Content Preferences Survey Template 🚀 Survicate

Content preferences survey template FAQ

What is a content preferences survey?

You're well familiar with content marketing trends. Yet, you're not sure if your audience preferences reflect those trends. Content creation takes time, and you'd like to be sure you produce content that yields results - it generates traffic and converts leads.

The content preferences survey we've created helps you enhance your SEO research and your knowledge of trends with direct feedback from your target audience. It enables you to validate your hypotheses about what formats and frequencies work best with your audience.

Tweak the content preferences survey template above according to your needs. Use the opportunity to send the survey to enhance your personas research.

Why use the content preferences survey?

Sending a content preferences survey lets you back up your assumptions on how your personas consume content with their feedback.

It helps you cut the time needed to develop content marketing strategies and arms you with initial data to validate.

By asking your audience about their preferences first, you avoid the risk of having your marketing team spend hours creating content formats the audience is not interested in. It also helps you choose the right content distribution channels and optimize your lead generation and nurturing processes.

Finally, the content preferences survey responses can inspire your SEO research. Make sure you include open-ended questions - the answers can open a treasure trove of new keywords.

What questions do I ask in a content preferences survey?

The questions you'll ask in your content preferences survey will be related to your goals. Here are some example questions that can help you brainstorm yours:

"How much time a month do you spend learning more subjects related to your work?"

This question is a good starting point. Make it close-ended and include a negative answer that sounds neutral.

For example:

"Unfortunately, I don't learn as much as I'd like to. I'm really tied up."

Try to make it sound like it's ok not to learn 🧐🤷🏻‍♀️ Otherwise, you risk the respondents will want to cover up they don't learn, and you'll end up with skewed results.

"Where do you go for information?"

By asking this question, you want to gauge the preferred sources of information, which will tell you a lot about content formats.

By making the question close-ended, you'll help respondents answer.

Remember to allow the respondents to select "Other" so that they can answer the question in a way you have not anticipated. You may find out things that surprise you. :)

"What content formats are the most convenient for you?"

If you went for the question above and the answers you proposed suggest content formats, skip this question.

"How often do you watch webinars related to your work?"

We suggest asking this question if you have a strong intuition that your audience participates in webinars. Ask about another content format if you think it makes more sense.

"How long should a webinar be, according to you?"

Again - swap the content format if it's more logical given your knowledge of the audience.

"How often do you read work-related blogs?"

With this question, you assume respondents read blogs. As with the first question, make sure your let respondents answer negatively in a way that doesn't make them feel guilty about not reading.

Also, feel free to dig deep: Ask about how the respondents read blogs. Find out if they use text-to-speech readers. Do they like to have blog posts delivered (to their inboxes), or do they prefer to google?

"Do you ever interact with newsletters?"

Ask the question if you consider sending out a newsletter.

"What is your favorite source of information? (Tell us the name of the website / the publisher / the content creator.)"

This should be an open-ended question you may want to ask early in the questionnaire. Don't narrow the choice. Instead, let them tell you their top-of-the-mind publisher. The answer to this question will also help you conclude the content format.

"Who do you think does the best job educating and why? "

This question is a variation of the one above. Feel free to choose the one that you prefer.

PRO TIP:

Survicate records the survey responses in real-time. So, you'll see those that have been given even if a research participant has dropped out without pressing the "Submit" button. Thanks to this feature, you can worry less about having too long a survey.

However, be strategic about the order of the survey questions. Remember to ask the most critical questions at the beginning of the survey so that you get the most vital answers even if respondents drop out halfway through the survey.

You'll find some of the questions in the content preferences survey template above. Feel free to check it out, modify it according to your needs, and give the survey a go. (No strings are attached.)

How to use Survicate’s content preferences survey template?

Setting up your content preferences campaign is a pretty straightforward process:

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1. Sign up.

Upon clicking the "Send this survey for free" button ', you'll be asked to sign up. There are no strings attached, so feel free to sign up using your business email.

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2. Customize and configure.

Once you sign up, the system takes you directly to the content preferences template.

Feel free to edit and customize it to your needs: Add or delete questions and make them relevant to a given respondent by applying skip-logic. See if the tone of the survey questions is suitable for your audience. If needed, tweak it to align it with your brand's voice.

If you're going to distribute the questionnaire among your customers, we recommend customizing the survey to make it look on brand. The tool makes it easy to change colors and backgrounds. You can also add the company logo.

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3. Get ready to distribute.

Now, decide which survey distribution channel you will use and what sample size is big enough. As to the latter - allow for the fact that not everyone will choose to participate in your content preferences survey.

As far as survey distribution goes, you can either create a website survey to ask your website visitors about their content preferences. Or select a 3rd party tool of your choice to email it with a marketing automation tool like ActiveCampaign or GetResponse. Alternatively, send it with the CRM you use.

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PRO TIP:

If you email the content preferences survey, we recommend you generate the survey code and embed it in the email body instead of sending it as a link. By doing so, you'll increase the survey response rates.

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RECOMMENDED READING:

To learn how to increase website surveys' response rate, check out: Pop-Up Surveys: Everything You Need to Know

To learn how to increase survey completion rates, read: How to Get Survey Completion Rate of Over 80% (A Real Study)

‍Survicate integrates with communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. If you want to have the responses dripping in directly to your company communicators, add the platform while you're configuring the survey.

It's an optional step we recommend doing. It'll make feedback collection an integral part of your team's workflow.

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4. Distribute and analyze results.

Send the survey and start analyzing the results. Survicate lets you access survey responses while a survey is still rolling. To see them, go to the tool's panel or have them delivered directly to your company's communication app.

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5. Act on feedback.

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Survicate's customers find the feedback collection tool powerful and hassle-free.

‍Give the template a try and improve your content at every stage of the funnel.