Are you considering using an online survey to get insights from your target audience or ideal group of panelists? If so, the first step is to make sure that you have a quality audience that aligns to your survey goals and has maintained assurances that fraudulent panelists have been removed prior to receiving the survey. Defining your ideal audience is one of the most important factors that will go into seeing success with your survey results, because without a thorough screening of panelists, your survey could end up with fraudulent or low-quality data.
Here’s what you need to know about narrowing down your survey respondents and why asking thorough screening questions is so important.
Know Your Goals Before You Get Started
Before beginning the process of narrowing down your target audience, it’s important to be clear on what type of information you are trying to uncover through your survey. This will help inform which questions should be asked and how detailed they need to be. Knowing who should answer the survey and why is key in creating an effective survey experience for both you and your respondents. The more targeted and specific the question, the better insight you can gain from each answer. This process is called pre-qualification, and you can use partners to help you create a pre-qualification survey, as well as launch the survey to help you find your ideal survey audience.
Consider Demographics When Creating Survey Questions
When creating screening or demographic questions, consider location, age, gender, income level, education level, marital status etc.. These types of questions can help provide context around each individual response, which will be important when analyzing the data at a later stage and when deciding which panelists meet your survey criteria. Consider making these questions mandatory as it allows for more accurate results when segmenting responses by demographics. Additionally, consider adding in my psychographic type questions into your pre-qualification surveys, to allow you to understand more about respondent mindsets, behaviors and more.
Screening Questions are Essential in Narrowing Down Your Target Audience
Without the necessary steps to qualify your survey respondents, you risk diluting the quality of your results, and open your survey up to fraudulent actors. One thing we recommend is that you include a voice-response question in your survey to ensure participants are authenticated and prove to be who they say they are. At Voiceform, we enable surveys that feel like a conversation, letting you ask questions with video, voice or text, and letting users respond with voice, text and other traditional response types as well. Adding voice gives you more context into your user, and forces users to authenticate that they truly are who they say they are. Without it, there's a risk that those filling out your survey might not be truthful.
Leverage the power of voice to authenticate panelists, and capture a better understanding of who they are.
Narrowing down your target audience for an online survey is essential in collecting quality data that can be used to make informed decisions within any organization or business. By understanding what type of information you are trying to uncover with your survey as well as considering demographics and screening questions when creating it, you can ensure that only respondents who meet certain criteria complete it. Additionally, you’ll need to ensure your pre-qualification survey has checks and balances in place to verify users, such as voice questions. Doing this will also help streamline the process of analyzing collected data and make sure that all responses from your survey can be verified as high quality and authentic. If you’re interested in learning more about how voice-responses can elevate your prequalification survey, book a demo with Voiceform here.
