How to analyse and prioritise your online survey results

Do you know who your target audience is and how you can help them?
Do you know which content they really engage with?

These answers lie in chatting to your audience and finding out what they really really want (or don't!) Feedback from users is a gift, you may not always want to hear what they have to say, but it will help you fine-tune your offerings and grow your business. 

Knowing your audience is a vital part of any small business. If you get it wrong, then you'll quickly lose customers. If you get it right, then you'll have people flocking to your site to buy your product or service because they simply can't live without it.

“But I have so many ideas, I don’t know where to start!”

If you're like me, then your problem is having too many ideas and you don't know which ones to focus on first and which ones to leave on the back burner for the time being. I decided to share my online survey results with you, so you can see just how to analyse and then prioritise them.

Last week I sent out an online survey to my email list, a couple of Facebook groups and to my Instagram account. I was in search of a few bits of information to really help me answer these key questions:

- Who is my audience?
- What are their pain points?
- What content do they find most appealing?

When you ask questions like these, then writing your survey becomes easy and focused. Remember to keep it simple. Ask no more than 10 questions in your survey and keep it focused around a couple of ideas.

It's always good to capture demographic data about your users. Demographics are characteristics about a population. They can include gender, age, education level, marital status, occupation, religion and income level. For my survey, I wanted to validate gender and age. First, knowing that my audience is predominantly female means:

• my branding, logo, and colours are more feminine, which will appeal to my audience

• I can focus on more female-related content

• I can integrate more yoga content (as I know yoga is currently a predominantly female practice)

• as a woman, my audience will relate to me more

The next question I was looking to answer was how do I choose which ideas to focus on first and how will I know what works and what doesn't?

 I have collected many different skills, tools, tips and tricks over the years and I needed to make sense of which to focus on first and which to drop for the time being and perhaps to go back to later. Also, I wanted to make sure that the ideas I love, my audience will love, too. So what did I ask? 

I gave the audience a selection of topics and asked them to rate them in order of importance to their business.
This is the outcome:

Of the 15 or so possible topics, I pulled out the top 6, as they mapped most closely to my list of skills and tools.
Next, I mapped all of those skills and tools onto this chart to see where they mapped to.

As you can see, the top answer from my audience is "Knowing your target audience" and under that, the tools and skills I can provide and teach include user research, surveys, creating personas, and user testing, amongst other things. And, you'll see that I also have ideas in all of the other areas. This chart allows me to prioritise all of my content and also to target one area first. The result being that I focus on "Knowing your target audience" and one of the tools is an online survey. You'll also notice that "Creating engaging content" rates quite high, and the tool I'm using is sharing my own work as an example. 

My final question shows me which content types my audience finds most appealing, so I can focus on providing more of those. Visual images (both video and photos) are the clear leaders. Since videos take a bit longer to produce, I'll make sure great imagery is used. I'll focus some content around success stories, and I can also create downloadable worksheets to teach my audience how to do the same. And one method of consistent delivery are weekly newsletters. 

So my strategy quickly became clear: 

• surveys become the focus of my next newsletter

• I use my online survey output as my content to talk about

• create engaging images to support it

• create a video tutorial, along with a downloadable worksheet that will form course content 

• create a success story blog post on how to interpret survey results, based on my own examples

If you'd like to learn more, then sign up for my weekly newsletter where I'll share inspiration that I now know is most appealing to you.

Got any questions or comments, then post a message in the comments below.

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