If you aren’t using surveys in your business, you’re missing a chance to read your customers’ minds.

Surveys will let you outsmart your competitors,  generate publicity that pulls traffic to your website and blog, and know immediately which products and services your market wants, how people want them delivered, and how much they’re willing to pay.

Yesterday’s webinar hosted by survey expert Jeanne Hurlbert was filled with valuable take-aways that can help any business or nonprofit  do more with less, despite the crummy economy.

You can sign up to listen to the free replay of “Your Cash-Generating Crystal Ball: How to Use Simple Surveys to Read Your Prospects’ and Customers’ Minds, Build Lists, Create Products, and Make Money.”  Keep a pen and paper close by, because you’ll be taking lots of notes.

I watched the webinar and listed these seven ways Publicity Hounds can use surveys for publicity and to build their businesses:

1. Speakers and trainers, deliver a mobile survey to your audience while you’re on stage, at the start of your presentation. Ask them what they want to learn, and weave the answers to their questions into your program. You’ll look like a hero on the stage!
2. Use a customer profile survey to find out what business problems keep your customers up at 3 a.m. Then create products and services that help them solve the problems.
3. To find joint-venture partners. Once you create that new product or service, a simple survey of no more than five questions can results in hundreds of leads that include names and contact information for people who’d like to help you promote it for a commission.
4. Conduct an annual survey relating to an interesting, hot or controversial topic in your industry. Brian Kluth, a former church pastor, takes an annual “State of the Plate” survey to see if church giving is up or down.  More than 150 media outlets have covered his survey results.  You can see his press release, read the survey results and see the array of dozens of media logos at his website.
5. Conduct a survey that relates to your product or service, ties into an upcoming holiday, and reports on how people behave. One of my favorites is the survey taken several years ago by Iams, the pet food company, on the relationship between people and their pets. It found that more than 90 percent of respondents surveyed admitted saying “I love you” to their pets. The survey results were released several weeks before Valentine’s Day, and the story was covered by top-tier media outlets and picked up by the Associated Press.
6. To gather dozens of instant testimonials. In a customer profile survey, you can ask respondents about specific products and services, or general comments about things like your customer service. You can use those responses as testimonials on sales pages, at your website, and in marketing materials. That’s what I did when Jeanne created my customer profile survey for me 18 months ago.

How to Avoid Survey Suicide

Jeanne also shared tips on how to avoid what she calls “survey suicide.”

The first questions on your survey should never ask respondents for information about demographics. Do that, and they’re likely to abandon the survey.

You must get them engaged immediately, and Jeanne showed exactly how to do that.

If you think have a good idea for a survey you want to conduct, or even if you have no idea about what you can ask your target market, sign up to watch the 77-minute replay. By the time you’re halfway done, you’ll have all kinds of ideas of how to use surveys to build your business.

Important: At the end, Jeanne made a special offer that expires at  5 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow, Aug. 14.

UPDATE on Aug. 16 at 9:38 p.m. Central:

I just learned that Jeanne is extending her offer again because so many people who wanted to listen to the webinar were on vacation. Listen by clicking the link above  but do it before 5 p.m. Central Time on Wednesday, Aug. 18. If you snooze, you lose!