How to identify and reach the right audience while conducting a survey

A survey target audience is vital as it ensures that your results are accurate and align with your goals. How well you know your audience will come in handy while identifying them. In this blog, we’ll look at identifying your audience, segmenting them, the need for a sample and some tips to keep in mind while reaching out.

Identifying your target audience

The first step towards reaching your audience is defining who they are. This allows you to make accurate assumptions about their behaviour and needs and ask only relevant questions. It also ensures that only people interested in your product are surveyed and only responses with actionable insights are considered.

Suppose you’re testing the market’s acceptance of a subscription-based robot vacuuming service. Your target audience is more likely to be young professionals short of time and money living in shared accommodations or small apartments. Reaching out to well-settled families who likely own vacuum cleaners may not yield any new insights.

However, if you know little about the behavior or lifestyle of your intended audience, you could try something different. In this case, casting a wide net and polling an audience across geography, demographics, and the like might help you identify your audience better.

Looking at existing research in industries, studying the competition, and defining who your audience isn’t are all ways to find your target audience.

Segmenting your audience

Once you’ve identified your audience, the next step is whittling it down. To do this, you’d create a segment in the contacts management section in most CRM or survey software. Segmentation is breaking down your audience into smaller groups based on common characteristics. For our robotic vacuum service, segmenting by geography will help gather insights into market readiness.

Segments can also be created according to demographics, the customer’s place in the funnel or purchase intention, product usage and any parameter you can think of. There may be many ways to slice and dice your audience. Look for the one that gets you the best answers.

An assortment of shapes and colors segmented by shape and color

 

Calculating the sample size

The sample size refers to the ideal number of users or customers you need to reach out to for a successful survey. Calculating the sample size allows you to reach out to a fraction of the overall population. Sample sizes come in handy when the overall audience is large. Reaching out to the sample is better because it saves time and still yields accurate results.

There are many ways to calculate your sample size. Learn more and check out our companion blog on the topic here.

Reaching out to your audience

You’re now ready to reach out to your sample target audience. Using survey software that automatically ends the survey when the required number of responses are collected is what we recommend.

Additionally, ensure that your customers respond accurately. Here are our top tips to improve your response rate:

  • Include screening questions or customer segmentation to ensure only relevant responses are collected. 
    • Include questions to check if the respondents are paying attention. Filter out the ones who’ve answered this question incorrectly.
  • The questions you ask should ideally measure distinct parameters.
    • E.g., a question asking if customers felt they overpaid for a product and following it up later with a Likert scale ranking the product on value for money are both asking the same question.
  • Avoid survey fatigue, where your audience becomes tired and stops answering accurately.
    • Limit the number of questions you ask to a manageable number
    • Filter out customers who you’ve contacted recently

Read our in-depth piece on survey best practices to learn more.