“Start a blog,” the internet strategists advise. But that’s only the beginning, not the ending. Where is the content going to come from on a regular basis to keep the content fresh, and the search engines coming back? Online surveys of your customers and prospects is an easy way to generate meaningful content, not only for your corporate blog, but for the website itself.

Market surveys are nothing new, of course, but online survey tools have proliferated in recent years, and their capability and power has grown too; one can now easily arrange telephone surveys through online survey services.

But who to survey, and what to survey them on? The annual best-practices benchmarking survey of your existing customer base is a good place to start. Offer participants a chance to see aggregate survey results to entice them to participate. The questions, obviously, will be particular to your product or industry, but try to keep it short enough that people will actually respond, and follow best-practices for surveys (no leading questions, no push-poll surveys, etc.) to produce results that are meaningful and useful, for yourself, and participants.

General market research surveys can produce useful content too. When designing surveys, give some thought to which questions can be used to generate public facing content in addition to guiding internal direction or strategy. Much of what you learn will be useful to customers and prospects, and it doesn’t mean you have to give away the jewels of your dataset. (And anyway, success is about strategy execution, not keeping your strategy secret.)

To build depth in the information you gather, think about how to screen participants in an initial, qualifying, survey, and identify those participants who self-identify or otherwise qualify for a longer in-depth survey. Look for criteria to identify willing participants in those longer surveys, and participants likely to have the answers to your questions.

Also look to how you can implement a cycle of surveys – plan for annual benchmarking surveys to actually take place annually. Create a calendar on which you can plot surveys on a quarterly basis. (Or some manageable periodicity.)

Content creation can be a slog, but with some planning and forethought, and the latest in online survey tools, it can be made a little easier.
David on Google+