What are your clients thinking?

Knowing exactly what your clients and prospects are thinking is a big part of the marketing game.

Often times small business owners think they know what their customers want, but assumption is a primary tool of choice drawing these conclusions.

The best way to really know what a market thinks about something is to ask. Run the idea up the old flagpole and see what kind of response you get. The Internet is spawning a whole new set of tools that can help the smallest of businesses tap the collective wisdom, or least collective opinion, of the masses when trying to make even the simplest business decisions.

Online surveys have become a powerful tool for the small business. By asking your clients everything from how much should I charge to what's the best color for our logo you can effectively test your assumptions before you push something out to the market.

Surveys are also a great way to monitor how you are doing in the eyes of your customers. Creating simple satisfaction surveys and serving them up to each individual customer allows you to find holes in your customer service and collect comments, good and bad, from the street.

Several email marketing services have begun to offer survey tools as part of the overall communications strategy. Emails with interactive components like surveys stand out and engage the reader more effectively than static content.

Planning what your readers would like to hear more about in your next five newsletter issues is as simple as proposing topics in a survey. Then you can better prepare the content your readers want to read the most.

Journalists love survey results and will often take great interest in the results of a survey conducted by an industry expert - that means you! Conducting some basic research about trends and habits in your industry is a great way to add some expert status to your brand and could land your results in a publication or two about your industry.

Sharing your survey results with prospects is a great way to help educate them on important information that may impact their buying decisions.

Survey tools come in several flavors and a broad range of prices from free to not so free. Online stand alone versions like Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are nice options for the small business. (Survey Gizmo also features a WordPress Plugin and Mac desktop widget.)

Email marketing services like iContact and Constant Contact also offer survey tools right inside their core offerings.

Bloggers have long seen the value of the interaction a good survey can generate, so there are lots of survey widgets available for blogging platforms like WordPress and TypePad as well.

About the Author: John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World's Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide published by Thomas Nelson.

He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. You can find more information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com