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Episode 232 - What You Can Learn from a Business Survey (+ How to Run One) - final
353 Plays3 months ago
Want to run a business survey? Listen in to learn why we surveyed our audience, what we learned, and how we’re using the results.
Would you rather watch a video tutorial? Links, resources and the full video can be found in the show notes. Check ’em out at https://daveyandkrista.com/what-learn-from-business-survey/. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
Grab your free font pairing guide at canva.daveyandkrista.com.
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Transcript
Episode Introduction & Audience Survey Impact
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, so in today's episode, I am going to be talking you through the survey that we recently sent our audience and what we asked, why we asked it, and what we're doing with the answers to those questions to impact our business.
Introduction to 'The Brands That Book Show'
00:00:14
Speaker
You're listening to The Brands That Book Show, a podcast for creative entrepreneurs who want practical tips and strategies to build engaging brands and craft high converting websites. We're your hosts, Davey and Krista, co-founders of a brand and website design agency specializing in visual brand design and show it websites.
Listener Gift: Canva Guide for Brand Design
00:00:33
Speaker
You're listening to The Brands That Book Show.
00:00:37
Speaker
I'm going to get to the episode in a second, but first I want to give you a gift just to thank you for being here with me today and listening to this episode. so If I learned anything in design school, it's that choosing the right fonts can make or break a design. and If you don't have a set of brand fonts to work with or you want to test out a few new fonts to elevate your online presence, I put together a free Canva guide that lets you actually copy and paste my exact settings into your own projects. so I did the hard work of figuring out the combinations for you and which serifs and sans serifs works together so that you can spend less time sweating your latest set of social media graphics and more time doing what you love. Grab your free copy of the guide at canva.dabianchrista.com. And now, onto the episode.
Enhancing Copywriting Skills with Ashlyn Quarters
00:01:16
Speaker
Okay, so let me start with the backstory here. So, we recently, as in earlier this year, enrolled in our friend Ashlyn Quarters' Copywriting for Creatives course. I got it after watching her webinar and being blown away, and I thought that it would be great for one of our new copywriters on our team to go through it to up her copywriting skills for the content that we are creating for our website and ourselves. But as I started to look through the content, I was like, ooh, I need to go through this. This content is so good. um Holy cow, guys. It's been a game teacher. I knew Ashlyn was smart. I've known her for a long time ever since she first stepped into this creative world. um But I didn't realize how intentional she was with all of her copywriting and the way that she runs her business.
Purpose & Insights from Audience Survey
00:02:00
Speaker
And so I really enjoyed going through her course.
00:02:03
Speaker
um So one of the things that she has you do as you're working through your brand identity and your brand messaging is to survey your audience. And there are a lot of different ways that you can do it, but one of the ways that we chose to do it was to send out a survey. It's like a type form survey to our audience via email and through social media. And our business is making some major shifts this year as we change some of our product offerings, we relaunch our website.
Business Changes & Davey's New Role
00:02:29
Speaker
And Davey has also taken on another role as CEO of Bedou. I'll share more a little bit more about that soon. So he's created, so while he's still involved in the business, he's not as involved as he used to be for the content creation. And a lot of that is falling on me and this other team member. So another reason why I wanted to go through her course and really dialing my messaging skills because I, have design skills. I can identify a font from like a mile away, like the actual typeface of the font. um But as far as messaging, I never never felt like I'm as strong of a writer as I am a visual designer. So it's been really good for me too to go through all of this. Anyway.
00:03:07
Speaker
So the survey, we sent it out to our audience using a type forum forum, and it walks them through a series of questions that help us learn more about what people have bought from us, how they interact with us, what they enjoy from us, what they want to hear more of, and I'm just going to talk you through some of the questions. And I'll be honest, I was really nervous about sending this out and getting answers because you never know what people are going to say. And outside of a few outliers who shall not be named, I think that the overwhelming majority of content that came back was like a warm hug.
Key Survey Questions & Audience Insights
00:03:40
Speaker
I know that's cheesy, but it just felt really encouraging and reassuring that we
00:03:47
Speaker
that we're on the right track as far as our brand goes and that we just need to keep doing a lot more of what we've been doing and just make slight tweaks. So if you filled out our survey, thank you. like it really I truly read every single response and it was really fun to read. Okay, so I'm going to dive into some of the questions and what I'm doing with these questions and why I asked them. so The first thing I asked people was, do you have a business? If so, what do you do? And so this one is pretty obvious. We just wanted a better handle on who is actually following us. When you first started our business, we were mostly targeting photographers and all of our templates were photographer specific. But over time, our audience has really broadened and we serve a um a lot of different types of business owners. We have resources for designers as well. And so I wanted to kind of get a general sense of
00:04:34
Speaker
how many people are in each group. So we found that our audience is kind of broken down evenly between photographers, designers, and then like various other business owners. And this is gonna help us figure out what kind of products to create for these different audiences, as well as what kind of content to create for the different niches. The second thing we asked them was where are they on their business journey? Are they in the dreaming phase? Are they building but not full time yet? Are they full time but they want to grow their business more? Or are they just like crushing it and looking to scale their business? Because again, this helps us figure out.
00:05:08
Speaker
who we're trying to reach and what kind of content is going to speak to them best. Because somebody in the beginning phases of their business is going to need entirely different content than somebody who's trying to grow their mailing list and scale their business. So we kind of wanted to get a sense of where people are within our community. And this isn't something that we typically know. So it was really fun to see the answers to this. We also asked people three brands they enjoy buying from or following from. um I loved reading through these because I love looking at brands and learning about new brands. And I also wanted to look for any like commonalities between the brands that people mentioned. There were a few outliers here that I didn't think really
00:05:46
Speaker
ah Yeah, really didn't resonate with like our ideal client, but um overall, it was fun to look at the kinds of brands they're inspired by and look at those brands' messaging and visuals and and think about how we can tweak our messaging and our visuals to speak more to those clients, especially the ones that are our like perfect ideal client. The next question we asked them was about who which personalities or businesses or blogs, magazines, authors they enjoy learning from. And we asked this to help us figure out who we could possibly network with for like PR opportunities, like cross promotions. And then from like a personal, I love to learn experience, it was just fun to see who everybody else is looking at. Somebody mentioned Oprah and I was like,
00:06:35
Speaker
dream. Like one day Oprah will do a cross promotion or work with Oprah in some way. That would be really cool. And then we asked people if we could wave a magic wand a la Hermione, who's my favorite Harry Potter character, and make your problem go away in your business, which one would it be? And this question, I'm really glad that we asked it because it gave me a lot of ideas for different content that we can create on our blog or a podcast or YouTube channel um to help answer people's questions and help them run better businesses. And so a lot of times we're trying to think of what kind of content do people want to know about? What do they want to learn from us? And answer act and asking this question gave us a lot of answers and um we're kind of like
00:07:16
Speaker
have content ideas for the next six months because of this question. So that was a fun
Product Requests & Marketing Strategies
00:07:20
Speaker
one to ask. The other thing that this question does is it helps us think about what kind of messaging we should be using to speak to these problems and how maybe our products can help solve these problems on our product pages and our sales pages. The next thing that we asked was what are three words that you would use to describe the Dave and Krista brand. I really enjoyed reading through this one and looking for commonalities and just trying to figure out if the messages for like visual messages and like written and verbal messages that we are conveying are ones that we want to convey. There's a lot of reassurance in here and also a few surprises. I'm just gonna say that. All right, next question. Are there any products you would like to see us add to our shop lineup?
00:08:02
Speaker
So this is where we ask people for any specific product requests. And we're probably not going to use every single product that came in. Some of them were very specific to very for two specific niches. And I don't know that if we were to put the time into creating that product, if enough of them would sell or if they would be repurposed enough for different industries, if that makes sense. And I'm also just kind of careful not to over clutter our shop with tons of products because I think that it dilutes the high quality, stronger products. So some of the ones that people answered I think are really good ideas. I think I saw a lot of commonalities in some of them and I'm going to probably work on creating those products. um And again, this is just an interesting thing to see what people requested of us.
00:08:45
Speaker
Oh, another thing that I learned from this one is that there are a few requests for products that we literally already have in our shop. And so that's just stood a reminder to me that we need to do a better job of marketing those specific products as well as the wealth of products that we already have. And so maybe we need to do that in some instances instead of focusing on always creating new products. So if you do your own survey and you ask that question, you might also learn the same result. Then we ask people what made them choose our business. And so We only ask these people who actually chose our business to work with us or um buy something from us. And this is an interesting question to ask because it tells us what we're doing right and the messaging that we are conveying and we'll probably double down on some of that messaging and different aspects of our website or our product sales pages. all I'm going to put kind of two questions together here because they kind of have the same thought. um Were there questions you need answers to but couldn't find any? and When comparing options, what were you looking for? Here we wanted to know if there were things that people were unsure about before they booked us, bought from us, etc. I'm going to call these like messaging gaps.
00:09:47
Speaker
We were trying to figure out are there things that people had questions to about our products or us or our offerings or um maybe the platforms that we build on that they either had to message us to ask or that they they just didn't even ask. They had to kind of figure out on their own because we want to make sure that we have the answers to those questions on the pages where we're selling
Effective Survey Techniques & Tips
00:10:07
Speaker
the products. Okay, so that is the bulk of the questions that we asked. A lot of the other questions that we had in there were kind of variations on this or elaborations. And before I close up this video, I want to share a few tips for conducting your own survey. um So first tip is to offer some sort of reward and to conduct the survey within a set time period. So we gave people about a week and a half to complete the survey. We reminded them a couple of times in the emails that we were sending throughout the week
00:10:35
Speaker
to fill out the survey, and then we had a special like reward um that we gave away five $100 Visa gift cards to people who completed the survey. And so we used a random generator to generate those names, and then we gave them that gift as a thank you. Whatever you give away, it doesn't have to be like that big. It could be bigger if you want. um You could give away like a special coupon or a discount code or like credit to a shop. If you have a shop, you could give away smaller gift cards. You could give away one gift card. so It's really up to you, but I think that giving something away and putting this in a limited time encourages people to take action.
00:11:13
Speaker
I also think that it's a good idea. Point two is to make this an annual survey. and This is I think our first survey. We might have done another survey a long, long time ago, but it's been so long I can't even remember. um and I loved this survey so much that I'm probably going to do it every year now. too see how people's answers change, to see how our audience changes, um and to figure out if I'm actually closing those messaging gaps and shifting our voice and in our messaging and our visuals to communicate the things that we wanted it to communicate.
00:11:46
Speaker
All right, so point three is a big one. Don't make this any longer than it needs to be. People are busy, they have other things to do, you don't want them to sit there for an hour answering questions about your business. They're probably not gonna do it. So I think that we said ours took like 10-ish minutes and we tried to keep it moving quickly. We had some like fun little things like animated gifs, gifs, I think gifs. I'm never gonna get that right, guys, and it's been like 20 years of doing web design. um along the way and we had multiple choice questions wherever we could so that was really easy for people to select things. They didn't have to write a ton in the boxes. We had conditional like logic in our type form so that they could skip over parts that weren't applicable to them um and type form is a really great resource for that because they make that logic process so easy. So keep it fast, don't make it long and help people move through it in a way that gives them back their time.
00:12:40
Speaker
Also, shoot, I just combined points three and four into the same point, but you get it. We might just save you time. If you like this episode, it would mean the world to us if you shared it with a friend. And as always, you can find us at daveandchrista.com. Thanks for joining me.
Conclusion & Call to Action
00:13:00
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Brands of Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, and sharing this episode with others. For show notes and other resources, head on over to davianchrista.com.