times to send emails at a time personalized to each individual subscriber. 

Websites: You can personalize your website based on your customers’ needs. If your audience is pet owners, you can feature your customers’ animals on the website. 

If you want to build relationships to focus on customer retention, give customers a reason to come back by creating a loyalty program. But make sure it’s one that matters. Don’t give them one point for every dollar they spend, then reward them with a free pen at 5,000 points.

Offer special incentives so that customers feel valued. Here are a few ideas:

• Members-only sale

• Exclusive discount code

• Access to gated content

• VIP invite to your event

They won’t just appreciate it—they’ll remember it.

Neiman Marcus strikes gold when it comes to its loyalty program. It’s clear that the more you shop, the bigger the benefits. And there’s a lot of them. They also fork out a truckload of points just for signing up.

Content marketing is about offering real value. Isn’t that why we stay in any relationship?

Produce content that’s well-written, does what it says on the tin, and solves an important business problem. People will come back for more.

That’s what we aim to do here at Typeform. Our blog articles are there to inform you about important industry issues, entertain, provide actionable tips, and help you understand our brand.

Of course, the aim is that eventually they’ll buy something from you—you’re running a business, after all—but in the meantime, you’re serving them useful content to keep your company’s name top of mind.

Relationship marketing is a long-term, never-ending job that may not yield immediate results.

But with the right mix of personalization, loyalty programs, content marketing, and social media, you’ll be on first-name terms with your most loyal customers in no time.

And they won’t forget yours either.

Strong emotions are at the heart of any good relationship. Learn how to compliment your customer relationship marketing with emotional marketing.

Growing your business isn’t something that happens overnight or without effort. For many businesses, rolling out new products, sales, and marketing initiatives are the biggest drivers of growth. While getting new customers in the door is important, focusing on existing customers can also create growth (usually for much less than attracting a new customer). To understand how to better serve your customers, it’s important to have customer feedback management tools.

Customer feedback management is the practice of collecting and analyzing information about what is and isn’t working in the customer’s journey to create a better experience for current and future customers. 

You can collect feedback through customer service channels, post-purchase surveys, support tickets, emails, and customer interviews. After you’ve collected and sorted the feedback, internal teams can figure out how to fix problems, streamline processes, and implement those changes. Because the changes solve customer pain points, the process helps build customer trust and loyalty.  

You can think of customer feedback management as a loop, an unending chain of listening and creating better processes.

One way to visualize this customer feedback management loop is to use the ACAF system, which stands for Ask, Categorize, Act, and Follow-up. Using this formula, you’ll be able to effectively repeat the steps needed to continually improve the customer experience based on the feedback you get.

To start improving your customer experience, you need to find out exactly what’s working and what isn’t. The best way to do this is by simply asking your customers. Depending on your goals, this might mean creating a cross-channel strategy to gather a huge amount of data as quickly as possible, or it might mean a gradual rollout across channels over several months. 

There’s no one right way to ask for feedback, just like there is no one channel that will give you the best results. Some of the most common channels you might use to interact with your customers include:

• Email

• Your app

• Social media

• Website

• Phone

• Text message

Each of these channels has its own strengths and weaknesses, but each one will provide you with some sort of information from certain segments of your customer base that the others may not. That’s why it’s vital to have some way of collecting feedback and channeling it to the right people for analysis. 

Categorizing feedback might seem like a daunting task, especially if you’re working with a large volume of it. But this is one of the most important parts of the process because:

1. It’s how you’ll determine if a piece of feedback is actionable or not

2. Categorizing feedback will reveal common threads (or trends) 

3. The trends you discover will help you create goals and build new processes

Actionable and non-actionable feedback

• Actionable feedback is any feedback you can do something about. This might include feedback about a part of your website that doesn’t work correctly or a complaint about a product. With actionable feedback, you can make a change or an improvement to prevent the same negative things from happening again. 

• Non-actionable feedback isn’t about changing or improving the function of a product, service, or channel. For example, the customer might tell you about a time your product or service was helpful. While you can’t use this type of feedback to make changes, it may be useful as a testimonial (with the customer’s permission, of course).

Identifying trends

Identifying trends as you categorize feedback will give you a lot of insight into how the customer journey is falling short. You may notice a consistent issue or complaint across channels. Pay close attention to them, as these trends point directly to an area that needs improvement.

Keep an eye on what you hear or see in poll responses compared to the data you’ve gathered about customer behavior, like time on site or how frequently a customer logs into their account. There can be real differences between qualitative and quantitative data, so make sure you aren’t identifying trends that aren’t backed up by the numbers.

If you’ve made it this far, it’s time to act.

Acting on feedback doesn’t mean you start taking action on every issue that comes up. Acting on client feedback starts with creating goals. Once you have goals in place, you can begin acting internally and externally.

Creating goals

After dividing feedback into actionable and non-actionable groups and identifying trends, the next step is setting goals for what your business wants to accomplish as it addresses customer feedback. While the overall goal is to improve profitability and grow your business, remember that improving the customer experience is one of the best paths to get there.

Creating goals isn’t always easy, especially when multiple stakeholders are involved. But by keeping your goals SMART, you’ll be able to see when and if these goals are met. SMART is an acronym for:

• Specific: The more specific a goal, the less confusing it’ll be. 

• Measurable: Goals have to have criteria you can judge them by. This can be a simple pass-fail, or it can be a spectrum from failure to success. 

• Achievable: Goals must be achievable by the team you have. Setting impossible goals is a waste of time and effort. 

• Relevant: Goals need to be pushing you toward a specific outcome. The work you’re doing has to be tied to that outcome.

• Time-bound: Goals need to have a deadline. You may have several dates, including when certain tasks need to be completed and when you’ll review the results of the work.

Acting internally

To bring the changes you need to make to fruition, you need to start with your internal team. While the focus is on improving the customer experience, it will be your team’s responsibility to fix the issues and implement the new strategies to help your customers. 

Designate action items to the appropriate teams with relevant findings, goals, and implementation strategies to get them started.

Acting externally

Your internal teams will perform the work needed to impact external customers. Depending on your goals, your customers may only notice changes in the areas where they had difficulties before, or you might invite them to take a more active role in improving your products and services. This can mean more frequent survey invitations, in-app or on-site micro-surveys and ratings, and other methods of gathering feedback.

Following up is a multi-step process where you track changes, record responses, and then use that information to further improve upon the changes you’ve made and tackle any new issues that have sprung up. 

Tracking and quantifying results

Track your progress based on the SMART goals you set. Assigning a number or letter grade to the changes will make quantifying your results easier. If possible, try to collect and track all results in one place. This will give the project leader the information they need to determine when something is finished and will make reporting on the success of these changes go more smoothly.

Refining and building new processes

Creating a new process will probably lead to other issues or reveal deficiencies in other places you weren’t aware of. But because the ACAF system is designed as a loop, constant refinement and implementation are natural.

Managing customer feedback can be time-consuming, but it’s important for strengthening customer relationships and growing your business. Here are a few reasons why having a customer feedback management process in place is vital: 

• It’s easier to track feedback after a product launch or update

• It allows for better, data-driven decision making

• It creates opportunities for innovation using customer feedback

• It shows customers your business is listening to their complaints or ideas

When your team manages feedback properly and uses it to create new initiatives, products, and customer service policies, your business may see improved growth. That’s because:

• Keeping existing customers is less expensive than attracting new ones

• Happy customers can become unofficial brand ambassadors who recommend products and services

• Using the information you learned from customers can help refine product or service offerings

• Customer feedback can lead to more specific, better-targeted marketing materials

The customer feedback loop is the continuous process of receiving feedback from customers and responding to it. That might mean sending a return email, or it could be as complex as overhauling your entire customer journey. In its simplest form, it looks like this:

1. A customer has an issue or a suggestion. They share it with the company via chatbot, email, or another channel.

2. The business analyzes and tracks that feedback.

3. Using the feedback they receive, the business develops a plan to fix known problems or revamp a process or part of the customer journey to reduce or eliminate known pain points.

4. The business rolls out these changes and begins tracking and analyzing new feedback to enhance the customer experience.

There are two main types of feedback: direct and indirect. Both are valuable, but they require different strategies. Here are a few examples of direct and indirect feedback:

• Post-purchase surveys

• Customer support chats

• Customer support calls

• Pop-up surveys

• Requests for features

• Usability testing results

• Customer satisfaction surveys

• Feedback on social media accounts

• Third-party review site ratings 

• Shopping behavior changes

• Social media posts about your company and products

• Loss of subscribers on mailing lists

• Discussion about your company online (Reddit, for example)

There are several metrics designed to give you more specific feedback about what is and isn’t working for your customers. These metrics collect and analyze customer feedback and qualitative data like site visits, clicks, and sales. 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This rating lets you gauge customer loyalty by asking them to provide a rating between 1-10 of how likely they are to recommend your company. You determine the score by subtracting the number of people rating you between 1-6 (detractors) from the number of people rating you 9-10 (promoters). 7 and 8 scores are “passives” meaning they won’t have much impact either way, but because they are close enough to promoters, it makes sense to invest time in figuring out how to get them to score higher. 

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): This shows how well your site meets customer expectations. The customer answers the question: On a scale of 1 (very unsatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied), how do you rate your overall satisfaction with this transaction? Divide the 4 and 5 ratings by the total number of responses to get the CSAT.

• Goal Completion Rate (GCR): This metric shows how many visitors have taken a particular action on your app or site. This could mean clicking on a specific button on a page, signing up for an email list, or buying something. Calculate GCR by dividing the number of visitors by the number of completed goals.

• Customer Effort Score (CES): This metric uses a scale of 1-7 to rate how easily users were able to navigate your site, make a purchase, or solve an issue. Add up all 5-7 scores, divide that number by the total number of responses, and multiply by 100 to get a score between 1 and 100.

For this example, let’s imagine a clothing company that specializes in athletic wear for rock climbers. This company has a website where they offer all of their products. To ensure customer problems are dealt with quickly, the company has created a customer feedback management system that prioritizes fixing checkout issues. 

They shared a list of known issues with the sales, web development, and customer service teams. With that list, they shared instructions with the customer service team to pass new issues directly to the web development team and to track instances of known issues in a spreadsheet.  

Phase 1: A customer adds a few items to their cart, but when they go to checkout, the site empties their cart and sends them back to the homepage. The customer sends a ticket using the AI-powered pop-up assistant on the homepage.

Phase 2: That ticket arrives in the mailbox of the company’s customer service manager. The customer service manager checks their internal knowledge base to compare the problem to other known issues. 

This problem is new. They forward it to the web development team.

Phase 3: The web development team examines the ticket, replicates the issues, determines the cause, and fixes it. They record this issue in the spreadsheet and mark it as resolved. 

Phase 4: The customer service manager responds to the ticket to let the customer know that the problem has been solved. At the end of the message is a link to a CES survey. After the customer completes the survey, the customer service manager records the response in the shared spreadsheet. 

Phase 5: Later that week, the web development team issues a report covering new issues and their solutions, along with the survey responses.

Handling customer feedback is much easier when you have the right tools. When weighing your options, look for flexible, powerful software that’ll integrate with your existing stack. Here are a few pieces of software that can transform how you collect, analyze, and improve your customers’ experience. 

Typeform is a platform that allows you to create interactive forms and surveys you can embed on your site, share via email, or add to a social media post. Typeform’s forms are user-friendly and mimic a real conversation by asking one question at a time. The platform collects data and thoroughly analyzes it to help you make better decisions about your customer feedback management.

Userpilot lets users create surveys for different parts of a customer’s journey. With templates and event triggers, you can collect feedback using several metrics. 

You can build surveys with Chisel and use it to collect data from customers and internal team members to aid in feedback management and product refinement.  

Formstack is a form-building platform frequently compared to Typeform. While Formstack offers many of the same features as Typeform, it doesn’t have integrated AI for real-time form responses.  

If your company has many different channels, Zonka can help collect and collate feedback from all your channels. Zonka can gather data from SMS, email, in-app, and site-based channels.

Canny allows users to collect feedback for products to build roadmaps for improvements and new iterations. Inform users of new features with built-in product updates.

Zendesk has integrations for many platforms that allow for better customer service with built-in AI, ticket automation, and analytics. 

Typeform makes it easy for you to create forms that integrate naturally into your site and ask the right questions at the right time. From improving email list sign-ups to gathering and analyzing the success of a survey, Typeform makes learning more about your customers and how to serve them easier.

What do brands like Dove, Patagonia, and Ben & Jerry’s have in common? Other than stellar products, their success comes from winning trust with their audience by communicating and demonstrating strong shared values. Whether it’s body positivity, a relationship with the earth, or social activism—these values are deeply human. 

More than ever, earning consumer trust is crucial for businesses. In a 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, 71% of consumers said it’s more important to trust the brands they buy and use today than in the past. And regarding business outcomes, 59% are more likely to purchase, and 67% become loyal customers and advocates when they trust brands.

As the brand examples above prove, you earn trust by connecting with your audience on a human level. Robotic marketing, whether AI creates it or not, is a turn-off. Customers can smell salesy, impersonal, or inauthentic marketing instantly.

But when you show your brand is genuine, caring, and relatable—and human—customers take notice.

Here are five ways to make your marketing more human and earn trust in the process.

To attract customers and brand advocates, present a clear and authentic point of view that represents who you are as a brand. That requires a distinct brand identity. 

What’s your organization’s mission? What’s your brand voice or the message you want to get across to your audience? What makes your company, ideas, and language unique? Make sure these tenets guide and are present in your marketing.

When you can convey what sets your brand and customers apart in a distinct style, it makes you a better storyteller. It gives context, cohesion, and color to your content. When you have strong opinions and expertise in your industry, it provides a steady stream of ideas and themes to create content around. Storytelling is part of the human experience, and the way each person or organization does it makes their own unique style. It’s something we all share and a way to translate how we see and interact with the world.

And from a business standpoint, communicating in a recognizable way makes your marketing memorable, which increases brand recall—the biggest driver of brand lift in digital media.

To reach your audience with relatable and relevant marketing that shows you really get them, you have to know them. That’s why defining, refining, researching, and understanding your audience is key. 

A great foundation is to develop holistic buyer personas that go deeper than the basic demographics. Think about all the insights that’ll help you reach your audience with messages that resonate. 

For example, you’ll want to ask questions like: 

• The channels where they’re most active, so you know how best to reach them

• What unique problems they have that your product and services can solve

• Their goals and aspirations that your brand and products can support 

• What they find interesting, inspiring, and entertaining to help shape and align your content

Understanding your customers on a deeper level will enable you to empathize with them. Demonstrating empathy to your audience shows that you’re listening to them and you care, which is huge for humanizing your interactions.

Ask your customers directly about their preferences, frustrations, expectations, desires, and other relevant subjects. Creating a survey to send to your target audience is an effective way to get the most reliable and accurate information.

In addition to learning about your customers as individuals, it’s important to learn about their experience with your brand and products. Their feedback will supply the knowledge to improve different aspects of your business, from products to customer service and marketing.

Feedback can come in many forms, from customer reviews to customer support conversations, social media conversations, sales calls, and surveys. These sources will provide invaluable qualitative data straight from the voice of the customer (VOC). 

With this intel, you can extract insights like: 

• Your product’s most common or valuable use cases

• Which features customers dislike or have problems with

• What’s missing from your product that customers want to see

Collecting, acknowledging, and acting on customer feedback is another way to earn trust. It proves you listen to and value your customers’ opinions and concerns. 

Another powerful form of feedback is user-generated content (UGC). This is the content your customers create willingly and organically, like social media content and product reviews. UGC is an impactful way to humanize your marketing because consumers trust and relate to content from fellow buyers. According to TINT’s 2024 State of Community Powered Marketing, “Consumers trust authentic, unpaid reviews from real customers more than any other type of content.”

Integrate and promote UGC about your brand and products on your website, emails, social media content, and any other relevant channels. When you receive a negative review or other feedback, address it promptly and offer solutions.

By prioritizing genuine, timely, and helpful interactions with your customers, you can go beyond transactional relationships to form stronger connections.

There are various opportunities to provide great customer support and elevate the customer experience across your different touchpoints.

Respond to customer outreach promptly and empathetically. This shows that there are real people behind your brand who care. Acting quickly to resolve issues and respond to questions can help save at-risk customers and signal to the rest of your audience that you’re committed and accountable.

Provide multiple ways for customers to get in touch through calls, emails, direct messages, and live chat. Track and store these interactions in your customer relationship management (CRM) platform or other system. Repurpose them as helpful, detailed FAQ pages and resources. Again, this shows your brand listens and wants to help.

Personalizing your marketing is another way to add a human touch by providing your audience with valuable, relevant content. Personalized marketing is like white-glove service for your customers. It shows greater care and attention by tailoring your marketing effortso the individual preferences and needs of your audience.

By leveraging zero- and first-party data to segment your customers based on their behaviors, purchase history, and reported interests, you can send personalized offers and recommendations. These targeted messages differentiate your outreach from the barrage of competitors deploying broad messages that don’t appeal to their intended audience.

At this stage of the game, personalization should be the standard. A McKinsey report found that 71% of consumers expect personalization from companies, and 76% become frustrated when it’s missing. Plus, companies that outperform others in personalization generate 40% more revenue.

Humanizing your marketing isn’t just about winning customers—it’s about building lasting relationships based on trust and empathy. By prioritizing these principles in your marketing efforts, you can differentiate your brand, drive loyalty, and achieve long-term success in a crowded playing field.

Start putting these practices into action by better understanding your audience and their perception of your brand. Check out these templates to survey your audience for feedback: 

“If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.”

Doesn’t sound too threatening if you’ve always been successful, right?

Continuing to do what you’ve always done means you’ll fall behind—and probably fade to darkness—to where all the forgotten brands go.

Take Kodak. They were a major player in photography for decades—remember? When digital photography boomed, Kodak kept doing what they always did. Their business floundered and people forgot about them. Well, everyone apart from Pitbull.

Now, look at Fujifilm, one of Kodak’s biggest competitors. They did the opposite and looked for ways to apply their expertise in film to the technology of the new millennium instead. Their company is still going strong.

The same goes for research. If you’re doing the same old types of market research, speaking to the same old people, and doing the same old tired surveys—you’re already behind.

How do you decide what kind of market research you need to do? It all comes down to what you need to know and what your business goals are.

In this article, we’ll explain the various types of market research you can use to solve issues and challenges in your business. We’ll throw you a freebie, too, and provide some market research tips about when to use each strategy.

Let’s get you ahead of the curve.

Brand research helps with creating and managing a company’s brand, or identity. A company’s brand is the images, narratives, and characteristics people associate with it.

Brand research can be used at every stage in a business’s lifecycle, from creation to new product launches and re-branding. There are at least seven types of brand research:

• Brand advocacy: How many of your customers are willing to recommend your brand?

• Brand awareness: Does your target market know who you are and consider you a serious option?

• Brand loyalty: Are you retaining customers?

• Brand penetration: What is the proportion of your target market using your brand?

• Brand perception: What do people think of as your company’s identity or differentiating qualities?

• Brand positioning: What is the best way to differentiate your brand from others in the consumer’s mind and articulate it in a way that resonates?

• Brand value: How much are people willing to pay for an experience with your brand over another?

A researcher will use several types of market research methods to assess your and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Generally, they will conduct competitor research, both qualitative and quantitative, to get a picture of the overall marketplace. Focus groups and interviews can be used to learn about their emotions and associations with certain brands.

Market research surveys are useful to determine features and benefits that differentiate you from competitors. These are then translated into emotionally compelling consumer language.

This type of market research is designed to evaluate whether your advertising messages are reaching the right people and delivering the desired results. Successful campaign effectiveness research can help you sell more and reduce customer acquisition costs.

It’s estimated people see up to 5,000 advertising messages each day. That means attention is a scarce resource, so campaign effectiveness research should be used when you need to spend your advertising dollars effectively.

Campaign effectiveness research depends on which stage of the campaign you use it in (ideally, it’s all of them!). Quantitative research can be conducted to provide a picture of how your target market views advertising and address weaknesses in the advertising campaign.

Competitive analysis allows you to assess your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace, providing you with fuel to drive a competitive advantage.

No business exists in a vacuum—competitive analysis is an integral part of any business and market plan. Whether you’re just getting started, moving into a new market, or doing a health check of your business, a competitive analysis will be invaluable.

A researcher will typically choose a few of your main competitors and analyze things like their marketing strategy, customer perceptions, revenue or sales volume, and so on.

Secondary sources such as articles, references, and advertising are excellent sources of competitive information; however, primary research, such as mystery shopping and focus groups, can offer valuable information on customer service and current consumer opinions.

Consumer insights research does more than tell you about who your customers are and what they do. It reveals why customers behave in certain ways and helps you leverage that to meet your business goals.

Knowing your customers deeply is integral to creating a strategic marketing plan. This type of market research can help you anticipate consumer needs, spark innovation, personalize your marketing, solve business challenges, and more.

Consumer insights research should be specific to your business—it’s about getting to know your target audience and customers. Various market research methods can be used, such as interviews, ethnography, survey research, social monitoring, and customer journey research.

Here are some of the characteristics you should understand through consumer insights research:

• Purchase habits

• Interests, hobbies, passions

• Personal and professional information

• How they consume media and advertising

Customer satisfaction research is a type of market research that measures customers’ experiences with products or services, specifically looking at how those meet, exceed, or fail to live up to their expectations.

Customer satisfaction is a strong indicator of customer retention and overall business performance. Successful customer satisfaction research should help you understand what your customers like, dislike, and feel needs improvement. You can use this type of market research to look at the quality and design of products, speed and timeliness of delivery, staff and service reliability, knowledge, and friendliness, market price, and value for money.

There are several ways to measure customer satisfaction, most commonly using surveys. An NPS or Voice of the Customer Survey can help you measure customer loyalty. Customer Effort Scoring measures how satisfied people are with customer service or problem resolution. CSAT is any survey that measures customer satisfaction, typically measured using Likert scale surveys. They can be conducted at different points in the customer experience, allowing deeper insight into that moment.

Customer segmentation studies aim to divide markets or customers into smaller groups or personas with similar characteristics to enable targeted marketing. By understanding how people in each category behave, you can understand how each influences revenue.

Customer segmentation research is best used if you’re ready to give customers individualized experiences. Not every customer in your target market is the same. The more you understand each specific persona, the easier it is to focus on delivering personalized marketing, build loyal relations, price products effectively, and forecast how new products and services will perform in each segment.

Market researchers use four characteristics to segment customers.

• Demographics: demographic information such as age, gender, family status, education, household income, occupation and so on

• Geography: where people live, from cities and countries to whether they are city dwellers or suburbanites

• Psychographics: socioeconomic status, class, lifestyle, personality traits, generation, interests, hobbies, etc.

• Behavior: brand affinity, consumption and shopping habits, spending, etc.

A researcher will identify your current customers and collect data about them through various market research methods, such as surveys, database research, website analytics, interviews, and focus groups. The aim is to gather as much information as possible.

Market research for product development involves using customer knowledge to inform the entire process of creating or improving a product, service, or app and bringing it to market.

Innovation is hard work. A quick Google will tell you that 80–95% of new products fail every year. Conducting market research for product and app development helps minimize the risk of a new product or change going bust as it enters the market. There are three stages where you can use market research:

• Conception: The moment you’re thinking about adding something new, market research can find market opportunities and provide insights into customer challenges or their jobs-to-be-done, so you can find a way to fill the gap.

• Formation: Once you have an idea, market researchers can help you turn it into a concept that can be tested. You can learn more about strategizing pricing, testing advertising and packaging, value proposition, and so on.

• Introduction: Market research can help you gauge attitudes toward the product once it’s in the market and adapt your messaging as it rolls out.

Keep making the product better or find opportunities to introduce it to new markets.

Product development research will utilize different market research methods, depending on the goal of the research. A researcher could present focus groups with product concepts and listen to their opinions, conduct interviews to learn more about their pain points, or perform user testing to see how they interact with an app or website.

Usability testing is concerned with understanding how customers use your products in real time. It can involve physical products, like a new blender, or digital products like a website or app.

Usability testing is helpful when you need to detect problems or bugs in early prototypes or beta versions before launching them. It typically costs far less to test a product or service beforehand than to pull a flawed product off the shelves or lose sales because of poor functionality.

There are several types of usability tests, which vary based on whether you’re testing a physical or digital product.

• Journey testing involves observing the customer experience on an app or website and monitoring how they perform. This type of study can be done online

• Eye tracking studies monitor where people’s eyes are drawn. Generally, they are conducted on websites and apps, but can also be done in stores to analyze where people look while shopping

• Learn ability studies quantify the learning curve over time to see which problems people encounter after repeating the same task

• Click tracking follows users’ activity on websites to evaluate the linking structure of a website

• Checklist testing involves giving users tasks to perform and recording or asking them to review their experience

When it comes to market research, you need to ask yourself what business challenge or question you’re trying to address. Then, select the appropriate methods and tools, such as market research automation, to simplify your process.From there, the world of useful data and actionable insights will open to you.

Say what you will about McDonald’s, but one of the things most respected about their brand is the international menu concept.

From maple and bacon poutine in Canada and gazpacho in Spain to India’s McPaneer Royale, McDonald’s knows how to give the people what they want.

And how do they inject local appeal in a global brand? By gaining a deep understanding of the consumers in every target market they plan to enter.

If you’re thinking about doing consumer insights research, you should be familiar with market research processes. Let’s start with the basics. What is market research, and how is it different from marketing research?

People often confuse market research and marketing research. Aren’t they just different words for the same thing?

ESOMAR, the global research and data association, and the American Marketing Association would disagree. Here’s the gist:

Market research emphasizes the process of collecting consumer data, while marketing research refers to the product of that information and/or a function within an organization.

Essentially, you might be looking for a marketing researcher to conduct market research. Market research will help you answer questions about your customers, your competitors, or current and potential markets.

Market research can seem like a mystery.

However, market research processes are quite systematic—well, in theory. In practice, the steps involve exploration, creativity, and abstraction.

Here are a few steps you can follow to make it a bit easier.

Researchers are curious people. That’s why every research project starts with a question.

What is the part of your business you want to know more about? Identifying the problem is the most important step in market research processes. It’s going to determine every step you take in the future—of market research, anyway.

Not sure where to start? Here are a few tips:

• Look for marketing challenges or opportunities. Maybe your brand awareness could use a boost. You’ve noticed declining customer loyalty, or you’re considering opportunities in emerging markets.

• Frame it as a question. Why is customer loyalty decreasing? How can we enter the market for luxury hotels? What does our customer’s typical path to purchase look like?

• Determine what type of problem you have. In market research, a problem can be ambiguous, clearly defined, or somewhere in the middle. Do you know the variables and factors influencing what you want to measure? This is important as it’ll influence your overall research design, which is up next.

There are three types of research designs. The design you choose will be informed by how well-defined your problem is.

If you don’t know much about the problem, you need:

• Exploratory research: If you don’t know the major variables or factors at play, your research is ambiguous. Exploratory research can help you develop a hypothesis or ask a more precise question. If you have a vague idea about what’s important to solve the problem, you need:

• Descriptive research: Descriptive research does what it says on the box— it describes a certain phenomenon or the characteristics of a population. It can build on exploratory research but doesn’t give insight into the how, when, or why. Descriptive research is useful for parsing out market segments and measuring performance. Consequently, you need a pretty good idea of what you’re measuring and how it’ll be measured. If you want to know how cause and effect are linked, you need:

• Causal research: Market researchers conduct causal research when they want to understand the relationships between two or more variables. Simply put, causal research helps you understand cause and effect.

Data is the essence of market research. At the end of these market research processes, data is analyzed, interpreted, and turned into information and actionable insights.

Data can be qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative data can take many forms, from descriptions to audio and video. Quantitative data is typically presented in values and figures.

When choosing your sample, you must select the population you want to study. A population is a group with some shared characteristics that you’re interested in gathering data from. It can be broad (Canadians) or narrow (independent gym owners in Chicago).

No matter how small or large your population, you’ll unlikely be able to work with everyone.

The key to choosing a good sample is that it is representative. That means the people you select to participate (the sample) should reflect the larger group you’re studying.

There are two forms of data you can collect: primary and secondary data.

Primary data is gathered specifically for your project. Secondary data has already been collected, either internally or externally through government agencies, consulting or market research firms, websites, social networks, and so on.

Depending on your research design, you may want to check internally for secondary data. For example, let’s say you’re trying to understand the annual purchase cycle for your business. You’d gather sales and reports and company records—that’s secondary data.

But of course, secondary data still needs to be prepared for analysis

There are two ways to collect primary data: directly or indirectly. Direct data collection is just that—you are speaking to your participants directly. That can be through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and so on. Indirect data collection typically means observation. Think in-store observation, shelf experiments, or website heatmaps.

Data analysis is a process of looking for patterns in data and trying to understand why those patterns exist. Data can be analyzed quantitatively or qualitatively.

Quantitative data analysis is a process more complicated than can be described here. Unless you’re a math whiz, you’ll probably just use a data analysis software like SPSS or StatCrunch.

Qualitative data analysis typically involves coding—but not the computer programming kind, don’t you worry. This type of coding can be done by hand or using software such as NVivo. It involves looking for themes, concepts, and words that are repeated throughout the data.

Interpretation involves answering the question: What does the data tell me about what I wanted to know?

That’s where themes and patterns come in. You can describe trends and present them using figures or descriptions drawn from your participants.

Part of interpretation is using what you know about customers, businesses, or markets to provide recommendations for how to move forward. These data-driven suggestions should offer a solution to the initial problem. The results of the research can also bring to light a problem you weren’t even aware you had.

Market researchers are able to draw on a large toolbox of market research methods. Typically, they fall into the qualitative or quantitative category because of the type of data they produce.

Best for: Exploratory research

Type of method: Qualitative

A market research technique that involves a group discussion about certain topics led by a moderator to uncover the thoughts and opinions of participants.

Best for: Descriptive research

Type of method: Qualitative

An interview that’s conducted with an individual aimed at getting deeper insights about attitudes, motivations, or experiences.

Best for: Descriptive research 

Type of method: Qualitative

Also known as participant observation, it involves spending time with participants in their natural environment (as opposed to a lab setting). 

Best for: Exploratory research

Type of method: Qualitative

Carefully watch people to understand what they’re doing. It allows you to learn about consumer or employee behavior but not the motivation behind it.

Best for: Exploratory or descriptive research

Type of method: Qualitative

This is a fancy way of saying “analyzing what people say.” Social listening is a form of discourse analysis. Examining customer reviews, help transcripts, social media comments, and more are all forms of discourse analysis.

Best for: Descriptive research

Type of method: Quantitative

Surveys are the crux of market research. They involve collecting facts, figures, and opinions using a questionnaire. Surveys can also yield qualitative data if participants write out answers. Surveys may seem simple, but there are a lot of factors that can turn good intentions into bad data—be sure to read our tips on the right question types to ask. 

Best for: Descriptive research

Type of method: Quantitative

Observation research can also be quantitative if you are observing participants without direct involvement and assigning values to certain behaviors.

Best for: Descriptive research

Type of method: Quantitative

Also called split testing, this is a way to compare responses to a variation of a single variable to see which performs better. For example, presenting users with two versions of an ad to see which gets more clicks.

Best for: Causal research

Type of method: Quantitative

Marketing experimentation typically involves manipulating a variable to see how it influences behavior. It can be conducted in a lab or in the field. 

Time to put this into practice. Let’s look at market research examples of various types of research designs. 

Mobile phone company HTC wanted to understand how they could improve the user experience of their phones. This problem required exploratory research because there wasn’t a specific feature they wanted to test. They simply wanted to learn more from their customers.

With market research, they observed how participants interacted with their phones. They looked for challenges people had with everyday usage. After analyzing these pain points, they added new functions to their next model that made the phones easier to use.

Company ABC wants to understand how large the market for vegan cheese is in Canada. They have a somewhat defined research problem: What is the potential market share for vegan cheese?

In order to provide an answer, market researchers will have to describe various characteristics: who the customers are, why they buy vegan cheese, competitor market penetration, and potential opportunities.

This requires mixed-method research. The researchers might collect secondary data on the number of vegans in Canada or how much vegan cheese is sold in the country and through which companies. They may also conduct focus groups to understand what motivates people to buy vegan cheese.

Once complete, they’ll be able to present statistics on vegans in Canada and estimate Company ABC’s potential market share.

Causal research requires keeping variables and conditions the same, save for the one you are testing. German marketing and sensory research company iSi is a company that runs both field and lab experiments.

They worked with a chocolate bar company to design an experiment that tested 12 different chocolate bar recipes.

The consumers sequentially tested the recipes and provided ratings (quantitative data) and descriptions (qualitative data) of each one. The result was that consumers were most satiated by “a firm, tough texture and a higher amount of caramel and peanuts.”

One thing to remember is that market research is an iterative process. You can keep using what you learn to conduct better studies and evaluate the changing market conditions and the whims of consumers. 

Ready to tackle the market research process? Build a market research survey with Typeform—choose from one of our customizable templates to gather beautifully designed data.

So, you’ve got the next billion-dollar idea that’ll blow the top off your profit margins. You just know you’re onto a winner! Time to throw a huge budget (or your life savings) at this idea, right? 

Not so fast! You’re not likely to get very far in the marketplace if you only rely on your gut instincts.

How can you know if your idea even has a chance of surviving in the cutthroat marketplace? 

The answer: market research. A realistic prediction, based on data, of your chances of success. Basically, it’s a way to find out the market viability of your idea.

If you’re new to market research, don’t be intimidated. This guide will take you from basic concepts through to advanced techniques. Plus, our in-house experts will walk you through real-life examples of how we do it here at Typeform.

Market research is the process of collecting information about your target market and customers so you can:

• Learn who your customers are

• Find out what they want and/or need

• Gauge potential market size

• Discover trends in your industry

• Get wise about what your competitors are up to

• Determine how you can stand out

This way, you’ll better understand how to serve your customers, prioritize, and get higher returns on your own marketing and product development efforts. Market research is an essential part of any business’s strategy, whatever the size of your company.

There are many ways to approach market research, and at Typeform, we’ve developed our own spin on it, thanks to continuous testing and the insights we get from being a market research tool ourselves (forms and surveys).

Uncertainty is an inevitable part of business—however, it’s still possible to reduce some of the uncertainty.

This is where market research is your best ally. Nothing is guaranteed, but making an informed decision based on comprehensive research beats a stab in the dark. Market research helps reduce the thickness of that fog to see what your options are and which direction you might want to take.

Convinced you shouldn’t be sleeping on market research? Great—let’s dive deeper.

Finding what works best for you is a must for useful and actionable market research. We don’t believe in a cut-and-paste approach for all businesses and markets, nor in one definitive “right” way to do things. However, there are some basic principles that apply across the board. Here are a few types of market research.

Secondary market research delves into information that you don’t create yourself. It’s data that’s already out there, which you can buy or access for free, and is great for benchmarking. 

Examples of secondary research:

Primary market research involves collecting information yourself—this may be more expensive and time-consuming than secondary research, but it’s a better investment in the long run. Focus on your own target audience and gather information directly relevant to your goals. 

Examples of primary research:

Quantitative market research gathers data that’s numerical, descriptive, and structured. You can draw statistics from quantitative research. It involves more of the “what” questions and can be done at scale.

This type of market research is usually carried out through surveys and questionnaires and can be internal or external. Internal quantitative research examines your current customers, while external can help you identify new customers and see the actual distribution of the whole market. External is more likely to be objective, as your own customers already know you and will have formed opinions.

Examples of quantitative questions:

• “Where do you live?”

• “How much do you spend on electricity per month, on average?”

• “Do you use this product?”

• “How often do you go to the gym?”

• “On a scale of 1–10, how satisfied are you with our service?”

Qualitative market research involves more of the “how” and “why” questions. It’s done at a much smaller scale, is less structured and more exploratory, aiming for insight rather than certainty. It helps you find out how customers feel about your product, their opinions and preferences—in other words, things that can’t be quantified.

Examples of qualitative questions:

• “Why did you choose product A over product B?”

• “How does this image make you feel?”

• “What do you feel is missing from this service?

• “Describe the last time you purchased something online.”

• “What are your favorite brands for dog grooming products?”

Usually, this type of market research is done through surveys with open-ended questions or interviews. A small number of interviews are conducted, which are then projected to apply to a larger population. 

Quantitative and qualitative research don’t need to be seen as opposite or distinct techniques. It can be an “and” instead of an “either-or.”

Market research tends to inform two main areas in a business: product development and marketing efforts. Whether it’s creating a new product or a new set of features, at Typeform, we always start from the end. 

Market research is one of the most important tools to answer these questions. Nobody wants to invest time, money, and effort into making something that no one wants or needs. Market research allows you to assess the market size, its opportunities, and your competitors. This is also where user research and market research inform one another.

Segmenting the market is one of the main activities in market research, as it gives you your target audience(s). How else will you know who is buying from you already, who to market to, and which marketing messages work best?

Competitor analysis, another cornerstone of market research, helps you craft your positioning. In simple terms: How you’re different from your competitors and why should buyers pick you?

So you can probably see by now how varied market research is. The way we do our own market research here at Typeform has evolved over the years through testing and experimentation. After much trial and error, we finally landed on the approach that works best for us.

Before we even think about launching market research of any scale, we make sure to have a clear objective in mind. 

Are you trying to enhance a particular metric (such as customer numbers or customer satisfaction level), gauge potential market size, or something else?

Define your objective(s) first, then move on to the next step.

Whatever your approach, the next thing you should always have at the front of your mind is your customer.

Still, focusing on the customer can mean different things to different people.

Brace yourself, because we’re about to say something controversial: don’t focus on buyer personas.

This flies in the face of what most other market research guides will tell you: Research your audience to create buyer personas and frame your offering around them.

Not that buyer personas aren’t important—they are. And at Typeform, we definitely use them, but we also follow the “Jobs To Be Done (JTBD)” model. This is the backbone for how we conceptualize everything, from our marketing messaging to our product development. It informs how we see our customers and how we segment them.

How many people in your business speak directly to customers? The bigger your organization, the smaller this number is likely to be, and the further removed the customer becomes from the decision-making. The job creates a consistent framework for everyone to work with and remains close to the customer’s needs.

As you identify needs that intersect, you can begin to find unique differentiators for your product. 

At the end of the day, your customers don’t care about you or your product or its features. They care about the job or jobs they are trying to get done, and if you provide the best solution, they’ll pay you for it. If you don’t, they’ll move on to your competition faster than you can say, “job to be done.”

 So how does this all relate to market research?

Rather than framing your market research efforts on creating buyer personas and targeting them, frame them around jobs your customers are trying to get done. There’ll be some natural overlap with personas, but you need not be wed to them.

Market segmentation is the act of dividing a target market into groups (or segments). This lets you tailor your efforts to each segment, whether that be your marketing strategy or deciding on features for your product.

• Demographics: age, gender, ethnicity, income, industry, job

• Psychographic: lifestyle, values, personality traits, interests

• Geographic: country, region, city, town

• Behavioral: spending habits, internet browsing habits

Depending on your situation, any of these might be useful focus points, and all of them no doubt provide valuable insight.

The benefits of segmentation include:

1. A better experience for customers: A better understanding of your customers can only really be a win-win. You’ll be able to tailor each part of your customer experience, from marketing message to product experience, based on their segment.

2. More targeted marketing: In other words, this means better use of your marketing resources. Rather than casting the net wide and crossing your fingers that you haven’t just thrown a lot of time and money away, your segments let you focus your efforts where they’re likely to have the most return.

3. Improved product development: Knowing the real demands of your target audience will allow for product development that they’ll actually appreciate (read: pay for).

Now that you’re convinced of the importance of market research and how it can help your business, you’re probably pumped to get started. Having even a basic plan can be the difference between a piece of research that has a real and lasting impact on your business and gathering some interesting insights that are forgotten in two weeks. 

Always start with the question: Why? What’s the purpose of the research? 

Your objective shouldn’t be “to do some research,” nor should you select a method first, whether that be a JTBD-based questionnaire, customer interviews, etc. 

Make sure you’re always starting with a question you want to answer and adapt the method to the question.

Examples of questions to think about:

• “How can we increase conversions?”

• “Why are people churning after two months?”

• “What is the appetite for this product?”

• “Which product features are most useful to our customers?”

• “In which region(s) should we focus our next marketing campaign?”

Let this always be front and center as you go about planning and executing your research.

• Do preliminary research: Have a basic understanding of the industry and the landscape you’ll be investigating. It doesn’t have to be extremely in-depth, but it’s important to have a foundation. This ensures you ask the right questions, know what to assess, and can get a more accurate vision of the market.

• Align with potential stakeholders: There may be others in your organization who could benefit from the data you’re about to gather. It may be worthwhile checking around to see how you could maximize your research efforts. Even just one extra question on your survey might provide essential data for someone else.

• Use the right tools for your market research purposes: Make sure that whichever tools you use are fit for purpose. As technology develops, market research automation becomes more important. Using the right tools won’t only save you lots of time and energy; it’s also essential for correct and high-quality data.

The questions you ask depend on your objectives. You should write market research questions that are purposeful and will help strengthen your relationship with your customers.

You should also consider running a test first, depending on the scale of your research. Sending your survey to a smaller population and analyzing the first few responses will let you check that you’re getting useful responses that are answering your research questions.

Sometimes, until we start getting results, we’re unaware that a question is ineffective. This may be because the question uses terminology not understood by the target audience. 

For example, you may ask, “What SaaS tools do you currently use?” If you get responses like “iPhone 11” and “desktop computer,” then you know you need to adapt your questions better to your audience! 

Here at Typeform, we sometimes send out test emails to smaller populations (around 10% of the target audience) for this purpose and adjust our surveys if necessary.

400 is the magic number.

Well, no, in fact, there is no magic number, sorry.

Generally speaking, 400 is the standard recommended sample size—this just means the number of people who responded to your market research survey. 

But this number can vary greatly depending on your total population (i.e., all the people that this research will apply to) and the way you segment them. 

But there’s a mathematical explanation for the popularity of 400: With 400 responses, your margin of error is 5%. 

For example, say you got 400 customer responses to your market research survey. 80% of your respondents answered “yes” to the question, “Would you buy from us again?” That means there’s a 95% chance that in your total population of customers, around 80% would buy from you again.

Don’t forget that to reach your target sample size, you’ll need to reach out to many more people! If sending out surveys by email, open rates tend to hover around 15-25%. The percentage of people who then go on to complete a survey will be even lower. 

To increase your chances of survey opens and completions, offering an incentive is never a bad idea. Prize draws or discounts on your product have worked well for us. And, of course, the experience of answering a market research survey is paramount for completions—make sure your form is user-friendly with a smooth and beautiful interface. 

Try to aim for a sample that’ll be a good approximation of your overall population. There’s a risk of bias, depending on the channel through which your research survey is shared. For example, if you share it on social media, you might get a younger average age of respondents, which may not be accurately representative of your total population of customers.

Below is a sample market research template for planning a piece of primary market data.

A brief summary of why this research was started:

• What led to this research being done/requested? 

• What needs to be validated or explored?

• What’s been done prior to this research? E.g., competitive analysis, brainstorming, previous research

• What insights will this research generate? 

• How will these insights be used?

We can’t emphasize enough the importance of having a clear goal in mind. What metric(s) are you trying to enhance? E.g., more conversions, less churn. This helps people understand the bigger picture of this research.

State what decisions are going to be made or impacted based on the research. As a general rule, if you’re not prepared to make changes, don’t run the research.

State the high-level objectives for this research. Try to keep it specific, actionable, and two to three points max. 

Provide a list of market research questions you plan to answer during this research (these questions are not the interview questions). 

List the primary characteristics of the people you’ll recruit for the research, like:

• Geography

• Job(s) to be done

• Industry

• Job title

Also decide on the minimum and maximum number of participants you’ll need for your study.

Remember, data isn’t reality—however, market research can give you a pretty decent view of reality.

Data can also be unpredictable. Missing a small detail can skew ‌results significantly, so try to be as methodical and meticulous as you can.

Put our market research survey template to the test with customizable questions and design. Take your questionnaire to the next level with over 1 million photos, videos, and icons, or upload your own. Build your ultimate market research survey today with the help of Typeform.

Need some help writing survey questions? We’ve got you. Dive into our types of question examples and write kick-ass survey questions.

This is what you came for—the good stuff.

Here are the types of survey questions you should be using to get more survey responses:

1. Open-ended questions

2. Closed-ended questions

3. Rating questions

4. Likert scale questions

5. Multiple-choice questions

6. Picture choice questions

7. Demographic questions

Open up a conversation with this question type. These are good types of questions to get more meaningful answers from, as people have the opportunity to give you more feedback through a text box. If you’re looking for a yes/no answer—you’ll need to use a closed-end question.

Open-ended question examples:

• What are you wearing today?

• How did you meet your best friend?

• What is it like to live in Barcelona?

Some questions just need a one-word answer. Like yes. Or no. You can use them to get some quick ‌bits of information, then go on to segment your survey accordingly.

Closed-ended questions examples:

• Did you order the chicken?

• Do you like learning German?

• Are you living in Australia?

Reach for the stars. Or the hearts. Or smiles. Send a rating question and find out how your survey-takers would rate something. It’s a super useful question to ask, as you can gauge peoples’ opinions across the board.

Rating questions examples:

• How would you rate our service out of 5?

• How many stars would you give our film?

• Please rate how valuable our training was today.

Likert scale questions are good survey questions for finding out what people think about certain things. Generally, they come in 5-, 7-, or 9-point scales, and you’ve probably filled one out before.

Likert scale questions examples:

• Do you agree that Channel 5 offers more comedy than Channel 6?

• How satisfied are you today with our customer service?

• Do you feel affected by the recent changes in the office?

Sending out a test or quiz? Multiple-choice questions are your friend. You can give a few answers and hide the real answer. Also, if you want to find out time periods or dates for an event, multiple-choice questions are the one. Plus, you can bundle them up nicely and neatly in a dropdown menu.

Multiple choice questions examples:

• Facebook was launched in… 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006

• How many of our restaurants have you visited? 1 | 2 | 3 | 4+

• What is the capital of Scotland? Perth | Glasgow | Aberdeen | Edinburgh

A picture paints a thousand words. But in a survey? It does so much more. Ask a picture choice question and make your survey even more interactive. Tell a story, and show rather than tell.

Picture choice questions example:

Demographic survey questions are a mix of different forms of questions. It’s up to you whether you want to use a dropdown here or an open-ended question with them.

Demographic question examples:

We live in the information age, a time when data is a source of capital. Surveys have become one of the time-tested ways of gathering data. But even with 200+ years of published research and experience, people still fail to obtain helpful information from their surveys. Lucky for you, it doesn’t take much time to learn how to carry out a successful survey.

If you’re still stuck wondering what type of data you should be looking to collect, take a look at our guide to qualitative vs. quantitative research methods.

Your objective is to get as many responses as you can so you can make the best decisions. But to do this, you need to follow a few basic “rules.” 

Here’s an overview of the best practices for writing survey questions:

• Keep your language simple and specific: Unless you’re asking Ph.D. students about their opinions on string theory, there’s no need to include scientific or confusing language. Type like you’d talk.

• Avoid leading questions: “How was our amazing customer service team today?” Emm, not actually that great… Don’t plant opinions in peoples’ heads before they answer.

• Ask one question at a time: Avoid putting two questions into one—“How was the food and ambiance?” Separate questions to get better answers.

• Don’t make the survey excessively long: If your survey is over 20 questions long, pause to think. Some surveys are just, well, long. But if you can condense it, your audience will thank you.

• Show how much longer there is: That said, if it’s long, let people know how long. Tell people when they’re halfway through your survey.

• Make your surveys mobile-friendly: We’re always on the move. So make sure your survey can be completed from the subway as well as from the office.

• For big ideas, split them into multiple questions: If you’re asking for lots of opinions on one subject, try to split a huge question into several different questions, each covering a different angle. And consider using rating scale questions to see how people feel about different ideas.

• Use open-ended questions sparingly: An open-ended survey question is a brilliant response option for getting honest and actionable feedback. But people get bored of typing in long answers, so vary your answer options and don’t stuff in too many open-ended questions.

Regardless of whether you’re creating a survey or a questionnaire, there is an art to designing effective types of questions. There are also several principles of survey design that’ll help you get the information you need from your customers.

Remember that the aim of conducting a survey isn’t just to get answers. We’re interested in what the answers will tell us about something else, which is why it’s crucial to define a clear purpose for every question you ask in a survey.

Before you start writing survey questions, create a list of objectives that outline the kind of information you’re trying to glean with each question. A plan for how you’ll use the data gathered from each response will help you ensure that the questions are targeted, relevant, and purposeful.

Example objective: Assess employee attitudes toward standing desks

Possible questions:

• In the past 12 months, have you used a standing desk?

• Research has shown that standing desks result in fewer sick days and more productivity in the workplace. I believe the company should invest in standing desks for employees (Agree—Neutral—Disagree)

While several articles expound various types of surveys, such as multiple-choice, Likert scales, open-ended, and so on, these  actually refer to the types of responses. On the other hand, there are two survey question types: factual or objective questions and attitude or subjective questions.

Factual questions are aimed at gathering data to categorize and quantify people or events. Hypothetically, people’s responses to factual survey questions can be independently verified and have right and wrong answers. Examples of what objective survey questions cover are things like how often someone exercises, where they were born, and what their purchase habits are.

Attitude questions, on the other hand, measure perceptions, feelings, and judgments. These are things that can’t be observed or objectively assessed because they are based on what individuals think or experience. 

Some examples of what subjective survey questions might cover include favorite brands, overall experience at a restaurant, or reasons for not voting for a certain candidate. With subjective survey questions, standardization is critical to ensure that people are interpreting and understanding the questions in the same way.

The objective of your overall survey will influence the type of questions you choose for your survey. The question type also has an impact on the response format (e.g., agree—disagree versus single-answer multiple-choice).

These two types of survey questions produce different kinds of data. Understanding the differences and how to treat each one will ensure you are producing meaningful information.

This seems obvious, yet there are surveys filled with questions that participants are unequipped to respond to. 

There are three difficulties people have when answering survey questions:

1. They don’t have the information. Most people can’t answer with any accuracy how many times they get up from their desk in a day, but they can give a vague indication (rarely, sometimes, often, never).

2. They had the information but forgot it. Some people might know their exact income from two years ago, but most won’t. Avoid asking questions that rely on long-term memory or calculations.

3. They have difficulty placing events in time. Participants may remember the last time they went to the movie theater, but they won’t remember whether it was six months ago or eight. If you must include questions that rely on long-term memory, use memory aids and association—for example, have them play out a scenario in their minds.

Imagine your objective is to learn whether water conservation warnings were effective.

Poor survey question: How much water did you use in your home last month?

Better question: In the last 30 days, how much water would you say your household used? (More than usual, less than usual, about the same as usual)

Even in online surveys, people exhibit what social scientists call social desirability bias. This is the tendency for people to answer questions in socially acceptable ways. In some cases, it means overreporting good behaviors (“I get up from my desk every hour”) or underreporting perceived negative behaviors (“I drink alcohol once per week”).

Being aware of sensitive and taboo topics in the population you’re studying can help you anticipate these areas. To generate accurate responses, incorporate these strategies into the survey:

• Include an introductory statement: By explaining why you’re asking, you set up the question and help them understand the motivation behind it.

• Emphasize the anonymity of the survey: People who are confident their responses won’t be identified are more likely to respond honestly.

• Put sensitive and demographic questions at the end: Starting a survey with types of questions like age and income can put people off. Your first survey question should be interesting, light, and easy to answer. Once they’ve started, they’re more likely to finish—and answer more sensitive questions.

• Stress the importance of accuracy: Discourage dishonest answers by outlining the end goal of the survey. People who believe their answers will help are more likely to be truthful.

Failing to write clear and specific questions can hinder your respondents’ ability to answer. The standard is that people should have a consistent understanding of what is being asked of them. If someone could interpret a question differently than you intended, the question could be improved. Avoid ambiguities. Don’t take for granted that people know what you mean in a survey question.

Poor survey question: In the past month, how many times have you visited a doctor?

There are two ambiguities in this question. First is the time frame: Does “in the past month” refer to the last 30 days or the most recent calendar month? The second is “doctor.” There’s a lot of room for interpretation—do nutritionists, spiritual healers, or psychologists count as doctors?

Better survey question: We’d like to understand how often you have visited a licensed medical professional, including dentists, psychologists, chiropractors, and nutritionists. In the past 30 days, how many times have you visited a medical professional?

If you need to define a term, be sure to put it first. Most people stop paying attention after the question has been asked.

Vague survey question: How would you rate your health?

The understanding of “health” isn’t consistent. Some people consider good health the absence of health conditions. Other people may be thinking about the extent to which they lead a healthy lifestyle.

Better survey question: Do you think you eat enough vegetables? (I eat plenty, I eat just enough, I could eat more, I don’t eat vegetables at all)

This question gets people to respond more directly to your interpretation of “health”: a healthy lifestyle. It may require asking more questions, but it’ll give you better data to work with.

Here are a few question types that should be avoided for the best survey data:

Do you think there are more postgraduates (Master’s, Ph.D., MBA) because of the country’s weak economy?

The question also includes a false premise: The participant is required to agree that the economy is weak to answer. The question also imposes a causal relationship between the economy and postgraduate study that a person may not see. Loaded questions are inherently biased and push respondents into confirming a particular argument they may not agree with.

Would you like to be rich and famous?

Double-barreled questions are difficult for people to answer. A person might like to be rich but not famous and would thus have trouble responding to this question. Additionally, you don’t know whether they are responding to both parts of the question or just one.

Do you agree that the president is doing a wonderful job on foreign policy?

Biased language that either triggers emotional responses or imposes your opinion can influence the results of your survey. Survey questions should be neutral, simple, and void of emotion.

Do you have extra money after paying bills that you invest?

This question assumes that the participant has extra money after paying bills. When a person reads a question they feel is irrelevant to them, it can lead to attrition from the survey. This is why Logic is useful—surveys should adapt to respondents’ answers so they can skip questions that don’t apply to them.

This question would be better asked in two parts: Do you have extra money after paying bills? (If yes: Do you invest the extra money you have after paying bills?)

Does your community have a problem with crime?

Not only are “crime” and “problem” vague, it’s challenging for a layperson to report on something related to the community at large. The responses to the question wouldn’t be reliable. Stick to asking questions that cover people’s firsthand knowledge.

If you are trying to understand the prevalence of criminal acts, it would be better to ask: In the past 12 months, have you been the victim of a crime?

If you received a $10,000 bonus at work, would you invest it?

People are terrible at predicting future behavior, particularly in situations they’ve never encountered. Behavior is deeply situational, so what a person might do upon receiving a bonus could depend on whether they had credit card debt, whether they needed to make an immediate purchase, the time of year, and so on.

Understanding the different question types is crucial when it comes to surveys and customer feedback. 

“The goal of writing a survey question is for every potential respondent to interpret it in the same way, be able to respond accurately, and be willing to answer,” explains Tammy Duggan-Herd, PhD, a psychology researcher-turned-marketer.

Focus on creating great survey questions, and you’ll get the answers and insights you need to achieve your goals. 

Ready to conduct effective market research? Build beautifully designed surveys with the help of Typeform. With customizable survey templates, you can reach your audience faster and more effectively. Start asking the right types of questions today.

The world of marketing and advertising is ever-evolving—how can anyone stay on top of the hottest trends? We get it. On top of tracking metrics, strategizing your next campaign, and A/B testing new marketing initiatives, you’ve got to keep up with marketing and advertising trends.

We’re breaking down the top six trends to expect in 2024, so you don’t have to. Keep reading to see the latest innovations in marketing.

Since its launch in November of 2022, ChatGPT has made waves across every industry, but perhaps none more so than the marketing world. From chatbots that create a better customer experience to automations that streamline workflows, AI has very quickly become a mainstay in marketing.

While everyone is still trying to figure out how to get the highest return on investment (ROI) with AI, we see marketers leveraging it in a few ways.

Marketers are rethinking how they use AI to create content, especially after Google started cracking down on AI-generated content that didn’t align with its people-first, EEAT guidelines. We expect marketing teams to continue using AI for content creation with guardrails and substantial edits that prioritize quality over quantity.

One of the most compelling cases for AI is its ability to make processes more efficient, so marketers can focus on higher-priority tasks. Marketers will continue to view AI as a powerful assistant, leveraging it even more this year, for things like:

• Analyzing customer data to identify commonalities, like pain points and preferences 

• Predicting customer behavior based on data analysis

• Segmenting customers for more effective marketing (personalization)

• Prioritizing the customer experience through real-time chatbots

• Automating tedious or mundane tasks like posting to social, lead generation, or sending emails

Remember those weird-looking goggles that the gaming industry and Meta popularized almost a decade ago? Well, they’re back… and savvy brands are leveraging AR and VR to create truly immersive experiences, from fashion shows to visualizing how furniture will look in your home (we’re looking at you, Ikea).

HubSpot found that 84% of marketers plan to invest in AR and VR in 2024, indicating a potential comeback. AR and VR can create unforgettable brand experiences, whether it’s an interactive product demo or a virtual showroom. Some of the world’s leading brands are already using AR and VR, like:

• American Express. They hosted a virtual “You vs. Sharapova” event using VR where people played a virtual tennis match against Maria Sharapova.

• Pokémon Go. Circle K and Pokémon Go parent company Niantic partnered to create an interactive AR experience, driving players to grab a coffee at Circle K.

With hardware becoming more accessible, expect a surge in AR and VR brand experiences.

Corporate social responsibility is no longer a nice-to-have—consumers demand it from brands. Harris Poll research shows that most shoppers, 82%, want a brand’s values to align with theirs. When values didn’t align, 75% of shoppers surveyed said they parted ways with a brand.

One of the more important values to consumers? Sustainability. Fifty-two percent said they want to support sustainable brands, with 55% willing to pay more for sustainable products. To appeal to their customers, brands will highlight their values. And according to HubSpot, 45% will increase their investments in creating content to do so.

Whether it’s from a form, survey, or email, marketers can collect vast amounts of data on their customers to create even more personalized experiences. And customers expect it.

A Segment study found that more than 55% of consumers will be repeat buyers after a personalized experience. The same study found that nearly 70% of businesses are increasing their investment in personalization.

Personalization starts with data, and if you can get it straight from your customers, you can create even more tailored content, marketing, and experiences. And with AI making analyzing data and segmenting faster than ever, marketers will continue to pour into creating hyper-personalized campaigns.

Thanks to shortened attention spans and the rise of TikTok and other short-form video platforms, marketers will shift content toward shorter videos, like Instagram Reels, TikToks, and YouTube Shorts. They’ll also focus on user-generated content (UGC), which is typically short in nature, free (with permission), and more authentic than perfectly polished brand content.

The Kardashians might have their name all over everything, but marketers in 2024 will move away from mainstream celebrities and toward nano and micro-influencers. Here’s why:

• Marketers have seen more success with influencers who have between 10k and 100k followers than with celebrities

• Nearly 50% of marketers saw the most success with micro-influencers

• Twenty-five percent of social media users surveyed by HubSpot bought something based on an influencer’s recommendation

But nano and micro-influencers are also more affordable, with some willing to take free products as payment. And they have the highest engagement rates of all influencers, making a micro-influencer collaboration an easy decision.

2024 has become the year of AI, and we can’t wait to explore it further (we’re already using it to help you create forms). We don’t know what’s on the horizon, but we imagine it involves taking AI to the next level—whatever that looks like.

What do you think is the next big thing in marketing? Not sure? Subscribe to Informed—a monthly newsletter where we keep you up-to-date on industry trends, related opinions, tips and tricks, and other news.

That’s pretty good, but with zero-party data—what you collect with those forms—becoming more important, form completion rates can have a high impact on your marketing efforts.

One way to increase form conversions? Personalization. 

Sure, you’re probably collecting data via forms to make the broader customer experience more personalized, but you can even personalize those very forms. 

How? With these three ways…

Consumers expect a personalized experience. And more than 75% of them get frustrated when they don’t receive it. That’s true for any online experience, including surveys. You can improve your response rate—the number of people who start your form—by almost 50% by including personalization in your ask. Better still, you can improve your completion rate when you personalize the form experience itself.

 When you personalize a survey, you create a tailored experience for each person filling out the form. One way to do that is with conditional or branching questions. These conditional questions allow you to get more specific insights from your audience because you personalize the question journey on the form taker’s answers to the previous question. 

Here’s an example. A company that makes sunscreen asks its audience about how they like to exercise. If a form taker responds with swimming, the next question they see is about their preference for swimming in salt water, fresh water, or chlorinated pool water. If a  different form taker responds that they enjoy running,  the next question they see asks about running outside or on a treadmill.   

At Typeform, this functionality is called Logic.

With Logic, the survey is specific to the form taker based on their answers. You can incorporate their experiences, likes, and opinions instead of only asking general questions. Here is an example of a form set up with Logic. You can see if someone says they are a cat person, the next question they get will be about cats—not dogs.

Want to see your question branches in a more linear way? Check out the Logic Map tool. It’s a great way to visualize the different paths available in your form.

Here are three ways adding Logic to your survey will help you improve your completion rate.

Shorter, more relevant surveys get more completions. As a survey creator, you walk the tightrope between asking too many questions, which can turn off your form taker, and not asking enough questions to get the information you need. That tightrope becomes more of a sidewalk when you use Logic. Form takers won’t see questions that don’t apply to them, making your survey shorter and more interesting to complete.

Many sources (including us at Typeform) suggest aiming for 10 questions or fewer. But that’s 10 questions that your individual survey taker sees. With Logic, your survey may have 15 questions total, but your form taker doesn’t see those five non-relevant questions. They only see the ones that align with their experience.

When you remove the non-relevant questions for your individual form taker, you remove the “next” fatigue—reading through a question only to realize it doesn’t apply to them. Plus, there is a little spark of joy when they see the progress bar zoom ahead, letting them know that they’re almost done. 

Survey length applies to both the number of questions and the time it takes to complete. Some questions take longer than others to answer. For example, “check all that apply” questions take twice as long as a single-option answer. Personalization tools allow you to lower the total number of questions an individual sees, so you have an opportunity to use other question types and still have a short, easy-to-complete survey.

There is a human on the other side of each of your forms, and you want them to know that you are listening. Almost 75% of consumers say feeling valued and understood is key to their loyalty to a brand. 

Surveys are a great way to gather feedback and hear from customers, but they can sometimes appear one-sided. With Logic, you can create a feeling of a back-and-forth conversation by incorporating the form taker’s previous answers into the next question. Like a good conversation, these survey questions are more likely to engage your audience to complete the form. Giving a more personable response helps the form taker feel understood. 

For example, you might send out a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey following a purchase. After the customer submits their one-to-10 rating, the next question can reflect that number. If they score their experience as a three, your next question might say, “We’re sorry you weren’t completely satisfied with your experience. Please tell us how we can improve.” 

But if they gave their experience a 9, your response might be, “We’re so excited you had an awesome experience. What did you like most?” These two options sound more human than the generic, “Why did you rate us that way?”

Personalization in your survey also helps you ask more specific questions that get to the nuance of the individual filling out the form. These questions are more interesting for the form taker, getting them to expand on their likes, dislikes, and experiences. This provides a more engaging survey experience because people enjoy talking about themselves.

If you’re reaching out to a new audience with your form, they may be a little wary about sharing too much information. 

By personalizing your survey, you show form takers that you’re interested in their individual experiences. Using interactive questions—through Logic—builds rapport, making your audience feel valued and more likely to be comfortable sharing personal information.

 Asking interactive questions that are directly related to a form taker’s situation can also give them some insight into the relevance of the data you’re collecting. You can be extra clear about how you will use the data. Of course, as a good survey practice, your welcome screen would have provided a legal question field or information about how you will use the data they provide. 

Clarity about how you’ll use the data collected is important for building trust. And trust is foundational to improving response and completion rates.

If a participant doesn’t know how an email address might be used, they may skip that question or close out of the survey altogether, especially if they don’t trust you. But you may not need to show an email disclaimer to everyone filling out your survey. If someone doesn’t want the incentive and chooses not to provide their email address, they don’t need to see the email disclaimer. You can set up Logic so only the people who provide their email addresses need to review your data policy.

Another example is a general market research survey. A few people answer *just right* and would be perfect for your latest ebook. You wouldn’t want to provide that resource to everyone because it wouldn’t be relevant to many people. Using Logic, you can provide the link to that helpful ebook only to people who respond a certain way. Giving people helpful information when they need it builds trust.

Yes, higher completion rates mean more complete data sets. But beyond that, personalization tools like Logic allow you to really get to know your customers. You can create follow-up questions that dig into their favorites so you can understand why they feel that way. Nuanced data about your audience helps you build products and marketing campaigns that truly resonate with your customers.

Going back to our exercise example, our sunscreen company now sees their swimmers more fully—wow, we have a lot of open-water swimmers in our audience—which enables the company to understand a niche they may not have known about before.

Ready to bring more personalization into your forms? Try Logic in your next survey by clicking on Logic in the side panel. If you need help, check out this article, What is Logic?

According to Crunchbase data, Global startup investments saw a 38% decline in 2023 compared to 2022. These cutbacks affected startups at all funding stages, with early-stage and later-stage companies both witnessing a decrease of about 40%.

This isn’t to say that funding is the key to success—because that isn’t true either. According to a PitchBook survey, some 3,200 venture-backed U.S. companies—that raised a combined total of more than $27 billion—went out of business in 2023.

While we don’t know how much these particular companies invested in market research, we do know that a recent CB Insights analysis of failed startups shows that 35% of the 100+ companies they analyzed went under because there was no market need for their product or service. 

Market research acts as both a compass and anchor for startups navigating the tumultuous seas of entrepreneurship. It shows you where you need to go and how you can get there, but it also keeps you safe and ensures you don’t drift off course in the face of unforeseen challenges. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the strategies and tools startups can use to scale market research efforts and gain the insights needed to succeed, even with limited resources. 

Beyond demographics and buyer personas, getting to the bottom of who your customers really are takes plenty of diversified efforts. 

However, the brunt of this work should focus on primary market research, which involves collecting information through interviews, surveys, phone calls, focus groups, and user testing.

Target audience surveys are often the most direct avenue for cementing your understanding of critical customer data, like demographics, values, and habits. Unlike live discussions, which are unscripted and sometimes tricky to navigate, surveys are created in a controlled environment. They give you complete control over formulating and presenting your questions to customers.

Target audience surveys can gather comprehensive insights into the preferences, behaviors, and needs of the target audience by asking:

• Demographic questions that gather basic information about respondents, such as age, gender, location, income, education level, and occupation.

• Behavioral questions that ask about things like purchase history and preferred channels to identify patterns and trends in consumer behavior.

• Satisfaction questions that gauge how happy or unhappy customers are with your products, services, customer support, and overall experience to identify areas of strength and opportunities for enhancement.

There are also less direct but equally relevant channels for understanding who your target customers are. For example, you can use media and social listening tools. 

Social listening platforms analyze online media coverage, social media conversations, and market trends to provide actionable business insights based on customer behavior trends. You can set them up to track things like keywords and brand mentions to monitor what your customers are talking about, where they tend to hang out online, and even what they’re saying about your product/service. 

Once you have a clear picture of who your customers are, the next step is to understand their needs and preferences. Focus on “jobs” instead of personas. When we say jobs, we mean what it is that customers expect your product to do for them. 

When you can figure out what job customers want you to perform for them, it’s much easier to differentiate your product offering from those of your competitors. For example, Typeform’s obvious job is to collect data. Our differentiator is that we offer a conversational and highly customizable experience that collects information and helps you build customer relationships.

Surveys are great tools for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data helps you understand who your customers are, while qualitative market research goes beyond the “who” and seeks to discover the “how” and “why.” 

These surveys work on a smaller scale and are less structured. They’re exploratory and provide insights into customer preferences. Here are some examples of what these types of questions could look like:

• Does our product/service meet your expectations?

• What is the most valuable feature we offer?

• Are there any features that you never use?

Customer intent is another metric startups are measuring more than ever. According to Zendesk’s latest Customer Experience Trends report, “70 percent of organizations are actively investing in technologies and tools that automatically capture and analyze intent signals.”

Customer intent and sentiment analysis tools, powered by machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), can automatically detect what each customer conversation pertains to (intent) and whether the customer’s message is positive or negative (sentiment). These types of insights help pinpoint preferences and better define what customers really want to gain by using your product/service. 

Industry research involves taking a step back from focusing on your customers and gathering/analyzing more general data about your industry. It can help you:

• Understand the dynamics of your industry, including the size of the market, growth trends, and potential opportunities.

• Identify underserved markets or areas with unmet needs to inform your product or service development strategy.

• Anticipate and mitigate risks that may arise, like regulatory requirements. 

• Create more informed business decisions on things like pricing strategies, marketing efforts, and resource allocation.

To get started with industry research, you can look into platforms that offer aggregated market and consumer data. These platforms pull ‌data from a wide range of sources to provide a holistic view of your industry, including data from government agencies, research firms, and industry associations. 

You can also use a tool like Google Trends (which is free) to perform online industry research by analyzing search data and trends that are most pertinent to your industry. Trends provides insights into how often specific keywords or topics are searched for on Google, as well as the relative interest in those topics compared to one another. Insights into consumer interests, preferences, and behavior, especially in the realm of online search, can help you make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and market positioning.

Competitor analysis isn’t about copying the strategies that are working for your competition. It’s about understanding them so that you can find your own niche and determine what you’re going to do to stand out from the crowd.

It’s yet another way to gain indirect insights into what your customers want by seeing what’s working for your competitors, what isn’t, and how customers are reacting to your competition’s products and marketing efforts. 

There are plenty of strategies and tools for evaluating your competitors from a variety of angles. SEO tools help you evaluate your competition’s online marketing efforts, providing insights into their content marketing activities, backlink profiles, the keywords they are targeting, how their pay-per-click (PPC) ads are working, and much more. 

You can also use search analytics tools that show you the keywords your competitors are buying on Google Ads and all the ad tests they are running. 

There are also technology profiling tools that help identify the technologies your competitors are using, like software, frameworks, programming languages, content management systems, hosting providers, and other tools utilized to build and run a website.

This type of data can help you from a technological and product development standpoint, and it can also inform marketing strategies. For example, you can identify which advertising platforms your competitors use and start using them yourself. 

You can also use surveys to gather competitor analysis. Whether they close the sale or not, your sales team can send quick surveys to discover data like which competitors they evaluated, why customers chose your product over a competitor, or why they decided to go with a competitor in the end. 

There are no guarantees in business, especially in the world of startups. However, market research can provide much-needed clarity—a realistic prediction of your chances of success.

The first step in being able to perform market research effectively is identifying the strategies and associated tools that can help you gather the data you need. The best market research tools provide firsthand data about what people think about your product or service and, more importantly, whether they need it. 

The customer, industry, and competitor data you gather through market research helps inform your business decisions from top to bottom with real, quantifiable data, not guesswork—enabling your product, marketing, sales, and support teams to act effectively on the insights you’ve gained.

If you’re here for the TL:DR (too long, didn’t read), here are the top five Instagram photo editing apps we have to recommend.

Picture this: you’re taking a great photo of your company’s all-natural no-sugar kombucha on the shelves at your local grocer. But then you notice after you’ve left that someone shoved their unwanted bag of coldcuts right behind it.

Or you’re at a company event, and you’ve just snapped a picture of your team to share on Instagram. But then you realize that sitting next to your colleague is a trash can with a banana peel peeking out of the top.

Photo ruined. Or is it?

With help from the best Instagram photo editors of 2024, you can cut out those annoying discards and trash cans. And you don’t have to hire a professional to do it.

It should be clear that Instagram is a key channel for attracting and converting customers. But with 200 million business accounts (and counting) on the app, you’ve got to do what you can to separate yourself from the crowd.

Instagram already has some simple photo editing capabilities. But if you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking for an Instagram photo editor to take your images beyond the basics.

Here’s some things a photo editor can help you with:

• Resizing. Apps that resize photos to fit Instagram’s square spec without losing picture quality.

• Design and display. If you want to get more creative with your pictures, you can turn them into infographics, create collages, or add text, overlays, and captions.

• Editing and effects. These apps let you add effects and filters, which range from basic cropping and background scaling, to changing color, hue, and saturation.

Let’s find one that works for you.

All of these apps are free—at least for basic features—and almost all are available for both Android and iOS.

Our designers love this program for quick pic editing. Here’s a few reasons why:

• The built-in camera with advanced controls lets you work your magic without leaving the app.

• Download the same filters in Adobe Lightroom, so you can edit pictures on desktop and get the same results on mobile.

• Connect to a creative community of photographers by searching the hashtag #VSCO on Instagram.

Everyone seems to love Snapseed. Now owned by Google, the photo editing app gives you things like:

• Filters and special effects, for when you need to make the CEO look less tired at the event where he’s speaking.

• Social sharing, so you can send pics directly from the app to Instagram and other social networks.

• Editing tools, including the basics like crop and rotate. Plus advanced features for white balance, double exposure, lens blur, and tonal contrast.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC has a desktop version that’s popular among designers and photographers. And there’s a mobile app for when you’re on the go. Take and edit photos, then beam them straight to Instagram or other social networks.

Some extras include:

• Advanced editing tools, like tone curve that changes color, exposure, and contrast.

• Ability to bulk edit photos. Copy edits across different pics for a consistent style.

• Edit a section of the photo with your finger or a stylus. Or any other appendage you want to try.

• Share photos straight to Instagram using the hashtag #lightroom.

There’s also a Premium feature called Adobe Sensei. It uses artificial intelligence to auto-tag your photos based on what’s in them and where they were taken. Slightly creepy, but still pretty cool.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC is free for basic features on iOS and Android. Premium features include sync across all devices.

Layout is Instagram’s own photo app. It’s both a photo taking and a photo editing app, with the ultimate aim of creating collages.

You can start with your existing images, or by taking a new photo with the app.

Here’s a summary of Layout’s features:

• Create collages from up to nine photos—so people can see your whole week of lunches in one place.

• Personalize layouts and collages.

• Instantly share to Instagram.

• Edit using Instagram’s filter tools.

Your photos need to be square if you’re going to share them on Instagram. It may be annoying, but there’s no way around it. That’s why this app specifically resizes for Instagram sharing.

Square Sized imports rectangular photos or videos from Facebook or your phone and makes them an Instagram-ready square size. So it’s not just a clever name.

Aside from its resizing feature and the ability to take photos from within the app, Square Sized also lets you:

• Add borders to photos.

• Layer filters, typography, shapes, and overlays.

• Add backgrounds.

• Share on social with a single tap.

Square Sized is free for basic features on iOS.

You might be thinking “Well thanks for providing that list, but when are you going to tell me which app my business needs?”

True, a lot of these apps have similar features. But they all work a bit differently—and they’re all free to download. So your best bet is to try a few out to see what works for you.

And if you’re looking for some more Insta-insights to apply to your business, then head on over to our ultimate guide to social media marketing strategy.

Today’s consumers are exposed to tens, hundreds, even thousands of marketing messages per day. Their attention spans are only getting shorter, and their dollars are only becoming more valuable. 

In a culture full of marketing noise, brands need to make their consumer value known pretty quickly. One way to do this is through marketing personalization. In fact, organizations that employ data-driven personalization see five to eight times the ROI on their marketing spend. 

Zero-party data (ZPD) is the future of marketing personalization. And if you haven’t already noticed—the future is here. If you’re not currently collecting ZPD, you should start soon. Immediately, even. And once you’ve finished reading this, you’ll feel a lot more confident doing so. 

Discover the differences between ZPD and other types of data, why collecting ZPD can be frustrating, and how to gain insights from the ZPD you collect (hint: AI is involved!).

The primary difference between zero-, first-, second-, and third-party data is how it’s collected and along with that, the degree of trust you can place in the data itself. At the basic level, you can get the same information from each type of data—but ZPD comes directly from the source, so it’s much more reliable. Here’s an example of how a marketer would use each data collection approach to obtain some basic personal information like a customer’s name and location:

• Zero-party data approach: Using a form, survey, or quiz to gather the information directly from your audience. You would directly ask the customer. 

• First-party data approach: A customer visits your site and places an order. That order form contains their first name and address.

• Second-party data approach: Basically, you buy someone else’s first-party data from a business partner.

• Third-party data approach: Purchasing the information from a consumer intelligence partner—who has no direct relationship with the customer—who’ve collected this information from other websites.

Often, the data you get is the same, but the retrieval methods are definitely not created equal. There’s a reason Firefox and Safari have already gotten rid of third-party cookies, and they’re on their way out of Chrome: they infringe on user privacy rights. 

And since you collect ZPD from your customers directly, you know it’ll be quality data. It’s collected from your exact audience, not a “lookalike” audience. So you’ll be able to apply the information to your marketing personalization efforts confidently.

ZPD may not always be 100% objective and, therefore, not always 100% accurate. It’s completely dependent on real people’s input—and people lie sometimes. 

You do, however, have to consider the questions you’re asking to gather reliable data. The data collected from deeply personal questions is going to be much different from data collected by asking about a user’s hair type or favorite productivity software. So, unless it makes sense for your brand to ask questions with strong psychological implications, your zero-party data is likely accurate. 

ZPD collection can be frustrating, sure—but the benefits certainly outweigh the drawbacks. Here are some pros and cons of collecting zero-party data:

• Customers may not be willing to provide it due to perceived privacy concerns

• You may not collect enough due to perceived privacy concerns

• Can be difficult to manage due to issues like volume and data use consent

• Can be unstructured due to inconsistent formats

• Can be difficult to analyze due to variety of information and under-represented customer base

• Highly relevant

• Reliable

• Safe for customers; doesn’t violate privacy

• Helps companies build trust with customers

• Transparent: user has to opt in

• Provides hyper-targeted insights

• Most beneficial type of data for personalization

• More important than ever due to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data

• Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws and the imminent extinction of third-party cookies

The biggest challenge of ZPD is how to clean and analyze it once you’ve collected it. Due to the unstructured nature of ZPD collection methods, it can be difficult to pull useful insights from the response data, especially if you have a smaller marketing team. 

The formatting on forms and surveys or other ZPD collection tools may not always be consistent. So gleaning actionable insights from them may require more time or person-power or tools—and a bigger budget.

But there are ways to make this easier. And using AI is one of them. 

The easiest way to parse collected ZPD is by using AI. AI can help analyze data through the following techniques:

• Natural language processing (NLP): Can help you develop insights from unstructured data

• Machine learning: Can help you extract patterns and make customer predictions

• Deep learning: Can help with things like analyzing time and image recognition

Since AI looks for patterns in large datasets, it can help you comb through a lot more data a lot faster. Through in-depth analysis, AI can help you discover marketing insights much more efficiently.

AI can help you determine things like whether respondents in a specific demographic group are more likely to buy your products or services. You can also put AI to work by asking it to generate summaries of its findings. You’ll be able to make inferences about your customers by reading a description rather than studying rows and columns in a spreadsheet.

• Predict customer behaviors

• Categorize customers based on psychographic information like personality traits and interests

• Segment customers who engage with particular brand events, like campaigns and sales

• Identify customers who may be interested in upgrades or additional products

• Classify customer sentiment and identify key phrases

• Qualify leads

When 87% of marketers believe data is their company’s most underutilized asset, it’s crucial to your strategy to find ways to put data to work for you. And if you’re taking the time and making the effort to gather data respectfully and directly from your customers, it’s worth it to make sure you’re actually able to do something with it. 

Although there are certainly challenges when it comes to collecting, cleaning, analyzing, and maintaining ZPD, AI is making this somewhat tedious task more manageable. 

And as important as it is to analyze and gather actionable insights from ZPD, its collection methods are just as—if not more—important. You can’t collect useful data if you’re not asking the right questions in the right format. 

Revenue leaders, how well do you know your customers, really? The irony is that despite having more tools and technology at our disposal than ever before, understanding our customers has become increasingly complex. And if we don’t understand our customers, we can’t put them on the personalized journeys that lead to the higher conversion and retention rates we all want. 

At the root of this problem is data fragmentation. We’re living in an era of “tech mayhem” – a term coined by Gartner describing the rapid proliferation of go-to-market (GTM) technologies, tools, and platforms that’s led to a crowded and fragmented landscape. This phenomenon often results in confusion among teams, as they navigate numerous options for analyzing and acting on data. 

I recently spoke about this topic at The Nordic Growth Summit, where afterward I heard from other leaders just how deep this data problem really goes. Not only is it challenging now, but it’s only going to get harder – 2024 is stirring up some fearsome headwinds. From the increasing privacy regulations to Google deprecating third-party cookies for all Chrome users by the third quarter of the year, we’re going to have to find new ways, or revert to old ways, to collect the data we need – because all while it’s getting harder to understand our customers, our customers’ expectations are only rising. According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

So, what can we do about all of this?

By unifying your GTM teams – sales, marketing, and customer success – and tools, you can break down silos and allow data to flow seamlessly across a united revenue function and tech stack. This enables you to complete the customer picture, providing a comprehensive, end-to-end understanding of customers needed to route them to the right place. 

Getting to this point takes time. You don’t need to overhaul your tech stack or reorg overnight to make progress. There are three simple steps you can take today to begin bringing disparate data together, so you can complete the customer picture and put every customer on a personalized journey.

Before you can complete the customer picture, you have to have all the puzzle pieces. Every business in the world needs to collect data about customers, but not all data serves the same purpose or provides the same value. There’s data that you obtain through your own platforms—like your website or mobile. There’s also data that you can aggregate by external sources or data providers. And then there’s zero-party data, where your customers willingly share their data with your company. 

Zero-party data holds significant value for businesses for many reasons, but the real beauty of it is that it gives you explicit insights directly from the source. This data is more accurate and reliable, reducing the risk of misinterpretation and enabling you to better tailor your products, services, and marketing efforts to what your customers really want. Beyond that, it builds trust.

This is, inevitably, where I mention that Typeform is the best way to collect zero-party data today. Our forms are built to be beautiful, conversational, and powerful – and get results. More than 150,000 businesses are creating forms using our product, driving upwards of 500 million responses each year. And in 2023, these forms saw a completion rate of 47.3%, more than 25 percentage points higher than the industry average completion rate of 21.5%, according to the Data on data report.

Now that we’ve covered the importance of gathering data straight from your customers – let’s move on to the second step you can take to complete the customer picture. It’s time to enrich it with other data available to complete the customer picture and achieve that deeper understanding of who your customers really are.

Having different types of data offers the opportunity to link them together. When you only have observed data, you know what’s happening, but not always why. By combining observed data with zero-party data, you can gain deeper insights. A unified tech stack is helpful at this stage, as it breaks down silos and allows access to data from various tools.

At Typeform, we’ve built tons of integrations, like our HubSpot integration, to help you connect your Typeform data with other data sources and tools. You can use Typeform + the ecosystem to get the job done.

Finally, with integrated data and a deeper understanding of your customer like never before, you’re ready to put every lead on a unique path. Customers need more than great content—they need help getting to the right destination. Maybe at this point in their journey, they’re best suited to talk to sales, or maybe a self-serve flow is better suited, or maybe they simply need to learn more about your product through a marketing nurture campaign. Whatever they need, with a complete customer picture, you can get them there. 

We all know how important understanding our customers is—this has always been true, and it continues to be so. Amid modern GTM complexity, revenue leaders must adopt strategies to complete the customer picture. By sourcing zero-party data, unifying and enriching data, and personalizing journeys, businesses can enhance customer experiences, drive loyalty, and ultimately achieve better outcomes. While the journey towards data unification may seem daunting, taking incremental steps can yield significant benefits in understanding and engaging with customers effectively.

If you’re planning to bring people together, you know that planning starts with an invite. And Facebook makes it easy to create an event, share the details, and get an idea of who’ll be attending (and who, regrettably, can’t make it,) all from a digital platform. A memorable Facebook event photo keeps your event top of mind and helps it stand out from the mindless scrolling of social media. 

Luckily, there are plenty of tools and tips to help you create an effective, on-brand Facebook event photo. Let’s start from the top.

The first tip for creating a well-designed Facebook event photo is to make sure it’s the right size and dimensions. If your image doesn’t meet the right specs, Facebook will stretch or crop it to fit the requirements—leaving your guests with a more doom-scrollable photo

The latest specifications for the main Facebook event photo are:

Even if you decide to stray from the suggested pixel dimensions, stick to the 16:9 ratio so your image displays correctly across all devices. 

But marketers know it’s rarely as simply grabbing an asset that meets the minimum requirements and adding it to your content. Let’s figure out what makes a good Facebook event photo and how to make one.

Sometimes it’s helpful to start with what qualities make a bad example. Your Facebook event photo shouldn’t be

• Blurry. Your image should be properly sized and work across all screen sizes

• Generic stock images. There are exceptions, like these beautiful free stock photos sites. 

• Unrelated to your brand. Who are you anyway?

• Filled with too much text. Facebook prefers ads and event photos with minimal text. As a rule of thumb, less than 20% of the image should contain text.

Also, Facebook says you shouldn’t include contact information like a URL, email address, or phone number in the event image.

Now let’s look at what makes a good Facebook event header:

• Unique, eye-catching image. Attract the attention of people who may not even be aware of your company.

• Supports your brand. Use images with similar color schemes, fonts, and your logo. It should be recognizable as you.

• Event details. Add the date, time, venue, and any special guests.

• Clarity. Help Facebook users instantly understand what the event is about.

Have a recurring event? Make a template image that you can easily edit with updated details of the next event. If you’re going it alone without a design team, Canva can be your sidekick in content creation. Canva makes it easy to craft a single Facebook event image or create a template to use over and over again.

Now that you’ve got an image, it’s time to add it to your event. If you’re not already an admin to the event on Facebook, you’ll need to ask someone who is to make you an event host.

Then follow these simple steps:

You can’t edit the size of your uploaded photo. But you can reposition the picture if it doesn’t exactly meet the specs.

Want to step it up a notch? Use a video in the banner for your Facebook event. Facebook recommends videos between 30 seconds and 5 minutes.

Don’t forget: You can also add photos and videos to the event page itself. Let your guests add them for that crowdsourced, community feeling by adding them as co-hosts.

Once you’ve added it, there are four main places where the event banner will show up for Facebook users and invitees. These are:

• The Facebook Newsfeed. On desktop this displays as 470 x 174 pixels and on mobile as 560 x 208 pixels.

• Main event page. Right there at the top.

• Upcoming events. The image will be displayed as a thumbnail.

• Suggested Events. If your event is public, it’ll appear to other Facebook users as a thumbnail.

So choose a high-quality photo that’ll look amazing at different resolutions and sizes—on both desktop and mobile.

If you plan to use Facebook events as a key part of your social media marketing strategy, then you need a photo that hooks your audience immediately, clearly communicates your brand, and sells an honest expectation of the event you’re throwing.

Get it right, and you’ve taken your first small step towards a successful event.

There’s a good chance you heard “AI will revolutionize marketing” at some point over the past year. Whether you agree or roll your eyes at this statement, AI is changing how marketing teams operate.

A 2023 study by The Conference Board found that 82% of marketers believe AI will improve their productivity. And as marketing budgets are being slashed left and right, working smarter and faster is more valuable than ever. 

AI has arrived to drastically cut down the amount of time needed to write and design marketing forms. Plus, it can help analyze them. Here’s how.

One of AI’s top benefits lies in its ability to help you be more efficient, especially when it comes to creating marketing forms. Instead of starting from scratch or using a template, generative AI will create a brand-new form tailored to your use case in a few seconds. 

Most AI form builders will have you answer a few prompts to help it generate your form. Gone are the days of struggling to decide which template to use, or which questions, in which order, should be included in your survey. You’ll save time and leave with a more organized survey. 

Typeform makes it easy to use AI in this way. To begin, you’ll explain what kind of form you want to create. This could be anything from an event registration form to a customer experience survey. 

Imagine you’re running a skincare brand and want to figure out which customers really love your products. You could easily set up a custom Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to send out.

Once you’ve told the AI what type of form you’re creating, you can tell it to add specific questions. This gives the AI an idea of what approach you want to take with the form. 

Last, provide some information about your company, such as your products or target audience. The more specific you get, the closer AI will be to generating the form you want. With a few quick edits, the form should be in perfect shape.

The completed form includes the specific questions you want to ask. In most cases, you’ll also find that the AI has generated additional questions based on the information you provided about your company, products, and survey use case:

Then, publish the form and send it to your customers. Voilà, you’ve saved hours of work!

Marketing forms should match your brand identity. But changing colors, picking fonts, and uploading images slows down the form-building process. AI can pull all of your brand assets from your website for you and generate templates that match your visual identity.

With AI, you’ll get all of the benefits of maintaining your brand identity with a lot less effort. Your marketing forms will have a consistent and cohesive design so people can easily remember and recognize your brand.

Maintaining your visual identity also builds trust. When you go to Target, you expect to see red shopping carts and their familiar bullseye logo. If you saw green carts and a different logo, you’d wonder if you were in the right place, right? In the same vein, a customer would get suspicious if they opened a nondescript form without any of the elements they associate with your brand.

Need an easy way to spruce up the language in your forms? Generative AI will help, whether that means simplifying complex sentences or crafting punchier phrases that leave an impression.

When you aren’t a wordsmith, it’s time-consuming to write a marketing form. And even when you spend hours poring over the right word choices, you still might not be happy with the result. 

With AI, it’s easier to revamp your language. And it takes just a few clicks.

Typeform’s AI can take a complex sentence, such as “Sign up to get access to one of our free trials,” and simplify it for clarity into “Sign up for a free trial.” The AI-generated version is easier to read, which is key to building marketing forms that perform better.

AI also helps when you’re stuck on coming up with answer options. It generates ideas that you may have missed or forgotten. And even if it doesn’t generate the perfect answer choices, it’ll spark an idea that helps you find the right ones.

From startups to enterprises, companies use AI to glean insights from huge amounts of data—petabytes, not terabytes. AI can do the same with your form data.

AI will discover any patterns or anomalies through an in-depth data analysis. For example, it can detect that respondents in a specific age group are more likely to be interested in one of your products.  

Even better, it’ll generate a description of its findings—so you’ll be able to easily understand what’s going on at a glance and share the findings with your team.

Almost 70% of marketers lack data-driven recommendations to help them outperform their peers. With AI insights, such recommendations are possible without investing hours in data analysis. Instead, you’ll have more time to think of strategies to improve your form performance.

Reach new customers with AI translations. Your forms will instantly be accessible in multiple languages.

When buying a new product, 65% of consumers prefer website content in their language, even if the content is poor quality. Since AI translation is far from unreliable, it’ll give your marketing forms a big advantage in reach.

Multilingual forms gather more data from varied markets, improving decision-making in marketing and product development. When you support multiple languages, you also build better customer relationships by showing you value accessibility.

AI saves time on lead qualification by automatically assigning leads to a specific category, such as “priority.”

When a lead fills out a form, AI uses their answers to qualify them. Then, it guides the lead to the most appropriate action, such as requesting a demo or booking a meeting.

Typeform’s AI allows you to create a lead qualification form in just a few short steps. First, you provide your company details, including a description of your ideal customer. 

The AI will generate an ideal customer profile (ICP) that you can customize.

The AI will generate questions and answers for you to review. It also assigns scores to each answer so it knows which answers indicate high-priority leads.

Review the scores to make sure they qualify leads correctly.

Automating lead qualification allows you to create a different form journey for each customer category. High-priority leads could get extra questions or a follow-up email, saving time and engaging them at the right moment.

AI isn’t the only trend that’s transforming marketing. Third-party cookies are also on their way out. And marketers need to quickly find a way to collect more customer data using alternate sources, such as marketing forms.

With Typeform’s AI capabilities,creating beautiful, functional forms is effortless. Plus, you’ll have a concise, on-brand forms in a fraction of the time it takes to build them from scratch. Sign up to get started.

GIFS have evolved from their humble beginnings back in 1987 as an internet oddity into everyone’s favorite photo format (yes, it’s a photo format!). They’re the perfect solution for communicating an emotion or the feeling of the moment. And for those with the GIF obsession, having the right GIFs on hand for the perfect response comes down to knowing where to find the best GIFs.

Here are 6 places to find the best GIFs on the Internet. No amateur web designs or blogs that haven’t been updated since 2006. These are the best GIFs that keep on giving (and better yet, they’re free and unblocked).

It’s the obvious choice, and it’s easy to see why. GIPHY came onto the scene in 2013 with an exceedingly clear and simple mission: to be the “Google for GIFs”. It’s fair to say there’s no better place to start your GIF search—they serve up over 10 billion GIFs daily. And it gets better. GIPHY is great for integrating with all the big messaging apps, so rest assured you can insert the exact perfect GIF into any conversation with colleagues, family, or that one group chat that just won’t fizzle out.

But there’s more to finding GIFs than flicking through GIPHY, right?

If you’ve ever found yourself wishing you had a GIF keyboard, Tenor is here for you. Originally called, “Riffsy”, Tenor is now GIPHY’s biggest competitor. Honestly, they’re quite similar—their search functions work the same, and their layouts are almost identical.

But there is one key difference—the GIFs. Just try it out and you’ll see. Type the same word into GIPHY and Tenor, then hit those search buttons. The results are surprisingly diverse.

Here’s an example:

Look at all those pugs staring at you in unison. Chilling yet effective. Now let’s move on.

Subreddits like /gifs and /reactiongifs are the place to find a response to anything. Yes, anything. Plus, it’s the go-to resource for discovering new and trending GIFs. You’ll find funny, informative, and wildly creative GIFs.

With Imgur you can grab your GIFs straight from the source. They’re like a GIF library, where other sites borrow from their database. Anyone can upload, and there are some genuine gems you won’t find anywhere else. Be prepared to do some digging, though. But one thing to note, it’s not a dedicated GIF site, so you’ll need to add “GIF” to your search inquiry. And, the thumbnails don’t move, but we can get over it.

It’s sort of a given that Google is where folks go to search for an image. But did you know you can search for a GIF, too? Simply select the “animated” filter and you’ll be scrolling GIFs from all corners of the web.

If you’re surprised to see Pinterest in this round-up, you aren’t alone. While we lean on Pinterest for ideas for dinner and home decor, GIFs are a surprising revelation. Search for any reaction or occasion and add “GIF” to find one that suits the mood. One small drawback—the thumbnails in search results don’t move.

True, there’s a ton of other GIF websites around. But they’re not as user-friendly.

So if you can’t find the GIF you’re looking for with the suggestions above, chances are you’ll have to make it yourself.

With all the survey-building tools out there, it’s important to choose the right one. How can you know what the right choice will be? Looking at Typeform vs. Outgrow, both tools can create forms, surveys, polls, and more for a variety of use cases. 

If you need a high level of interactivity, Outgrow might be a better choice because you can create a chatbot. However, Outgrow has a lot of restrictions on the types of questions and projects you can create based on your plan.

If you want more flexibility in what you create and how you design it, then Typeform has what you’re looking for. Unlike Outgrow, you can completely customize your layout and use templates, even with our free plan. There are also no restrictions on the type of project you can create, so you can let your creativity run wild.

Hang around to see how these two tools compare, covering the differences between their design, data, features, integrations, support, and overall value.

Outgrow allows you to gather more responses with its starter plan, but there’s no free trial. You’ll also need multiple account upgrades to access most of the advanced features and create more projects. While there’s a seven-day free trial, there’s no free plan on Outgrow.

Typeform limits responses depending on your plan, but you can create unlimited projects. You can also access nearly all the features and design capabilities of the tool on any Typeform plan. Even on Typeform’s free plan, you can create personalized experiences to help your business thrive.

Let’s dive deeper into how these tools perform.

Outgrow and Typeform offer different support options based on your plan. With Outgrow, Freelancer and Freelancer Pro plans only have access to live chat and self-help resources. Essential plans gain access to email support, and Business plans gain access to email and phone support.

With Typeform, all plans have access to email, learning forums, and self-help documents. Typeform’s Plus, Business, and Enterprise plans unlock live chat support, and email requests from Business and Enterprise plans get prioritized.

These two tools are similar in their overall offerings, though they offer different types of support to different account levels. If you prefer live chat support, then you might go with Outgrow. If you prefer email support where you can keep a thread going, then you might prefer Typeform.

Outgrow has a seven-day free trial before you can choose a plan, starting at $22 per month for its Freelancer plan. However, many features are restricted, and if you want full access to the tool, it’ll run you at least $600 per month with its Business plan. In addition to limited features, you can only create five projects with the Outgrow Freelancer plan.

Typeform has a free plan option. Paid plans start at $25 per month and are billed based on responses, so you can create as many projects as you’d like. Some features are limited to paid plans, like accepting payments or allowing respondents to upload documents. But even free plans can take advantage of all question types, templates, and Formless, our AI helper, to create a well-designed survey.

Does your marketing team have shiny object syndrome? It’s a common diagnosis in today’s marketing landscape, where new technologies pop up constantly, making it hard for you to focus your efforts.

According to a recent KORTX survey, 40% of digital marketers have difficulty keeping up with trends. Sure, keeping tabs on how your industry is evolving is important. However, prioritizing exploration of all the latest trends can often divert attention and resources away from established strategies that you already know work well. 

A recent report by Vital showed that generating leads was by far, the biggest challenge reported by the marketing professionals they surveyed. Keeping up with the latest trends also landed in the top 10. 

So, how can you balance innovating and experimenting to improve lead-generation efforts while continuing to hit your targets? The trick is to identify what’s already working and then look at new and exciting trends within that already successful channel.

Let’s look at five fresh spins you can take on already proven lead-generation strategies to experiment responsibly in 2024.  

Research by Conductor found that customers are 131% more likely to buy from companies immediately after engaging with educational content. When asked to choose between four brands, 83.6% chose the company offering educational content.

With gated content like educational courses, it’s also about quality and value. Is the content meaningful enough for prospects to warrant taking a few minutes to fill out a form and give you their contact information? Educational content often receives positive responses from customers for several reasons:   

• It helps build trust: When a company shares knowledge and expertise through educational content, it establishes itself as an authority in its field. According to this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer, 66% of people trust “company technical experts” to tell them the truth about innovations and technologies, third behind only scientists and peers. 

• It empowers: Educational content gives customers the tools and knowledge they need to make better-informed decisions. It also provides valuable information and insights that customers can apply to their lives or work. It helps them understand complex concepts, solve problems, or learn new skills.

• It builds relationships: By offering value beyond the product or service, businesses can differentiate themselves as not just companies but partners in learning and growth, helping build stronger relationships and fostering loyalty.

• It promotes long-term engagement: Educational content has a longer shelf life than purely promotional material. Customers are more likely to return to educational resources for reference or to learn more, leading to sustained engagement.

Courses are the perfect type of educational content to try out in 2024. Unlike other gated educational content you might have used in the past (research reports, industry trend reports, ebooks, podcasts), courses are highly interactive. Customers aren’t just consuming the content; they are participating in it. 

Recent research by Mediafly found that companies that leveraged interactive content saw a 94% higher increase in content views than those that only used static content. 

Courses also provide a great opportunity to get feedback from customers you know are willing to engage with you. Use surveys to ask them what they thought about the course, what they found most valuable, and what they’d like to learn next. These answers can provide useful insights into customer pain points that can help further refine your lead-generation efforts. 

Quizzes are one of the most irresistible types of interactive content. They appeal to people’s curiosity and their innate desire to learn more about themselves and their interests. They also offer individuals a chance to gain insights into their traits, preferences, and behaviors in a fun and casual way. 

Mediafly’s research found that interactive content sees 52.6% more engagement than static content, and it’s hard to find content that’s more interactive than quizzes.

Here’s an example of how you can combine a quiz and educational content for a lead-generation strategy that’s bursting with interactivity: 

Say you’re a software company that offers project management tools. Create a quiz titled “What’s Your Project Management Style?” asking questions to assess the user’s approach to project management, such as their preferred work style, communication preferences, and organizational skills.

Upon completing the quiz, users are provided with a customized result that categorizes them into different project management styles, such as “The Planner,” “The Collaborator,” or “The Innovator.” Users can then be routed to a custom landing page with resources about how your software helps them maximize their working style.

You can use many types of lead-generation quizzes for various purposes, including engagement, data collection, segmentation, lead qualification, and nurturing—let your imagination go wild when creating and testing them. 

The statistics backing customer preference for video content are hard to deny. According to Wyzowl’s research: 

• 91% say they watch explainer videos to learn about products or services

• 82% have been convinced to buy a product/service by watching a video

• 89% want to see more videos from brands 

• 87% say video quality impacts their trust in a company

Semrush found that 45% of marketers believe video is their best-performing content, and 30% of marketers who don’t use short-form video told Hubspot they’d start using it in 2024.

While marketers already know how great video is, you can double down on video as a lead-gen tool by incorporating interactivity.

With compelling video content, you can capture the attention of potential leads, engage them effectively, and drive them toward conversion. You can also showcase products or services, educate audiences on industry trends and best practices, provide demonstrations and tutorials, or share customer testimonials and success stories with video. 

You can even create videos with built-in forms to create interactive video conversations. Record and upload videos with questions, prompts, or instructions, allowing customers to provide video or text responses. This interactive format enables businesses to gather feedback, conduct surveys, capture leads, or provide customer support in a more engaging and personalized way. 

According to recent Salesforce research, 53% of marketers view generative AI as a “game-changer,” and 51% already use or experiment with it at work. The research also notes that marketers believe that generative AI saves more than five hours of work per week by eliminating busy work and allowing them to concentrate on more strategic work. 

AI solutions have already been integrated into almost every marketing tool to automate repetitive tasks, provide insights, and optimize marketing strategies. AI algorithms can analyze lead data and behavior patterns to score leads based on their likelihood to convert. You can also use AI-powered predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs and preferences.

AI also enables personalized marketing and lead nurturing campaigns, collecting and analyzing customer data and behavior to deliver targeted content and offers. You can also use AI to create automated outreach campaigns tailored to different segments of your target audience.

Generative AI is also great for brainstorming and ideation, helping you create email campaigns, messaging, and even survey questions when you need help to spark your creativity.  

Zendesk research uncovered that two-thirds of consumers are more likely to become repeat customers if they have the impression that a business cares about their emotional state. One of the best ways to inject emotional insights into your lead-generation activities is to use sentiment analysis tools.

Running on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, these tools can analyze customer conversations and determine their sentiment, categorizing interactions as positive, negative, or even neutral based on the language used.

Customer sentiment analysis uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data that you can collect through:

• Sending feedback surveys with questions gauging customers’ satisfaction, preferences, and experiences.

• Monitoring social media platforms to track mentions, comments, and conversations about their brand or products. 

• Collecting online reviews to understand customers’ experiences and satisfaction levels.

You can use customer sentiment to identify common pain points or challenges that potential customers are experiencing. By understanding customer frustrations or concerns, you can tailor lead-generation efforts to offer solutions that resonate with customer needs.

Analyzing sentiment lets you identify key messaging elements that evoke positive emotions and highlight them in your campaigns. Similarly, businesses can alleviate doubts and build trust with potential customers by addressing negative sentiment or concerns.

Sentiment analysis can also steer product development by providing data on how customers react to new and old features and services. You can use it to identify signals such as enthusiasm, interest, or dissatisfaction, helping you tailor your offerings based on things they’ve reacted positively to.

Sentiment analysis enables you to understand how current and potential customers feel about you and your product, helping you identify areas for improvement, act on them, and track changes over time.

If you’re unsure where to start innovating lead-generation efforts, templates are an evergreen, tried-and-tested way to get your creative juices flowing.