The first step toward making effective business decisions is to have enough data. Lack of the right data does not make any decision firm and stay effective in the long term. Organizations across the world use any of the data collection methods to stay intact with plenty of data with them. They churn and process the collected data to get the right insights and utilize it in their decision-making.
Various streams of data collection exist (it's expected they will increase further in the future). Selecting a stream or maybe two more streams is important. At this point, I believe that your organization is following some super-unique data collection methods for the sake of making the right and purposeful business decisions. If you're not (which is probably the reason you looking for this blog), you can definitely find a way to collect your business data after this blog.
Before you move further into this, please check how data ACTUALLY works in every part of the decision-making process.
Guess the reasons why newly launched products fail…even if they promised a lot!
It's obvious they did not meet the customer's needs and stayed in the loop with much lesser demand. It happened because the organization could not be able to collect the right amount of data. Primarily, they have missed adding on product demand, customer preferences, and their direct competitors' data. Further, a lack of proper data assessment and extracting the right insights from it could have caused big product failure.
Heard of Online Data Collection?
Collecting data online is the most popular and trickiest method that you can ever have. The amount of data shared online has grown insanely over the recent years. By the end of 2025, the total generated data will hit 180 zettabytes (as per recent IDC estimates). So, you can imagine how much data you can have online, than any other resources.
With the right strategies, you can excel in collecting online data. Also, you must know that many companies are still facing issues in online data collection. It happens when you don't have the right direction and proper strategies. Anyway, we are here to choose the right methods to collect online data, so let's dig into that now.
Available Data Collection Methods
Businesses across the globe follow the following methods to collect data. Mostly the data they extract is either directly related to their customers or indirectly to potential customers. But companies have options there to choose whether they want to collect data directly or choose another way.
Majorly, data is collected and reached to the willing company in the following three ways;
If you want to proceed with First-Party Data Collection, then you have plenty of data collection methods, which you can follow to collect data.
Let's begin with…
Surveys
Simply saying, it's one of the easiest ways to get your customer's preferences, choices, feedback, and opinions. Surveys are also part of online data collection where you can easily perform them to get customers' insights online. All you need is to create the survey template and share it with your intended audience to get it filled.
Getting analytics and preparing comprehensive reports from surveys must be your goal here. If you think taking out data from surveys and preparing a fresh database out of it is consuming your crucial time, you can delegate it. For example, survey data entry services are there to help you process survey information without any hassles.
Tracking Transactions
Each time a customer makes a purchase on an eCommerce site or point-of-sale platform can help in tracking. You can understand deeply where your customers spend the most and where the least. To get the right insight, you need to have a seamless data collection process at your end.
Related: Effective Ways to Capture Data
Online Tracking
Understanding the behavioral patterns of your customers on online platforms can gain you deep customer psychological insights. For that, you need to apply online tracking methods. Here, you have to implement pixels and cookies to your site to gather your customer's behavioral data. Once you do that you can have access to different tools to track your web visitors' behavior easily.
After the implementation, you can track which part of your website has the highest activity, which means where customers show their most interest. Hence, you can frame strategies based on the data and design a website to navigate your visitors to reach a particular destination (read conversion).
Social Media Tracking
Framing data strategies without considering social media data is an unworthy idea. I know you agree with this. Social media has huge potential in terms of understanding buying patterns and engaging with customers. One of the best data collection methods for social media is to track the prospectus. Finding how to engage with your audience and pull the right insights from different social platforms must be the goal here.
Suggested Read: Marketing Data Collection: Reality of Marketing Sucess
Other Primary Data Collection Methods
Data is everywhere, you just need to find it. Besides collecting data from primary sources, you need to focus equally on secondary sources. It will help make your data strategies for decision-making comprehensive. Here are a few secondary sources where you can genuinely collect raw data for further processing;
- Financial Statements
- Sales Reports
- News Journals
- Magazines
- Government Reports
- Executive Summaries
- CRM software
What Happens Post-Data Collection
To reach the right insights, proper organization of the collected data is crucial. Often data analysts face issues with raw collected data as they find it unorganized. Even if they proceed with such unorganized or directionless data, the insights gained from the data would have no use. Rather, organizing the data after collection is the right way you can continue with the analytics.
Nowadays, many organizations choose data collection services to organize their collected data before sending it to the analytics. It's the best way you can manage your raw data. Not only does it arrange data, but it performs;
- Creating data storage to save vital data
- Backing up data with due measures
- Arranging data in accurate measures
- Filling data when it needs
- Rectifying mistakes and taking actions
Let's Wrap It
After understanding popular data collection methods, now you need to finalize what method you need to choose. I would recommend you choose the method based on your business requirements. Ideally, if you want to engage with your audience on social media and on web platforms then you must prioritize social media tracking and online tracking methods.
Once again, if your business looking for some suggestions directly from your customers, you can choose surveys. Any of the methods you choose, it must serve the purpose and that's the main matter here. Lastly, if you need something to discuss about data collection and data processing, you can ask us. We love to hear from you.
