Collecting data is becoming an ever more important part of a business’s strategy. By obtaining data about your customers, finding out who they are and what their needs are, you can use this information to develop products and marketing to drive sales upwards.
Of course, there are various regulations when it comes to collecting data. You must obtain the customer’s approval and ensure that data is kept securely and not passed along to third parties. For this reason, data management systems are big business and a data collection company such as https://shepper.com/ can help not only with data collection but also with analysis and secure storage.
Is collecting data necessary?
Five Types of Data
First is primary or raw data. This is information acquired directly from the target audience and collected firsthand by the business.
Similar to this is second-party data. This is a type of data which is acquired by the business from another organisation which has already obtained the primary data. This can sometimes offer greater insights and accuracy than raw data collected directly by the business.
Next, is third-party data. In this case, a data collection company can use various data collection tools to gather and sell large quantities of data, offering great scalability and the ability to divide the data into quantitative or qualitative. This can be a really useful resource for businesses.
Quantitative data is a fourth type of data which is arguably the most essential for businesses, displaying sales figures, return customers, etc. Because it is in figures, it is easy to analyse.
Qualitative data, while not in figure format, is also essential to businesses, giving them an insight into customers’ opinions – highlighting what they like (and don’t like!) about a product or service. This can again be really useful for businesses to get some firsthand opinions, for example in the form of product reviews, so they know what sells well and what customers would like to see done differently.
