Former LinkedIn and Microsoft marketer Tony Ward will head up SurveyMonkey's Australian and New Zealand operations, with a key focus on bringing its B2B solutions to local creative agencies and brands.
Ward joined SurveyMonkey from LinkedIn as director of sales and talent solutions and was previously CMO and COO of Microsoft in Australia.
SurveyMonkey is best known as a platform for building surveys but now wants to be seen a professional tool which can be used for B2B solutions. While his core role at SurveyMonkey is to lead and build the local team, Ward told AdNews his focus will be on building the awareness of one of these services, its Audience tool, launched last year.
Audience was designed for businesses to gain insights into areas spanning concept testing to brand awareness. Ward feels Audience is a natural fit with creative agencies.
“A lot of creatives are using it as an input to the creative process,” Ward said. “They might have a hypothesis but they're using audience to go and actually gather insights about how people feel about a particular product and come up with creative off the back of it.
“The other thing agencies try to do is pitch for new business. When I’m talking to agencies I say to them 'imagine if you could take the incumbent's creative and your ideas about what would be a good campaign for that particular segment and test it with the audience your client is targeting'.”
The tool has been in market for about 12 months and, while tight-lipped on exact figures, Ward said growth is in quadruple figures “off a reasonably small base”.
Australia is SurveyMonkey's largest international investment outside of the US and the UK with the local office including on-the-ground support services and will act as a base for Asia Pacific.
SurveyMonkey global head of research Jon Cohen, who was in Australia to speak at ad:tech, said the tool has already resonated well in the US, because it is building easier access to research.
“There are really big, consequential decisions that need to be made, and they're often being made without data because of the cumbersome research process that has existed,” Cohen said.
“What Tony is focused on now is how we have changed over the years from being a tool that people could use to a tool that experts can use more cheaply and more easily.
“In some cases it is replacing nothing, agencies had previously made decisions on gut instinct and they can bring data into the process.”
The company is also looking to increase its staff from eight people to 15 by the end of the year, including one staff member specifically focused on partnering the Audience tool with clients and agencies.
“We're making some big bets on where we believe we should focus our time and agencies is one of them,” Ward said.
“There is a massive awareness about SurveyMonkey but there isn't necessarily the awareness to the advances that we've made to the B2B side.
“I'm spending a lot of my time with agencies because I know that it's really important for the end client If we don’t get the agencies to understand what's in it for them and how it can help they’re business it's potentially a challenge.”
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