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Businesses large and small depend on swathes of data in order to effectively acquire, manage and serve clients, adapt their strategies, and implement new models. But in a world of constantly changing data, trends, and technologies data acquisition has become almost an art form with many different tactics, both subversive and direct, that can be employed before analysis.
Of course, studies can be performed and metrics, habits, and loyalty can be tracked either through customer reward cards, website cookies, or onsite survey teams but these either take time, incur an expense, or both, so when it comes to modern data strategies, the internet can be your best friend as it lends itself well to data mining.
Some of the best methods of data acquisition are:
Online Surveys
Social Media Engagement
Analytics Tools
Surveys are a tried and tested method of gaining large amounts of specific data in a short space of time while social media can provide instant and direct access to consumers and employees alike and analytics tools offer a comprehensive overview of all aspects of consumer data.
Online Surveys
An older form of data acquisition, yet still effective, surveys can be an excellent tool for gathering information on pretty much anything since they can be tailor-made to ask direct questions and opinions about a particular subject, product, or even your business itself.
There are many online survey sites that can be utilized and will pay customers a small fee to fill them, which is covered as a part of your expense or you can choose an email surveys provider that can create a custom solution and then mail it to a segmented recipient list in order to gauge quick and efficient data on a specific topic.
Social Media Engagement
The communication choice of the 21st century, social media is now used by almost 5 billion people globally, which means its platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are an absolute gold mine of data. Most of the platforms, Facebook in particular, actually provide data acquisition tools such as short surveys that can gauge a customer base response to a specific campaign, their opinion of your company, or reflect any changing trends.
However, given the recent allegations and scandals concerning Facebook data practices, you would be wise to be careful in how any data is processed, sorted, stored, or shared since not informing clients of this could constitute a criminal offense depending on your country or state of origin and its laws.
Analytics Tools
One of the most effective methods of data acquisition is the use of free analytics software. Primarily, Google Analytics is the tool of choice for most people since it can provide a fully comprehensive overview of web development trends and user behavior on your website, how your traffic is attained, and from what sources. Social media platforms also implement their own analytics tools that you can use when monitoring any kind of campaign on their sites as well.
The online nature of analytics software means that it is best suited to monitoring one platform at a time though and at the moment they do not all integrate with each other, but this is something that could happen in the future. That being said, there are other paid analytics tools such as FullStory, Pendo, and MouseFlow that can track and manage data from multiple sources including keywords, conversions, and sites across multiple campaigns at the same time.