PR surveys are powerful tools used by public relations professionals to gather insights, measure brand perception, and shape strategic communications. By conducting custom PR surveys, companies can collect real-time audience opinions, generate unique data from media coverage, and enhance the impact it has on their brand (and measure it).
In this ultimate guide, we delve into the power of custom PR surveys, exploring how tailoring your approach can unveil invaluable insights and elevate your strategic communication efforts to new heights.
It is a form of quantitative market research where the opinions of the general public are gathered.
It is intended to be statistically reliable and is released to news outlets through stories and other sources to gather attention by sharing valuable information about beliefs and habits.
It is called many names such as omnibus surveys, PR polling, public opinion polls, polling questionnaires, and so many more. They are all the same!
As the digital world continues to explode, receiving more press coverage is becoming increasingly difficult. To stand out against the masses, your press pitches must be unique and contain information that can’t be found anywhere else.
In fact, Inc., reports that by giving journalists access to original research, you can feel more confident that you’ll receive a press mention and earn maximum distribution.
Additionally, surveys are a great digital PR strategy for getting higher search rankings. When media outlets like The New York Times, USA Today, and Forbes source your survey data, they will link to your website.
A backlink from these high domain authority websites signals to Google that your content is more reputable. As a result, search engines are more likely to rank your content higher because they can trust that your content will meet users’ expectations.
Recommended Reading: 9 Ways to Get More Backlinks for Your Website
PR polling studies are mainly conducted through online surveys because:
✔️ They are affordable
✔️ They are timely
✔️ They offer high-quality data
The ROI of online surveys is much higher than what can be achieved through a mail, phone, or in-person methodology.
Now that you understand the basic definition of PR polling, let’s walk through the 14 step process of conducting a survey with an experienced market research firm.
For a short overview, read: 5 Steps to Conducting a PR Survey.
The point-of-contact from your team reaches out to a PR survey company and shares your needs and expectations of the market research (we’ll share what information to provide the third-party later on!)
The research firm will send over a calendar invite to answer any questions you might have to help you make the best choice for a partner.
It typically lasts 15 to 30 minutes and is conducted via a conference line dial-in or video call.
Hey, even though we work with our clients from all over the world, we still crave some face-to-face time.
Next, the PR survey services firm builds out a proposal for you. In our case, we offer up a thorough document that highlights your objectives discussed on the discovery call, our recommended approach, a timeline, and a fixed cost.
Prefer something more a la carte? Our proposals often include several different packages so your project can match any budget.
These are built into bronze, silver, and gold market research programs for your public relations survey.
In most cases, this proposal will make it over to your inbox within one or two days after the discovery call, even faster if requested. We don’t mess around.
Recommended Reading: 7 Components of a Market Research Proposal
Now you are ready to roll. You have chosen your market research company, and we’re off.
The kickoff meeting lasts about 30 to 60 minutes. An agenda is sent before the call to keep everyone on task.
The purpose of a kickoff meeting is to:
It can be done in-person, through a conference call, or even a video chat through screen share.
During the kickoff, you meet your PR market research team for the survey, which includes a pairing of analysts, assistants, and marketing coordinators.
They’ll have some great ideas on survey questions to get your data featured by big-name publications but also listen to your unique needs.
What is measured gets managed. Any good PR survey project needs a market research workplan. This workplan is distributed to the team within 24 hours after the kickoff meeting.
It’s a one-page document exchanged and updated throughout the project. It includes the tasks, responsible parties, and dates of completion.
This way, everyone knows exactly where everything sits on the timeline.
It is undoubtedly the most crucial step in the entire public relations survey process — garbage in, garbage out.
You must write the survey questions with an end in mind, and this is where market research companies can lend their decades of expertise.
Survey writing is part art and part science.
The key is to THINK ABOUT WHAT HEADLINES AND STORIES you want to tell in your press release, whitepaper, website copy, and other shareables.
Knowing what you want in the end will help you plan for it.
Length of a PR polling survey.
The recommended sweet spot for survey length is about 10 to 15 questions. There is a lot you can cover with this 3-to-5 minute survey length or length of interview (LOI).
Asking additional questions and having both primary and secondary objectives allows you to hedge secondary headlines.
More on the recommended number of questions you should ask in a survey, here.
Planning for secondary headlines.
The results of a survey can be anticipated, but there is always a risk of the unknown.
Planning for other headlines to hang your hat on is recommended, in case your core objective does not turn out to be confirmed through the response data.
Plus, these additional findings and insights make your press release all that much more informational for news sources and readers.
Again, the survey writing step is critical.
Our PR market research firm will send you a Word document with all of the questions. Your team offers edits and feedback on the draft. We revise and return with comments.
Sometimes this process takes only 1 or 2 drafts. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 drafts. We don’t take the next steps until you are fully satisfied.
Our team is excellent at educating brands on how to make surveys work for their PR strategy.
Speaking of the next steps, now we jump into survey programming. Once the questions are finalized, this can typically be turned around in a day for a short survey.
We take the questions and place them into our survey software hosted on the surveys.driveresearch.com domain.
What to look at when programming a PR questionnaire?
Need a break from reading? Watch this video! Our market research firm shares helpful tips when coding a survey.
Once the programmed version of the survey is complete, the link runs through a rigorous internal process. Our testers are cruel as they use our online survey testing checklist.
Our testers relish finding mistakes and errors. They bathe in the potential of finding a skip pattern or logic mistake. It is what they live for.
All key project members review a test link of the survey for final sign-off. If there are any updates found, those are made to the survey link before fieldwork begins.
Get it? A Drive Research test drive? Sorry, we probably didn’t need to hammer that pun home.
It is an important step and one that speaks to our systematic process and crazy attention to detail.
Why start with a full-launch when you can be more cautious and ensure everything is working as planned before hitting go?
Once you’ve skipped a soft-launch, you’ve reached the point of no return.
We carefully review the incoming data as part of the soft-launch, which is planned for about 5% of the sample.
Those initial soft-launch responses are run through the wringer for quality, logic, and comprehension.
Viewing the data from the eyes of our clients.
Beyond the back-end system review for errors, we also view the data from the client lens.
These initial results will be very telling.
Our PR survey agency looks at open-ended responses.
It’s vital to soft-launch to review both functionality and context.
We hate those firms that press “go” too quickly for clients without a soft-launch.
It’s almost like saying “Too bad. Sorry, we didn’t catch this earlier. We can’t field this with a new audience. You lose.”
With any new car purchase, always give it a test drive first.
So the soft-launch responses look good? Great! We’re ready to kick the tires and light the fires.
Now our team jumps into the main course. We open up responses to progress towards your total number responses.
You may be wondering, how many people do we need to survey? Keep reading!
With a general population sample, this moves quickly. Our market research firm typically can obtain a full dataset of respondents within a day or 48 hours.
Heck, with a name like Drive Research shouldn’t speed be assumed?
This online portal is an outstanding benefit of working with our PR survey software. Once fieldwork begins, we share a passcode-protected interactive client reporting dashboard with your team.
Boy, that was a mouthful, but it speaks to the awesomeness.
You have the ability to login and view the up-to-the-second results from your survey at any time.
Here are a few examples of our online reporting dashboard.
We provide overall results (full sample size) and even cross-tabulations of results by audiences.
Maybe you want to look at cuts by age or generation, cuts by household income, or cuts by gender.
Our PR market research firm can set all of these up for you.
Example 1: Overall Results
Example 2: Breakdown by location
While collecting all of the responses from the panel, our team is also behind the curtain reviewing the data with a fine-toothed comb.
Our PR polling company reviews survey responses for:
If they do not meet our standards, we replace those cases at no charge. We have zero tolerance!
Recommended Reading: Your Survey Fieldwork is Complete – Now What? Use These 9 Data Cleaning Tips
In addition to the interactive reporting portal, those custom links also give you the ability to download your charts and graphs for your PR study in four formats:
With the online links, you can hover over data points for more detail, or fully explore and analyze open-ended responses through word clouds.
These are included as part of the base package for the market research.
Are the charts and graphs not enough for you? Are you not a numbers person? Do you define MATH as Mental Abuse To Humans?
We’ve got you covered.
Our topline summary report is a 3-to-4 page narrative summary of the essential findings and takeaways.
This Word document is a perfect executive summary for your PR survey. It includes the background and methodology and bullet-point summary of insights from each question with added interpretation and context.
Plus! A banner Excel file.
Along with the narrative summary, our market research company puts together a banner Excel file.
What is in it? It an Excel file of all of your cross-tabs, which compares results across categories for each question.
It’s an easy-to-use document that showcases comparisons by demographics such as age, income, gender, the region of the country, and other vital items.
It also includes significance testing at the 95% confidence interval to highlight noteworthy differences.
It’s the easiest way to digest the results and integrate the findings into your press release or other shareables on the PR end.
Do you crave more data? Do you want to peel back the onion even further to dive in? This comprehensive report is for you.
It’s a full PowerPoint deck of slides detailing every result. This report includes:
It’s a more polished version of a deliverable. It can easily be shared with the entire team and includes all of the relevant information in one tidy document.
It is meant for both the readers who want a high-level story and for those who want all of the data.
Later in this article, we’ll walk through some value-added deliverables to help you get the most out of your consumer polls.
Recommended Reading: Topline vs. Comprehensive Report: What’s the Difference?
Let’s say you are a mortgage company, and you want to be able to tell the story about how frustrated the new Millennial and Gen Z homebuyers are with the mortgage process.
It gives your brand fodder to talk about how your process is more straightforward and different.
Were you frustrated with your mortgage experience (application, communication, outcomes) for your most recent home purchase? Select one.
Issue: Remember, your goal with the research is to promote the high percentage of respondents who express frustration.
As a dichotomous question with two choices, you are forcing the respondent to lean in one direction or the other.
Even if they are a little frustrated, they may still select “no” because the overall experience was okay.
Using a scale of 1 to 5 where “5” indicates very frustrated and “1” indicates not at all frustrated, how frustrated were you with your mortgage experience (application, communication, outcomes) for your most recent home purchase? Select one.
Benefit: Asking as a Likert scale gives you more considerable variance usefulness of the data points.
If only 20% of your audience selected “1” not at all frustrated, that means 80% of your respondents indicated at least some level of frustration (rating of “2” to “5”).
This clever way of asking the question allows your story to be told and double-down on your PR headline—all without any acquiescence bias or partiality in how the question was asked.
Our PR team of survey experts offers details like this throughout the survey design process, ensuring you maximize the value of every survey question.
Several types of audiences are available to survey for your custom public relations study. We detail all of those audience and demographic options for you below.
The choice is yours. Choose wisely!
Consumer surveys are the most common audience utilized for PR surveys.
Common verticals that request surveys with consumers include:
Plus many others!
Public relations surveys are not always administered to consumers. Our national market research agency works with many businesses, organizations, and brands that communicate in the B2B space.
These B2B surveys require our firm to reach out to business professionals to ask survey questions regarding their business or professional role and environment.
Recommended Reading: How to Conduct a B2B Survey? A Step-by-Step Process
A PR survey can be conducted with any demographic segmentation or bucket you are interested in.
It includes adults of any age group (those 18+) and even minors if your study needs to survey those under the age of 18 for a variety of reasons, such as choosing colleges.
If you have a specific profile or ideal customer avatar (ICA), an online panel company can target, find, and qualify this audience for your needs.
Common demographics our clients look for include:
The list can really go on and on.
Beyond demographics and profiling data, your qualification criteria can dig a level deeper.
Survey questions may be designed to hone in on specific types of purchases, behaviors, and even feelings or sentiments around a topic.
Here are some examples of these types of questions that can be utilized to qualify or disqualify respondents for a PR survey:
Have you never heard of this term before? It’s okay. It’s the fancier way of saying demographics in a B2B market research targeted at business professionals.
Much like a consumer survey, many options exist in terms of firmographic questions to qualify an audience and laser focus your sample.
Here are a few examples of firmographics:
Leave it to the experts on this one.
Most PR and communications survey companies in the U.S. have access to email databases (or market research panels) or respondents they can access at any time to collect feedback.
These panels often take years to build and are continually added to help grow the base. They consist of people who have already voluntarily signed up and rose their hands to participate in market research.
More about online research panels.
Panel participants sign up to participate in future studies and offer a ton of information about their demographics, buying patterns, and behaviors, so they stand the best chance to qualify for paid surveys.
They are invited to participate through email as each new study arises. The panel companies keep a close eye on frequency and fatigue, so a variety of participants can complete each survey.
What is the incentive to participate?
They are often offered a reward in points (i.e., like a credit card point system) or gift card raffles. Even those who disqualify earn points (albeit fewer), to keep them coming back.
Those who qualify and complete the survey are awarded more points. These points can be redeemed for prizes, gift cards, and trinkets.
Are panels representative of the U.S. population?
The best PR survey services companies care about the general make-up and representativeness of the panel for market research.
Through the simple click of a button, the pool of respondents that respond to your survey can be structured to be Census representative on critical demographics.
Since the ultimate goal of public relations surveys is to have the data featured as part of a story in a news publication(s), 1,000 responses have been the established gold standard.
The number of responses to surveys is loosely based on statistical confidence.
I say loosely based because confidence intervals, the margin of error, and sampling error all assume a survey uses a probabilistic random sample.
For instance, at the 95% confidence interval, a sample size of 1,000 produces a margin of error of +/- 3%.
This means if the survey were conducted 100 times with another random sample, 95 out of 100 times the results would yield within +3% or -3% of the stated totals from the analysis.
This 3% is the accepted standard for national studies.
Some national and international brands we partner with for PR surveys opt for sample sizes of 2,000 over 1,000.
This additional 1,000 responses reduces the margin of error by nearly a full percentage point from +/- 3.1% to +/- 2.2%.
Here are the margin of errors for a variety of sample sizes below at the 95% confidence level.
Your market research consultant can easily manage it. Hard quotas are set up to cap particular audiences to a specific number of completed surveys.
Let’s say you want to collect 1,000 responses, but you want to oversample those under the age of 45.
A quota would be designed to cap a maximum number of responses for those aged 45+ at 250 responses among 1,000.
It would allow for 750 responses to be collected for the 45 and under age group.
Advantage #1: More statistical reliability
As outlined in the margin of error chart above, additional responses equal additional statistical reliability and trust in your dataset.
It can put your internal team, clients, news sources, and journalists at ease. It’s much easier to poke holes or doubt in a survey of 200 respondents than it is to find fault in a study of 2,000 respondents.
Advantage #2: More reliability in cross-tabulations
In addition to aggregate reliability, your subsets of data cross-tabulations and segments become more reliable as well.
For example, if your total sample size is 1,000, and you want to compare the results of males and females, each of those two genders detail sample sizes of about 500 each.
So when comparing genders, those comparisons are less reliable in terms of margin of error. If your sample size were bumped to 2,000 overall, each of those gender subsets would now have pools of 1,000 responses.
Advantage #3: More attention
It is often an understated benefit. More responses make your PR study more eye-catchy for news sources. As a journalist, it’s easier to ignore a survey of a few hundred respondents than it is a few thousand.
Particularly, when your survey discovers unique and proprietary insights and tells a fantastic story. Studies with 1,000 or 2,000 responses are door-openers.
When seeking earned media opportunities, the more data you have, the better the chance of being picked up with your public relations survey.
With any earned media, you need to put your best foot forward. If the difference of being picked up by WSJ.com versus not being picked up by WSJ.com is an extra 400 responses and $1,000, wouldn’t it be worth it?
Advantage #4: More credibility
In addition to sampling reliability and attention, credibility also plays a role. Your survey needs to be structured soundly, professionally, and not incur any bias.
If your survey topic touches on any sensitive topics, news sources may challenge the findings. Additional responses help quell any skepticism about sampling error almost immediately.
It’s a given. As your sample sizes increase, it means more rewards and incentives are paid out to survey respondents.
The cost of a 200-response survey will not be the same as the cost of an 800-response survey.
View this in terms of ROI. Is it worth the additional cost? Most likely.
Is your timeline tight? Increasing your sample size from 400 responses to 2,000 will impact the schedule somewhat.
If you are surveying a wide enough audience, say, the general population in the U.S., the impact would be minimal – as little as hours.
However, if your incidence rate is low and the audience you are surveying is narrow, adding a few hundred responses to the sample size could slow down the end date considerably.
It could be days up to a week or more. Work with your custom PR survey services company to how long the market research will take.
It is essential to understand maximum feasibility for your market and audience.
It is something you can ask them in the early going to help guide your decision around the number of responses requested.
If you are looking for females aged 18 to 24 who purchased a cell phone in the past 6 months, it may be determined that the maximum feasibility for this audience in 1 week of fieldwork is 780 responses.
Knowing this cap helps your organization assess your plan for sample sizes.
There are so many benefits of working with a PR polling company for your survey. We highlight the top reasons you should consider it here.
A major advantage of custom PR surveys is that they generate media-ready data that journalists can easily understand, trust, and use in their reporting. News outlets are constantly looking for fresh, credible statistics that help them illustrate trends or support a story. When your survey produces clear, well-structured insights, it becomes far more likely to earn placements across industry publications and mainstream media.
Media-ready data also removes ambiguity for reporters. Strong PR surveys present findings in a way that feels unbiased, transparent, and easy to interpret. If results appear overly promotional or strategically slanted, journalists will often ignore them. They want clean numbers, straightforward takeaways, and quotes they can include without questioning the motive behind them.
The more your PR survey reads like objective research rather than marketing content, the more trustworthy it becomes in the eyes of the media. Well-crafted survey data functions almost like a pre-packaged news asset. It gives journalists a reason to cover your story, provides them with ready-to-use statistics, and positions your brand as a reliable source of industry insight.
That’s why using a third-party market research company for PR surveys is the smartest way to get media-ready data that journalists actually trust. When a brand conducts its own survey and publishes results about its industry or competitors, readers and reporters can easily spot the bias. They may assume the findings are self-serving or strategically framed to support the company’s narrative.
Whereas if the press release details findings directly and objectively through a third party, it adds legitimacy and credibility to the research data.
If nothing else, this is a must-have for your PR survey.
Objective journalists are far less likely to publish or comment on potentially slanted articles or press releases that shed particular light on the writing or sponsoring organization.
Objectivity is crucial!
One of the most valuable benefits of conducting PR surveys is the ability to truly understand your audience beyond surface-level demographics. By gathering detailed data on their attitudes, preferences, and behaviors, you gain actionable insights that enable you to craft messaging that resonates deeply with your target market.
For example, a PR survey can reveal how your audience perceives your brand, which topics they care about most, and what motivates their decisions. This knowledge helps you avoid generic communications and instead deliver personalized messages that help you connect with your audience. Additionally, understanding all your segments allows you to tailor campaigns for different groups, increasing the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising.
By continuously monitoring changes in audience sentiment through periodic PR surveys, your PR strategies stay agile and responsive to evolving market trends, ensuring sustained engagement and impact.it.
Recommended Reading: Benefits of Working with a Third-Party Research Firm
PR surveys provide unique, data-driven stories that capture media and public attention. When you share fresh survey results, you offer journalists, bloggers, and influencers original content that stands out from typical promotional messages.
These insights can be transformed into eye-catching press releases, engaging blog posts, and shareable social media content, all of which contribute to increasing your brand’s visibility. For instance, revealing surprising consumer trends or industry opinions through a PR survey can spark conversations and earn valuable earned media coverage.
Moreover, survey data lends credibility to your messaging, making your content more trustworthy and newsworthy. This organic amplification helps build brand awareness and positions your company as a thought leader in your field.
There is no wiggle room for mistakes. When it comes to statistics and data, you do not want the reader or news source to have any doubt about the survey responses.
If they notice a mistake, they will lack confidence in sharing the story with their audience.
If you notice little typos, grammar mistakes, or even formatting errors in emails or proposals, it’s usually a more massive sign the PR firm does not pay particular attention to detail.
It is bad news when it comes time to analyze and tabulate the data for your PR survey.
Your surveys or your partner helping with the surveys should be an expert in the art and science of wording survey questions. You shouldn’t have to be (when you work with a third-party like us).
When building out the questionnaire, focus on topics of interest that your respondents will want to answer. The goal is to create questions that produce credible, media-ready data without introducing bias or confusion. An expert will think carefully about question wording, flow, sample definition, and the story you ultimately want the media to pick up.
Reporters, editors, and readers want insights that reveal shifts in behavior, surprising trends, or sentiment around emerging issues. Avoid overly technical phrasing or promotional language that signals an agenda. Instead, stick to straightforward wording that encourages honest responses.
A good expert also ensures the structure of the questionnaire supports clean storytelling. That includes choosing the right mix of question types, keeping the survey short enough to avoid respondent fatigue, and placing sensitive questions later in the flow. Clear definitions, mutually exclusive answer options, balanced scales, and unbiased phrasing are all essential to producing data that journalists can/want to trust. When you work with a third party (the right one!), they handle this complexity for you so you don’t have to worry about the mechanics, only the impact of the results.
Make sure your data quality standards are sky high, whether you’re doing your PR surveys yourself or not. Here are some things that are ideal for the best data quality in survey responses:
Now, if you are conducting market research, you may only think that the market research company produces numbers for you.
Statistics here.
Graphs there.
Charts there.
Incorrect! The best national PR polling companies offer multiple services to help repurpose and add even more value to the study by using data for your marketing strategy.
Think…”Are there any ways and other formats we can share the information to improve the return on investment (ROI) of our efforts?” The answer is always yes.
Here are value-added services for your public opinion polling project.
The ultimate graphical shareable. An infographic is ideal for sharing your PR polling results on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
The infographic is an eye-catching and engaging way to share the results of your survey.
Drive Research is a big fan of using infographics to display research results in a fun and aesthetically pleasing way.
Here is an example infographic our team created for a PR survey on gyms re-opening in 2020.
Repurposing your survey results into other deliverables is recommended. Don’t think about just a single post that summarizes all of the results in one post.
Theoretically, each question from the survey tells its own story and could be a separate blog post as part of a series. Write these for both shareables on social but also for SEO.
Most likely, the PR study you recently completed offers a lot of value to your readers, customers, and potential customers.
Reformat the findings or the press release into a page or page(s) on your website.
In addition to blog posts and website copy, if you have a news section on your website, the PR you gather from the survey fits perfectly there.
Remember, we’re all about repurposing. Each data point and insight from your survey makes for a nice shareable on social media.
Share the key insights with links to your website or blog. Share mini-insights with graphical PNGs. Even share your infographic.
Break those insights down by age generations, and you have even more nuggets to share. It is endless.
Here is an example of how our client, Seedership repurposed findings from a PR survey to share on social media.
It may be the fifth mention but one the most valuable. If you are struggling to get press and awareness of your brand, a survey is an excellent way to get on the radar of big-name news sources, sites, and journalists.
Survey data is unique and proprietary, and it’s something of value you can offer them that NO ONE ELSE HAS.
For example, our client ABC Creative was featured in Yahoo Finance as a result of our PR polling survey.
Whitepapers are a creative way to generate leads and customers. Most of our brands put together a 3-to-4-page in-depth whitepaper highlighting the survey insights.
They place this on a landing page on the website and require a form fill to download (name, organization name, email, and phone number).
You can also use PPC and social media advertisements to drive traffic to the landing page to generate even more leads.
It is a similar strategy to the whitepaper, but more in-depth. Perhaps you can leverage some of the survey data to help educate your customers.
If you are a mortgage company, you may be able to build an eBook for first-time homebuyers. Your introduction page could feature some data and numbers from the national survey you just conducted with first-time homebuyers.
The golden question, right? How much does an online survey cost with a PR polling company?
If you read through to the final chapter of this ultimate guide, you are probably immediately jumping to: “This all sounds great, and I see the value, but can I afford it?”
The short answer about the costs you don’t want to hear is: it depends. But it does.
Have no fear, though. We are here to explain and help you understand what factors impact the cost of a PR survey firm project for your organization.
We outline these items below and tell how they can drive the expense UP (⬆️) or DOWN (⬇️).
This first point relates to the geography of your survey. Do you want to conduct the study domestically or internationally?
Conducting the survey domestically ⬇️
If you’re going to complete a survey with our market research company in the U.S., there will be no extra costs.
Unless you need our team to provide a Spanish translation for those respondents, which is very rare for a census-representative national survey for PR purposes.
Conducting the survey internationally ⬆️
However, if you need to conduct the survey internationally, there will be additional fees.
The additional charges are for translation and programming fees related to taking the English version of the survey and setting it up in other languages (i.e., Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, etc.)
There are also translation fees on the back end to review any open-ended questions and convert those to English for interpretation.
Open-ended questions are free-text responses where respondents type in answers rather than select from provided categories.
These comments are often proofed and categorized into themes, which is called coding.
If you are running a survey with translations, it is a good idea to limit the number of open-ended comments or remove them entirely, so all the questions are closed-ended via categories.
If they are all close-ended, the analysis and interpretation are more straightforward. Since the categories are already translated for the survey outreach, the percentages can be easily applied through the responses without any additional work.
Did you know we can conduct a survey for your organization in over 200 languages? Don’t believe us? Here is the list below.
Understandable regarding the cost impact here:
⬆️ Cost increases if: the additional language(s) are needed for surrey administration and/or analysis.
⬇️ Cost decreases if: your survey is conducted in English only.
A second factor that impacts the cost of your PR polling survey is the number of questions you want to ask, or what is also called the length of the interview.
A 50-question study takes your PR polling survey firm longer to draft and longer to program.
It also requires the company to pay a more significant incentive to obtain responses. A respondent may not be willing to take a 20-minute survey for $1, but will they take it for $5?
More extensive studies equal more substantial rewards. But in some cases, higher rewards can equal lower market research costs.
Using our advice above, try to aim for about 10 to 15 questions for your PR poll. It is about a 3-to-5-minute LOI.
⬆️ Cost increases if: more questions are added, and the survey is longer.
⬇️ Cost decreases if: fewer questions are asked, and the survey is shorter.
The next factor we examine which impacts price significantly is the number of responses you need to gather. Perhaps no other element has a more considerable impact on the budget.
From our discussion earlier in this ultimate guide, here is a short recap of what you need to consider in terms of completed survey responses:
A total of 100 responses offers a +/- 10% margin of error, which is not ideal.
The results will be directional but not very reliable. Remember, with a PR poll, you want to be confident in the results, so this confidence can be passed to journalists and news outlets when discussing the results.
But let’s take a look at a few examples as we look at cost impact:
If that cost per response increases to $5:
With those examples, it’s easy to see how the cost of the sample can skyrocket as the number of responses increases.
If you have a budget in mind and are willing to share it with the PR polling firm, they can design a package to fit your needs best.
⬆️ Cost increases if: more responses are requested.
⬇️ Cost decreases if: fewer responses are requested.
With our PR polling company, several reporting options exist for your organization. There are 3 options to choose from with our team:
Level 1: Base package.
It includes an online dashboard of all of the charts and graphs from your survey using a passcode-protected link. You can log into the interactive online reports at any time and view up-to-the-second results.
These reports incur no additional charge to you, and we include a handful of cross-tabulation reports as well (data compared by specific demographics or behaviors).
These reports may be exported in Excel, PDF, PowerPoint, or Word to view offline.
We also find several clients who are looking to cut costs, take the PowerPoint slides, and format them into their brand template. It makes it cost-effective and straightforward.
Level 2: Topline report with cross-tabulation banners.
With the base package, our PR polling firm does not offer any interpretation.
In those cases, the sponsoring brand or client reviews the analysis and prepares its press releases, shareables, and other deliverables. It helps reduce costs.
Many opt for the Level 2 package with our company. The topline report is a 3 to 4-page (maximum) Word document that highlights the themes and findings from the poll in a bullet point style format.
The insights detail the key takeaways from the survey objectively and ensure all primary and secondary goals are addressed.
In addition to the executive summary topline, our team also prepares a full Excel file of banner runs.
The questions in the survey are listed in the rows, and the cross-tabulations are listed as columns.
These files are an excellent way to view the full results at a glance and compare results across demographics.
Instances, where results are statistically significant, are noted in the cells.
What this means is if males are significantly more likely than females to purchase tires for vehicles, this cell will be highlighted as statistically significant.
Level 3: Comprehensive report.
It is the Cadillac package of PR polling studies. Our full PowerPoint file includes:
In most cases, a 10 to 15-question survey can easily create a deck of over 100 pages for this comprehensive reporting package.
⬆️ Cost increases if: you request a higher level of reporting.
⬇️ Cost decreases if: you request a lower level of reporting.
Outside of the number of responses, no factor has more of an impact on cost. For this item, you’ll want to ask yourself how difficult this audience to reach is?
A random sample of Gen Pop. ⬇️
If you are looking for a random sample of the general population, the incidence (or qualification rate) is high. If you have no disqualifying criteria, the IR would be 100%.
Niche audience ⬆️
However, if you are looking for a niche or select type of respondent, the IR plummets, and more invites must be sent to non-qualifying respondents to find the respondents you need.
Here is an example of how IR goes from high (easy) to low (complicated):
⬆️ Cost increases if: you are targeting a highly specific audience (low IR).
⬇️ Cost decreases if: you request an easy-to-target audience like the general population (high IR).
It is somewhat related to the prior point around IR and the difficulty in targeting an audience.
In many cases, what makes B2B market research different is that surveying this audience will always be more expensive than surveying a consumer audience.
Costs increase even further when you narrow down or laser in on specific roles/titles, verticals, or company size.
However, working with a PR polling agency will help. They often have access to both consumer and business panels to make the outreach much easier and more feasible.
⬆️ Cost increases if: you are targeting business professionals.
⬇️ Cost decreases if: you are targeting consumers.
PR and marketing professionals are communicating in a noisy world.
Top-tier editors receive hundreds of pitches in their inboxes every day. However, on average, journalists open only 3% of the media pitches they receive.
That means these writers are receiving 100, 250, or 500 pitches a week for only 5 story spots.
How can your brand break through the inbox clutter? According to a recent study with 500+ digital publishers, most describe their perfect piece of content as one with exclusive research.
Drive Research conducted a public relations survey with 600 respondents across the United States.
The objective of the survey was to see how safe people felt returning to the gyms after quarantine guidelines had been lifted.
Key findings from the PR survey included:
Drive Research created a press release with key findings from the survey. We sent this survey to a contact list with hundreds of reporters from across the country.
Results from the survey were featured in 50+ media publications including USA Today and Yahoo Finance.
Not only did our PR survey help our brand get exposure, but it also increased our site traffic and domain authority.
Here was the impact of our gym survey:
Drive Research is a PR survey company. Our services extend across the U.S. and the world. Our market research firm has worked with Fortune 500 brands, helping deliver insights, action items, and ROI on their survey efforts.
Our research has been featured in top-tier news outlets such as USA Today, Forbes, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, and more.
Contact Drive Research today!
