marketing, market-researchI recently graduated college and finally decided to pursue an idea I’ve had for awhile. I created a survey in Google and have been using my friends and their friends as my pool of respondents. I’m looking for at least 100 responses, but so far, my contacts have only yielded about 30 responses. I’ve looked into some of the paid survey resources online, such as Google surveys and SurveyMonkey, but I really don’t have a lot of money to pay people.
What can I do, with little to no budget, to find more participants for my survey?
Two words: follow up. Your friends, and their friends, mean well, but they’re busy. So an invitation, a friendly reminder, a progress update, a request for help - everything you can do to nudge without getting spammy will tip your responses up a little. 30 responses is a good start, and you can probably get near or past your 100 target. If people are positive but don’t follow through, call them and fill their responses in for them.
However, it’s possible that your survey itself is the problem. Have you made it too long? Is it confusing? Have you made it clear whether it’s named or anonymous? Have you spelled out a “no spam” promise?
So first, go through your survey super carefully, and be critical. It might be worth breaking it up into a one page, 1-3 question form that is asking people whether they’re willing to help, and then another that goes just to people who respond positively.
There are plenty of other ways to get surveys out there, further out into your social networks. So invest a little more time with the first target group, both to push the responses up and to refine the survey to reduce attrition between good intentions and completion. Then take the improved survey out via LinkedIn, Twitter and the rest. You’ll get there.
There are many places that you can advertise with no charge. What places would actually yield you results of course depends on what the idea is. Facebook groups, forums, LinkedIn groups all may be ideal. You should make sure that posting advertising/advertising type posts would not be against the TOC/forum/group rules especially since in some places that is a banning offense.
Those same places are also great for getting deeper involvement/knowledge/networking with your target audience and or fellow businesses which can lead to benefits.
That depends largely on your target audience, which if you haven't already chosen you need to do so ASAP. HERE is an article about what target audiences are on wikipedia. and HERES another that talks about focusing on and finding your target audience.
Short man's version, you need to get a group of people and focus on them. Lets say, for example, that your target audience is male college aged students. Then you automatically have a way of getting ahold of them. Go to a campus, talk to them, ask them for a moment of their time, and buy them a doughnut. If your target audience is stay at home moms, go outside a daycare with candy for their kids. (just try not to be too creepy there)
The fact of the matter is, there is only so much you can do with an online survey, its great that your family and friends are helping, but get out of the house! go find your people and ask them what they want. Maybe you have multiple target audiences, then go out and ask both of them. If you want results, you will have to make them by being fearless, and forward (but not overbearing) to get what you need.
You may offer your respondents something useful (incentive) in return for participating in the survey.
Two obvious things, which you could give them are
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