Product Positioning Blog by Artem Chetverykov, Product Marketing Consultant

How to Run Effective B2B Surveys for Under $500

Many marketers focus on 1:1 interviews for discovery or survey existing users with low response rates. They skip prospect surveys – and that’s a mistake! ❌

Initial customer interviews give hypotheses, not scaled insights. 📊 Pain points and preferences vary.

You need to stack rank learnings to identify the best customer profile for your product. 🎯

Prospect surveys answer key questions and test hypotheses in product positioning and product messaging. But they take forever and cost a fortune! 💸 And getting responses is hard. 😫

Here’s the good news – with SurveyMonkey you can run cheap, effective prospect surveys fast using: 👉 Target Audience – Buy responses from their massive, targeted panels 👉 Screeners – Weed out irrelevant people The trick is to use both in combination to get the best price for the respondents. 💰

Let’s look at an example. I’ve needed to understand what is the best possible audience and its characteristics for a B2B SaaS interviewing tool.

I built a short 5 questions survey (you can go up to 8 without it significantly impacting the price) including a screener question: 🗒️ “I have interviewed for jobs in product management, marketing or sales within the past year” With this question, I knocked out everyone not in my target audience. 🗑️ Remember that SurveyMonkey will charge only for completed responses not for screened-out responders. But SurveyMonkey will charge more if your incidence rate (the percentage of individuals who qualify to take your survey) is too low. You want to keep your incidence rate at around 50-75% no less and to get there you need to select proper targeting criteria. 🎯

There are all kinds of targeting criteria, you can reach exactly the person you need – e.g. director of marketing at an AI startup, living in Austin, with all kinds of demographics, and so on, but you will end up paying $25 per response and your survey is going to cost a pretty penny. 💸

I tried to think creatively about which filter in combination with my screener is most likely going to deliver that audience at 50% incidence or more. As I needed to survey those who regularly interview for white-collar jobs I selected a higher education filter 4-year college and Graduate degree. 🎓

In the end, I got 160 responses for $330 and an incident rate of 75% with a margin of error of 8% which is good for making most decisions. ✅

The final tip – do not include demographics, location, age, sex, etc. Those are included for free and you can access those in the raw survey data. 🆓

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