Tying paying customers to marketing channels or advertising sources that brought them to your business can be vital for your growth. It allows you to pinpoint which marketing efforts already work well and which ones you need to improve or stop using.
One of the easiest ways to do so is simply by asking the “How did you hear about us?” question.
After a customer gives you a call, sends an email, walks into your store, or makes an online purchase, naturally you’re curious about how they found and why they chose you and not some of your competitors.
While it’s always nice to have a friendly face-to-face chat with your customer to find out more about their customer journey, it’s hardly always doable in practice. The best way to automate and speed up this process to a certain extent is by using a How Did You Hear About Us? survey or form.
Keep on reading to find out why and how you can easily create one, as well as what options to include in your own survey. Plus, we have prepared a free survey template you can use right away.
Why your business needs a How Did You Hear About Us? survey
Without knowing how your customers found you, you could be missing a huge opportunity to even further boost your most effective marketing channel. At the same time, you could be wasting a lot of your time, money, and effort on ineffective methods.
That’s why it’s vital to know where your customers came from.
Knowing so can also help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and ditch those campaigns that don’t justify the money spent.
Now that you know why it’s good to have a How Did You Hear About Us? survey as a part of your marketing and sales process, it’s also good to explain this to your customers. Let them know that the information they provide will have a meaningful impact on your products or services and help you improve and offer even better customer experience.
By adding a sense of purpose, your customers will be more likely to provide you with useful answers.
How to create a perfect How Did You Hear About Us? survey
When asking this question in your survey/form, there are several approaches that you could take. Obviously, in order to ensure a respondent can fully express their opinion, you should provide them with every possible option available. Ideally, you would offer them an empty text field where they would type their answer.
However, practice shows that this leads to a bunch of incomplete or nonsensical answers, as people generally see this type of question as something that brings them no additional value and just want to get it out of their way.
So, in order to avoid receiving a bunch of “don’t remember” or “N/A” answers, you could offer multiple choice answer options that would contain only the places where you really are advertising. This doesn’t require much effort, as all that your respondents have to do is click on one of the options.
But which options can you offer as an answer to your “How Did You Hear About Us?” question? And how to account for those people who really don’t remember? Here are some of the most common options you can use.
Top How Did You Hear About Us options
Determining the answer options for your question should be based on where most of your money and time is being invested when it comes to marketing efforts.
Start by your paid advertising channels and the inevitable “search engine” option, move on to 3rd party networks where people generally hang out (social media, blogs, etc.), and then include options that can’t be digitally tracked (TV, radio, etc.).
To cater to respondents that miraculously found you via a channel that you didn’t predict, always make sure to include the “other” option and, ideally, allow them to type their own answer in there. Adding this option can also help improve the accuracy of your surveys by allowing those unwilling to provide a meaningful answer to kind of “skip” your survey.
Here are some sample options you might include.
How did you hear about us?
- Search Engine
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Youtube Ads
- Other paid social media advertising
- Facebook post/group
- Twitter post
- Instagram post/story
- Other social media
- Radio
- TV
- Newspaper
- Word of mouth
- Other
Now that you know which options you should include, you can easily build your own survey or form. Or you can take the shortcut and use a ready-made template.
How Did You Hear About Us Template
Here’s a How Did You Hear About Us? form template you can use for inspiration.
Or you can actually use it, simply by logging in to your LeadQuizzes account (sign up for a FREE trial if you’re not a user yet) and selecting it from the list of available survey templates.
Add a follow-up question
Often, respondents will pick the easy way out and provide the most straightforward or most expected answer instead of being honest and informative. The reason lies in what’s usually referred to as the “effort economy” – it’s when people decide not to spend too much time or effort doing something that’s not going to directly benefit them.
If you’ve already tried running this kind of a survey, you’ve probably received some such minimalistic or nonsensical responses that were clearly less accurate and descriptive than you’d like them to be.
One possible solution is to add a follow-up question after your initial “How Did You Hear About Us?” inquiry. You can use it to ask for additional clarification. For example, if the answer to your initial question was “via social media”, you can follow up by asking which social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on).
Also, here are some additional questions to ask if you’re looking to find out more about your customers’ first point of contact with your business:
Follow-up question examples
Which Google search brought you to us?
Of course, you should use this as a follow-up for those who said that they found you via a search engine (if you use LeadQuizzes to create your survey/form, you can use logic branching to determine who should see this question).
This question can also help with your keyword research and SEO if you’re not paying for expensive SEO tools. Once you know which terms they’re using to find you, you can easily optimize your content to rank even better in Google search.
Did you find what you were looking for?
A very simple, yet very effective question. We at LeadQuizzes actually use this question on some of our most visited pages to find out if the content is good enough and whether there’s an opportunity to provide our visitors with additional value.
If the answer is no, this question is followed by another one asking “What else could we help you with?”, where we provide some predefined answer options, as well as a text field where the visitors can type in their custom answer. This approach helped us generate more leads from our blog by offering additional content (requested by our visitors) as a lead magnet.
How likely are you to engage with us again? Would you recommend us to your friends?
This question can help determine how satisfied your customers are with their first visit/purchase and whether they would recommend you further on. It’s closely related to NPS (Net Promoter Score). Be careful, however, not to pop this question too early as your customers might find it overwhelming.
Conclusion
After you’ve gathered all the responses to “How Did You Hear About Us?” and other related questions, you can calibrate your budget accordingly, focusing on channels that actually bring customers and cutting out those that don’t.
Following the tips and suggestions presented in this post will also help you improve user experience and gather more relevant and accurate data from your customers, resulting in more satisfied customers willing to help their friends hear about you too!
