How much would it be worth to you, to get data on the purchasing habits of your customers? What TV shows do they watch, what income bracket they belong to, are they hip urbanites or down-home country-folk? The ability to place ads in the right places, whether they’re TV commercials or billboards, speaks to Marketing Rule #1: Know Your Customer. If you don’t know who and where your customers are, you won’t be able to give your product away—at least not to anyone who would value it.
There are four steps to working with data. First you have to get it. After that you need to understand it, interpret it, and apply it to your business strategy. Think of the data as bricks—if you want to build something using bricks, you also need to know how to put the bricks together so your structure doesn’t fall down. It’s not simply a matter of buying bricks.
This article is going to help you figure out how to get the data.
Let’s assume that you don’t have a marketing team. Your budget doesn’t stretch to hiring envisioneers or infomediaries or any of those other made-up skills that appear on resumes. If what you need is a cost-effective way to acquire proprietary data about your target-market, online survey companies provide just the kind of service you’re looking for.
An online survey can be completely customized by your company, can include participant qualification questions so that you only get answers from people who meet criteria you choose, and it doesn’t have to be costly.
When you publish your online survey, you can set the survey to close after a specified period of time, or when a specified number of responses have been recorded. Your online poll vendor will provide the responses either as raw data, or with some analysis—depending on the level of service you’re paying for.
And remember—any type of information is worthless if you don’t know how to use it.
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