Many marketers would agree that superior content marketing that creates high quality Content is no easy feat. There are many hours, blood, sweat and tears that go into the planning and execution of months of content and not to mention, a lot of questions that need to be answered. Who exactly is viewing your content? What is their perception of it? Is your content influencing the decisions they made?
…And the list goes on.
As you may recall from your high school Statistics class, the best way to answer these questions is to conduct surveys. As a content marketer, you always want to make sure your content is attracting the ideal customer, positioning the brand the way you intend and creating quality results. A great way to collect surveys is through YouTube polls.. You may even think of finding ways to buy YouTube likes in an attempt to reach more poll-takers.
Developing survey questions that support these three objectives can give you a lot of valuable insight, which you can use to adjust your content accordingly. The key, however, is to learn how to accurately analyze the results of a survey before making decisions based on its data. Even the most perfectly designed survey is useless if you relay incorrect perceptions of results to the stakeholders. Truly understanding your results is what makes the difference between good content marketing and superior content marketing.
Now before you jump in to analyze results, remember that asking the right questions is just as important. The type of questions you include will determine how you analyze them. You can find tips on how to write good survey questions here.
See the Big Picture
The first step in interpreting survey results is to take an overall look at your data. Consider questions such as; How many people participated in the survey? What was the response rate? What was the average time respondents spent completing the survey and how well do these people represent your target audience? This will help in determining how valuable your data is to begin with and identify if there are any potential biases skewing the results.
Focus on Large Differences
When you take a first look at your results, don’t get swept up by the small details, no matter how unusual they are. Prioritize the large differences in data first and try to identify trends. Also, you want to remain skeptical of your results until you have conducted your survey multiple times. This will help you get a feel for what is considered “normal” and identify defective questions. If you get very different responses for the same question each time, it’s safe to say that question is an unreliable indicator.
Choose the Correct Visual Representation of Data
As a rule of thumb, you want to represent your data in the form of graphs rather than tables. Visual representation of data is much easier to interpret and can help make sense of large data with many factors. Tables are more useful when you need to focus on precise numbers, but graphs take huge chunks of data and simplify them.
Don’t Get Stuck on Your Hypothesis
If you design an impeccable survey, get the results back and notice the responses do not reflect what you had expected, don’t panic! Most people refuse to believe things that are contrary to their expectations but it is important to refine and re-conduct your survey multiple times until you’ve confirmed the findings are legitimate. Do they reflect poor brand perception? No worries, this may just be a blessing in disguise. The truth is sometimes ugly but it’s better to find it and take care of it sooner rather than later