The most important thing to ensure that survey responses guide your communications effectively is to act on them. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of identifying what your audience members want, make sure you reap the benefits of providing them with what they want.
When it comes to learning what current clients, prospective customers, association members or others want to know, nothing beats going straight to the source. By surveying a representative sample of your key audience, you can obtain a breadth of insights quickly and at relatively low – sometimes even no – cost.
If your communications are only, or even primarily, focused on meeting your needs, they likely aren’t meeting your needs because they aren’t winning the attention of your audience. If you want people to read what you write, write what they want to read.