Today, more than ever before, businesses rely on data to make decisions and drive their growth. It can be used to plan a new product, target a marketing campaign or even as a product itself. In short, data is valuable. However, many business teams are left unsure about how to effectively and efficiently collect the data they need to be competitive. Below are five methods that can be very useful for data collection.
1) Surveying
Surveys are a well-established and effective means of collecting data. The process is simple: pick some representative users and ask them to fill out a form. This may be your existing customers, prospective customers or an entirely different group. Surveys let participants give you their opinions directly and in a relatively straightforward manner. Writing strong survey questions is important to success. The problems with surveys tend to be that the participants are somewhat self-selecting. The people who want to participate in surveys may have relatively strong opinions, for example. If you send a survey to all your customers, only those who think very strongly or positively about you are likely to respond. Additionally, people’s responses do not always line up with their actions.
2) Data Wrangling
Chances are you have some existing data or can collect some data but are unsure of how to actually use it. This is a problem that plagues many organizations. For example, you may have website analytics but be unsure about what they actually mean. Data wrangling solutions can help you make more sense of your data. You can use these tools to clean, structure and enrich your data to help you make faster and better-informed decisions. This helps organizations overcome the biggest hurdle to using business data: analysis. Without a fast and insightful analysis of your data, it is close to being worthless as a business tool.
3) User Analytics
Do you have a website, app or other digital product? Gather user analytics from your digital properties. This is an easy source of information for a lot of teams. For example, if your customers create accounts with your website in order to use a product, you can leverage that information to help you make decisions. You may want to take advantage of data wrangling and other organizational tools such as dashboards. One of the great challenges of user analytics is that the raw data is plentiful and confusing. Finding ways to turn it into useful key performance indicators and decision drivers is an important step.
4) Customer Communication Mining
Your team likely communicates with your customers through email, phone, web chats and more. These communication tools can be a source of helpful information. For example, if your customers consistently request support with a specific feature, that may indicate that it is not sufficiently intuitive. You may also be able to find common objections from prospective customers. You can address these concerns on your website. Identifying what your customers and potential customers are saying will help you understand how to sell your products or services better. You may be surprised by how much your audience is already telling you about your offerings and marketing.
5) Social Media Platforms
Another similar source of information is your social media presence. One of the great aspects of social media is that conversations can be multi-sided. So, unlike many traditional marketing channels, your customers can talk back to you. This gives you a great number of opportunities for collecting data and understanding your customers. For example, if a particular video gets a lot of positive engagement, it is likely that it was effective. However, if it gets ignored, it probably did not achieve its goal. Many platforms make gathering data relatively easy. Understanding how you can collect and analyze data will help you make better business decisions. In today’s economy, insight is as important as value. In fact, many businesses are built on collecting data. So, don’t fall behind. Start collecting today.