In recent years, we’ve seen the influencer marketing space explode. It’s no longer limited to household-named celebrities but is now saturated with thousands of social media personalities with varying niches.
If you’ve done research on influencer marketing before, you know that there is a lot of conflicting information regarding best practices, impacts of brand partnerships, costs, and more.
Because of these differing opinions, we recommend going straight to the source and surveying content creators, bloggers, and influencers.
Doing so can give your organization actionable insights as to how to cultivate the ultimate brand partnership and open doors to a new source of revenue.
Our market research company, Drive Research often partners with brands and social media platforms to survey content creators, bloggers/vloggers, and influencers. Below is the process we follow to generate high-quality feedback.
Report: A Brand's Guide to Working with Influencers
Step 1. Determining Objectives
The first step to conducting market research with social media influencers is to determine your goals and objectives for the project.
Important objectives to discuss with project stakeholders include:
- What are you hoping to learn?
- Who is your target survey respondent? Think demographics such as vertical, age, gender, etc.
- What is the incentive for content creators to take your survey?
- Is there a timeframe for when you need the survey results?
- What will you do with the results of the content creator survey?
Discussing these questions with your team will assure everyone is on the same page. It also makes drafting survey questions easier because you have a direction for what type of answers you need to uncover.
Step 2. Writing the Survey
The next step when surveying content creators, bloggers, or influencers is to start drafting the questions.
Whether it be a shared Google Doc. or a piece of paper, start writing all possible questions you’d like to include. Then rank them by must-have questions to secondary question options you’d be okay skipping.
From our experience conducting market research with influencers, it’s best to keep the survey short.
- Aim to keep the survey to 15-20 questions
- Aim to keep the survey to 5-7 minutes
Because this is an audience who is used to being large sums of cash for their time, you want to keep it brief. Moreover, with any online survey, shorter questionnaires often lead to higher response rates – meaning better quality data.
Step 3. Programming the Survey
Next, you’ll need to transform your final survey document into an online survey platform such as Survey Monkey or Alchemer.
Or, depending on your budget, consider partnering with an online survey company like Drive Research.
Our team can partner with your organization to write, program, and field the survey to content creators. Better yet, we understand best-practice survey language and coding to assure no mistakes are made in the back end.
However, if choosing to conduct the market research in-house, we recommend double or triple checking the programmed survey before sending it to influencers.
Here is a programming survey checklist to help!
Step 4. Accessing Content Creators and Influencers
This step is perhaps the most challenging. Because they are a newer audience, online survey platforms don’t have access to a large sample of content creators, bloggers, vloggers, etc.
The bad news.
Therefore, many brands try to scrape Instagram, YouTube, and Tik Tok to collect enough contact information which they can use to send the survey.
The problem with this approach is that it’s very time-consuming. It can take hours to create a list of hundreds of influencers, only to receive a handful of survey completes.
The good news.
We manage many of these content creator projects for brands, therefore Drive Research has built an in-house panel with thousands of relevant social media influencers.
It is a list of those who have signed up and are eager to participate in different types of market research such as online surveys, user experience, in-depth interviews, and more.
Contact our team to learn more about our survey costs, influencer panel, and process.
Step 5. Fieldwork
Your survey is written, programmed, and ready to launch. We recommend soft-launching the content creator survey to a small percentage of your list. Then, review responses and see if respondents are making their way through the survey as intended.
If so, field the survey to the remaining list! After a few days, send a reminder to non-responders. This can help increase response rates.
Once your goal number of responses is reached, close fieldwork and start cleaning the data.
- Did the same person take the survey twice?
- Are there respondents who answered “option A” for every question?
- Are there respondents who took the survey in 20-seconds?
These are all red flags and should be removed from the data file before analyzing the results.
Step 6. Analyzing the Results
Take the time to go through each survey question and review the results. For instance, what assumptions were right? What surprised you?
While each brand is different, our market research company creates comprehensive reports including executive summaries, question-by-question results, infographics, and recommendations for the next steps.
Whatever your approach to analyzing the data is, be sure to be confident in your understanding of the results. It will make taking action with the data that much easier.
Step 7. Taking Action
Although it’s the last step, it’s the most important. What’s the point of surveying influencers, bloggers, and content creators if you’re just going to sit on the results?
Depending on the objectives of your influencer online survey, there are several types of action you can take.
Here are a few examples of how our clients have used their survey findings:
- Refined the user experience of their platform
- Created lead-generating content such as reports and blog posts
- Improved their brand partnerships and relationships with influencers
- Mastered their marketing and sales strategies
- Identified key sources of awareness to get in touch with target audiences
The possibilities are endless!
Survey Influencers with Drive Research
Drive Research is a national market research company that partners with brands and social media platforms to yield data and feedback from influencers, content creators, and vloggers/bloggers.
We have access to an in-house panel of thousands of influencers across various sectors such as fashion, lifestyle, parenting, bridal, gaming, and more.
To learn more about our service, contact our online survey company today.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Emily Rodgers
A SUNY Cortland graduate, Emily has taken her passion for social and content marketing to Drive Research as the Marketing Manager. She has earned certificates for both Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
Learn more about Emily, here.
