Why do you need an education B2B survey

With an education B2B survey, you can get a better understanding of your target audience and their needs. This helps you improve your product or service. You can also get feedback about how people use it and what they value most.

When you’re selling to businesses, your target audience is likely to be a lot more varied than when selling to consumers. For example, let’s say that you are a consulting company that wants to look into the education industry in Latin America. Say that the particular schools that you want to research are niche and therefore harder to survey. One way that you can go about this research is to run an education b2b survey. An Education b2b survey allows you to gather multiple data points quickly and easily. There are a couple of steps to go through in this process.

First, you would need to decide on the goal of your education b2b survey. This goal could be gathering data points to conduct an analysis into the pain points of students studying in niche schools in Latin America, for instance. The next step would be to decide the questions you want to ask in the survey. Lastly, you would then program and run the actual survey itself. Let's get into which kind of survey questions you can ask. 

Education b2b survey: What are the questions you can ask respondents

The questions that can be included in an education survey are those that will help you understand the way students are performing in school. You need to ask questions that will let you know how well they are learning, what they think about their teachers and school, and what they want out of their school experience.

The categories of questions can include:

1. Demographic questions: These are questions about the student's age, sex, race/ethnicity, disability status, language spoken at home, etc. This information is used to get a better idea of who is taking the survey. A guide on demographic questions is available here. 

2. Academic questions: These are questions about performance on tests and assignments. They can also include questions about grades or other factors that indicate academic achievement or lack thereof. These kinds of questions will give insight into how well students are doing overall in school (and also whether or not any gaps exist between subgroups).

3. Emotional quotient questions: These ask about feelings about school, friends and family members who are involved with the student's education (like teachers), stress levels related to academics or activities outside of class time sports practice or after-school jobs), etcetera. These answers help research companies understand how well students feel supported by their peers as well. Going back to our example of surveying students in Latin America, some questions can look like the following:

• What is the most important factor in their decision-making process when choosing an elective or the main subject?
• Who are the decision makers so that you know exactly who you're addressing with your research?

You can also get information on how big your target audience is by asking questions such as: What percentage of people in my country have access to the internet? How many students are there in schools with more than 2,000 staff? However, these questions will depend on the nature of the survey project. 

What not to ask in your education B2B survey

There are many things you should not ask in your education B2B survey. The following list provides some examples:

• Questions that are too personal or sensitive, such as asking what the respondent's race is or how much money they make.
• Questions that are too vague, such as asking what types of technology are used to run the educational institution.
• Queries that are too complex and require an explanation for you to answer properly, like "How long have you been in business?" If a respondent thinks about this question for longer than 15 seconds (or even less), chances are you won't get an accurate response because they'll be distracted by other thoughts during their deliberation time. Instead, ask something like "How long has your school been in business?" This way there's no need for any further explanation and it's quick and easy to answer. 
• Questions where the answers may be opinionated rather than factual should also be avoided since they can bias future results of your study. For example: "Would you prefer School X over yours?"

For a guide on framing questions, the National Foundation for Educational Research has a guide you can use. Check it out here for additional information. 

How to run an education B2B survey

As the first step, you can start with identifying a goal for your education b2b survey. Next, you can look at dividing your target audience based on segments. Segmentation is the process of dividing a population into subgroups. It’s used to make surveys more efficient, as you can ask your questions to smaller groups and get faster results.

Segmentation is used in many business processes, including:

• Marketing campaigns – Segmenting your customers based on their interests will help you create targeted ad campaigns that reach each group directly.
• Customer service campaigns – If a customer has an issue with their order or needs assistance with something else, knowing who they are and what type of product or service they use will help you quickly address their concerns.

The way you segment a population into subgroups is by defining your criteria and then selecting the groups that meet those criteria. In order to do this, you have to first know what type of information you want from the survey. Let's go back to our Education b2b survey example. Some possible segmentation questions can be the following:

• What kind of institution is it? (Public or Private) 
• How many employees does the institution have? (100 or more than 100) 
• What is the range of curriculums that they offer? (within a certain numerical range) 

Once you have segmented your audience, you can now move on to crafting the survey itself. Developing the survey involves practices such as survey programming and scripting. After the survey has been scripted, you can then launch it. It's also a good idea to first test the Education b2b survey on a small set of the population. If you'd like help with these terms, don't hesitate to reach out to us here.

For resources on segmentation, have a look at this guide from the Marketing Insider. 

Keep in mind the purpose of your survey and involve the right people at each step

As with everything else, it's important to keep your goals in mind as you design and execute your education b2b survey. That will help ensure that:

• the right people are involved at each step
• the scope of the survey is clear
• you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your survey
• when writing a survey, think about what you want to achieve with it. What do you want people to say? How can you get that information?

When you find out the results of your research, it’s important to set aside time to evaluate their impact. Look at how they matched up with your original goals, and if there are any areas you want to improve on in the next round. What did you learn about yourself as a researcher? Did anything surprise or impress you?

Conclusion

An Education b2b survey is a method of gathering information in order to determine the effectiveness of current programs and services. It is an integral part of any business strategy and can help you build on your strengths while identifying areas for improvement. If there's anything else we can do to help you get better at running surveys and getting results that matter, we'd love to talk.