ABM TacticsSales Enablement

How Can You Use Surveys to Generate More B2B Leads?

Asking how to get more B2B leads from using surveys seems vital in today’s marketplace. Yet, this idea begs the question of why anyone would use surveys in the first place. The reason is simple: a survey of your target audience can give your company insights you can’t get anywhere else. It can yield actionable data that informs your business decisions.

Understanding the Importance of Surveys in B2B Marketing

Surveys are instruments that enable companies to gather significant responses from would-be customers. In the realm of B2B, they fulfill a number of important roles:

They help you to know your customers and prospects better, and their kinds of tools or services they do business with and the kinds of business problems they have with them and otherwise.
They assist with market research to help you to understand better the size, scope, and characteristics of your target market.
They can drive your content marketing program by surfacing valuable intelligence on the kinds of problems, challenges, or opportunities that your customers and prospects face.

Determining customer pain points: Surveys assist in indicating precise predicaments that possible clients are encountered with.

Assessing brand recognition: This is about understanding the workings of your brand in the minds of the people whom you have targeted as your ideal consumers. It’s about knowing how well they know you; better yet, it’s about knowing how well you know them and then using that knowledge to inform marketing strategies.

Understanding customer preferences: Information gleaned from surveys can inform not just product development, but also the creation of marketing campaigns.

As per a SurveyMonkey report, the organizations that make it a practice to connect with their customers through surveys have a customer satisfaction rate that is 20% higher than the norm. Those customers are much more likely to recommend us to other folks. That’s much more common than if we were just sitting around, waiting for our customers to tell us what they think.

How Can You Use Surveys to Generate More B2B Leads?

Here are several strategies you can employ for effective surveying that leads to generating new sales opportunities:

Include polls in your content marketing: Poll visitors to your site on your content marketing medium of choice, be it a blog, eBook, or webinar, to make them feel more personally involved in your business.
Use incentives: Provide a discount or exclusive access to elicit participation in your surveys.
Break your audience down into segments: Make your surveys relevant to different sections of your audience, and they will yield much better insights.

For example, a company of medium size in the software sector might use pointed surveys to gain a clearer understanding of certain industries. From this, they could better customize their marketing to draw in prospects in the sectors that they think hold the most growth potential.

Best Practices for Using Surveys in Lead Generation

To ensure your surveys are as effective as they can be, follow these best practices:

Surveys that are long bring down the rate of people who complete them. They also bring down the rate of good completion, which is to say, the rate of people who complete them in a way that makes the resulting data useful. I think it is safe to say that.”Surveys that are long reduce the rate of people who complete them, and bring down the rate of good completion, too.”

Inquire using open-ended questions: These can yield qualitative insights that closed questions might overlook.

Before launch, test your survey: Use a small segment of your target audience to conduct a preliminary test of the survey, assessing whether the questions make sense and are on point.

A study that the American Marketing Association did found that 70% of the people who they asked to be in the study said they would probably finish a survey in which they would be asked to give their input that took less than five minutes. So, when you ask someone to be in a survey, if you can keep it short and make them feel good about their chance of being a lead, you’re better off. Because that’s going to give you some data to work with.

Integrating Surveys with Your CRM and Marketing Automation Tools

To enhance your lead generation even more, combine survey data with your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools. This combination makes possible:

Improved lead scoring: Evaluate survey answers to enhance lead scoring models.
Marketing messages tailored to individuals: Create “one-to-one” communication strategies using insights obtained from surveys.
Follow-up automation: Actively nurture leads who respond to your surveys by automatically attending to them until they are converted to sales or until they drop off. This is a mostly set-it-and-forget-it function. You can make it brainless and also tailor it to your leads. Here’s how.

For instance, users of HubSpot who took advantage of the built-in surveys saw a 30% uplift in their lead engagement rates. Further, automating follow-up emails contingent on survey results ensured that the leads were getting the accurate info they needed and when they needed it.

Real-World Examples of Successful Survey Usage

Many organizations have found success in using surveys to generate leads. Here are a few examples:

SurveyMonkey
HubSpot
Qualtrics
Google Forms
Typeform

Experience management software such as Qualtrics used surveys to pinpoint essential market divisions. Accordingly, the business customized its products and enhanced the quality of its sales leads.

Salesforce: The company systematically polls its customers about what they like and don’t like. As a result, their offerings have consistently improved. And that, in turn, has led to a 15% increase in targeted lead generation.

These instances show the way in which surveys can achieve not only data collection but also significant results in lead generation, and when I say “lead generation,” I mean that surveys can act as a pathway to prospects.

Conclusion: The Future of B2B Lead Generation through Surveys

To sum up, an effective way of producing more B2B leads is to use surveys.

B2B businesses that are able to understand their core target audience are much more likely to succeed in producing high-quality leads. The way to get there is through using surveys strategically within the marketing funnel and backend. This means not only embedding them in your marketing strategy but also leveraging the insights for audience segmentation and finding a way to integrate the data with your CRM for even more effective lead nurturing.