Often, marketing and sales people tear out their hair trying to figure out what customers and prospects are thinking.
- Are they coming to a show?
- Are they thinking about purchasing at the show?
- Did they like last year’s show? How far did they travel?
- What do they look for in a booth?
So here’s a radical idea: Ask them.
Survey tools today are cheap, simple to implement, and sophisticated enough to gather some incredibly helpful information. There’s a really helpful article at idealware.org that outlines some of tools available to you that are free or cheap. The article also outlines a few features to look for:
Pretty much any good online survey tool will allow you to easily define your survey questions and the possible responses using an online interface, and then send your constituents a link to answer the survey online. But some offer more sophisticated functionality that can be very handy when you’re planning anything more than the simplest survey. What types of features might be useful?
- Flexible survey look and feel. A survey that has prominent branding for a survey tool rather than for your organization can be off-putting to your constituents and decrease response rate. A package that allows you to update colors, and font, and header graphics can help you match a survey to your website or organizational branding.
- Skip logic. As you design more complex surveys, it’s often useful to let respondents skip a whole section of questions that don’t apply to them. Survey skip logic allows you to define, for instance, that those who answer “no” to question 10 should skip to question 15.
- Piping. Piping allows you to pull answers from one part of a survey into another. For instance, if someone says in one question that they live in New York City, you can then ask them in a follow-up, “What’s the best thing about living in New York City” – filling in the name of the city from the previous question. More sophisticated packages allow you to combine skip logic and piping to customize surveys even further.
- Randomization. The order of a set of questions, or the set of answers to a given question, can often affect survey responses and thus the quality of your data. Features that automatically randomize the order of particular questions or answers will help avoid this issue.
- Website integration. While many of these packages create surveys in their own web page, some allow you to embed them into your existing website. This can be a particularly useful way to do quick, one-question surveys (called polls), or to gather opinions from web visitors in a longer survey.
- Data analysis. One of the primary differentiators between inexpensive packages and their more expensive brethren is their ability to help you to analyze the data and understand the meaning behind the results. Most packages provide simple reports summarizing the answers to each question, and many will let you download them into Excel or another tool for futher analysis. More advanced packages allow you to cross-tabulation to see the data relationships between different sets of questions, or to do complex statistical analysis.
Keep in mind that no software package can do the design work to ensure your survey will collect effective, high quality data. While it’s easy to slap together a set of questions, designing a survey that will capture the data you need in a rigorous way is complicated, and you’ll likely benefit from consulting someone who has experience with survey design.
The article goes on to give an overview of some of todays more popular free and cheap survey sites. You can (and should) read it here: Link
For tradeshows, it would be good to survey before and after a show with the before coming far enough ahead that you can still plan toward the results. While this kind of survey may not give you a totally clear picture, it can be effective in making decisions about booth design, position and even which tradeshows to attend.
The Rogers Company provides effective marketing solutions necessary for a successful trade show, event or branded environment. Visit our site to learn more about our array of client services including marketing consultation and planning.