Given the decisive importance and prevalence of data collection, it's essential to know how to collect it. But, even more important, it's vital to understand how to collect information in a manner that will most likely give you meaningful results.
As a budding marketer, you are probably seeking new and innovative methods for collecting data.
We explore the most common ways of collecting data and discuss the analytical value of each technique. We'll then provide some ideas on how you can improve your current process or experiment with new data collection methods.
The Importance Of Data Collection
Data collection has many vital roles in marketing. Data collection also provides insights into our society and its growth. You can use historical data for various purposes, including chronological trends that allow us to trace tendencies and attempt to predict future events.
But before we discuss the advantages in depth, let's find out what data collection is and the different types of it.
What Is Data Collection?
Data collection is the process of gathering, storing, organizing, and providing information for a specific purpose. It involves enriching data with new information and ensuring the integrity of the data over time.
Types of Data Collection
As a marketer, before you can analyze the data or use it to make any conclusions about the purpose behind your data collection, you must collect it in a reliable and reproducible way.
There are two different types of data: primary data and secondary data. Both can be collected for further analysing and making decision.
Primary Data Collection
Primary data refers to the marketer's first-hand information they collect as they conduct their study. It utilizes direct observation to observe behaviors in real time as they unfold. This first-party data is helpful for small sample sizes, is mainly used in research studies, and is usually an evaluation of a specific method or process. Some examples of primary data collection methods include:
Surveys
Interviews
Experiments
Focus groups
Secondary Data Collection
Secondary data is data that another source has already collected. It's usually provided to the researcher as a dataset and is considered a more reliable source when you cannot obtain primary data. Some examples of second-party data include:
Government publications
Historical and statistical documents
Trade journals
Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Data
Qualitative and quantitative are essential aspects to remember when choosing a data collection method. Why? Because the data collection method depends on the type of data, you’re collecting.
Qualitative Data
Qualitative data is information that is subjective and allows for more descriptive analysis. In other words, it relies on the language and experience of the person collecting the information. Qualitative methods often use evidence presented through text, pictures, audio recordings, or video.
Quantitative Data
Quantitative data is objective numerical information that appears in a structured format. It utilizes numbers and can discriminate between distinct values. Quantitative data collection methods have many specific ways to measure something and can be measured, tracked, or analyzed with a scale of values.
Advantages of Data Collection for Marketers
With an understanding of these terms, let's move on to data collection advantages for marketers.
1. A Deeper Understanding of Your Market
Data collection is a standard part of most business models. Having data on your market gives you a deep understanding of your client base and how they interact with your products or services.
Viewing trends over time, you can see financial and social capital changes. This approach can help your organization create a more thorough analysis of the market that it's targeting.
2. Enhances Your Customer Database
Data collection forms the basis of almost every demographic database. These methods are used throughout a business to obtain information about how people behave and live and even what products or services they use.
Obtaining this kind of data enables your marketing team to be able to construct a more accurate buyer persona for your future campaigns.
3. Expands Your Marketing Ability
Access to your market's data allows you to make more informed decisions regarding marketing strategies and programs. You can therefore operate on a data-driven marketing strategy instead of just taking shots in the dark.
Using multiple data collection methods, your company can get a more comprehensive view of your market and its reaction to products or services. You can gain detailed insight into how market changes occur naturally and which were directly caused by your actions (or lack thereof).
4. Allows for Better Personalization
Personalization is the ability to customize your product or service to suit each individual based on their unique interests and behavior. Data collection can help you connect with your consumer by understanding their needs, desires, and wants.
By knowing more about the wants and needs of your potential customers, you'll be able to provide them with products and services that better meet their needs.
5. Mitigate Risks
If you are armed with data, you can use that information to your advantage. How? Use historical data to predict what’s going to happen in the future - or at least, what’s most likely to happen in the future. Building prediction models and having some idea of what may be to come will help you to be more prepared, thus reducing your risks.
6. Improve Operations and Processes
Operations and processes may not strike you as a marketing advantage. However, your marketing team will be able to perform at a much higher level if the operations and processes backing them are more efficient. To do this, you need to collect data from your current employees, but how they feel things could be better.
8 Data Collection Methods
Now that you understand the benefits of data collection, let's look at eight methods you can use to improve your data collection.
1. Surveys, Polls & Questionnaires
Surveys, polls, and questionnaires gather information from a representative sample or a population. They contain multiple open-ended and close-ended questions and are set out in a way that’s simple enough to gather insights from your target audience, while not discouraging truthful and explicit answers.
The goal is to get people to respond truthfully to get meaningful data. By asking a series of questions and recording the answers, you can understand your target market's thoughts about your products or services and what they want or need.
Here are some useful tips for making surveys the right way.
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2. Interviews & Focus Groups
Interviews and focus groups collect data from a more specific audience. These methods collect information and opinions directly from people. In addition, they help capture direct observation data that has not been observed or recorded.
Interviews and focus groups are instrumental in generating ideas for new products and services and improving the current ones you offer.
Instead of a random group, you'll draw in a specific target market and learn more about their preferred products or services with a focus group study. It’s important when conducting a focus group to make sure that your audience has been carefully chosen, the environment is comfortable, and your moderator is skillful. This enables you to gather reliable data.
You can even conduct interviews with your employees so that you can gather some vital data about your business and its inner workings. Remember we said that collecting data can help improve operations and processes? Well this is your starting point.
They are also more flexible than surveys and polls because it allows you to ask specific questions about your market, industry, or client base. How do you know which you should choose to use? Well, focus groups should only be used when interaction between your participants is necessary and beneficial.
3. Data Reports
Data reports are one of the most commonly used data collection methods because they provide a concise and easily readable format for sharing information.
This method usually involves a small amount of subjective interpretation but can be very effective for describing complex trends that are hard to follow in raw data.
Reports use graphical or statistical methodologies to convey a narrative of the source data. They give you a quick overview of an essential piece of data and often highlight the current market trends.
Reports can also help you to compare your business to a specific competition or provide actionable insights for your marketing plans.
Looking for more marketing reports or, better yet, templates? Here you go.
4. Online Forms
Online forms can effectively create, customize, and automate online data collection forms.
Creating online forms can be tricky, but with a form maker tool like involve.me on hand, it can be easy. In fact, it can take just minutes to get your interactive form set up and embedded on your website.
Online forms are beneficial for providing feedback on products or services before they hit the market. You will gather instant responses and insights from your target market, helping you refine and align your efforts.
For example, if you’re running an affiliate program, then you need an affiliate sign-up form. On this form, you might want to try to gather information such as the industry the person is in, their contact details, and the details of their websites and social media profiles.
5. Secondary Collection Through Datasets, Documents & Records
Secondary data collection methods collect information through more significant groups of people who have already contributed to the market. It involves using third-party data sources such as online databases and search engines. They also include official records like census data, other reports, and published documents.
Secondary collection sources can be easily accessible and provide a wide variety of data points based on your target market's behavior or buying habits. If taken from reliable data sources (such as government websites or scientific articles), they can be more thorough and accurate than other collection techniques but are less interactive and less targeted toward your exact audience.
6. First-Person Observation
First-person observation involves directly watching your target market in action. For example, you can observe your market by going to work, home, school, or other public spaces. You can follow a specific behavior over time or get a quick view of their routine.
By watching your target market, you'll be able to understand and record more about their behaviors and how they interact with the environment around them. This method is subjective but very effective for learning and documenting new trends that are hard to find otherwise.
7. Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring is a popular data collection method for its flexibility and ease of implementation. It enables you to collect real-time information.
Social media monitoring involves listening, watching, tracking, and responding to questions from social media comments. It can help you understand your consumers' reactions or behavior based on their response to specific events or trends in the news.
Popular tools for social media monitoring include Hootsuite, Social mention & Keyhole.
8. Online Tracking & Analytics
Online tracking and analytics provide a detailed overview of your business's performance based on user usage data. You can track individual user behavior over time, such as their search queries, purchasing habits, and browsing behaviors.
By gathering this information, you'll be able to identify common problems and uncover unmet needs. You can also measure your ROI for the capital spent on marketing or advertising.
4 Tips For How To Make Data Collection More Engaging
With the data collection strategies above, you can gather the information you need from your target market to make informed decisions. But, many people believe that data collection is tedious and not worthwhile.
To make sure you are getting the most value out of your data collection, consider these tips for making it more engaging:
1. Utilize Visualized Data
Visualized data helps users understand complex information and easy-to-read reports with graphics and charts. It breaks down the information you're collecting and puts it into a simple, easy-to-understand format.
This approach helps you provide faster insights and make smarter decisions rather than relying on complex jargon.
Some people are visual thinkers. Therefore, asking them to write a paragraph on their experience with your company will not be effective. However, instead, you can ask them to fill out a pie chart, fill up an experience meter, or create a word cloud instead. You can also create a poll or a questionnaire that uses visuals instead of text.
To put it simply, questions should move away from text (which may be boring) and include images and visuals instead. You could even use gifs or emojis to express emotions and images to represent different situations.
You can get more engaged with your data by establishing a visual hierarchy and organizing the information, so it's clear and intuitive. To make data digestible, you need to minimize the complexity and make your messages clear and concise. Use headings, lists, and tables to organize your findings.
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2. Use Interactive Calculators
Interactive calculators offer personalized and customized interpretations of data. They are built into dashboards and reports, making them easier to use than spreadsheets or pivot tables.
Interactive calculators give you an instant overview of a single metric or a combination of metrics related to your target market's behavior. They help you quickly conclude your source data, whether a large dataset or just a tiny sample from your target market. As a result, you can get more personalized insights on what is impacting their buying decisions.
3. Employ Gamification
Gamification can help your data collection strategy by making it more engaging. It uses game mechanics (such as rewards, leaderboards points or levels) to draw your target market into a specific activity that involves effective data collection and analysis processes.
In addition, you can use gamification to increase engagement by making it fun to gather authentic customer insights.
You can incorporate gamification into any data collection method, whether your company's intranet, website, or online community. It turns data collection into a game designed to get people excited about the research process and make them feel like they're playing a part in it.
Let’s talk examples. This is an oldie but a goodie. Samsung launched Samsung Nation in 2011, a gamified corporate website that rewarded visitor engagement with points, badges, and promotions. Through the website, members participated in challenges and user-generated Q&As to win points.
4. Make Information Clear, and Accessible
The business's data collection process should be easy to understand and follow. You can get more people to participate in your data collection process and improve the efficiency of the process by making it clear and accessible.
You will get more people engaged in the process by communicating clearly about your company, your target market, and your data collection efforts. Complement this by using accessible data collection tools that are easy to understand without compromising the data's integrity.
How does this make your data collection more engaging? If the information you’re asking for isn’t clear then you risk alienating your target audience and the chances of them not completing the survey or interview or not completing it accurately is more likely.
Final Thoughts
Qualified data collection methods are essential for creating strategies and making business decisions. Your data collection strategy should align with your company's goals and objectives to develop compelling data to help you meet those goals.
It's crucial to get the information from your target market in a way that provides real-time, actionable insights.
You'll need to choose a method that works for your type of business, and you can apply it across various platforms or environments. How do you know which method is right for you? It depends on what data you need, how fast you need it, and how much budget you have to collect it.
What comes next? After you’ve collected your data, you need to clean it (not all data collected is usable) and make sure it is relevant and well-structured. Working with incomplete or corrupted data for making decisions or predictions is the last thing you’d want to do. Keep in mind, if your data is bad then the conclusions and decisions may be bad as well. This is known in the data world as GiGo (garbage in, garbage out). It is better to thoroughly clean your data and if needed even run your data collection campaign again, just to make sure you work with the best quality of data you can get.
Once you have a clean data set, you can create reports from this data and visualizations to help you, your team of marketers, and your stakeholders get a better understanding of the insights collected.
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