Online Web Research Services & Data Research, Data mining

There are various ways of gathering information about your clients but first a word or two about the types of data and types of research.

Secondary Data
Information gathered from published data sources about the characteristics, lifestyle, buying behaviour of your target clients is known as secondary data. These data sources could be government reports; information held by Chambers of Commerce, business libraries or trade associations; newspapers, radio and TV; Industry directories; trade publications and magazines and so forth. You might gather this type of information by visiting libraries, specific websites or by doing a keyword search in a search engine such as Google or Copernic or on bookmarking site such as delicious. This type of information gathering is often referred to as doing desk research. Secondary data not only provides you with extensive information on a sector, a market, your competitors, your customers but it plays the very useful role of putting your primary data research into context.

Primary data
When you gather information directly from your customers or from target clients this is known as primary data. There are numerous ways of doing this:

* Face to face interviews
* Telephone interviews
* Hiring interviewers to go through a questionnaire with people in shopping malls, in the street, at airports for example
* Self-completion questionnaires
* Talking to people who have attended one of your speaking engagements or at networking events
* On-line surveys
* 'Listening' on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, on-line forums
* Observation
* Focus or discussion groups

Read more...