5 Inbound Marketing Persona Survey Tools

At the foundation of all marketing is research and persona building. If your business doesn't know or understand its target audience and market, how can you effectively go about selling them a good or service?

The term data-driven results is everywhere, but without it marketing a product turns into throwing things at a wall and blindly hoping something will stick.

This necessary persona building begins with raw data and research, which means surveys of potential customers. But the old days of calling or just filling out forms and writing down results is long gone. Nowadays, to effectively manage all the data, anayltics, and results from surveyin, a marketing and survey research tool is a necessity for organization and concrete, readable findings.

Let's examine five of the top inbound marketing persona survey research tools, and see where they fall when it comes to features, abilities, and pricing options.

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1. Surveygizmo

The first inbound marketing personas survey tool we will look at is Surveygizmo. They put an emphasis on building surveys using logic to help raise completion rates; they include functions such as skip logic and piping questions, or using content to populate later questions.

Surveygizmo also allows the user to either build surveys from scratch, or use one of their already made survey templates. They offer one-click reports and ease of exporting, so you can easily share and examine your data.

Surveygizmmo has four levels of pricing, without a free option. Their Solo package starts at $19 per month, and their next package, Basic is $49 a month. After that, they have the Professional package at $99 a month, and their final package, the Premier, is $199 a month. (Comparing this pricing to another tool, Surveymonkey is interesting, as their most expensive package is $780 annually, versus the Premier package, which would equal out to $2388 a year.)

2. Surveymonkey

The next inbound marketing personas survey tool we will look at is Surveymonkey, which advertises itself as the world's leading survey platform, with over 20 million customers. Their survey builder offers over 15 types of questions, can be sent from mobile devices, and is integrated with partners like MailChimp and Eventbrite.

They also offer the option of SurveyMonkey Audience, where you can define your audience and choose from hundreds of attributes. Their data from analytics can be shared in presentation-ready charts and reports.

There are four levels of pricing at SurveyMonkey, beginning with the Basic package, which is free, then Select, which is $26 a month, then the Gold level of pricing, which is $300 annually, and then finally their platinum level of pricing, which is $780 a year. Their most popular package is the gold level.

3. Qualtrics

The third tool we will look at is Qualtrics, which has over 6000 clients, many of them universities and business schools in the US. They offer a host of features, including their specialized Voice of the Customer (VOC) Implentations, custom dashboards, API Inegrations, and Conjoint Analysis, and mobile surveys.

For pricing, their trial run is free, but when it runs out you have to upgrade to a paid package. Qualitrics, unlike the other marketing and survey tools, does not offer a tiered pricing available on their website.

Instead, you have to sign up for demos of their different products, as well as signing up to get a consultation with someone from Qualtrics to discuss and customize the tools you will want/need for your system.

4. Google Forms

As with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Google Forms lets anyone that is invited to collaborate on building your form or survey. Google Forms also allows an unlimited number of respondents to the form created by sharing the URL, so it can embedded to a website or sent to a Gmail inbox. The survey responses are collected in Google Sheets, and charts and real-time responses are available inside Forms.

Because Google Forms is a free tool, available to anyone with a Gmail account, Google Forms seems less focused on marketing and instead seems to be more of a general survey tool. While there are spreadsheets and reports and results, they don't have tools like skip logic, hundreds of attributes to choose from, or VOC Implementaions.

For managing results and really digging deep into persona analysis, it might be more wise to go with a paid service that offers more of the specialty features needed to manage data.

5. Wufoo

The last inbound marketing persona survey tool we will look at is Wufoo, an online form builder that creates and utilizes contact forms, online payments, online surveys and event registrations and also offers cloud storage.

Wufoo seems more focused on forms and payment processes then surveys, personas, or analytics. While it does offer the option to have full reports an results of the forms, as well as integration with MailChimp, it is not as focused on obtaining and managing data from persona research as some of the other survey tools.

Wufoo has a limited free account, and then moves into tiered pricing. (Not a priority, but they have the best names!) Their Ad Hoc package is $14.95, their Bona Fide package is $29.95, their Carpe Diem package is $69.95, and their Ad Infinitum package is $199.95. These are all monthly prices, Wufoo also offers annual price options on each package to save money.

Have we missed any inbound marketing persona research and survey tools? Let us know in the comments your opinion or experience with any of these tools!