We’ve talked about the way that surveys can really help with you getting to know what your customers think about your business and your products. But what about using surveys to generate some buzz about something related to your business?

We just did a survey using our own online survey solution where we asked our small business customers to answer a few questions on how they feel about healthcare reform because it’s a hot topic in the press, and we also asked how small businesses think they’ll be spending their advertising dollars in 2010. The results were very interesting but it also makes a good case study of how announcing survey results can get your name out there.

After we collected the results, we were able to get two different stories out of answers people gave us.

What We Did to Make Our Survey Results Successful

• We sent two different press releases, one about how small businesses are coping
  with healthcare and one about how they’ll spend on marketing in 2010.
  This let us target two different types of publications, doubling our exposure.
• We sent two email marketing campaigns to all of our customers to talk about the results and sent them to the blog and the raw results.
• We blogged about it, twice.
• We Twittered it numerous times and we posted it on Facebook.

What Happened as a Result

• We got 20 pieces of coverage in publications from press releases.
• We got over 700 pageviews to the blog articles we posted mainly through our email marketing campaigns.
• It was retweeted on Twitter about 22 times mostly because we got the word out through email marketing.

So what can you talk about in your industry? Remember, you want to be a bit more broad than just focusing on your own customer satisfaction. You could get your message to a wider audience that way.

A maternity shop can survey their expecting mothers about their weight gain or how they feel about flu shots. I even uncovered a survey for Dads about how they deal with emotions of their pregnant wives!

A software company who sells to corporate enterprises might survey their CIO customers and ask them what trends they see in the next year for things like importance of security because of the rampant hacking into businesses that has been happening.

A wine enthusiast list can be surveyed to talk about if wine has affected their health positively or negatively, if they double their consumption around the holidays or if they drink wine with each meal.

Any retailer can survey their customers about how they feel about shopping at a retailer that doesn’t ship with recycled materials and doesn’t have a good “green” policy.

Once we did a survey to our small business customers and asked about their business productivity around opening day of baseball and we did it pretty close to that day. Our results showed that there was a severe drop. What do you know? We announced it a few days before opening day and we got two pieces of TV coverage, one was CNBC!

So remember, the key is to announce the results of your online survey and get the word out, hopefully they’re topical and timely. Look at what’s hot in the press and tailor your survey around that topic. Then make sure you send an email campaign and use your social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to get the word out. These are just a few quick ideas of how you can put surveys to work for your business even if it’s not tied directly to your own customer satisfaction.

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