Businesses and governments love to collect data on their customers, clients, and citizens. As a species, humans are always trying to suss out the “why” in everything, and dream of getting the when and what as well. Demographic reporting is just the start. Using location intelligence software and geospatial information systems, companies today can find ways to grow their businesses that are more effective and efficient.
Here are some ways to structure your surveys to get the most from them:
- Get the information you need and want. There are a few ways to get the information you need from people responding to a survey. You have several options for the questions themselves. You can use drop-down answers, multiple choice questions, or allow respondents to put in their own response. These options can help you with demographic reporting in a way to gather how old they are, what they do for a living, what they are interested in, and what their gender is.
- Customize your questions to the audience you are looking for. You can tailor your questionnaires to the audience you think will be receptive to your product or service. If you are a hair salon that caters to women over 50, you need to have a different set of questions than if you are a new veterinary clinic that only treats cats.
- Find a survey service that allows you to customize the look of your survey with different templates. These should allow you to make the survey mesh with your other marketing materials. You need to remember that anything you send out has to work with everything else. This means the color schemes need to be the same as well as the messaging.
- Work out a good method to examine all the data you collect. Collecting data is only the first step in the process. The real and fun work starts when you analyze it. This is where you take what information you have received and determine what respondents think and why they think that way. One other way to look at it is to break the responses into different categories such as gender and age. You can see how women between the ages of 20 and 30 view think vs. men of the same demographic.
- Compare and contrast the responses you receive. Most survey services can help you do this or you can work with other demographic reporting tools to move this along. Decide what demographic you are looking for and filter out the answers from all other groups. If you are interested in men who are between the ages of 20 and 30, you can filter everyone else out and get the data you need.
- Take your data and share it. Sharing raw data with your colleagues or boss may not be your best plan. What you will want to do is use one of the demographic reporting tools to create something that says what you want to say. Graphs and charts can often tell a story better than a table. It will make more sense to the people who have not poured over it as you have.
- Use what you find in your first survey to create better ones in the future. Once you get the hang of creating surveys, digging into the data you collect and using that to show your findings to your colleagues and the world, you can start building surveys and questionnaires that are more and more helpful to your business. The demographics reporting skill is a combination of art and science.
When businesses take the time to really understand, through the use of demographic reporting tools and other means, who their target audience is and where they are located, providing them with access to products becomes easier. This works for a few areas. This can be helpful to see just how much your clients or customers like your products. This can help when you have a new product you wish to sell to them. Getting more information helps every kind of business from retail to healthcare and even to universities.
The best news about data collection is that it sounds more complicated than it is.
