Surveying Customers for Content Preferences

[Anonymous]

A year into our content marketing strategy and I am dying to learn more about our customers' content consumption habits.

I know the best way to engage is to create the "right" TYPE of content content which focuses on our clients' biggest challenges, but beyond that I am looking to soon survey our customers to find out more about some more specifics regarding:

-Length (short, long, medium?)
-Type (Video, whitepaper, case study, blog article?)
-Frequency (every week, twice a month, once a month?)

So here's my question: Before I pull out the market research hat and write what I hope to be a SHORT survey, I was wondering if anyone here has already conquered the survey mountain and might have a survey I can bum some ideas off of to help me get started?

[Anonymous]

I'd leverage the market research for the mechanics - that can be data driven - have the survey focus on the content that they would find valuable, and align that to where they are in the funnel to move them along.

[Anonymous]

I'd look at doing a little extra legwork before you put together your survey -- find some prospects/customers that you can do brief interviews with. Getting some qualitative information first will help you build a better survey.

Otherwise, you're starting with an assumption that your customers do care about things like length, type and frequency. Interviews might uncover that customers would prefer blogs and need different ways to get the content, or are looking for specific information.

I think you'll get more out of your survey by first talking to the people you want to market to, and then build the survey to do a test on whether those ideas hold out for your larger population.