200: The Role of Surveys: Shaping Our Business Strategies

Hi there. Welcome to the Professional Creative. This episode is all about asking the right questions. One thing I love to think about as a creative entrepreneur and in my business is that anytime I begin to wonder, I wonder what people want, I wonder what people think. All of a sudden, every single time, I will realize, you know what? You don't have to wonder. All you have to do is ask. Some of the most successful businesses in the world have gotten to their level of by doing nothing more than asking what their audience wants and serving it up to them over and over and over again. And so this concept of asking is so simple and it's so enlightening. And so in this episode, I want to outline all the different ways that we ask our audience what our favorite questions are to ask in surveys and three examples of how we've done this in our business. I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. First, I have to tell you a story. This story is about the importance of asking the right questions, my friends. Okay, so last year at our team strategy session, I always loved doing something super special. I love to surprise and delight with a kind of an event or an activity and no one knows what it is. We've gone ziplining before, we've done art projects before, we've done things like rented e bikes and so nobody ever knows what they're up for. And I think this is so much fun. So last year what we did is that I worked with Erin on my team, who's my events planner. She's incredible at this to kind of source some ideas for the place we were going. We were going to Charleston. And so she sent me a bunch of ideas and one of them was a boat ride. And it was like this link sent me to this beautiful Charleston yacht at Sunset. The website sold me right away. The homepage was stunning. It was an insanely beautiful setting with the yacht and the golden light bouncing off the water and the whole thing. I was like, yes, this is what we're doing. It reminded me of a Nicholas Sparks movie. Let's go. So I gave Aaron the green light to rent the boat, plan the surprise, and keep everything under wraps until the big reveal. So I asked. Let me be very clear. I asked no questions. I said, I love this. Let's go. So when the time came, we all loaded up into this big kind of bus and we headed to the marina. The team had no idea what was happening. And I was so thrilled for the moment, I could hardly wait. And so we turned this corner and everyone started to see these big, beautiful boats. And I said, ladies, we're going on a yacht. And so everyone squealed and started to cheer. They were so excited. Except Aaron didn't really cheer and squeal. And I didn't really notice at the time, but looking back, she was just kind of sitting there looking at me. And I was like, okay, so we start walking past these gorgeous yachts. They're pristine and massive and luxurious. And we just keep walking and we keep walking and we keep walking. And then we reached our yacht. And my friends, it was not a yacht. It was a very, very small, very casual, we're going to call it, like, pontoon boat with no roof. And so I. I played it cool. I was like, okay. And so, you know, here we go. We got, like, this charcuterie board. We're all, like, moving around each other because it really is the size of a pontoo boat. And Tessie is, like, thinking to herself, she tells me later, she's like, oh, this must be the boat that's going to take us to the yacht. And so at one point on the boat ride, I just go sit over next to Aaron. We're like 10 minutes in, and I said, aaron, is this what you thought it would be? And without hesitation, she said, yes, Bonnie, I tried to tell you that it's not a yacht. And everyone heard her say that. And we all started dying laughing. Everyone was like, wait, what? So we called it out. We're like, this is not what we thought it was going to be. And we laughed and laughed and laughed. And now it's this ongoing joke. So every time I try to plan something for the team, they all make a joke that it's going to be a great yacht and they've never let me live it down. This is my point. It's so important to ask questions. It's so important to ask the right questions. And a perfect example of how asking instead of assuming could have helped in my particular situation. The real problem is when we assume what our people want, which is where I'm going to take this conversation. The stakes in Charleston, they were low. But when it comes to running our business and knowing our audience, the risk is not worth taking. And so that's why today I want to talk about this. In fact, I'll tell you this kind of secret. In my world, I have a lot of creative entrepreneurs, and the success of things like launches are all over the board. Some are insanely successful, beautiful, amazing, impactful launches. And sometimes people launch and really it falls flat and they're not sure why, and they're tired and disappointed. And so here's one kind of common denominator is that I don't know of a launch that has failed when the launch was delivering on the very thing that they had been asked for again and again and again. The time where I see launches fail is when someone launches something when, quite frankly, they were never asked for the product. And this is so easy to fall into. I've done it myself so many times because we think we know, and oftentimes we just don't. It's easy to fall into this trap. You know, our calendars are full. We've got events and newsletters and collaborations and travel and all of these things. And it's just like there's a bit of juggling, and sometimes we miss the mark. And the most important part of slowing down, to really be intentional. We build something beautiful that no one really needs. We send emails that feel like noise instead of value. We host an event but don't know what resonated most. That's where surveys come in, and they've helped us ask better questions and listen with intention. And that has therefore fueled so much of our success. So before I get into it, I've compiled a few of our very most effective survey questions for you in a free download for today's episode. So head on over to the professionalcreative.com to download that again for today's episode. And you can use that as a starting point so that you don't have to wonder what questions to ask. So what happens when you ask your audience meaningful questions? Well, you gain the clarity over what's working in your business. What is your bread and butter? What should you keep investing in? You also discover blind spots in your business strategy. What's not working and what do you need to pivot away from or refine? This is not a delicious piece of cake to eat when you hear what's not working. And my friends, it's the most valuable question you can ask. What could we improve? What did you not like about this? It is not fun to go through those answers, but I'm telling you, they are so incredibly important to improving your products and services and offers and making something really, really impactful. So don't shy away from it. You also build genuine connection and trust with your audience. I know that I love it when I feel like I've been brought in as a co creator to something that someone else is building. I feel so heard and understood and that in turn builds loyalty and and just a really beautiful community. People really want to know that they're being listened to and cared for and not just being sold to all the time. You also cultivate a rhythm of listening and engaging in a valuable conversation to have, being open to feedback and open to pivoting. So incredible. So today I'll discuss three surveys that we sent just in the last year and how powerful they've been and how they've shaped our decisions. The first one is our newsletter frequency. This is a pretty simple one, but so incredibly important. So last year we started a bi weekly newsletter. And so biweekly is one of those words that really annoy me because did you know that it means either twice a week or every other week? Couldn't we come up with another word? So for us it means every other week. So twice a month we actually run two biweekly newsletters. So if you sign up for both of them, you get an email every single week. One is called Beneath the Surface, which is a play on our mascot, the Swan. Our swan is like elegant and sophisticated on top of the water, but paddling furiously underneath the surface. And so this newsletter is for creative entrepreneurs and it's a real behind the scenes of the gears that are running underneath the surface of our business. Specific for creative entrepreneurs. The other one is Secrets of the Studio and this one is specifically developed for surface pattern designers. So it's industry news, industry insight into surface pattern design. If you want to sign up for either of them, you can do so. They're free. Just head over to bonniecristine.comnewsletters bonniecristine.comNewsletters and you can choose which one you want to receive or both. We love writing them and so one of the things that I was curious about is whether the cadence was too much or not enough. We Found ourselves kind of asking this question and thinking about it and going back and forth. And I was like, you know, we should just ask. So at the bottom of one of our emails, we inserted a survey, which you can do with Kit, by the way, which I love. Kit's our email service provider. And so I popped in this survey and said I would love your feedback. How do you feel about the cadence of our newsletters every other week? The options were, love it, it's the perfect rhythm. I want more. I prefer weekly, it's fine, but I'd prefer less frequent issues like Monthly. 74.5% of our audience said, I love it, it's the perfect rhythm. This was so validating to me because I was over here kind of making some assumptions and hoping that I was right. Anytime we are making assumptions and hoping that we're right is your red flag. It is your go time for a survey. This simple survey provided so much confirmation for us to continue with our timing. And it just gave us clarity and encouragement knowing that people were loving it. This isn't always the case though, quite frankly. I have done a survey really just for survey's sake before. I remember this one time that I had four class ideas that I was going to come out with next. This was years ago and I had already decided which one I was going to do, but I did really have four ideas. It's just that I had already decided, but I was like, well, I'll kind of as a teaser and let everybody know it's coming. I'll do a survey. So I ran this survey and wouldn't you know that the one that I was definitely moving forward with was the least requested. No one wanted it. And I was like, oh my goodness. First of all, I can't believe it. Because I was so sure that I knew exactly what everybody wanted. I was wrong. And so I took this hard pivot and did the other idea, the one that everybody wanted. And in turn, it was incredibly successful. But had I not listened, had I not surveyed and listened, I have no idea what would have happened with that. Do you ever look at beautiful patterns on fabric or gift wrap and think, could I create something like that? Imagine seeing your designs come to life in the same way. Well, now you can with Start simple, my free mini class series in fabric, gift wrap and wallpaper design. And yes, it's totally beginner friendly. No experience needed. Imagine taking a simple sketch or doodle and transforming it into a beautiful pattern ready to print and hold in your own hand in these quick beginner Friendly classes. I'll guide you step by step through the essentials. Doodling, turning your doodles into digital art, creating custom color palettes, and creating your very first repeating pattern. And the best part, you'll finish with a real product. I'll teach you how to export and upload to my favorite places to get your own custom fabric, gift wrap or wallpaper in your hands. It's amazing to see your vision brought to life in this way. Whether you're looking to play or explore or maybe even kickstart a whole new side hustle, start simple is the perfect way to get started. Plus, it's absolutely free. Go sign up at bonniecristine.com startsimple I can't wait to see what you make. This is the perfect, no pressure, joyful way to explore your creativity. Sign up today@bonniecristine.com startsimple and let's make something beautiful together. Okay, so now let's talk about a really big example. And this is the surveying that we did ahead of this enormous change between Flourish by existing membership into its new public edition called Pattern Plus. Pattern plus is opening on May 27, and I want to talk you through how we made this change. We had a hunch, we knew some things that we wanted to update. We were gathering intel from members along the way. But before we made any huge sweeping changes, we knew we needed to survey. So we did two editions of this. The first one is really working for us in the background at all times, and that is a part of our exit process. So if you cancel your membership, you don't have to give us feedback, but we invite you to give us feedback if you want. We ask you why you joined and why you're leaving and what improvements you would like to see to the program and if you had any feedback for us. And this is so incredibly helpful. So we started digging into these in depth. This is something that we look at every single month. But for this in particular, we went really, really deep dive into the feedback that we had received here. The next one was surveying our existing members. So I have about 3,500 members in Flourish and I wanted to ask them and get their insight. So I surveyed them with one question. You want to know what it was? What's one resource tool or shortcut that would simplify your workflow or make your life easier? That was it. Just one question. And I promised them if they filled it out, they would get a free $5 gift card to Starbucks. So we had coffee on us. If you would answer this one question. And so the survey cost me a couple of thousand of dollars. It's the best I've ever spent because the insight was exactly what I needed in order to move forward. Quite honestly, the answer surprised us. This was an open ended question. So there were no multiple choices. And so many of the people had the same exact requests. So many I would have never known. And so one of them, the very top request, the most requested feature, was something that was not on my radar to supply. Want to know what it was? Mockups. So if you're not familiar with what a mockup is, A mockup is a picture of a product that has layers built into it so that you can open it in usually Photoshop and apply your pattern or your artwork to it and it looks like a real product. This is super helpful for surface designers who want to show their work either on social media or in their portfolio. So this was not on my radar and also not in our wheelhouse. We don't really do mock ups. This is not something that I'm an expert in. I kind of know what I'm doing, but not really. And so we kind of troubleshooted like this is the number one thing they want. How are we going to make it happen? We considered partnering with another expert to do them together. We considered like AI and pretty quickly decided, no, no, that's not the right direction we want to go in. So what we ended up doing was partnering with a photographer, Callie, who's my best friend but also a professional photographer. And she and I are hands on curating mock up shots every single month. We've styled my home, we styled my sister's home last month. And so we're doing these every single month. And then we're partnering with a like a tech expert to work on the file setup to turn them into mock ups that we're then supplying to members of Pattern Plus. So one of the things I think is interesting is that we are offering them in both Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop is the known beloved program for mockups. But what we didn't want is to require our members to get another app or program if they didn't already have it. So we're also supplying them with Illustrator files as well. That will allow them to use the mock up just the same. So that's super exciting. We figured it out, we made it happen. And we would have never done this had we not surveyed and understood their deepest wants and desires for the program. The top 10 most requested features in that survey ended up being Deliverables for Our new membership and it was so clarifying for us. The third example I want to give you is our Surface Design Conference. Post event feedback. So we host a live event every year. In past years it's been called Immersion Live. This year, I don't think I've said this publicly anywhere, but we are calling it Surface Design Live. It's happening in October. And we love this program. We love this event so much. It's really an opportunity for us to just bring everyone together and talk about our industry. So we always host a post event survey because we want to hear what you loved, what we can improve and what you would like in future events, which is so important to include. When you host a repeated event, it's kind of easy to assume that you've got it all figured out. But we always, based on their feedback, tweak the next year's event because we never want to start learning and we never want to stop listening. One of the best questions that we ask is who would you love to see on stage for the next conference? And this helps us in our brainstorming. Like it gives us a really great jumping off point. These are the people that the people have asked for. So let's start there. So a few questions that we've included in this survey are how would you rate your overall experience? What made you choose to attend the conference this year? Which three sessions did you find the most helpful or inspiring? And again, who would you love to see speak at the event in the future? So this, this survey and the takeaways, it helps us refine the event and experience year over year because we really do pivot with pricing and timing and speaking topics, all based on feedback, never on assumptions. These three surveys I've shared above are all external ones that we send to our audience. But we do internal surveys as well. Our Immersion launch every year, we always survey our internal team as a post op. So what worked, what didn't? What do we need to refine so that we can take that and really learn from it the following year? So we send so many surveys throughout the year for multiple different reasons. But we have a bit of a framework. Every single survey has these things in common. The first one is that we keep things simple. We try to keep surveys simple for our team and for our audience. We use Google Forms. That's a pretty simple system. It functions super well, it's recognizable for most people. There are a bunch of other options as well. One that we love is Typeform. There's always SurveyMonkey as well. But we Love a good old Google form. We find that it works really well and you aren't charged per usage, which is also nice. We like to keep our surveys as short and sweet as possible. Two to five questions is great, sometimes it's got to be more. But try to keep it simple. An easy ask for people we focus on clarity and specificity, so we prioritize asking clear, direct questions. If we want to gauge, we provide a scale for people, like let's say from 1 to 5. How would you rate? If we want to hear their thoughts or options, we bullet out options so that they have something to get started with. If we want to hear their top three speakers, for instance, we provide all of the speakers so that they don't need to look up or recall the names. You want to make it easy for your audience to take the survey. And then from a specificity standpoint, we try to keep each survey specific to our particular end goal. Is that around the podcast? Is it around our email newsletter frequency? Is it around our membership? Is it around our conference? And we always say thank you. We always look to say thank you because someone being willing to take even a moment out of their day to provide feedback to us is such an incredible gift. So we always try to say thank you. We try to say thank you in our words, in our actions. And sometimes again with something like a Starbucks gift card, sometimes we enter people in for a giveaway. So for our conference survey, anybody who filled it out was entered to win the next year's conference for free. And other ideas we've used are a handwritten thank you note, a gift from our shop, all kinds of things just as a way to say thank you for taking the time. If we're going to make an ask, I think it's also really important to figure out a way to say thank you. I think surveys sometimes can feel big or filled with data. We can kind of get focused on impressing our audience with the questions or in the robustness of it all. But I just want to encourage you that a single well phrased question can often provide you everything you need to move forward with clarity. For example, one of our surveys we asked which area of your business do you feel the least confident in? Super simple question, but the result was so interesting. And 37 and a half said social media and online marketing. In another survey we asked the question, what is the biggest hurdle you're facing right now in regards to your art? Again, it was a single question, but the result is 39% of people said, I don't have enough hours in the day to work on it. Interesting, right? Surveys are just an incredible opportunity to gain clarity over what's working in your business. Again, to discover those blind spots to build genuine connection. So you can ask yourself, where am I assuming? Instead of asking what question could really unlock clarity for me this week? Remember, keep it super simple. Don't overthink it. And then how can I thank those who take the time to respond? Think through your business and consider where those unknowns are, where you are really considering and assuming and wondering. Again, if you're wondering it's time to survey. You can look at your project for gaps or question marks, or between the tasks or events that make up those projects. You can ask yourself questions like I wonder what they think about this? Or do they like this frequency? Or what do they want to learn from me next? Or what do they want to buy from me next? Was this part of the event a success? How could I be serving them more efficiently or effectively in this area? Then you can look at your unknowns and draft just a few simple survey questions. Maybe start with three. You can always do more later. But getting them asked at the beginning is so incredibly important. So like I mentioned at the beginning, if you've been unsure or you just want a way to get started, go grab our free download for today's episode. It is our favorite questions to ask in any survey. They're the ones that we have used time and time again to build a successful business. You can get that at today's show notes over at professionalcreative.com thank you for showing up today. In next week's episode, we're going to examine how we organize our weekly email newsletter and how you can easily apply a similar flow to your own weekly email newsletter. Until then, my friends, create the beauty that you want to see. Come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. Bye for now. Sam.