Unlocking Audience Insights: Crafting the Perfect Survey for Your Podcast

So last week we talked about getting mentally prepared to do a survey and today we're actually talking about what questions should we ask and how can we enable people to take it.

Because I'm kind of worried I'm going to put the survey out and nobody's going to click on the button or whatever it takes.

And so today we're going to talk about questions and we're going to talk about steps you can take to make a survey that people actually want to click on.

Shocking.

It starts with knowing your audience.

I know that's kind of a broken record around here, but also, if you've never done a survey and you don't want to do a survey, I would love to hear from you.

And there's no shame in it.

I'm just trying to understand.

Hit it, ladies.

The school of Podcasting with Dave Jackson.

Podcasting since 2005, I am your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson.

Thanking you so much for tuning in.

If you're new to the show, this is why I helped you plan, launch and grow your podcast.

My website is School of Podcasting dot com.

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And last week we talked about, hey, are you really ready to accept feedback?

And we talked about that.

You have to accept feedback if you're going to be successful.

That starts with knowing who your audience is and knowing what they want and giving it to them, while at the same time knowing what you need to get out of your podcast.

So what we're going to talk about today is actually shaping a survey.

And so the one thing I want to point out here, if you have never done an audience survey and you don't plan on doing one, I would love to hear from you.

Not to go, how dare you.

I would just, I don't understand that mentality.

So I'm always open to hearing another person's point of view.

And so if you're like, oh, this is about surveys, I'm out.

Okay, and you're never going to do one.

Just send me a quick note, go out to schoolofpodcasting.com contact and leave me a note.

And so let's hop into this, shall we?

The first thing you have to do, and I'll throw this in.

Now, if you're like, dave, you sound like you're sick.

Yeah, I am.

It's great.

I have Covid.

Mmm.

Just like mom used to make.

But here's the thing.

When you're planning your survey, as does everything with your podcast, a good relationship with your audience is the foundation of increasing the response rate, meaning how many people actually take your survey.

We've got some tips on that today, because I realize some people might go, I don't do surveys because I'm convinced nobody's going to fill one out.

And so we're going to talk about that.

And so you want to start off your survey with an opening paragraph.

Now, this should be short.

You're going to hear this a lot.

Keep your survey short.

The longer you make it, the more people are going to click on your button and go, ugh, I'm not doing that.

But your opening paragraph should explain how they, the audience, how they are going to benefit.

Because who doesn't want to benefit?

And so it's a beautiful thing to go, hey, I'm doing this show for you, and I'd like to make it better, but I can't make it better if I don't know what you want.

And so using sentences such as, you know it would help us out, you know it would help me out, can increase your response rate of up to 18%.

Because not only do people want to benefit, people want to be heard.

And when you're saying, hey, I'm willing to listen to you and consume your ideas.

So all you have to do is click here and fill out a few questions.

Now, how many questions?

Well, I went out to two different sites and when I googled, this one was called Pointer Pro and the other one was called Survicate.

And both of these are kind of high end survey companies.

And so they had these different, you know, blog posts about how to get people to open up your survey.

So I'll have a link to that out in the show notes, just go to school of podcasting.com962.

And so they say generally surveys that have more than 15 questions are considered too long.

And your completion rate.

So this is there's completion rate, and then there are how many people started?

So we want them to start how many people respond and then how many people actually complete it.

And so they go, when you go more than 15 questions, it kind of turns into too long, didn't complete.

And so they say in their experience, if you don't have a prior commitment, meaning you don't have a previous relationship with people, you can get everything you need from your respondents in a maximum of 10 questions.

Therefore, we recommend shortening your survey as much as possible and removing all unnecessary questions.

I saw this in everything I researched.

Make it as short as you can to get the information you need.

So you need to know the information you need.

So things like demographics and how much money do you make and demographics, things like that that you might need if the goal is advertising, but if the goal is more about content, is this working for you?

Then maybe you don't need the demographics.

It's really up to you.

They do say, do not start with the respondents demographics because you're like, okay, let me click on this.

And they're immediately like, how much money do you make?

Are you black, white, purple?

You know, do you have any kids?

Where do you live?

That that can be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.

And they bail.

So don't start with demographics if that's something that you want.

Now, one way that you can get people to take your survey is through incentives.

And so they say, some people might even prefer to share their views rather than receive an award and say, so they say, consider making your incentive optional.

So for my survey, I'm giving you time at the school of podcasting.

But if I made it $5,000, well, yeah, I might get more people.

But they say if you make it really like this amazing incentive, then it might actually influence people to not give you any negative feedback because they want to be nice to the person who's potentially going to give them a lot of money or something like that.

So keep that in mind.

The goal is to get honest feedback a little later on.

I've got some feedback from the last episode about someone who did a survey.

And again, sometimes it doesn't take a ton of incentive to get people to do it.

If your audience is engaged, they do say that offering an incentive can actually increase your percentage of people taking the survey, 19% versus those people that don't offer an incentive being 8%.

So you know, that's a big boost.

So that might be something you want to consider and.

But sometimes it might be just branded goodies, you know, something that's around the show and especially if it's a one of a kind, that's even better.

Then again, if you make a super expensive audience, the people responding might not want to say anything negative because, well, you're going to give them a lot of money.

There's another thing.

Here's some jargon.

Let's learn survey jargon, shall we?

Skip logic.

I'm like, wasn't he a game show host?

Ladies and gentlemen, here's the host of Ding dong dang it.

Skip Logic, everyone.

But Skip Logic is where you ask them a question, and then based on what they answer, it kind of says, why did you say that?

And so that Skip Logic, if a tool you're using offers that.

And my initial reaction was like, wait a minute, that's more questions.

I thought the whole idea was to make it short.

But they say when the questions are relevant, relevant to the user, then they don't mind.

So again, it really comes down to knowing who your audience is and asking the right questions.

And it keeps the survey relevant when you do those types of things.

Another thing, whatever tool you're using, get one with a progress bar.

And what I mean by this is when you go to, you know, question two or three or five, or if there's a next page or something like that, and they can see that, wow, I'm 37% done with the survey.

That will increase the completion rate to 12% or up 12%.

Not to 12%, but up 12% versus if you didn't have a progress bar.

And actually getting people to take the survey.

I thought this was kind of amazing because we could just put a link in the show notes, click here to take the survey.

But if you add a button that says, click here to take the survey.

And this is another thing.

If we go back to that beginning where we're explaining how they are helping us, that button could say things like give input or share my opinion or contribute or have your say or your voice counts, anything.

That kind of just proves that, hey, we're listening to you.

And having a button apparently is much more enticing.

Who knows that people will actually go ahead and click that because you had a button, instead of just click here to take the survey.

And then in the same way that you start your survey.

And so the survey is going to be like they said, about 400.

Was it words or characters?

It was 400 words.

Again, keeping it short.

Hey, we thank you so much for taking this time.

You're going to start off being very grateful by filling out this survey.

Here's how you're going to benefit, right?

You're.

By filling out this survey, you're helping make the show better.

And I can tailor the content to your needs, however you want to do that.

But you want to say it is, thank you so much, and here's how you're going to benefit.

And at the end, you want to again, express lots of gratitude.

Hey, you've made it to the end of the survey.

And speaking of that, if you know it's only 10 questions or 15 questions, you might put that at the in the opening.

Hey, thanks so much for taking time to fill out this survey.

There's only 14 questions.

There's only eight questions, whatever it is.

And I really appreciate you taking the time to fill out this survey.

It's going to help me make the show so much better for you.

Well, when you get to the end of the survey, you also again, want to end by saying how absolutely thankful you are that they took the time.

Now, I read in some different places that it's good to follow up with them later, but this is where you have to be careful because if at the beginning, if you go, thank you so much, it's only, you know, 11 questions and it's going to help me make the show better.

And you will not be spammed.

I'm not selling your information.

It's up to you.

If you then later contact that person to say thank you so much, you might add a button in there.

Can I follow up with you if I have more questions?

Just think about that.

That if they're like, I don't want to get on somebody's email list and then they fill out the survey and four hours later, there you are in their inbox saying, thank you.

I'm not sure how that's going to go over.

So that's something just to think about.

And this is where we kind of go, you have to be you.

And I think it's going to depend on what they say in the survey.

So keep that in mind now for questions.

Back in the day when Tom Webster worked for Edison Research and Edison Research, if you ever have any needs for information on the podcasting space, Edison Research is a great place Tom now works for.

Sounds profitable.

And he again is still creating amazing surveys on what's going on.

And now they're getting even more granular and fine tuning.

Like they just did a survey on the true crime genre.

So it's really cool.

And Tom has been doing these surveys forever.

And so there is a free version of the Edison Research questions that you can download.

I'll put a link to that out at school of podcasting.com962 and you can download those.

But when Tom wrote the book and have you not read this book yet?

Are you kidding me?

It's called the Audience is Listening, a little book.

I always forget the timeline, the tagline you said turning around to get it off his bookcase.

Because, yeah, the audience is listening a little guy to building a big podcast links in the show notes out at school of podcasting.com962 and what Tom did was he took those questions and kind of revamped them and put them in his book.

And so what I'm going to do here is give you some of the questions.

I don't want to give you all of them because, you know, it's Tom's book.

Now if you're using pod page@podpage.com that is a great tool.

By the way, a full disclosure, I'm the head of podcasting at Pod Page, but you can go over and we've taken those questions with Tom's permission and you can go in.

There's about 19 questions.

So again, it's probably a little long to use them all, but you can go in and pick just the ones you want because again, if there are questions about what's your favorite guests and your show is a monologue that doesn't pertain.

And so here are some questions from Tom's book.

So we will start off with how often do you listen to the name of your show?

How long have you been listening to the name of your show?

How did you find and discover your show?

That is something you want to know so that you can do more of that.

How soon do you typically listen?

So again, that one for me, do I really need to know that they downloaded it?

But some people want to know, is this really your favorite show?

Do you think each episode of the show, whichever one your is, should be longer, shorter or same length and it just goes on?

These are all great questions.

Again, depending on your show, it asks you, is there anything else you would like to mention about the name of your show?

For example, things you enjoy, don't enjoy, or where we can improve.

And it goes on and on.

And again, if you want that, there are demographic questions that ask where people listen and things like that.

But you have to think about what do you need and if the goal is I want to grow the show, the number one way you grow your show is by making content that inspires people to listen to the show.

I like open ended questions.

I know when I did some research on this, they're kind of like you can burn people out, but if you don't have a ton of questions and people really see how this is going to benefit them, then they will fill this out.

Now the hard part when I read this was like, ooh.

But if you think about it all things that really help are typically not easy, right?

Podcasting Itself is not easy.

And so some things you can do is you have to make it easy.

So one of the cool things about pod page is you can just go to your website.com survey and it will take you to your current survey.

Now, if you're not on POD page, you could use something like pretty link if you're on WordPress, but make it easy for them to take your survey.

I'm kind of bummed right now.

I am using WordPress for the school of Podcasting because I need to have one website on WordPress because I still have clients that use WordPress and I have somehow behind the scenes, reDirected School of Podcasting.com survey to a page on my site.

And I've looked through pretty links.

I've looked through every plugin I have on the website.

I cannot figure out how I redirected School of Podcasting.com survey to this page.

So I just took the page that it lands on and said, here, click this button to take the survey.

So I'm actually putting.

It's like I'm requiring one extra click and that really bugs me.

But it is what it is.

This is what happens when you've been podcasting for 19 years.

You've probably did something back in 2007, and you can't remember how to go in and tweak it.

But make it easy to do that.

And then the other thing you're going to have to do is remind them.

So in the same way that if you are selling a product, you have to mention it more than once, you can't just say, hey, my book is out, and then go, well, that's weird.

Nobody's buying it.

No, you have to treat that almost like a sponsor and remind people.

And that is the same thing with surveys.

You have to say, hey, if you haven't done it already, I'm doing the survey to help us make the show better for you.

Just go to my website.com survey.

And so the question then says, well, how long do I run that?

And so again, these are two services that make surveys.

And so one is called Pointer Pro and the other one is called Survicate.

And they stated that the lowest number to make changes to your show would be 25%.

So if you get an average of 100 downloads per episode after, let's say, 30 days, you would want 25 respondents.

And that's kind of like at times, like, hmm, okay, but that's what they said.

Now you can always do you.

I don't know that I would make A lot of changes if it was only 3%, but that is a number to look for.

They also mentioned things like 50%.

That would be amazing if you do that.

But to me, 25% again.

And just keep reminding people, just, hey, thank you so much.

We're up to 10%.

Make it kind of a.

Almost like a pledge drive.

Hey, everybody, let's see the tote board.

Hey, we're up to 17%.

All right?

And then you can say, well, our goal is 25.

So if you haven't filled it out, go to my website.com survey and that will take care of that, hopefully over time and again, it's kind of up to you.

The one thing they did say in both places as I was researching this is if you make any changes to the form, only change one thing.

Because let's say you.

You make the title of the form a little different and you also change a bunch of questions, and all of a sudden you get a lot more feedback.

You don't know which thing you changed made the difference.

So if you only change one thing at a time, give it a little bit of time and go, okay, I'm gonna try this now.

And then something takes off.

You're like, oh, they didn't like this one thing here, so keep that in mind.

But I said at the beginning here that when you do surveys, it can result in great results.

And so my buddy Ray over at around the Layout Calm, it's a podcast about model trains.

And the thing about model trains is if you go over to Ray's website, there are guys that got into model trains when they were, you know, kids, and they've still.

And I mean, the amazing worlds they make in their basements and houses and garages.

And it's just amazing the.

Because they love it.

And when I say love, I mean they love it.

And so Ray sent me a note.

He said, hey, great episode last Monday.

That's the1@schoolofpodcasting.com 961.

He said, I enjoyed what you said about being willing to accept feedback and advice.

When I ran my survey, I would take a moment to mentally prepare myself before reading it, remembering that it was one person's opinion and that they took the time to share their opinion and that they truly mean well and not to read too far into what they're saying.

Yeah, they're not out to get you.

Oh, he asked for my feedback.

I'm going to tell him he's a jerk and blah, blah, blah.

And he said, ultimately, the feedback I received helped me solve an issue that I knew I already had.

And he said I was stuck in Groundhog Day with my podcast and my listeners knew it too.

And what he means by this is he was bringing people that were in a model trains and he'd kind of go over their story and it was just kind of okay.

And so their suggestions helped me shake up the format to meet not only what they wanted, but it helped me create the podcast that I wanted to.

And so when you enjoy the podcast, making it, that's a huge thing.

And when your audience loves what you're cooking, that's even better as well.

He said, I've also shifted away from looking at my numbers and have adopted the mentality of it's not how many listens to my podcast, it's who many.

Right?

It's the right people, not the number of people.

He said, I'm blessed to have such an engaged audience and I wouldn't trade it one of my listeners for 10 that are non responsive.

And so I asked him about his survey that he did because he got a huge amount of replies on his surveys.

And I said, what did you offer like a million dollars?

And he said it was win a free T shirt.

He says, I don't have any data on that, but I doubt it was that that filled know that got them like, oh, free T shirt.

I'm going to go do this.

He said, I'd like to think it had more about me asking them to help me shape the future of around the layout podcast.

And I really think that's it.

Because when I talked to Ray, his, his community is amazing.

I talked a couple weeks ago about how somebody had made this like laser wood carving thing of Ray's logo with lights in it.

And that's just not something you're going to pick up at Hobby Lobby.

It was something they made from scratch and that is huge.

If we go to George, Rob does a show called the Geologic Podcast.

It has nothing to do with geology, but George is a guy I always thought was interesting.

I listened to his show and at every 100 episodes, his audience makes the episode like they're like.

And they all just explain how great George is.

That's an engaged audience.

And he didn't ask for that.

They just surprised him.

They're like, hey, we noticed you're on episode 99.

Here's episode 100.

And so that's amazing when you have that kind of engaged audience.

Now let's talk about reality, shall we?

I did a show called Weekly Web Tools and I like doing it.

But the whole point was I wanted my audience to send in either voicemail or, you know, anything, email and let me know what tools you're using and talk a little bit about your services.

And I'm here to tell you I think I got two in about 10 years.

And the only time I ever got feedback was when I said, hey, I think I'm shutting the show down.

And then all of a sudden, everybody's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, here's some stuff.

And so I, looking back at that, I don't know if I just needed to make my call to action more succinct and let them know this is how you know you're going to get some promotion.

Don't know what the deal was.

I don't know if I had a specific landing page.

I know with POD page, you can go to, you know, your website, dot com, voicemail, and there's a button right there for them to leave it.

And some people may not want to have their voice on a podcast.

Well, then make sure there's a way they can contact you.

But that was one that always made me scratch my head.

And looking back, I'm like, well, I could have done this.

I could have done that one.

If you want to do an old radio trick, here's something you can do.

And that is have your cousin, your brother, somebody.

It's a radio trick.

And so if you're like, hey, let me know if you have any questions on such and such or blah, blah, blah, have your brother use the voicemail thing and say, hey, Dave, heard you asking for stuff, and I thought about this and blah, blah, blah.

And once they hear somebody do it, for some reason, they're like, oh, wait, is that all I have to do to get my voice on the podcast or get something read in the podcast?

And that can sometimes have them jumping in to take part.

And the reason I say this is an old radio trick is back in the 80s, you know, you'd be listening like, hey, it's Rock and Rick Allen playing the hits.

Just call the number and we'll get it on for you.

So I called up and I said, hey, can you play something from the new Judas Priest album?

And Rock and Rick said, no, but if you request lover boy, I can put that on for you.

And that's when I went, oh, they're fibbing.

That's not, you know, that's not really what's happening here.

And so, of course, I said, hey, Rock and Rick, can you play some loverboard for me?

And he was like on 96.

5.

And I was like, oh, the bubble has been broken.

Reality is not what I had thought.

But it is a radio trick that.

Because think about it, why did I do that?

Because I heard somebody do it and I'm like, oh, is that all you got to do is call and you can get on the radio?

So that might be a trick you can do.

And I know some people have said, can you just use chat, not chat, GPT11 Labs to have some AI voice?

I guess you could.

That's.

That's AI11 Labs is always a little weird.

But there's something you can do.

Trying to prime the pump.

But you also then when you're not getting an engagement, maybe sit back and go, okay, what do I need to do?

Is it easy to leave a voicemail?

Is it easy to leave an email?

Okay, great.

Do I have an easy call to action and whatever it is.

And then just tweak things.

And then I remember I used to listen to, I think it was six degrees of separation or something like that.

It was something with six degrees.

And at the end of every little spot the host would say, send me an email, whatever it was, you know, email at 6 degrees, blah blah, blah.

And then he would do this little bit.

It'd be like a minute or two.

You're like, hey, thanks so much.

Send your comments to.

And he just beat his email into your head.

And so maybe that's the tactic you need to do is just keep mentioning the way to contact you.

So there are many ways to do this, but you can just like Ray at around the layout.com get amazing feedback that can help you get your show to where it needs to be, to where people that hear it go, oh my gosh, man.

If you know anybody who is into model trains, they got to go to around the layout.com because that's kind of the goal here is to get people to tell their friends.

But you're not going to make your show any better by just going by what you want.

Now granted, you have to again know succinctly who your audience is and what they want.

And you need to know your why.

And it's by knowing that why that helps you figure out what feedback you will accept.

And maybe some feedback you go, yeah, that's not really for the show.

I don't want to be an interview show or I don't want to be this show or that show or trivia or whatever they suggest.

But that's where you can go, thank you so much.

For your feedback.

I really appreciate it.

And keep on listening just to acknowledge that they sent that in.

So with that, that is my thoughts on doing a survey.

And again, if you're a person that's like, I'm just not into surveys, Dave, I again, there.

This is no shade.

This is no judgment.

I would just love to hear why, because I don't understand that.

And I'm trying to understand that.

So I can't understand it unless you let me know.

So schoolofpodcasting.com contact and I am running a survey.

So if you go to schoolofpodcasting.com survey, I will be running that until I get 25% of my audience that has actually answered that.

So I thank you before you've even clicked it yet for your participation.

It's my way of helping me.

You know, it's the Jerry Maguire help me help you.

And so if there are things you want to hear about on this show, this is where I'm collecting your responses.

I am checking my list.

I'm.

Or how's that go?

I'm making a list.

I'm checking it twice.

And I'm going to try to make the show that when somebody says, do you know any podcasts about podcasting?

People go, oh, this is the one you got to hear.

You got to go listen to School of Podcasting.

That's my goal.

So thanks so much.

And Again, School of Podcasting.com survey.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaking of feedback and giving people promotion on my show, it's time to find out what are we asking for the question of the month.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

And I realized not everybody is using Pod Page, but.

Well, you should, said the guy who is the head of podcasting at Pod Page.

But if you're not, there are some options.

One is Google Forms.

I'll have links to all these out at school of podcasting.com962.

That's one.

But I know some people are like, google is the devil.

And so they don't want to have any information in there from themselves or from their audience.

I get that.

Then you might check out Jotform.

That is one that has a free version.

You can have up to 100 monthly submissions.

So it's kind of limited.

If you want their paid version, it's $34.

Then there is one called tally t a l L.

Why?

And what's interesting about this one is I kind of like it.

It's very clean.

Their forms are super simple to Create.

They have all sorts of different ways to integrate questions and such.

That is the one thing I should mention here.

If you are doing your own survey and you have the whole like hey, on a scale from 1 to 10, make sure that 1 to whatever is even.

Because if you make it hey, between one and five, how do you feel about this?

That enables people to just choose three all the way down the middle.

And so when you make it one to six, well then they have to figure out, am I a little more three or a little more four?

So that is something.

Many, many moons ago I was a customer service rep and I made many surveys, which is probably why I'm so big on them.

But keep that in mind.

Tally has a free version as well, and I believe their paid version isn't really that expensive.

Like I say, JotForm is 34amonth.

Tallies is 29.

And keep in mind you could do this for maybe a couple months and then turn it off.

But again, if you want a truly free version, then you're going to go to Google.

Everything I talked about today you can find@schoolofpodcasting.com 962 thanks so much for listening.

If you know somebody who is thinking of doing a survey for their podcast, could you do me a favor?

If you're listening on your phone or whatever, go up to the share button, share it with your friend.

They're going to think you're neato because you shared this great content and so you're going to look good and I get to grow my audience.

Or you could just send them to school of podcasting.com follow and they can follow the show and never miss another episode.

Thanks so much for listening.

Until next week.

Take care.

God bless.

Class is dismissed.

And if you want one that's not Google Forms, it's called mm.

It's called something with a T.

Yep.

And my brain is already checked out.

Usually it's my mouth that checks out, but I am almost overdosing on cold medicine and all sorts of stuff.

And tall Tally.

Tally.

It's Tally.

There you go.

Tell him what he's won.

If you like what you hear, go tell someone.