The data-driven world has made our lives easier, especially corporate lives. The credit for this convenience goes to data collection and the driven research. Insights cannot be overstated. They are just what they are. Its reason is accurate and comprehensive data collection, which enables businesses to achieve excellence in decision-making, predict market trends, and gain a competitive edge.
This post is based on the significant role of data collection in the domain of market research. Certainly, the gathered data should be valid and of premium quality, which will take any business a long way through realistically working strategies.
Importance of Data Collection in Market Research
Market research is typically based on data, which is the systematic collection of records to deeply analyse and interpret meaningful information about the market. Specifically, this information is concerned with the target audience, competitors, and overall market environment. Typically, it is the very first step to discover crucial information resonating with the business objective. Once gathered, research, analysis, and strategy-making follow. Majorly, leveraging data collection leads to these results:
- Understanding Consumer Behaviour
Data collection is done with a purpose. Primarily, it is market research that guides understanding consumer behaviour. Not just any data, but the records related to consumer preferences, cart history, purchase menu, and feedback indicate the richness of information. Businesses target these records to gain deep insights into customers’ intent and behaviour that drive them to make marketing decisions for cross-selling or upselling. And these decisions become successful, which is proven in the Harvard Business Review study, which proved that companies relying on data-driven marketing strategies are six times more likely to gain profit year-over-year in comparison to their competitors who don’t follow this approach.
- Identifying Market Trends
Identifying market trends no longer depends on gut feelings. They are actually derived from collected records related to sales, social media interactions, and industry reports. These datasets help in foreseeing trends. Accordingly, they develop or adapt their marketing strategies. It is clearly proven in a report by McKinsey & Company that companies leveraging data to draw on or adapt to market trends see a 15-20% increase in their return on investment.
- Enhancing Competitive Analysis
The next benefit from data collection is enhanced competitive analysis. Its role is commendable, especially when you want to discover your competitors’ pricing strategies, new or existing products, marketing campaigns, and customer feedback. It can be done by benchmarking business performance and spotting areas to improve. Considering a survey report by Deloitte, 82% of companies believe that data-driven competitive analysis adds a cutting edge. It brings them a strategic advantage.
Valid and Quality Data Collection
Market research must be effective, which can be possible if the gathered data is valid, fresh, and clean. This kind of data represents a valuable record to study and draw precise information from that is free from biases. Overall, the collected data is a luxury because of these factors:
- Ensuring Valid data
Validity refers to examining the accuracy and authenticity of a piece of information. Valid & quality data collection is achieved through appropriate methods and advanced tools like Octaparse or scraping via APIs. For collection, some methods like surveys require a well-drafted questionnaire, sampling, and consistently following a specific process like web scraping and cleaning. For instance, web scraping methods help extract web-based information through APIs or tools like Scraper. They further help in processing and checking their validity for research at the next level.
- Ensuring Quality Data
If you want high-quality data to be collected, pay attention to even a single detail. It should be error-free and have no biases that can adversely impact results. This result can be achieved by relying on authentic data sources, regularly updating databases, and continuously using robust data cleansing methods like deduplication, normalization, enrichment, etc. Otherwise, your condition would be similar to that of the US economy, which approximately endures a loss of $3.1 trillion per year because of poor quality data, according to IBM research. This loss can be avoided through high-quality data collection, which prevents unnecessary expenditure on business resources.
- Technology and data Collection
The next vital thing that adds value is advanced technology for data collection. Investing in tools like surveys, social media analytics, online polls, CRMs, web analytics, and data mining can help maximize the volume of valuable data quickly, sometimes in real-time, and accurately. Accenture studied and found that companies investing in advanced analytics and data collection technologies see a 126% enhancement in productivity as compared to those using traditional methods.
The Impact of Valid and Quality Data Collection on Business Strategies
Now, let’s explore the impact of valid and accurate data on business strategies.
- Improved Decision Making
The very first impact is seen in decisions. They will be accurate if the data represents high quality. With valuable and reliable records in their hands, businesses are in a position to make informed choices about which product to develop, what the marketing strategies should be, and where to allocate resources. A study by PwC proved that data-driven decisions positively impact and achieve 20% more outcomes.
- Enhanced Customer experience
Customers’ needs and preferences are no longer a secret. With relevant data in hand, businesses tailor their products and services accordingly to their customers’ intent. It helps in meeting their needs effectively. Consider a report by Salesforce, which states that 79% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands because they provide personalized experiences. Certainly, data informs them to provide individualized choices, which leads to maximum customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Increased Operational efficiency
Operational efficiency can be improved if the operation manager is aware of the performance history of each resource. This history represents crucial data related to backend operations, production processes, chain performance, and employee productivity, which can be analyzed to discover gaps. Accordingly, beneficiary companies can streamline their operations at way lower costs. Gartner discovered that businesses relying on data-driven approaches improve operational efficiency, which saves 25% of the overall cost on average.
- Competitive Advantage
Competition is indeed cutthroat, which can be led through insight-driven decisions. They help in predicting market changes, which makes them ready with proper responses swiftly as per demand. This is how they become the winners of the competition. According to Forrester Research, companies using advanced data collection and analytics are 2.8 times closer to achieving above-average business performance.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, data collection can provide the best base for making breakthroughs in any company. This process introduces strategists to realistic figures of pricing, competition, productivity, or anything related to the goal. It helps in staying ahead by making data-driven decisions, which help in gaining consumers and an edge in a competition.
