Create a Survey & Landing Page

[00:00:00]
>> In my experience, try to pick a topic that you can support by numbers. So people love it when you say things in a report like, 22% of respondents have never done usability testing on their website, right? That kind of insights people really like. So don't pick a subject that's so wooly that it wouldn't enable that kind of analysis.

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Again, I'm gonna get into exactly how to do the report, so don't overly worry. So once you've done that initial contact and you're beginning to get a sense of, okay, I wanna write a report on this kinda subject and I want it to cover these kinds of things.

[00:00:41]
Then you can get into preparing to send a survey, right? Why a survey, right? Why are we asking people to complete a survey? Well, there's several reasons. First of all, it's gonna give us valuable content for the report, cuz as I've already said, writing a report is quite intimidating.

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But if you've got a survey and you can just reference things that have been said in the survey, means a lot less work on you, makes the whole thing a lot easier. Secondly, and probably more importantly, it's an opportunity to contact people again and go, hey, don't forget I exist and I'm interested in your sector.

[00:01:21]
It's also really good for understanding your audience, right? What is it they want? What is it they care about? So let's talk about creating that survey, right? So we know roughly what we wanna write about. We know who we wanna reach out to. What do we wanna ask in that survey, all right?

[00:01:40]
First thing, it can't take more than 5 to 7 minutes to complete. I reckon around 20 questions is about right, okay? Too few and it looks like you're not really trying, too many and people don't complete it. So by far the majority of those questions should be multi-choice questions, all right?

[00:02:04]
That will, A, it makes it a lot easier for people to complete, and they can do it faster and they don't have to think so much about it, and B, it makes your data analysis much easier. So doing things like, 22% of people said this, you can see it instantly without having to do a lot of digging.

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With any survey, it's always good practice to start with a really easy question, right? The reason being is that once people start something, they're more likely to finish it. So ask them a no-brainer question or so something like, how big is the company you work for or something like that.

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Or alternatively, ask them a question which you know they're gonna have a really strong opinion about, right? A question like, is your department adequately funded, right? Cuz they're all instantly going, of course it's not. And it's a bit of a wasted question, but it's a good one at getting them engaged.

[00:03:11]
Right, so, at the end of the survey, you wanna ask, would you be willing to be interviewed, right, cuz I'd love to chat with you. Now this, the people that say yes to this are invaluable, right? So I had one agency who who did this and they sent out their survey, bless them.

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But not agency, it was a freelancer, right? Freelancer sent out the survey and he picked a very niche market. But even so, it should have worked. He unfortunately only got three replies to the survey, right? He was gutted. Yet one of those replies said, you can contact me.

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And so he gave him a ring and had a chat with them, and it led to six months worth of work for him. So if anybody who says they're willing to be interviewed, take them up on it, really invaluable, often that can turn into work. So it's a really good one.

[00:04:12]
And then at the end as well, it's worth offering that site review thing that I said. Now, the site review only needs to be very lightweight. It just basically needs to be, well, the one that I do because I do usability, I basically spend 20 minutes looking around the site, recording me live with Loom, saying this isn't so good, that's great, that's wonderful, no, I don't like that, basically.

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And I send that to them. If you work in something like performance, you just could run it through some of the tools that are out there that enable you to do it. Keep it very, very lightweight. Don't spend a long time doing it. But people really appreciate personal feedback on their particular website.

[00:05:00]
So offer that if they want it as a thank you for completing the survey. In terms of creating a survey, I happen to use an app called Forms.app, because it's easy to embed it in my website, and it's not easy to customize. But really, it's up to you, you can use anything you want.

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I wouldn't use Google Forms because they look damn ugly and we wanna integrate it into a landing page, and yes, I would avoid that. But other than that, you're okay. So what specifically to ask in your in your survey with those caveats in mind. So really you're after questions that provide insights into the audience, and what they're interested in.

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Or particularly who they are and how they kinda fit into the broader structure. So a common question that I ask is, who does your web team report into? Because what you're after, right, I know that there are certain things that people within organizations want to know about how other organizations do it.

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Does that make sense? So one of them for example is, are we reporting to IT? I don't think that works very well, is that common? So if my report can say, only 23% of people reporting to IT, then that's valuable to them. So it's questions about information that your audience are interested in knowing and allows them to compare themselves to others.

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Questions that address the audience's pain point in some way. So a typical one would be, do you have a dedicated budget? Because a lot of teams don't have a dedicated budget. They're at the whim of senior management. So that might be those kinds of pain point questions, good to ask.

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Questions about the company's make up is quite useful, mainly to allow you to segment your results afterwards. So what do I mean by that? So for example, you could say 23% of companies with less than 100 employees do this, while 53% of companies with over 100 employees do this.

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So asking them a little bit about their company and what its structure is is worthwhile. And then questions relating to your area of expertise or the services you offer. So when was the last time you did a performance audit? Do you run ongoing conversion rate optimization? Do you have a design system for managing your front-end code?

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Things like that. So you've decided on your 20 questions. You've got the additional at the end of, would you be willing to do an interview, do you want this free site review? Now, we've gotta send that, we've gotta get that to our audience, but what we're gonna do first is we're gonna create a landing page to go with that survey, right?

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So we're gonna embed the survey in a landing page. Now in terms of what that landing page is gonna cover, it's gonna explain the offering. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, we're gonna start that landing page by clearly explaining what they get if they complete the survey.

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So something like, for five minutes of your time, you will get insider insights into charity fundraising by getting our free report for your participation, something along those lines. We'll also emphasize the benefits of completing the survey, or more specifically, the benefits of the final report that will come out of the survey.

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Benefits could include an awareness of the competitive landscape, evidence to support your requests to management, and insights into areas of innovation. So it's not necessarily the detail of what the report is gonna cover but how it's gonna help people. It'll help me get my manager to agree to give us a dedicated budget, for example, that kinda thing.

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Then there's the scope. So landing page will say what the final report is gonna cover. And that will be broadly based on the kinds of questions that you're asking in the survey. You don't need to get into too much details. So you've got a bit of flexibility later.

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And then finally a little bit, this is where you can just now begin to introduce the idea of you and your expertise and your services. You can say a little bit about why your company is undertaking this research, all right, and your experience in the sector. So it's all very, very gentle, all right?

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What's the phrase? Slowly slowly catchy monkey, which I never really did understand that phrase or where it came from or what it means, but apparently, the idea of going slow. Why you'd wanna catch a monkey, don't get it. So, in terms of designing the landing page, look, basically, if you are a designer, then you're gonna wanna design it yourself cuz you wanna showcase the work you do.

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But really, for anybody else, you can just use a tool like Leadpage, Pages.net, there's an ample of these kinda landing page creator tools out there where you just pick a template, you can pop your stuff in there. Try not to write reams of content, try and break it down into nice content blocks that make it easy to scan.

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You don't need to say a lot, but you do need to say a little bit. Use lots of lists and icons if possible to make it more scannable. And don't repeat yourself too much or overstate things. And then have that obvious call to action start the survey, right?

[00:11:00]
So we've got a little landing page in place, don't spend too long on it, but have it there with your survey in it. Either embedded actually in the page or linked from it, whatever's easiest.