If you own a business or run a marketing team for a company, you should be utilizing Google Forms. Whether it’s for marketing, operations, or internal purposes, Google Forms can elevate your company or team’s communication to become fast and efficient.
What is Google Forms?
Google Forms is an online software that allows businesses or individuals to create an online questionnaire to collect information from a group of people. Once all individuals have completed the form/survey, the creator has access to the data via spreadsheet and an analytics platform. For personal use Google Forms is free, and for business pricing starts at $6.00 per month for Google Workspace (which includes Google Forms).
The forms are customizable, allowing the creator to stick to a brand or theme. The platform is extremely user friendly and customizations are fairly simple to implement.
Here is an example of a Google Form:
How to Customize a Google Form
As you can see, there are many different options when it comes to customizing the Google Form. It is important when creating a Google Form to customize it with a goal in mind. If you have a strong, recognizable brand, you may want to include a header image and the correct colors that correspond to that brand. If you don’t have a strict brand to stick to, you may want to consider making it to obtain as many conversions as possible. When embedding a form, you may experience that not all features translate well, but functionally it still works fine.
The following are different sections of the Google Form to customize.
Header Image: This will give you the opportunity to upload your own image, or use one of Google’s preset images. We recommend using your own image if the survey is customer facing.
Introduction Content: This is your opportunity to explain the purpose of the survey. Be thorough but not too wordy. We want to make sure customers complete the survey without leaving.
Questions: In the next section you’ll see the options for questions. Keep it simple and build your questions to receive the most direct answers possible. Remember, if you leave questions open ended, you may get open ended answers that are not direct.
Answers: In some cases, like multiple choice questions, provided answers that are clear and provide enough answers that the survey taker will fall into at least one of the options.
Types of Questions
Google Forms give you the flexibility to add many different variations of questions. With the default types of questions provided in Google Forms, you should be able to construct an efficient questionnaire/survey that captures whatever information you’re trying to collect in an effective way. The following are the default questions provided from Google Forms:
Multiple Choice Questions
Checkbox Questions
Short Answer Questions
Linear Questions
Analyzing Results
Google stores all of the responses in a CSV format. You can access it via Google Sheets or Microsoft Word, whichever you primarily use. Google Forms also has an analytics feature that will place the data in creative ways. This can be leveraged if you are presenting this data to someone else and would like a more visual perspective.
This image was taken from Google Forms directly as an example:
Time For Action!
Now is time for the fun part. Dive into Google Forms and create one for fun to start. Once you get the hang of it, you can start using it for business purposes. Google Forms is a fantastic way to collect data for whenever a survey is the appropriate course of action.
