5 great survey templates for agencies of all shapes and sizes

Whether you’re a 10-person, boutique creative agency, or a huge conglomerate media agency, you’ll have a reason (or two, or three) to speak to consumers.

You may need to understand broad consumer trends across whole markets in order to be a thought leader in your industry and attract new business, or you might need to get confirmation that your creative assets hit the right spot. Whether these two examples apply to you, or whether you have alternative needs, consumer data and insights should be invaluable to your agency.

One of the greatest challenges for any agency is receiving buy-in from clients that you understand their market down to a tee; what messaging will resonate, where key consumers interact with media, and other unique behaviours.

Read our 2018 media consumption report for up-to-date insight into consumers’ media habits.

In fact, every action you take on behalf of the client should reflect your attempt to create the greatest return on investment for them. And the way to ensure ROI, rather than just hoping for it, is to know your client’s ideal customers inside out.

But it needn’t be as daunting as it sounds. We’ve done the hard work for you and collated five great survey templates that can be used across most agencies to bring your thinking in line with that of the end consumer.

Use cases

The survey templates below fall into three broad buckets. Your consumer insights will be used to support your pitches, support your client’s own activities and aims, or serve to establish your agency as a thought leader.

But each template isn’t mutually exclusive, most of the surveys you use will serve two or all three of the aims – meaning even more bang for your buck!

Competitor analysis (for use in pitching, client activities and thought leadership)

When you want to keep a finger on the pulse of the key and emerging competitors for either your brand or your client’s brand, run a simple competitor analysis survey.

As markets can change in the blink of an eye, we recommend running your competitor analysis survey on a regular quarterly or biannual basis.

The Attest dashboard has a pre-loaded competitor intelligence survey template, requiring just a few simple details to be inputted before you can start gathering the data to show your clients that your campaigns are optimised for their competitive landscape.

Industry trends (for use in pitching, client activities and thought leadership)

Understanding your client’s industry inside out, perhaps even better than they do, will give your team the edge to act on these insights before competitors and align your decisions with the direction in which the market is heading.

But direction can’t be gauged with a single dip. Industry trends surveys should be carried out at least annually, if not more frequently, to establish the behaviours that are growing, those that are declining and those that seem to have dropped out of the picture entirely. Only then will you know which wave to ride. See this survey in full for a template for your own Industry Trends insights

Brand tracking (a service you can offer to support your client’s activities)

Can your client’s accurately assign ROI to their campaign investments? Can they measure which channels, messages or media are driving key brand metrics such as awareness, consideration and purchase intent? And do you have the data to prove that the work you do is driving incremental value?

If you can’t say ‘yes’ to these questions, then brand tracking is a must for you.  

Brands often do little to health-check how they’re performing in the market as a whole, above and beyond anecdotal evidence that their sales seem to be doing well.

A brand tracker, run monthly or quarterly, dives deep into the key metrics that indicate brand health; Net Promoter Score, purchase intent, purchase drivers, reception of messaging and more.

Set your first brand tracker live before your agency rolls out a major new campaign (called setting the baseline), to have a clear picture of the metrics that shift in your subsequent dips and the direct impact your campaigns are having on the success of the client’s brand.

See this survey in full

With just a few details, you can set up a brand tracker from Attest’s pre-designed template, and be health-checking your client’s brand in a matter of hours.

Choose to target the audience segments that your client is most interested to reach, using as many demographics as are required, or send the survey to a nationally representative sample for an overall picture of brand perception in the wider population.

Directly measure the impact of your campaign by comparing results from before, during and after the campaign. You can even add extra levels of insight by targeting or filtering the regions or demographics most exposed to your campaigns.

Explore the Attest brand tracker survey template

Creative testing (for use in pitching, client activities and thought leadership)

For creative agencies, creative testing can be the holy grail to convince clients that your campaign will land.

Discover 5 simple creative tests you could be running to optimise your next campaign

Using Attest you can test images, audio clips, video clips and copy, uncovering the sentiment and message conveyed by each. Knowing that your creative will resonate, by optimising at this early stage, will save time and money by ensuring nothing risky or suboptimal goes to market.

A/B testing using Attest is extremely easy; duplicate surveys and select exclusive audiences to ensure no respondents are biased by seeing more than one of your creative options. Or run a single survey, asking one sample of respondents to choose their favourite creative, or the creative that evokes the most favourable reaction.View the three surveys for a useable template for your own creative tests: Test A, B and C

Campaign performance (for use by your clients and for your own thought leadership)

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?

It’s already well-understood that measuring the success of campaigns, especially for keeping your clients loyal to you, is extremely important. Metrics and tools already exist for digital campaign tracking. It can become trickier, though, to track out of home and offline media channels.

Surveying your key consumer segments can unveil the impact your campaign, no matter the medium, is having on the target audience. There needs to be a prior, base-level survey completed, then a follow up dip to see the areas in which increases are achieved – across awareness, purchase intent, perception and more. See this Campaign Performance survey template in full

The next steps…

These five templates aim to remove the uncertainty from launching your own consumer insight, so that you can win more clients and deliver the greatest value to them. With interesting and insightful data in your back pocket, you can be confident in your pitches, sell additional services to clients and grow your own reputation for thought leadership.

Get in contact with Attest to discover how we can help to bring your agency closer to your client’s consumers, help you win pitches, drive up ROI and retain custom.