How to Get Feedback from Your Target Audience?

As you know by now, your brand is what people perceive you as. Since we are in the stage of designing your brand, shouldn’t we find out what other people think about it before investing in other marketing materials?

A common mistake that designers make is that they design according to the owners’ preferences and change if they don’t like it. However, this approval stage should be dependent on your market, so that your brand can bring you customers, not just good-looking enough to make you look cool.

How do we get people feedback?

It is usually a tedious process. That’s why many small businesses just want to skip the step and focus on their business operations. However, since the tech startup boom started in the last couple years, more and more people need early feedback to validate their business ideas. As demand for feedback rises, crowdsourcing feedback platforms are born.

A crowdsourcing feedback platform is a software that allows you to create surveys and gather respondents for you. It’s a subscription-based model with pay-as-you-go fees.

Here’s a list of platforms that we use to get feedback on our work:

• Google Survey
• Ask Your Market
• Helio

Sometimes, a client’s target market doesn’t have enough respondents on one platform, so we will use couple platforms to gather people’s feedback.

What does it mean by we don’t have enough respondents?

Well, what’s the point of getting feedback from 2 to 3 people? They might be in your target market, but it’s such a small sample size that won’t accurately represent the whole group of people,

We have to find a sample size so that our answers from this survey are statistically significant. Then, we can make action plans based on the responses instead of listening to the noise in the market and follow it blindly.

For example, we have a real estate brokerage client in Surrey. Her target market is around 60,000 people in Surrey. We had to survey approximately 120 people to achieve a 95% confidence level with a +/- 9% accuracy.

How accurate can you target the demographics?

So far, our favorite platform for running the surveys is Google Survey because they have the most extensive user base.

However, with such a big database, Google still can’t allow us to target people in a precise manner. Don’t worry though. We can fix this through the questioning process.

Questioning process

What we are trying to get from the respondents is that whether the design is conveying the message.

For example, here’s a client who runs a lifestyle blog in San Franciso. The story behind her brand is that her blog is a shield for young people to use to protect themselves in today’s harsh and confusing society.

Hence, we had a question like this:

We have a “none of the above” option in the question because if the design sucks, it’s highly possible that they can’t pick an answer. If you force them to choose one, your data is screwed.

As we know, people in San Franciso may have different cultures and preferences from people in Los Angeles. If we only target California, we will get a mix of people with diverse backgrounds.

Hence, we want to use couple warm-up questions to see if the respondents are relevant to our target market. If yes, we give the answers more weight. Otherwise, we consider the answer as noise.

Here are some questions that are on her survey.

Analyzing Results

Once we complete the survey stage, we have to analyze it and see if the design makes any sense to the market.

We first calculate the weighted average by seeing what they answer in the warm-up questions. If they warm up questions identify that they are in our target market, then we give more weight to those answers.

Now, we execute the first round of AB testing. We want to see if people who picked none of the above is statistically significant.

If yes, then we have to scratch all the design and restart. If not, we can investigate which design is the best for the market.

If one of the options is statistically significant that it standouts, that is the winner. It is feasible that all design options are evenly distributed and that none of them win.

If that’s the case, you as the brand owner can make the final call on it because the market has validated for you that any one of the design will work out for you.

How many options do you need?

Well, there’s a balance to this.

You want to give the respondents enough options and have them pick the best one so that their choice is made after careful consideration. On the other hand, you don’t want to give them too many options because it will be too overwhelming.

Our golden number is at five along with the none of the above option, six options in total.