Use SurveyMonkey for audience research

Business Benefits

Identify audience demographics, needs, and opportunities.


Define your research objective by pinpointing the problem your audience research needs to solve.

Audience research goals can be as broad or as specific as you require. Common examples include:

  • Understanding your customer demographics.
  • Learning sales objections.
  • Identifying problems that customers want solved.
  • Highlighting marketplace issues that a future product could solve.
  • Understanding the types of content or topics your readers need.

Consider the insights your existing audience or SurveyMonkey’s Market Research global survey panel has and how they would benefit your product development, branding, messaging or marketing.

Decide whether you want to survey your existing audience or leverage SurveyMonkey’s global survey panel.

Surveying your existing audience is ideal if you want to learn more about your existing customers’ needs.

Surveying through SurveyMonkey’s third-party audience platform is ideal if you are just getting started, want to research a broader audience, or are hoping to expand into a new audience segment for which you have no contacts yet.

You may also consider a hybrid approach, using Google Ads and similar external advertising to drive your target audience to your SurveyMonkey survey.

Click Create Survey > Start From Scratch in your SurveyMonkey dashboard to survey existing customers, or click Create Survey > Buy Targeted Responses to leverage the platform’s global survey panel.

To achieve actionable insights from your survey, you need an appropriate sample size. Broadly, 400+ respondents should deliver data you can trust. However, every company is different and SurveyMonkey’s sample size calculator can reveal how many respondents you need based on your population size.

If you choose to use both your own audience as well as SurveyMonkey’s third-party audience, ensure data validity by:

  • Using the same audience demographics: do not mix different audiences, such as pre-existing customers plus third-party respondents who have never heard of your brand.
  • Using the same survey design and questions.
  • Using the same sample size from both audiences.

Select Market Research as your survey category in the drop-down menu to prepopulate your survey-building wizard with audience research questions.

Choose questions that are as specific to your brand or research goals as possible, or use custom questions that are:

  • Specific to your industry, brand, or customers.
  • About real problems you’re trying to solve.
  • Open-ended, yet aimed at a specific scenario.

Add screening questions to the start of your audience research survey to eliminate participants who aren’t part of your target audience.

After entering your screening question, click Edit > Logic. For each disqualifying answer, select Then Skip ToDisqualification Page in the drop-down menu.

For example, you might screen for someone’s geographic location if you’re a local small business, or ask someone if they’ve ever purchased one of your products.

Follow the on-screen prompts to add SurveyMonkey’s pre-existing audience research questions, or enter your own survey questions.

SurveyMonkey includes Net Promoter Score-style ranking questions, open-ended questions such as What is one thing our product is missing?, and demographic questions that let you learn more about your audience’s background. Review these questions with stakeholders who are involved in the problem or scenario you’re trying to solve with this audience research.

For example, if your editorial team is struggling with low readership, they may want to customize these questions to address:

  • Blog competitors and where your audience consumes content, not a generic question about your audience’s favorite websites.
  • Problems your audience wants to solve, not generic questions about their needs.

Use SurveyMonkey’s sample size recommendations to calculate a sample size sufficient to ensure your audience research is accurate.

For example, if your total audience size is 3,000, you need 350 surveys completed for a margin of error of ±5%.

If you are struggling to get enough audience members to participate in your survey to obtain the right sample size, consider:

  • Promoting the survey to your audience through owned channels like email and social media.
  • Using paid advertising to share the survey.
  • Incentivizing the survey by entering survey respondents into a prize draw.

Click Collect Responses > Share a Survey Link to get a link to your survey. Email the link to your audience, post it on social media, or embed it on your website.

Wait until you have enough responses to your audience research survey to hit your sample size goals.

Open your completed SurveyMonkey survey and click Analyze Results.

Click Insights and Data Trends to see overarching results of any multiple choice or ranking questions. Select Question Summaries to see grouped responses to open-ended questions.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:40:34Z