Best practices to analyze data from marketing surveys
In this article, you will learn about data analysis, its importance, and best practices to do it correctly.
Companies that need to solve specific problems, such as understanding their target market, and the acceptance of a new product or service may use marketing research for this.
This process of doing marketing research involves the design of the research, collecting the data, analyzing it, and transforming it into a report.
Through marketing research, it’s possible to connect the public to the company. And then, a series of aspects are made possible. Some examples are defining new marketing opportunities, evaluating the marketing team’s actions, and understanding the performance achieved.
How is the data analyzed?
Whenever marketing research is done, there are 5 phases that must be followed. This is important so the research is complete and reliable after it’s finished.
Marketing Research phases:
- Identify a research need;
- Design the research study;
- Conduct the study;
- Analyze the results;
- Share the research insights.
All these 5 phases are important for marketing research, and today you will learn more about phase 4: analyze the results.
Phase 4: Analyze the results
After conducting the research, it’s time to understand the results, clean the data and report whatever was found. In order to do it, it’s important to look deeply into the answers and information gotten from people.
The type of analysis done will change according to the type of research that was conducted. That is, analysis for qualitative data is going to be different from quantitative data.
However, regardless of the type of research done, what the marketing team has to do is translate the data into useful knowledge. The knowledge will be useful when it can be used for the main goal of the research.
4 best practices of data analysis
1. Ask the right questions
In order to have good data analysis, the questions asked previously must be thought carefully.
The moment the questions for marketing research are being planned, people must always keep in mind what is the goal of this question.
Is the answer going to help the marketing team to make a decision? Is this information relevant to the product or service that is being developed?
As shared in this article, the best template for marketing research questions is:
I am going to conduct an _______ among ______ to learn about __________ measured by ________.
Example:
“I am going to conduct an online survey among clients of the company to learn about their preferences when it comes to online meetings measured by their answers in the survey and interviews.”
2. Structure questions in the right way
There are different types of questions to ask in marketing research. They can be quantitative or qualitative, including open-ended, categorical, or metric questions.
In an effort to use the correct type of question one must understand the differences. Because of that, you find an explanation below:
Open-ended
The respondent must write their answer, which can be online or on paper.
Categorical
There are always options for responses. Those can be “yes or no” questions, but also have options such as “male or female” questions.
In addition, categorical questions can be multiple-choice questions, so the respondent has to choose the correct answer for their reality.
Metric
Having an answer requires that the person thinks about the number of times they did something. Another possibility is gathering answers such as “not important, important, very important” or “choosing a number from 0 to 10”.
3. Spend time on data cleaning
Data cleaning is crucial in the process of data analysis because it’s through this best practice that “bad” responses can be eliminated.
These responses can come from people who are not in the target audience or didn’t answer the questions as expected. One example is when there are incomplete answers, which can happen because the people were lazy or had technical problems.
When data cleaning is done in the correct way, the result is responses with accurate information. Consequently, better decisions can be made. On the other hand, if you don’t clean your data well, the analysis will probably have problems and result in inaccurate decision-making.
4. Chose a good data analysis tool
After cleaning the data, it’s time to make a proper analysis, which can be done using different types of tools.
Some of the most common tools are excel and tableau, but companies may also invest in more advanced tools such as SPSS to have statistical information.
The best analysis tool will be the one that meets the demands of the company. If a more advanced analysis is necessary, then it is advised to invest in one. If a simple spreadsheet and graphs are enough, simpler options may be used.
It’s time to get to the final stage of marketing research
Now that data analysis is ready, the final stage of marketing research can happen. As mentioned above, the fifth stage is sharing the research insights.
And when data analysis is done correctly, this stage becomes easier because the data was real, accurate, and met the expectations.
That’s why is so important to spend some time organizing and analyzing the data that was collected.