Determine what you want to learn from your survey

Before creating our survey, we want to identify our objectives for our market research. So let’s first reflect on what we’re using this survey to find out - do we want to understand what keeps our loyal customers satisfied? Identify product improvement areas? Gauge interest in a new feature we’re planning?

Let’s pretend I’m launching a new business selling eco-friendly cleaning products, and I want to understand what features are most important to people when buying these products like this. This will help me with product design and marketing.

So I know what I want to find out, but I can use ChatGPT to help me determine the specific research objectives for the survey.

Here’s the prompt I’m using.

Help me define clear objectives for a market research survey focused on [survey goal and product/service area].

Define your target audience

Now I want to determine who my ideal customers are based on demographics, interests, and behaviours.

Who should be the target audience for this market research survey?

Generate, refine and organise relevant questions

So we have our objectives and we know who we want to target. But what are we going to ask them? Let’s use ChatGPT to come up with the actual content of our survey.

Based on the objectives you determined above, generate questions for my survey to understand what features are most important to people when buying [product/service area].

I’m pretty happy with this output. But at this point you can refine the questions ChatGPT suggests based on your target audience, the format in which you’ll be sending the survey, your product etc. Prompts like "How can I make this question clearer and more engaging: [question]?" or "Suggest ways to personalise survey questions for [target audience segment]." can help with this.

Also, ChatGPT automatically categorised my questions into sections and suggested the format for each one (single choice, open text response etc.). You can ask it to do this for you if it doesn’t do it by default.

Pilot test and analyse responses

Now I have my questions, I’m ready to pilot-test my survey. You might choose to leave this step out - but testing with a small group can be great way of highlighting gaps in your survey questions or different ways to phrase some things.

Once I’ve distributed my survey to a few folks, I can use ChatGPT to help me analyse the responses.

I’ll upload the data as a CSV along with a copy of the survey questions and this prompt.

I used these questions in my pilot test survey which I gave to 5 people. I'm uploading the survey questions as a reminder, and the responses as a CSV. Based on the questions, the responses I got, and my objectives listed above, do you have any suggestions for how I might further refine the survey to get a more meaningful end result?

Collaborate with ChatGPT here until you’re happy with your survey questions. Now you’re ready to distribute your survey.

Distribute survey and analyse response

Once your survey is all done and you’ve got your data, it’s time to analyse it. Trawling through responses one by one to look for patterns would be painstakingly slow, so naturally, we’re going to use ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting.

Help me analyse the open-ended survey responses related to the question "[specific question]". I've uploaded the responses.

Create actionable strategies from insights

I’m going to use ChatGPT to help me come up with ways I can use my survey data.

You can ask it any number of questions here depending on what you’re using your survey for. But in my case, since this is a new business I’m building, I’ll ask it a couple of things related to that.

I’m launching a new business selling eco-friendly cleaning products. Based on these survey insights, how could I tailor my branding to appeal to potential loyal customers?


What copy could I use on my website’s homepage that would resonate with potential loyal customers?