Online Promotion Tips: Use a Survey

Online promotion sometimes takes twists and turns.

If you are one of my Facebook friends or follow me on Twitter, then you've seen what we've been up to today to promote our teleseminar The 5 Internet Marketing Traps that Can Derail Your Business.

Yesterday, Patsi threw out the idea to do a survey with our registered participants (up to 395 right now) to find out what they believe their challenges are with online marketing.  OK, takes a bit of work, but we are keeping it simple.

Why a survey?

A survey accomplishes a few things.

1. We get a chance to connect with our community and get their feedback
2. Our community gets a chance to air their frustrations
3. We can develop a better program, product or service based on what our community really wants
4. Our community feels "heard" and we develop a better relationship with them
5. We get up-to-the-minute information about the biggest challenges facing our readers, customers and prospects
6. The responses provide excellent fodder for blogs, ezines, articles, presentations, ebooks, video tips, etc., etc.

In this case, we are using SurveyMonkey to create and manage the survey. You can use the site for free if you limit your survey to 10 questions and 100 responses. Or, you can pay $19.95 for a month and collect more responses and post more questions.

Our survey about Internet Marketing Traps is 4 questions and we're sending it out to more than 20,000 people plus posting it on all our social networking sites, so we paid the $19.95 to get more than 100 responses. I will cancel the account before the next monthly payment.

All told, it took me about 30 minutes to set it up and tweak it to have our picture and redirect people to the registration page for our teleseminar -- clever, eh?

Once the survey was set up, here's what we did (so far):

• Posted link on my Facebook profile (Patsi and Kathleen will post on their profiles too)
• Posted via Ping.fm so it would push out to all my status updates on MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn
• Sent an email broadcast to everyone who has already registered for the teleseminar
• Sent a message to Blog Squad Fan Club on Facebook
• Sent a message to everyone who has RSVP'd to the event posted on Facebook
• Posted on our blogs

Next, I'll post it to my contacts on LinkedIn. We'll also include the link in our next email promo for the program.  The more people who respond to the survey, the better the data will be. We may submit a press release about the survey as well.

By the way, we'd appreciate it if you take the survey!

What would you do? How would you get the word out about a survey in order to get maximum response?

Next week, watch how we use video tips to promote the free teleclass!

Related posts:
Online Promotion Tips: Use Twitter
Online Promotion Tips: Use Facebook
Online Promotion Tips: Go Offline with a TeleSeminar
Online Promotion Tips: How to Get the Word Out

Comments

[Reut Schwartz-Hebron]

My first time here. Followed you here from Linkedin--was impressed by what I found there and am impressed by what I find here.

Thank you for this rare gem of a blog.

Reut

[Armil]

Thank you for letting me know about about using survey for my website promotion.

[Wendy Battles]

Hi ladies,

Your timing is perfect with this post. I'm creating a survey to send to my list around obstacles to optimal health and what they most need. I love all the different ways your using technology to get the word out and it's encouraging me to think beyond the standard ways I might communicate.

By the way, how important is it to keep the survey short?

Thanks for the great ideas.

Wendy