EPISODE 36 OF WHAT WOULD THEY DO? THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PODCAST FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS
NOTE: Some of the tools and resources mentioned in these shownotes could be affiliate links. That means when you click the link to create an account, start a free trial or make a purchase, it won’t cost you any more but I may receive a commission for introducing you. One thing I want to stress is that I would never recommend anything or anyone I haven’t successfully worked with myself or trust unconditionally.
In today’s episode, we’re getting into the nitty gritty of strategic audience research and the templates behind it. Specifically how to get actual insights from your surveys instead of a bunch of vague, unusable fluff.
We’re answering this listener question: “I regularly survey my audience, but I struggle to get useful answers. How can I get people to actually respond and what’s important in the process so I get the right outcomes and useful responses?”
If you’ve ever sent out a survey only to hear crickets, or received responses so surface-level they left you with more questions than answers, this episode is for you.
I walk you through the entire process I use in my own business and for my 1:1 clients inside my Intensives. From setting the right survey goals and crafting powerful questions to boosting response rates and turning data into messaging gold.
If you’re making strategic decisions based on assumptions (or you’ve been procrastinating on surveying your audience altogether), this episode will give you the roadmap you need to move forward with clarity.
What we cover:
Why strong audience research is the foundation of everything in your business
How to design surveys that give you rich, usable insights
The psychology behind what makes people actually want to respond
Why vague questions lead to vague answers, and what to ask instead
How I helped a client get over 500 strategic responses for a membership survey
The role of segmenting, branching, and user experience in survey design
How to turn survey responses into content, sales copy, and retention strategies
Soundbites:
“This framework underpins every survey I design in my business or for my client projects as part of the intensive. You don’t send out surveys just for the sake of it. And everything starts by asking yourself, what exact decision am I trying to make off the back of this? So what is the purpose of this survey? What is it trying to help us achieve? And then how do I set up the survey so I can compare different mindsets and bridge the messaging gap as a nice side effect as well.”
“Audience insights absolutely are the key to successful messaging, to a long-term successful business, to offer creation, to your customer experience, your customer retention strategies. It really is the foundation to everything you do in your business.”
😍 Love the show?
Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).
Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.
Your next steps:
Download my FREE Strategic Survey Questions here.
Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.
Grab the FREE State of the Customer online business industry report with first-hand findings, gaps & opportunities PLUS proven strategies to boost your customer experience. Download FREE here!
Join the Retention Lab 🧪, the membership for savvy online business owners determined to grow their revenue, referrals and repeat business without more marketing. Join here!
Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.
Episode Transcript:
Nadine Nethery (00:00)
Hey, hey, and welcome back to today’s episode of the podcast. We are going to dive deep into all things strategic audience research today because I am answering the following questions. I regularly survey my audience, but I struggle to get useful answers. How can I get people to actually respond and what’s important in the process so I get the right outcomes and useful responses?
What a fabulous question. So this person is hyper aware that audience research and audience insights absolutely are the key to successful messaging, to a long-term successful business, to offer creation, to your customer experience, your customer retention strategies. It really is the foundation to everything you do in your business. And…
finding you here tuning into this episode clearly means something about the episode title resonated with you and you potentially have finally sent out that survey you spent so long sitting on thinking about you send it out you wait you wait you wait and you hear nothing but crickets or you get responses that are so vague and literally give you nothing like you know I really like the program or I didn’t sign up because of
Really, those answers are no good. They don’t give you anything and they’re a big waste of time. So audience research and the process around it is such a common issue in online businesses, in businesses in general. There’s so much confusion around it. People just don’t know where to start. And many of my one-on-one intensive clients either come to me for assistance with their audience research.
as the starting point for the strategic decisions that follow. So they’ve realized that writing copy, designing offers, creating messaging, know, corrupting your customer experience really needs to come after the audience research process. Or these one-on-one intensive clients have skipped this process entirely until now, and they’ve realized that really they’re money on the table.
because they’re basing all their decisions and their offer design, their customer experience, and their strategies on their assumptions. So let’s start with the overarching question here. Why does audience research matter? I’ve hinted at it already, but to sum it all up, audience research shapes all aspects of your business and also your customer experience strategy.
Your customer research literally drives everything in your business. The offers you launch, the way you show up, the words you use in your messaging, the way you deliver your offer, the way you design the format, your retention strategies, all aspects of your business. And if you’re designing everything based on your assumptions, it’s simply not going to cut.
because you are so close to your offers and your business that what makes sense to you often will not resonate with your audience. I work regularly with customers in my intensive to help them be super strategic before they go too far down a rabbit hole. So some reach out before they even design their offer to find out what their customers actually want and need. Others reach out to fix up offers that
used to convert but no longer sell and then I help shift their offer, their messaging and their funnel and others want to use the audience insight we uncovered together to take their membership onboarding experience to another level because they know they can do so much better. So in all these cases, I strategize a super effective survey people love taking and a survey that gives us both
quantitative and qualitative data. So it gives us numbers and statistics, but also those crucial important mindset revelations. It’s not something that I throw together, just like that. There is so much thought process and planning behind this survey to make sure it does what we want it to do.
So once that survey is out there, I then analyze it all for my clients before designing messaging, the customer experience strategy, the action plan overall around what we found. If that’s something you’d be interested in, absolutely get in touch. I’m booking intensives at the moment. So let’s chat. But back on track, I want to take a closer look at the two issues at hand here. So there are two problems with surveys. Surveys.
that don’t get responses because we all know people are busy, they really have too much on their plate already, so why should they take our survey? Or it could be that surveys often feel like a chore. They receive survey requests all the time and there’s really no value proposition behind the survey, no reason for them to actually act and share their thoughts with us.
And then there are the surveys that get lackluster responses. So people actually reply, but the answers are vague, fluffy, surface level, and it’s really not good for us. how can we fix these issues? So I have, a proven approach that works for me and my clients. The last survey I did in my last intensive got 500 responses for a membership.
These aren’t all members, so we actually designed two surveys, one for members, one for non-members, to help us uncover those different mindsets. And it was designed to not only improve the retention strategy and onboarding strategy, but also to work out what members at different stages
of their member journey need to hear what types of members stay inside the membership the longest and what their mindset is. So we can then shape the sales messaging to speak particularly to those members who are perfectly primed to become long-term fans. This framework underpins every survey I design in my business or for my client projects as part of the intensive.
So everything starts with a crystal clear goal. You don’t send out surveys just for the sake of it. And everything starts by asking yourself, what exact decision am I trying to make off the back of this? So what is the purpose of this survey? What is it trying to help us achieve? Is it designed to uncover messaging gaps? Is it designed to lean in on the experience? So we can refine that and really emphasize that.
what info will genuinely move the needle for us? And then how do I set up the survey so I can compare different mindsets and bridge the messaging gap as a nice side effect as well. Next up, we need to have the right questions in the survey.
So highly recommend not using too many drop downs and tick boxes because they again lean into your assumptions, right? The options you give people are based on your assumptions. Only use drop downs and tick boxes to gather data or to help you segment people into different brackets. So the project, intensive project I was referring to before is for a craft membership. And this particular membership
is serving different types of crafters,
but also different experience levels. And we wanted to uncover the thought patterns of experienced crafters, of beginner crafters, what each of them is struggling with, what they need to hear, what they’re experiencing. So drop downs and tick boxes are great to segment people and help you stack different mindsets up against each other. But when it comes to the actual thought processes and mindset, you should…
lean towards open-ended questions. And when it comes to those open-ended questions, I like to stay clear of questions that start with why. Because why in itself implies an element of judgment, right?
So potentially reframe it to something like what made you decide to cancel rather than why did you cancel? So there are little things and little tweaks that you can make to your surveys to make them more user friendly and make them more enjoyable for people to complete. So my surveys often get feedback that they were so enjoyable to take, they were easy, they flowed because as I said, I branch survey.
questions out so they’re highly specific to their situation and experience level in the case of my previous intensive. So they’re designed to be easy to take because we want people to complete them, but they’re also highly effective. If you want a list of strategic survey questions that I use in my surveys, then I have a list of
survey questions that you can swipe and use them as a starting point for your own survey. Obviously, have a look at what works for you and what fits in the context of your survey. But yeah, they’re strategic, they work and they can be a perfect starting point to spark your own survey journey. So hit up the link in the show notes.
So we’ve already established the survey needs to start with a clear goal in mind. It needs to have great questions and it also needs to be irresistible for people to answer. I usually encourage my clients to add an incentive or a reward for taking the survey because we’re all selfish by nature. Humans, unfortunately, need often external motivation to take action.
So what we usually do is run a competition among anyone who responds to the survey with meaningful responses. So that’s always a caveat. We’ve definitely mentioned that the responses need to be meaningful and valuable to go into the drawing. And it’s totally optional. So people can complete the survey anonymously, but the vast majority of people obviously wants to win the prize and then leave their name and email address.
And things that we’ve used previously in client projects is a gift voucher for their favorite online store. For example, it could be a gift voucher or credit towards courses and products they sell in their businesses, or it could even be a donation to the charity of their choice close to their heart. Also, make sure you keep the survey short and sweet I usually recommend 10 questions max.
Don’t just throw a whole bunch of questions at people. Make sure the 10 questions you answer are the most valuable to you. And then very important as well, while there is an incentive, you also want to set the expectations and tell people right from the get-go, ideally in the email you send inviting people, that it’ll take them roughly five minutes of their time just to be crystal clear and remove that barrier as well.
And then once you have all these amazing survey responses flowing in, You want to maximize those survey findings. Actually set aside time to go through the survey. So I have experimented with ChatGPT helping me go through the survey findings and while it can pick up certain trends,
It is pure gold for you to actually read through the responses and pick up some of the phrases, some of the wording your audience is using because as much as chat GPT can pick up trends, chat GPT doesn’t understand the intricacies you are looking for in those responses. So take the time, look through the responses and then what I do is organize them into buckets. around desires, pain points, objections, false beliefs.
All those things. And if you were clever and segmented those survey responses into experience level when it comes to crafters or how long they’ve been inside the membership, whether they have ever been a member or not, whether they have purchased from you before or not, whether they have attended your summit or not, then that absolutely allows you to have a look at those points of difference, any messaging gaps you might have to fill.
and it’s pure gold because you can use this bucket list as inspiration for your content plan where you tap into objections to address them in a social media post. It can be inspiration for podcast episodes. It is pure gold because it keeps giving and it speaks to the core of your audience. Your audience told you that’s what they’re struggling with.
Your audience told you that’s what they’re dreaming about. So speaking to those things shows you genuinely know them, you care and you want to help them get those results.
I would absolutely love you to head to the show now, grab that list of survey questions, they are pure gold, they’re free and then once you’ve downloaded that list, ask yourself what do I need my audience survey to reveal
and then make note of the questions you are going to include in your survey, design it and actually send it out because having those first hand customer insights is going to be invaluable for everything you are going to plan for the rest of the year, but also 2026, the year ahead.
If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, subscribe, leave a review, everything helps to get the show in front of even more
driven business owners. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will see you next week.
