What Can You Learn From Quantitative Data?

There’s a qualitative and quantitative aspect to most research, especially when it comes to researching a population of people. Surveys, pools, experiments, and other kinds of research can choose to focus on the qualitative or quantitative aspects of data. When the research focuses on quantitative data, it’s focusing on the numbers of the data more than anything else.

For example, when a company surveys a few thousand people from New York City, they’re looking to see how many city people have a positive response. With this knowledge, they learn the number of people who may purchase their product and their potential revenue margin.

This is different from a qualitative research focus, which is focused on the subjective nature of data. If a survey asks which product is better than another, focusing on the qualitative would mean focusing on which product was preferred, while being less focused on how much.

What Does Quantitative Data Tell Your Business?

When we focus on the quantitative aspects of our research data, we learn specific things about our research subject that we can’t learn from a qualitative focus. For businesses conducting research for their product, there are a number of things their quantitative data can tell you: 

• Your Target Demographic: You need to have someone to sell your product to. When you send out a survey asking whether individuals have any interest or use for something like your product, the types of people who answer “yes” become a potential target demographic. These are groups who have a commonality with each other. They can be people over or under a certain age, of a specific gender, of a specific class, etc. A product usually has multiple target demographics they base their marketing and supply around.
• Your Product’s Demand: You need to know–or at least have an idea–of how many people are interested in purchasing your product. Surveys and studies can give you this information, which will help with your marketing and supply decisions.
• Your Expected Profit Margins: Every business is about money. If you aren’t making a profit or building towards being profitable, your business can’t thrive. But you can’t operate on assumptions, so you do your research. Your research finds out how many sales you may rake in, and you use that information–plus information from previous studies, successes, and failures–to predict your upcoming profit margins.
• Industry Trends: When you need to come up with your next product, service, or marketing tactic, you want to look at what your industry is doing. If your research concludes that people are moving towards an alternative to your product or service, you have the chance to react. Without quantitative data, that wouldn’t be possible.

Contact Focus Forward For Quantitative Data Support

If your research team needs assistance with gathering a sample population for your studies, we can help. Focus Forward’s Survey Squad gathers people to participate in focus groups, phone interviews, online diaries, and many other types of marketing research every day. If your research team needs a community for ongoing research, we can help. We understand that this is a completely different process that includes hours of hard work and collaboration that we’re used to.

If you want people to test products, necessitating IHUTS, we can make your IHUTs as easy for your team to use as possible. We do the recruitment from our panel, have expert project management, do follow-up surveys, promise product fulfillment, offer incentive processing, and program and code OEs. When you work with Focus Forward on your quantitative data research, you get all the help you need. Contact us today.