Using Polls
If you want to know what your fans want, one of the easiest ways to do this is to simply ask them.
For this reason, polls and quizzes have become a mainstay in marketing. They are often used to gather qualitative data or help put a prospective customer on their ideal track.
When it comes to music marketing, polls can take a lighter and more playful approach. At the education phase, we’re here to entertain and build community - so our usage of these tools can be a bit less intense.
That being said, this information can come in handy throughout all future stages of the Buddy System, so it’s not something we want to undervalue either.
A few poll tools we can use are the following:
- Google Forms
- Facebook Group Polls
- IG Stories
These are simple to set up and simple to interpret, but we can tailor our design of these polls to intentionally provide us with actionable data once we have some traffic rolling through them - so let’s look at 4 main poll examples that do exactly that.
- Merch Preferences
People don’t buy CDs anymore...or do they? You don’t know what your fans will or won’t buy until they buy it (or don’t). The perfect way to test this before needing to put money on the line is to simply ask your fans what they would and wouldn’t buy.
Click Here to borrow my Merch Survey Google Form template as referenced in the video. - Music Format Preferences
Is it time for vinyl? Do your fans prefer streaming over all else? If so, are they Spotify or Apple Music people? Singles, or albums?! All of this can be discerned from your fanbase, and then you can tailor your release strategy to their preferences. - Fan Interests
Asking clinical questions such as “Do you enjoy movies” coax generic answers - but if we tailor our questions to be entertaining and provide us with valuable insights, we can get a LOT more information with a lot less. The results of a question like “Star Wars or Lord of the Rings” offer an immediate sense of culture among our fanbase, especially if there is a clear trend. - Product Testing
As you make your latest shirt design, you may think “ugh, I don’t want to do another black tee, but it seems like the safest option.” Well, let your fans tell you what color they might want! Not only does this ensure you’ll sell what you make, but responding to your fans’ votes by putting them into action will make them feel heard.
Using these poll tools and these design options, we can aim to get useful responses from our audiences wherever they may lie - in our Facebook Group, in our Instagram audience, or through a Google Form which is linkable in emails and anywhere else!
Run some of these polls and populate the data in the corresponding tabs in your Data Hub. As we build up our data here, we will have direction for all sorts of future campaigns.