Original research is often the foundation of a great thought leadership platform—it’s a way to move beyond well-informed opinion and create proprietary data that positions your firm to own an important conversation.
A seemingly simple but easy-to-get-wrong piece of the research puzzle is questionnaire development. Writing survey questions can seem deceptively simple, especially in the age of AI. But if you don’t invest the time up front to craft questions that truly probe the topic, you’ll end up with a whole lot of data that doesn’t tell a story.
The trap: Asking what you already know
One of the easiest ways to end up with uninteresting research is to ask questions that produce predictable answers.
Most executives will say they want their organizations to be innovative and most businesses will say they care about their customers. True? Sure. Boring? Absolutely.
Take our research report on AI, “Moving fast, flying blind.” When developing this study, we wanted to understand more than whether marketers were paying attention to AI search, because that was already a safe assumption. Anyone who has been on LinkedIn in the past two years knows that marketers are paying attention to AI search.
The more interesting question was whether organizations actually understood how to respond to the changes taking place and whether their confidence in their approach matched what they were doing in practice.
So rather than simply asking respondents whether AI search was important, we explored what organizations were actually doing and where they were encountering uncertainty. The result was data that broke through the “AI search is important” narrative into something much more telling: 84% say they know how to show up in AI search, but 51% don’t have confidence in what they’re doing. Nearly half acknowledged that their organizations may have moved too quickly into AI visibility tactics without a clear long-term strategy. The disconnect is jarring, and it’s what caught the media’s attention after the report was published.
There are three categories of common missteps when drafting survey questionnaires:
Misstep No. 1: Not having a focused intention
It’s tempting to think that, if you’re going to survey your potential clients, you should ask them everything. This leads to a disjointed effort likely to confuse the survey participant and lead to a disconnected set of results that doesn’t give you much to work with.
Every survey at Scribewise begins with a storytelling mindset, the same one that shapes our thought leadership and PR campaigns.
- What is the market talking about?
- Where might conventional wisdom be wrong?
- Is there a gap between what people say they believe and what they actually do?
- And, perhaps most importantly, what would make someone stop and think differently about an issue they thought they understood?
To do this, we create a storyline—an outline of all of the data points we want to collect that plugs them into the broader narrative we want to tell. Although we can’t predict exactly how the numbers will shake out (and sometimes you’ll learn that what you believe isn’t quite right!), this approach keeps your firm’s “neon fingerprint”—the unmistakable, instantly recognizable identifier of your company—at the center.
Misstep No. 2: Not considering the user experience
Survey flow matters just as much. When a survey forces respondents through a series of unrelated mental jumps, they get tired, and tired respondents default to the easy, expected answer. Or worse, they drop out completely. The strongest questionnaires feel effortless to the person taking them, precisely because so much thought has gone into them behind the scenes.
For example, if you’re surveying business leaders about AI adoption, don’t jump from questions about their company’s strategy to questions about employee training, then back to technology investments. Instead, guide respondents through a logical progression: where they are using AI today, how they’re preparing their teams and what challenges they’re encountering. That natural flow not only makes the survey easier to complete; it helps surface more thoughtful answers because the respondents aren’t getting whiplash from your survey design.
Knowing what to ask is only half the work. How you ask it determines whether you get honest answers or polished ones.
Misstep No. 3: Rushing through your foundational thinking
If you rush through the process of developing questions, you’re going to end up with a big pile of so what.
AI can generate a questionnaire in seconds, and it will seem to be a perfectly satisfactory one. That would be fine if you were simply trying to validate conventional wisdom; that’s more like market research than research for marketing.
Research that breaks through the noise and drives an industry-wide conversation comes from knowing where conventional wisdom might be wrong and designing questions to find out. That part still takes people who can dive deep through subject matter expert interviews, understand what the media has an appetite for and know which questions are worth asking.
Research that’s impossible to ignore
In a crowded market, simply having data isn’t enough. The real opportunity is to uncover something your audience hasn’t heard before—and give them a compelling reason to care. That takes more than a generic set of questions. It takes curiosity, strategic thinking and a willingness to challenge the status quo. When you get that right, research becomes more than a report. It becomes a reason for people to pay attention to your business.