How to Do Tracking Surveys: A Step-by-Step Example

If you want to get a deeper understanding of your customers, one of the best tools that you can utilise is tracking surveys. Because a tracking survey allows you to check how much your respondents' answers have changed across a certain time period, you will get a better understanding of how your business and products are performing in the eyes of the people that matter: your customers.

Although the process of setting up a tracking survey may feel daunting, once you’ve made the effort, you can easily get it up and running at any time. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do tracking surveys.

In this scenario, we’ll use the example of conducting a tracking survey for the purpose of investigating "how much a new product has penetrated the market".

The new product is "Toner A", and the customer target group has the following profile:

• Women in their late 20s who are particular about organic products
• People who are sensitive to beauty trends, and want to keep their skin youthful
   

So, why is this tracking survey being done in the first place? Well, Toner A is supposed to be marketed primarily through online channels, yet, sales are not as expected. Therefore, in order to find out how much this toner has penetrated the market, we’re going to conduct a tracking survey using SNS.

In this survey, we will compare the degree of recognition with Toner A while displaying the competing products and Toner A on the questionnaire.

Conduct a tracking survey and
confirm the number of people in each stage

To check where the survey respondents are at each brand awareness stage, we have set the tracking survey questions as follows:

The options provided for the above questions will include both Toner A and competing products. By doing this, we are comparing the degree of recognition between the competing products with Toner A.

For example, if there is a large number of people who are unable to name Toner A in the survey results, it can be concluded that "Toner A is not recognized by customers in the first place", which means that the chosen marketing channel may not be effective in reaching the target customers.

The above survey uses questions that can be asked many times to identify brand awareness, so it can be used repeatedly in tracking surveys. In this way, tracking surveys will be more useful to you by creating questions that can effectively utilize the results in your marketing strategy, no matter how many times you ask the same questions.

Check the relevant responses and
determine the next step to take

After receiving the first survey results, we can launch the following marketing measures based on what we discover the problem to be:

• I don't even know the product name: Increase exposure due to lack of awareness
• I'm not interested: Review the advertising points because the appeal of the product is not conveyed
• Do not consider purchasing: Identify the reasons for consideration in an ad hoc survey
• Currently pending: Check if differentiation is inadequate, switching costs are high, or both

When you run the survey multiple times—hence, it is a tracking survey—you can see whether your marketing efforts have succeeded in changing your customer’s responses. By the next yield of survey results, it’s possible that your current problem (lacking awareness of the product) has already been remedied, or you may need to change your marketing initiatives again.

Summary

Tracking surveys require a time and resources commitment from your business—but if you’re willing to put in the effort, you can gain a lot more insight than you do in a one-time survey.