why market research is important for business

10 Reasons Why Marketing Research Is Important to a Business

It’s easy to dismiss the importance of marketing research. But new businesses need sales and customers as soon as possible, and market research can ensure that those sales and customers don’t stop coming.

When you get caught by the creative spark, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of market research. But there’s a real need for market research before you bring a product to your customers.

Today, I’ll take you through some basic marketing research concepts. I’ll also explain why marketing research is important and share some resources to help you get started on your own marketing research.

If you want to stay up to date, you should also read the in-depth guide to the latest marketing trends on the Envato Blog.

What Is Marketing Research?

Before you can understand the importance of marketing research, you need to know what it is. Market research isn’t about a specific method or activity—it’s just what businesses call their attempt to learn more about their target customers.

While tasks like surveys and focus groups can help, they aren’t absolutely necessary, and they aren’t the only things you can do to research your target market. Here are some tasks that can be part of your market research:

• Have short conversations with contacts who are part of your target market . Let’s say you’re looking to launch a wedding photography service. Talk to your contacts who have been married or who are engaged and ask them about their experience in hiring and working with a wedding photographer. Even a five-minute conversation can give you insights on how to run your business.
• Look up Facebook groups relevant to your target market . This can provide a free, low-effort way to reach target customers online and ask them questions. Eventually, you can go back to these groups to promote your business, if the group rules allow for it.
• Add a survey form to your website . If you already have a website for your small business, you can offer potential customers a small discount in exchange for completing a survey. This tutorial on online market research forms can help you get started.

The above activities are just a handful of tasks that could be part of your market research. In fact, you can classify any task as a market research activity as long as you end up knowing your target market’s needs, behaviors, and preferences.

The Importance of Marketing Research

These are the ten reasons why market research is important, especially for smaller teams and businesses:

1. Better Understand Customer Needs

While every business has many stakeholders, the customer is always at the center of what you do. Conducting market research helps keep your customer as your business’s focus.

Here is where you can avoid the disconnect that businesses of all sizes can have with their customers. Learning their perspective from first-hand accounts has its benefits, including understanding what their needs and wants are. Taking this information into consideration will help guide your strategy better.

2. Uncover Emerging Trends

Understanding customer needs also means uncovering industry trends. When interpreting your findings, it’s not uncommon to identify where businesses like yours will be headed in the future.

Staying ahead of the curve has its benefits. It allows you to better serve your customers in the future. Your business will be able to better position itself as an industry leader. There’s also increased trust in a business that can cater to its customers’ current and future needs.

3. Identify Potential Issues

While it’s great to keep an eye on the future in market research, it’s also important to pick up on any pain points your customers have. Pain points are the issues that stand in the way of your customers having a smooth experience when interacting with your business.

The more pain points you can identify, the better. After all, you can’t solve a problem you don’t know you have. This is why marketing research is so important: you’ll be able to work on solutions that have been bothering your customers with the data to support your efforts.

4. Easily Spot Business Opportunities

After you’ve done your market research, it’ll be clear who you want to reach out to (your target customers), where you can reach them (your marketing channels), and what they’re interested in. Once you’ve defined these, you’ll be able to easily spot business opportunities. For example:

• Form partnerships with other businesses . Learning about who your customers are, such as their demographics, can help you find other small businesses that serve them. You can approach these businesses for joint promotions that’ll be mutually beneficial.
• Create profitable order upgrades . Knowing the other products and services that your customers tend to buy can help you come up with add-ons, product bundles, and upsells that increase the average value of each order.
• Find new locations to sell to . Knowing the geographical areas where most of your target customers live will allow you to create compelling targeted campaigns that suit the needs and culture of that area.

5. Lower Business Risks

Around half of businesses with employees don’t survive past the fifth year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics . The way to make sure that your business survives for longer is to ensure that you’ve got a steady stream of sales and customers. To do that, you need market research.

Regular market research will be your way to check in with your current customers and potential customers to ensure that you’re still meeting their needs. Here’s how you can apply this:

• Test new designs and products before launching . Before you go all-in on a dramatic change for your business, you can test it on a smaller subset of your audience to see if the change would be welcome. For example, if you plan to do a redesign of a popular product, show the new design to your most frequent buyers. Test or ask them if they’re more likely to buy the new design versus an alternative new design or the old design.
• Find out why customers don’t come back . Ideally, your small business should have recurring customers. If they don’t come back, you can conduct a survey of previous customers or set up a focus group to find out why you’re not making any repeat sales.
• Get insights on problem areas . If your most popular product sees a big drop in sales for three consecutive months, you need to find out how to fix it before it ruins your profits completely. Survey your most frequent customers about the product and find out where the problem lies. It could be anything from a decline in the product quality to a glitch on your online store. You’ll never know unless you ask.

6. Create Relevant Promotional Materials

If you’ve ever wondered what text or images to put on your fliers, website, or social media accounts thorough market research will tell you exactly what to do. Since target customers have already expressed all their wants, needs, and frustrations with you, you’ll know exactly what to address and how to address it when you start creating your marketing materials.

For example, author Tiffany Sun surveyed her readers to find out which problems they were trying to solve. Instead of coming up with blog topics or headlines in a vacuum, she used the results of this survey to brainstorm compelling topics.

Here are some other ways your marketing materials will be easier to create:

• Knowing whether customers see your products and services as a necessity or as a luxury can help you design your product labels, brochures, and a website that fits their perception.
• Identifying the age range of your customers can tell you the type of language you’ll be using in your promotional materials. You’ll write differently when addressing retired Baby Boomers than you would when addressing young professionals.

7. Know Where to Advertise

One of the problems that small business owners face is a limited budget. Because of this, your marketing budget should be optimized to give you the best returns possible. Your market research can help ensure that you’re reaching your intended audience in the channels where they’re most likely to see your message.

These are some of the budgetary tasks that your market research can help with:

• Buying ads on social media . If your market research shows that your target audience spends most of their time on Instagram and almost never uses X, you’ll know to direct most of your social media ad budget to Instagram and forget about X.
• Placing flyers and posters . Knowing the physical spaces where your customer spends their time will tell you where you can best place your advertising. For example, university students are likely to be on campus, so placing ads for that market means that you can try bulletin boards on campus or outside local establishments that their crowd tends to frequent.
• Targeting ads . Online ads such as social media ads and pay-per-click ads can often be targeted with precision. This means that you can target based not just on the usual demographic data, but also based on online behaviors, life stage, and interests. If you truly know your customers, you’ll be able to maximize the potential for targeting. For example: here are some of the targeting options for Facebook Ads :

8. Outsell Competitors

Businesses that know their customers better tend to win more. If you can beat your competitors at finding out your customers’ needs and you aim to fulfill those needs, you’ve got a better chance of standing out from the competition. Here are some ways you can use market research to outsell competitors:

• Target dissatisfied customers . Asking target customers about their frustrations with your competitors’ products or reading their product reviews can help you improve your own products and market them to an audience that’s ready to switch brands.
• Find an underserved customer segment . Your market research might reveal that there’s a segment of the market that your competition has neglected. This will give you a new customer segment to reach out to.
• Identify unaddressed customer needs . During your market research, you might uncover some customer pain points or desires that you don’t see addressed in your competitors’ marketing materials. Try including them in your own marketing and see if the results show an increase in sales.

If you need to know more about conducting market research with competitors in mind, check out this guide on how to write a competitive analysis . You can also learn more about finding out who’s buying from your competitors .

9. Set Better Goals for Your Business

When business owners set goals for their business, they’re typically related to growth in sales or customers. But without market research, you won’t be able to know if your goals are achievable and how to achieve them in the first place.

You might say that you want to double sales by the end of the next quarter. How would you know if this goal is feasible if you don’t know whether the size of your target market is more than twice the size of your current customer base? Without knowing the current size of your potential market, you’ll just be setting arbitrary goals.

With market research, you’ll be able to determine the specific ways you want to expand your customer base. For example, do you want to reach new customers via a new untapped market segment? Or do you still have room for growth among your current target audience?

If you need help setting growth goals for your business, check out this guide on small business growth strategies . You can also learn how to set effective goals for your freelance business .

10. Decision-Making Becomes Simple

The importance of marketing research frequently comes up when making tough business decisions. Instead of having arbitrary criteria for the decisions you make as a business owner, you can always go back to your market research report. Based on that report, will this decision lead to more customers? Will you be able to reach more people who are likely to buy from you? Will it be clear to them that your business can meet their needs?

While not all decisions should be solved by market research, many of them can be, such as:

• where to spend your advertising or marketing budget
• whether there’s a demand for a new product you want to make
• if you should open a storefront in a new location
• which products to discontinue and which ones to merely improve
• how to price all your offers

There’s a real need for market research because it provides you with solid facts. Through market research, you’ll make more informed decisions rather than resting the fate of your business on guesswork.

Discover the Importance of Market Research for Your Business

Now that you understand the importance of market research, you’re ready to get started. Your business doesn’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on focus groups and extensive surveys to conduct market research. But it’s important that you do market research in the first place, and present your research findings with your team.

As long as you end up with a thorough list of your target market’s demographics, needs, and frustrations, you’ll be able to reap the above benefits as you grow your business. Why not get started with your marketing research today?

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Written by Mary Kate Miller | June 1, 2021

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Market research is a cornerstone of all successful, strategic businesses. It can also be daunting for entrepreneurs looking to launch a startup or start a side hustle . What is market research, anyway? And how do you…do it?

We’ll walk you through absolutely everything you need to know about the market research process so that by the end of this guide, you’ll be an expert in market research too. And what’s more important: you’ll have actionable steps you can take to start collecting your own market research.

What Is Market Research?

Market research is the organized process of gathering information about your target customers and market. Market research can help you better understand customer behavior and competitor strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide insight for the best strategies in launching new businesses and products. There are different ways to approach market research, including primary and secondary research and qualitative and quantitative research. The strongest approaches will include a combination of all four.

“Virtually every business can benefit from conducting some market research,” says Niles Koenigsberg of Real FiG Advertising + Marketing . “Market research can help you piece together your [business’s] strengths and weaknesses, along with your prospective opportunities, so that you can understand where your unique differentiators may lie.” Well-honed market research will help your brand stand out from the competition and help you see what you need to do to lead the market. It can also do so much more.

The Purposes of Market Research

Why do market research? It can help you…

• Pinpoint your target market, create buyer personas, and develop a more holistic understanding of your customer base and market.
• Understand current market conditions to evaluate risks and anticipate how your product or service will perform.
• Validate a concept prior to launch.
• Identify gaps in the market that your competitors have created or overlooked.
• Solve problems that have been left unresolved by the existing product/brand offerings.
• Identify opportunities and solutions for new products or services.
• Develop killer marketing strategies .

What Are the Benefits of Market Research?

Strong market research can help your business in many ways. It can…

• Strengthen your market position.
• Help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.
• Help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Minimize risk.
• Center your customers’ experience from the get-go.
• Help you create a dynamic strategy based on market conditions and customer needs/demands.

What Are the Basic Methods of Market Research?

The basic methods of market research include surveys, personal interviews, customer observation, and the review of secondary research. In addition to these basic methods, a forward-thinking market research approach incorporates data from the digital landscape like social media analysis, SEO research, gathering feedback via forums, and more. Throughout this guide, we will cover each of the methods commonly used in market research to give you a comprehensive overview.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Primary and secondary are the two main types of market research you can do. The latter relies on research conducted by others. Primary research, on the other hand, refers to the fact-finding efforts you conduct on your own.

This approach is limited, however. It’s likely that the research objectives of these secondary data points differ from your own, and it can be difficult to confirm the veracity of their findings.

Primary Market Research

Primary research is more labor intensive, but it generally yields data that is exponentially more actionable. It can be conducted through interviews, surveys, online research, and your own data collection. Every new business should engage in primary market research prior to launch. It will help you validate that your idea has traction, and it will give you the information you need to help minimize financial risk.

You can hire an agency to conduct this research on your behalf. This brings the benefit of expertise, as you’ll likely work with a market research analyst. The downside is that hiring an agency can be expensive—too expensive for many burgeoning entrepreneurs. That brings us to the second approach. You can also do the market research yourself, which substantially reduces the financial burden of starting a new business .

Secondary Market Research

Secondary research includes resources like government databases and industry-specific data and publications. It can be beneficial to start your market research with secondary sources because it’s widely available and often free-to-access. This information will help you gain a broad overview of the market conditions for your new business.

Identify Your Goals and Your Audience

Before you begin conducting interviews or sending out surveys, you need to set your market research goals. At the end of your market research process, you want to have a clear idea of who your target market is—including demographic information like age, gender, and where they live—but you also want to start with a rough idea of who your audience might be and what you’re trying to achieve with market research.

You can pinpoint your objectives by asking yourself a series of guiding questions:

• What are you hoping to discover through your research?
• Who are you hoping to serve better because of your findings?
• What do you think your market is?
• Who are your competitors?
• Are you testing the reception of a new product category or do you want to see if your product or service solves the problem left by a current gap in the market?
• Are you just…testing the waters to get a sense of how people would react to a new brand?

Once you’ve narrowed down the “what” of your market research goals, you’re ready to move onto how you can best achieve them. Think of it like algebra. Many math problems start with “solve for x.” Once you know what you’re looking for, you can get to work trying to find it. It’s a heck of a lot easier to solve a problem when you know you’re looking for “x” than if you were to say “I’m gonna throw some numbers out there and see if I find a variable.”

How to Do Market Research

This guide outlines every component of a comprehensive market research effort. Take into consideration the goals you have established for your market research, as they will influence which of these elements you’ll want to include in your market research strategy.

Secondary Data

Secondary data allows you to utilize pre-existing data to garner a sense of market conditions and opportunities. You can rely on published market studies, white papers, and public competitive information to start your market research journey.

Secondary data, while useful, is limited and cannot substitute your own primary data. It’s best used for quantitative data that can provide background to your more specific inquiries.

Find Your Customers Online

Once you’ve identified your target market, you can use online gathering spaces and forums to gain insights and give yourself a competitive advantage. Rebecca McCusker of The Creative Content Shop recommends internet recon as a vital tool for gaining a sense of customer needs and sentiment. “Read their posts and comments on forums, YouTube video comments, Facebook group [comments], and even Amazon/Goodreads book comments to get in their heads and see what people are saying.”

If you’re interested in engaging with your target demographic online, there are some general rules you should follow. First, secure the consent of any group moderators to ensure that you are acting within the group guidelines. Failure to do so could result in your eviction from the group.

Not all comments have the same research value. “Focus on the comments and posts with the most comments and highest engagement,” says McCusker. These high-engagement posts can give you a sense of what is already connecting and gaining traction within the group.

Social media can also be a great avenue for finding interview subjects. “LinkedIn is very useful if your [target customer] has a very specific job or works in a very specific industry or sector. It’s amazing the amount of people that will be willing to help,” explains Miguel González, a marketing executive at Dealers League . “My advice here is BE BRAVE, go to LinkedIn, or even to people you know and ask them, do quick interviews and ask real people that belong to that market and segment and get your buyer persona information first hand.”

Market research interviews can provide direct feedback on your brand, product, or service and give you a better understanding of consumer pain points and interests.

When organizing your market research interviews, you want to pay special attention to the sample group you’re selecting, as it will directly impact the information you receive. According to Tanya Zhang, the co-founder of Nimble Made , you want to first determine whether you want to choose a representative sample—for example, interviewing people who match each of the buyer persona/customer profiles you’ve developed—or a random sample.

“A sampling of your usual persona styles, for example, can validate details that you’ve already established about your product, while a random sampling may [help you] discover a new way people may use your product,” Zhang says.

Market Surveys

Market surveys solicit customer inclinations regarding your potential product or service through a series of open-ended questions. This direct outreach to your target audience can provide information on your customers’ preferences, attitudes, buying potential, and more.

Every expert we asked voiced unanimous support for market surveys as a powerful tool for market research. With the advent of various survey tools with accessible pricing—or free use—it’s never been easier to assemble, disseminate, and gather market surveys. While it should also be noted that surveys shouldn’t replace customer interviews , they can be used to supplement customer interviews to give you feedback from a broader audience.

Who to Include in Market Surveys

• Current customers
• Past customers
• Your existing audience (such as social media/newsletter audiences)

Example Questions to Include in Market Surveys

While the exact questions will vary for each business, here are some common, helpful questions that you may want to consider for your market survey. Demographic Questions: the questions that help you understand, demographically, who your target customers are:

• “What is your age?”
• “Where do you live?”
• “What is your gender identity?”
• “What is your household income?”
• “What is your household size?”
• “What do you do for a living?”
• “What is your highest level of education?”

Product-Based Questions: Whether you’re seeking feedback for an existing brand or an entirely new one, these questions will help you get a sense of how people feel about your business, product, or service:

• “How well does/would our product/service meet your needs?”
• “How does our product/service compare to similar products/services that you use?”
• “How long have you been a customer?” or “What is the likelihood that you would be a customer of our brand?

Personal/Informative Questions: the deeper questions that help you understand how your audience thinks and what they care about.

• “What are your biggest challenges?”
• “What’s most important to you?”
• “What do you do for fun (hobbies, interests, activities)?”
• “Where do you seek new information when researching a new product?”
• “How do you like to make purchases?”
• “What is your preferred method for interacting with a brand?”

Survey Tools

Online survey tools make it easy to distribute surveys and collect responses. The best part is that there are many free tools available. If you’re making your own online survey, you may want to consider SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, or Zoho Survey.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is a breakdown of how your business stacks up against the competition. There are many different ways to conduct this analysis. One of the most popular methods is a SWOT analysis, which stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” This type of analysis is helpful because it gives you a more robust understanding of why a customer might choose a competitor over your business. Seeing how you stack up against the competition can give you the direction you need to carve out your place as a market leader.

Social Media Analysis

Social media has fundamentally changed the market research landscape, making it easier than ever to engage with a wide swath of consumers. Follow your current or potential competitors on social media to see what they’re posting and how their audience is engaging with it. Social media can also give you a lower cost opportunity for testing different messaging and brand positioning.

SEO Analysis and Opportunities

SEO analysis can help you identify the digital competition for getting the word out about your brand, product, or service. You won’t want to overlook this valuable information. Search listening tools offer a novel approach to understanding the market and generating the content strategy that will drive business. Tools like Google Trends and Awario can streamline this process.

Ready to Kick Your Business Into High Gear?

Now that you’ve completed the guide to market research you know you’re ready to put on your researcher hat to give your business the best start. Still not sure how actually… launch the thing? Our free mini-course can run you through the essentials for starting your side hustle .

About Mary Kate Miller

Mary Kate Miller writes about small business, real estate, and finance. In addition to writing for Foundr, her work has been published by The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Bustle, and more. She lives in Chicago.

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The Importance of Market and Marketing Research in Business

Learn the difference between market research and marketing research

Laura Lake is a marketing professional and author of "Consumer Behavior for Dummies."

When it comes to running a business, making assumptions about your customers, market, competitors, or systems can cause you to waste time, money , and effort.

To make effective decisions that will grow your business and use your resources wisely, you will need to put some of those resources toward conducting market and marketing research.

Market Research vs. Marketing Research

Market research involves identifying a specific "target," and focusing exclusively on that group. It is research into a narrow group of consumers to understand their behavior and motivation.

Marketing research has a broader scope that market research. It is used to examine the entire marketing process of a company, rather than only looking at the consumers that the company is targeting.

The Importance of Market Research

Successfully running and growing your business depends on understanding your target customers. Once you have a clear picture of their goals, needs, and values, you are more able to drive them towards purchasing your products or services.

Market research is one of the best tools you have for understanding your customers. It gives you hard data that you can use to drive your marketing strategy, making both marketing and selling easier and more effective. 

Market research helps you:

• Improve communication.  It drives your communication not only with your current customer base but with target prospects as well. Market research shows you where your customers can be reached, as well as what language will be most effective in attracting their attention and resonating with them on an emotional level.
• Identify opportunity.  Market research helps you identify both high-level and more accessible opportunities for reaching and converting new customers. It can be the best way to discover new platforms for advertising, consumer concerns you were unaware of, and gaps within your market that you can fill.
• Lower your risk.  Concrete data keeps you focused on the real opportunities and helps you avoid unproductive effort. When you understand your customers, you can use your resources to reach them more effectively, with less risk of wasting time, money, and effort on marketing initiatives that don't work. Market research also helps you identify low-risk, high-reward areas where your company can expand or offer new services,

The Importance of Marketing Research

Marketing research is important for evaluating what is and is not working in your business model. It includes research into your target market, as well as the systems in your business that make up your marketing conditions.

Marketing research looks at every aspect of the Four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. This includes:

• Public Relations
• Modes of distribution
• Development of new products/services
• Promotions and advertising
• Market conditions

Marketing research helps you learn not just what your customers want, but how successful your business is at reaching and connecting with them. It helps you identify problems and opportunities, refine your systems, and evaluate your marketing strategy.

How to Conduct Research for Your Business

Though they look at different aspects of your business, both market research and marketing research should follow the same pattern of data collection and analysis.

• Define the problem.  Start by identifying the focus of your research. Knowing what question you are trying to answer will help you structure your research effectively.
• Determine your budget and timeframe.  How much can you afford to spend on the research process? How soon will you need to have data collection completed? Like all the strategies that you use to grow your business, research should be conducted within your available resources. However, depending on the urgency of the questions you are answering, it may be worth spending more money to get the most comprehensive results possible.
• Design your method and needs.  Identify what data needs to be collected and how you will gather it. Some options are observation, surveys, telephone calls, or focus groups. If you are unsure how to structure your data collection, consider working with a professional research firm.
• Choose a sampling method. How will you select the participants for your research? You may need a random sampling from the general population of consumers, a group that all have a single lifestyle factor in common, or responses only from people who are already your customers. Create a plan for identifying and contacting your participants.
• ​​ Plan for data analysis. Decide how you will analyze your data. Will you need quantitative data for statistical analysis or qualitative, observational data to give you a broad picture? Will you use software or do it by hand? Take time to learn about various methods of analysis to find the one that will best answer your research question.
• Data collection.  Once you know what question you want to answer and have designed a research method to answer it within the constraints of your available budget and time, it's time to collect data. Many businesses work with professional firms or consultants to conduct their actual research.
• Analysis of the data. No matter how straightforward your data seems at first glance, you'll want to use specific methods of analysis to ensure that you understand what it is telling you. The methods of analysis that you use will depend on the type of data you collected. This should also be when you check for errors, which can occur in your sampling method, data collection, and analysis.
• Create your report.  The final step of the research process is drafting a report on your findings. Your report should outline the entire research process, from developing your problem statement to the results of your data analysis.

No matter what type of research you are conducting, you will need to follow the full research method to arrive at a conclusion that will benefit your business. If your findings lead to a solution to your problem statement, you will be able to decide on the next steps for your business.

If you were unable to answer your research question, that doesn't mean your research was done incorrectly. You may discover that you need to ask different questions or that the situation was more complicated than you anticipated. When that happens, it's time to continue your research until you've arrived at a solution.

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Home Market Research

Importance of Market Research + Types & How to Plan it.

Market research will help you develop a successful marketing strategy. It is one of the reasons why market research is so important for organizations that want to make informed decisions. This article will highlight the relevance of market research and importance of market research.

For your products and services to be well-accepted by customers, you must know the choices and preferences of your target audience . Market research provides you with essential information about your competitors and existing products. 

The results offer you insights into what it would take to succeed in the market. Hence, organizations base their business decisions on good market research, such as sales and marketing strategies.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

Market research helps reduce risk by allowing you to determine product features, pricing, and promotions from the outset. It also helps you focus resources where they will be most effective.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

This blog will discuss the importance of market research, its types, and how to plan it for your business.

Content Index

What is market research?

Types of market research, the importance of market research for your business, how to plan market research, how questionpro helps in market research.

Market research is a systematic process of gathering, evaluating, and interpreting data. It is the basis of any business that does well. The data could be about a target market, customers, competitors, or the industry as a whole. The research serves a variety of reasons, ranging from identifying a new market to launching a new business.

Market research assists entrepreneurs in making sound business decisions. It may remove the guesswork from innovation and direct resources to the most promising ideas and projects. Different companies conduct market research for different purposes.

Businesses use various types of market research to gather information about their target market, competitors, and market research industry trends . There are two main types of market research: 

• Quantitative research.
• Qualitative research.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research focuses on generating numbers, for example, what percentage of the population buys a specific product. It is conducted using surveys and questionnaires. You can do simple quantitative research yourself by talking to customers. 

More detailed quantitative research can be used to identify markets and understand customer profiles while launching a new product.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research relies on facts and figures to discover what people think and feel about products and what factors affect their purchasing decisions. Researchers use surveys and focus groups to gather this information while interpreting the results is a job that requires certain research skills .

To learn more about the differences and characteristics of these types of research, we recommend reading Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research .

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Interview

You can also conduct secondary research using existing surveys and business reports. Use free online information on market size, sales trends, customer profiles, and competitor activity.

Your customer records can give you a wealth of knowledge about purchasing patterns, the most popular services among various demographic groups, etc. 

Market research can help you analyze key trends and predict how the market will change. Here are some of the reasons why market research is important for your business:

Identifies new products and services

Market research can assist you in determining what new products or services the market requires and how you can provide them. Key issues with developing a specific product or service can be identified, allowing you to avoid costly development mistakes. 

It also assists you in determining which factors are most important to customers and how to implement them into what you want to bring to market.

Identifies potential customers

Demographic information such as gender, age, income, occupation, and lifestyle can help you better understand your customer base. If you know who your current customers are, you can target them in the future. Marketing to the wrong type of customer can lead to poor product performance.

Establishes product or service viability

If your company plans to launch a new product or service, you must first determine whether the market is ready for it. Will the product be well received? Is the product required by the customers you want to reach? Will it be workable, and what are the chances of success?

Keeps your company ahead of competitors

Comparative studies are excellent for tracking your competitors’ progress compared to your company’s. 

If they are far ahead of you, this is an excellent opportunity for you to learn what they are doing differently than you. Business strategies can be developed to help you stay ahead of your competitors.

Reduces risk and enhances profitability

Knowledge can help reduce your company’s risks and determine which risks are worth taking based on past and future market trends. 

Market research help in determining market viability , lowering the risk of failure. Understanding your customers’ needs is also important for risk reduction. At the end of the day, lowering risk helps to increase profitability.

Helps to understand existing customers

Your customers are complex, and what they require previously may not be what they require now. To be successful, you must constantly monitor the pulse of your customer base. Market research can help you better understand your current customers. 

The market research also helps to determine customer satisfaction levels. If you discover their low satisfaction levels, you can figure out why and fix it. If it is high, you can figure out why and learn how to keep it that way.

Helps set realistic goals

You can set realistic goals by using current data about your market and customer base. Establishing a growth pattern over time lets you know what to expect in the future and how to really develop that growth. 

Setting attainable goals will save resources, succeed before you start, and miss out on better long-term goals for your company.

Effective market research starts with knowing what you are trying to accomplish and what information you need. You can do it yourself. 

For example, if you are considering buying or renting a store, you can analyze traffic levels at different times. Or you can talk to your potential customers.

However, to make good business decisions , you will need a more comprehensive approach. 

For example, if you conduct a market survey , you will need survey software to design a survey, customize the look and feel and generate reports. You might also want to integrate the tool with other CRM and marketing automation software. 

Survey software can let you export results in standard formats or share the reports with others. You can also create online surveys in multiple languages and let your respondents select the language of their choice.

One of the most important aspects of planning market research is asking the right questions. Design the survey such that it collects meaningful and high-quality data.

If you want to know more about how to do this, we recommend our article: How to Write a Market Research Plan?

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

QuestionPro is a market research software platform that assists businesses in conducting various types of market research. It has market research tools to create, distribute, and analyze surveys and other research methods. QuestionPro can assist organizations with their market research in a variety of ways, including:

Surveys: QuestionPro has a full survey builder that lets organizations make their own surveys, add questions, and choose from a variety of question types, like multiple choice, open-ended, and rating scales.

Data collection: QuestionPro enables organizations to collect data via online surveys, email, web pop-ups, and mobile devices. It also provides a variety of data collection methods, including panel sampling, random sampling, and targeted sampling.

Data analysis: To assist organizations in gaining insights from their data, QuestionPro offers a variety of data analysis tools such as cross-tabulation, descriptive statistics, and inferential statistics .

Real-time data reporting: QuestionPro provides real-time data reporting, allowing organizations to monitor the progress of their research in real-time and make changes to their survey design as needed.

Integration with other tools: QuestionPro integrates with a variety of other tools, including Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Zapier, to provide organizations with a comprehensive view of their market research data.

QuestionPro offers businesses a comprehensive platform for conducting market research and gaining valuable insights into their target audience, competitors, and industry trends. It enables businesses to make informed decisions based on data-driven insights.

LEARN ABOUT: market research trends

Market research should be well-structured, concise, and provide useful insights to help the organization make informed decisions. It should also serve as a starting point for future research and assist organizations in identifying areas for improvement in their business strategies.

Market research is an important component that summarizes the research findings and insights. It gives you a clear picture of the market and its trends, consumer behavior, and the overall competitive landscape.

If you are interested in conducting online survey research, QuestionPro can help you. Request a demo and learn how our survey software works and the advantages of using it in your next market research. Get started today!

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How to Do Market Research: The Complete Guide

Learn how to do market research with this step-by-step guide, complete with templates, tools and real-world examples.

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What are your customers’ needs? How does your product compare to the competition? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in your industry? If these questions keep you up at night, it’s time to conduct market research.

Market research plays a pivotal role in your ability to stay competitive and relevant, helping you anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and industry dynamics. It involves gathering these insights using a wide range of techniques, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and observational studies.

In this guide, we’ll explore why market research is crucial, the various types of market research, the methods used in data collection, and how to effectively conduct market research to drive informed decision-making and success.

What is market research?

Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry. The purpose of market research is to offer valuable insight into the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, and anticipate shifts in market trends and the competitive landscape. This information helps you make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies for your business, and maximize your chances of long-term growth.

Why is market research important? 

By understanding the significance of market research, you can make sure you’re asking the right questions and using the process to your advantage. Some of the benefits of market research include:

• Informed decision-making: Market research provides you with the data and insights you need to make smart decisions for your business. It helps you identify opportunities, assess risks and tailor your strategies to meet the demands of the market. Without market research, decisions are often based on assumptions or guesswork, leading to costly mistakes.
• Customer-centric approach: A cornerstone of market research involves developing a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This gives you valuable insights into your target audience, helping you develop products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers.
• Competitive advantage: By conducting market research, you’ll gain a competitive edge. You’ll be able to identify gaps in the market, analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses, and position your business strategically. This enables you to create unique value propositions, differentiate yourself from competitors, and seize opportunities that others may overlook.
• Risk mitigation: Market research helps you anticipate market shifts and potential challenges. By identifying threats early, you can proactively adjust their strategies to mitigate risks and respond effectively to changing circumstances. This proactive approach is particularly valuable in volatile industries.
• Resource optimization: Conducting market research allows organizations to allocate their time, money and resources more efficiently. It ensures that investments are made in areas with the highest potential return on investment, reducing wasted resources and improving overall business performance.
• Adaptation to market trends: Markets evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements, cultural shifts and changing consumer attitudes. Market research ensures that you stay ahead of these trends and adapt your offerings accordingly so you can avoid becoming obsolete. 

As you can see, market research empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, cater to customer needs, outperform competitors, mitigate risks, optimize resources and stay agile in a dynamic marketplace. These benefits make it a huge industry; the global market research services market is expected to grow from $76.37 billion in 2021 to $108.57 billion in 2026 . Now, let’s dig into the different types of market research that can help you achieve these benefits.

Types of market research 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Exploratory research
• Descriptive research
• Causal research
• Cross-sectional research
• Longitudinal research

Despite its advantages, 23% of organizations don’t have a clear market research strategy. Part of developing a strategy involves choosing the right type of market research for your business goals. The most commonly used approaches include:

1. Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the underlying motivations, attitudes and perceptions of individuals or groups. It is typically conducted through techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups and content analysis — methods we’ll discuss further in the sections below. Qualitative research provides rich, nuanced insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies and brand positioning.

2. Quantitative research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, involves the collection and analysis of numerical data, often through surveys, experiments and structured questionnaires. This approach allows for statistical analysis and the measurement of trends, making it suitable for large-scale market studies and hypothesis testing. While it’s worthwhile using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, most businesses prioritize the latter because it is scientific, measurable and easily replicated across different experiments.

3. Exploratory research

Whether you’re conducting qualitative or quantitative research or a mix of both, exploratory research is often the first step. Its primary goal is to help you understand a market or problem so you can gain insights and identify potential issues or opportunities. This type of market research is less structured and is typically conducted through open-ended interviews, focus groups or secondary data analysis. Exploratory research is valuable when entering new markets or exploring new product ideas.

4. Descriptive research

As its name implies, descriptive research seeks to describe a market, population or phenomenon in detail. It involves collecting and summarizing data to answer questions about audience demographics and behaviors, market size, and current trends. Surveys, observational studies and content analysis are common methods used in descriptive research. 

5. Causal research

Causal research aims to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. It investigates whether changes in one variable result in changes in another. Experimental designs, A/B testing and regression analysis are common causal research methods. This sheds light on how specific marketing strategies or product changes impact consumer behavior.

6. Cross-sectional research

Cross-sectional market research involves collecting data from a sample of the population at a single point in time. It is used to analyze differences, relationships or trends among various groups within a population. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for market segmentation, identifying target audiences and assessing market trends at a specific moment.

7. Longitudinal research

Longitudinal research, in contrast to cross-sectional research, collects data from the same subjects over an extended period. This allows for the analysis of trends, changes and developments over time. Longitudinal studies are useful for tracking long-term developments in consumer preferences, brand loyalty and market dynamics.

Each type of market research has its strengths and weaknesses, and the method you choose depends on your specific research goals and the depth of understanding you’re aiming to achieve. In the following sections, we’ll delve into primary and secondary research approaches and specific research methods.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market research of all types can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: primary research and secondary research. By understanding the differences between these approaches, you can better determine the most appropriate research method for your specific goals.

Primary market research 

Primary research involves the collection of original data straight from the source. Typically, this involves communicating directly with your target audience — through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more — to gather information. Here are some key attributes of primary market research:

• Customized data: Primary research provides data that is tailored to your research needs. You design a custom research study and gather information specific to your goals.
• Up-to-date insights: Because primary research involves communicating with customers, the data you collect reflects the most current market conditions and consumer behaviors.
• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Despite its advantages, primary research can be labor-intensive and costly, especially when dealing with large sample sizes or complex study designs. Whether you hire a market research consultant, agency or use an in-house team, primary research studies consume a large amount of resources and time.

Secondary market research 

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing data that has already been compiled by third-party sources, such as online research tools, databases, news sites, industry reports and academic studies.

Here are the main characteristics of secondary market research:

• Cost-effective: Secondary research is generally more cost-effective than primary research since it doesn’t require building a research plan from scratch. You and your team can look at databases, websites and publications on an ongoing basis, without needing to design a custom experiment or hire a consultant. 
• Leverages multiple sources: Data tools and software extract data from multiple places across the web, and then consolidate that information within a single platform. This means you’ll get a greater amount of data and a wider scope from secondary research.
• Quick to access: You can access a wide range of information rapidly — often in seconds — if you’re using online research tools and databases. Because of this, you can act on insights sooner, rather than taking the time to develop an experiment. 

So, when should you use primary vs. secondary research? In practice, many market research projects incorporate both primary and secondary research to take advantage of the strengths of each approach.

One rule of thumb is to focus on secondary research to obtain background information, market trends or industry benchmarks. It is especially valuable for conducting preliminary research, competitor analysis, or when time and budget constraints are tight. Then, if you still have knowledge gaps or need to answer specific questions unique to your business model, use primary research to create a custom experiment. 

Market research methods

• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• Observational research
• Online research tools
• Experiments
• Content analysis
• Ethnographic research

How do primary and secondary research approaches translate into specific research methods? Let’s take a look at the different ways you can gather data: 

1. Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods for collecting structured data from a large number of respondents. They involve a set of predetermined questions that participants answer. Surveys can be conducted through various channels, including online tools, telephone interviews and in-person or online questionnaires. They are useful for gathering quantitative data and assessing customer demographics, opinions, preferences and needs. On average, customer surveys have a 33% response rate , so keep that in mind as you consider your sample size.

2. Interviews

Interviews are in-depth conversations with individuals or groups to gather qualitative insights. They can be structured (with predefined questions) or unstructured (with open-ended discussions). Interviews are valuable for exploring complex topics, uncovering motivations and obtaining detailed feedback. 

3. Focus groups

The most common primary research methods are in-depth webcam interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are a small gathering of participants who discuss a specific topic or product under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions are valuable for primary market research because they reveal insights into consumer attitudes, perceptions and emotions. Focus groups are especially useful for idea generation, concept testing and understanding group dynamics within your target audience.

4. Observational research

Observational research involves observing and recording participant behavior in a natural setting. This method is particularly valuable when studying consumer behavior in physical spaces, such as retail stores or public places. In some types of observational research, participants are aware you’re watching them; in other cases, you discreetly watch consumers without their knowledge, as they use your product. Either way, observational research provides firsthand insights into how people interact with products or environments.

5. Online research tools

You and your team can do your own secondary market research using online tools. These tools include data prospecting platforms and databases, as well as online surveys, social media listening, web analytics and sentiment analysis platforms. They help you gather data from online sources, monitor industry trends, track competitors, understand consumer preferences and keep tabs on online behavior. We’ll talk more about choosing the right market research tools in the sections that follow.

6. Experiments

Market research experiments are controlled tests of variables to determine causal relationships. While experiments are often associated with scientific research, they are also used in market research to assess the impact of specific marketing strategies, product features, or pricing and packaging changes.

7. Content analysis

Content analysis involves the systematic examination of textual, visual or audio content to identify patterns, themes and trends. It’s commonly applied to customer reviews, social media posts and other forms of online content to analyze consumer opinions and sentiments.

8. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research immerses researchers into the daily lives of consumers to understand their behavior and culture. This method is particularly valuable when studying niche markets or exploring the cultural context of consumer choices.

How to do market research

• Set clear objectives
• Identify your target audience
• Choose your research methods
• Use the right market research tools
• Collect data
• Analyze data 
• Interpret your findings
• Identify opportunities and challenges
• Make informed business decisions
• Monitor and adapt

Now that you have gained insights into the various market research methods at your disposal, let’s delve into the practical aspects of how to conduct market research effectively. Here’s a quick step-by-step overview, from defining objectives to monitoring market shifts.

1. Set clear objectives

When you set clear and specific goals, you’re essentially creating a compass to guide your research questions and methodology. Start by precisely defining what you want to achieve. Are you launching a new product and want to understand its viability in the market? Are you evaluating customer satisfaction with a product redesign? 

Start by creating SMART goals — objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this clarify your research focus from the outset, but it will also help you track progress and benchmark your success throughout the process. 

You should also consult with key stakeholders and team members to ensure alignment on your research objectives before diving into data collecting. This will help you gain diverse perspectives and insights that will shape your research approach.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, you’ll need to pinpoint your target audience to determine who should be included in your research. Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or stakeholder profiles. Consider demographic factors like age, gender, income and location, but also delve into psychographics, such as interests, values and pain points.

The more specific your target audience, the more accurate and actionable your research will be. Additionally, segment your audience if your research objectives involve studying different groups, such as current customers and potential leads.

If you already have existing customers, you can also hold conversations with them to better understand your target market. From there, you can refine your buyer personas and tailor your research methods accordingly.

3. Choose your research methods

Selecting the right research methods is crucial for gathering high-quality data. Start by considering the nature of your research objectives. If you’re exploring consumer preferences, surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights. For in-depth understanding, focus groups or observational research might be suitable. Consider using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a well-rounded perspective. 

You’ll also need to consider your budget. Think about what you can realistically achieve using the time and resources available to you. If you have a fairly generous budget, you may want to try a mix of primary and secondary research approaches. If you’re doing market research for a startup , on the other hand, chances are your budget is somewhat limited. If that’s the case, try addressing your goals with secondary research tools before investing time and effort in a primary research study. 

4. Use the right market research tools

Whether you’re conducting primary or secondary research, you’ll need to choose the right tools. These can help you do anything from sending surveys to customers to monitoring trends and analyzing data. Here are some examples of popular market research tools:

• Market research software: Crunchbase is a platform that provides best-in-class company data, making it valuable for market research on growing companies and industries. You can use Crunchbase to access trusted, first-party funding data, revenue data, news and firmographics, enabling you to monitor industry trends and understand customer needs.

• Survey and questionnaire tools: SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Google Forms is a free tool that lets you create surveys and collect responses through Google Drive.
• Data analysis software: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are useful for conducting statistical analyses. SPSS is a powerful statistical analysis software used for data processing, analysis and reporting.
• Social listening tools: Brandwatch is a social listening and analytics platform that helps you monitor social media conversations, track sentiment and analyze trends. Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords across various online sources.
• Data visualization platforms: Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps you create interactive and shareable dashboards and reports. Power BI by Microsoft is a business analytics tool for creating interactive visualizations and reports.

5. Collect data

There’s an infinite amount of data you could be collecting using these tools, so you’ll need to be intentional about going after the data that aligns with your research goals. Implement your chosen research methods, whether it’s distributing surveys, conducting interviews or pulling from secondary research platforms. Pay close attention to data quality and accuracy, and stick to a standardized process to streamline data capture and reduce errors. 

6. Analyze data

Once data is collected, you’ll need to analyze it systematically. Use statistical software or analysis tools to identify patterns, trends and correlations. For qualitative data, employ thematic analysis to extract common themes and insights. Visualize your findings with charts, graphs and tables to make complex data more understandable.

If you’re not proficient in data analysis, consider outsourcing or collaborating with a data analyst who can assist in processing and interpreting your data accurately.

7. Interpret your findings

Interpreting your market research findings involves understanding what the data means in the context of your objectives. Are there significant trends that uncover the answers to your initial research questions? Consider the implications of your findings on your business strategy. It’s essential to move beyond raw data and extract actionable insights that inform decision-making.

Hold a cross-functional meeting or workshop with relevant team members to collectively interpret the findings. Different perspectives can lead to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions.

8. Identify opportunities and challenges

Use your research findings to identify potential growth opportunities and challenges within your market. What segments of your audience are underserved or overlooked? Are there emerging trends you can capitalize on? Conversely, what obstacles or competitors could hinder your progress?

Lay out this information in a clear and organized way by conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Jot down notes for each of these areas to provide a structured overview of gaps and hurdles in the market.

9. Make informed business decisions

Market research is only valuable if it leads to informed decisions for your company. Based on your insights, devise actionable strategies and initiatives that align with your research objectives. Whether it’s refining your product, targeting new customer segments or adjusting pricing, ensure your decisions are rooted in the data.

At this point, it’s also crucial to keep your team aligned and accountable. Create an action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities and timelines for implementing the recommendations derived from your research. 

10. Monitor and adapt

Market research isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, customer behaviors and industry trends. Set up mechanisms to collect real-time data and feedback. As you gather new information, be prepared to adapt your strategies and tactics accordingly. Regularly revisiting your research ensures your business remains agile and reflects changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Online market research sources

As you go through the steps above, you’ll want to turn to trusted, reputable sources to gather your data. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Crunchbase: As mentioned above, Crunchbase is an online platform with an extensive dataset, allowing you to access in-depth insights on market trends, consumer behavior and competitive analysis. You can also customize your search options to tailor your research to specific industries, geographic regions or customer personas.

• Academic databases: Academic databases, such as ProQuest and JSTOR , are treasure troves of scholarly research papers, studies and academic journals. They offer in-depth analyses of various subjects, including market trends, consumer preferences and industry-specific insights. Researchers can access a wealth of peer-reviewed publications to gain a deeper understanding of their research topics.
• Government and NGO databases: Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other institutions frequently maintain databases containing valuable economic, demographic and industry-related data. These sources offer credible statistics and reports on a wide range of topics, making them essential for market researchers. Examples include the U.S. Census Bureau , the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center .
• Industry reports: Industry reports and market studies are comprehensive documents prepared by research firms, industry associations and consulting companies. They provide in-depth insights into specific markets, including market size, trends, competitive analysis and consumer behavior. You can find this information by looking at relevant industry association databases; examples include the American Marketing Association and the National Retail Federation .
• Social media and online communities: Social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (X) , forums such as Reddit and Quora , and review platforms such as G2 can provide real-time insights into consumer sentiment, opinions and trends. 

Market research examples

At this point, you have market research tools and data sources — but how do you act on the data you gather? Let’s go over some real-world examples that illustrate the practical application of market research across various industries. These examples showcase how market research can lead to smart decision-making and successful business decisions.

Example 1: Apple’s iPhone launch

Apple ’s iconic iPhone launch in 2007 serves as a prime example of market research driving product innovation in tech. Before the iPhone’s release, Apple conducted extensive market research to understand consumer preferences, pain points and unmet needs in the mobile phone industry. This research led to the development of a touchscreen smartphone with a user-friendly interface, addressing consumer demands for a more intuitive and versatile device. The result was a revolutionary product that disrupted the market and redefined the smartphone industry.

Example 2: McDonald’s global expansion

McDonald’s successful global expansion strategy demonstrates the importance of market research when expanding into new territories. Before entering a new market, McDonald’s conducts thorough research to understand local tastes, preferences and cultural nuances. This research informs menu customization, marketing strategies and store design. For instance, in India, McDonald’s offers a menu tailored to local preferences, including vegetarian options. This market-specific approach has enabled McDonald’s to adapt and thrive in diverse global markets.

Example 3: Organic and sustainable farming

The shift toward organic and sustainable farming practices in the food industry is driven by market research that indicates increased consumer demand for healthier and environmentally friendly food options. As a result, food producers and retailers invest in sustainable sourcing and organic product lines — such as with these sustainable seafood startups — to align with this shift in consumer values. 

The bottom line? Market research has multiple use cases and is a critical practice for any industry. Whether it’s launching groundbreaking products, entering new markets or responding to changing consumer preferences, you can use market research to shape successful strategies and outcomes.

Market research templates

You finally have a strong understanding of how to do market research and apply it in the real world. Before we wrap up, here are some market research templates that you can use as a starting point for your projects:

• Smartsheet competitive analysis templates : These spreadsheets can serve as a framework for gathering information about the competitive landscape and obtaining valuable lessons to apply to your business strategy.
• SurveyMonkey product survey template : Customize the questions on this survey based on what you want to learn from your target customers.
• HubSpot templates : HubSpot offers a wide range of free templates you can use for market research, business planning and more.
• SCORE templates : SCORE is a nonprofit organization that provides templates for business plans, market analysis and financial projections.
• SBA.gov : The U.S. Small Business Administration offers templates for every aspect of your business, including market research, and is particularly valuable for new startups. 

Strengthen your business with market research

When conducted effectively, market research is like a guiding star. Equipped with the right tools and techniques, you can uncover valuable insights, stay competitive, foster innovation and navigate the complexities of your industry.

Throughout this guide, we’ve discussed the definition of market research, different research methods, and how to conduct it effectively. We’ve also explored various types of market research and shared practical insights and templates for getting started. 

Now, it’s time to start the research process. Trust in data, listen to the market and make informed decisions that guide your company toward lasting success.

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How to do market research: The complete guide for your brand

Written by by Jacqueline Zote

Published on  April 13, 2023

Reading time  10 minutes

Blindly putting out content or products and hoping for the best is a thing of the past. Not only is it a waste of time and energy, but you’re wasting valuable marketing dollars in the process. Now you have a wealth of tools and data at your disposal, allowing you to develop data-driven marketing strategies . That’s where market research comes in, allowing you to uncover valuable insights to inform your business decisions.

Conducting market research not only helps you better understand how to sell to customers but also stand out from your competition. In this guide, we break down everything you need to know about market research and how doing your homework can help you grow your business.

Table of contents:

What is market research?

Why is market research important, types of market research, where to conduct market research.

• Steps for conducting market research
• Tools to use for market research

Market research is the process of gathering information surrounding your business opportunities. It identifies key information to better understand your audience. This includes insights related to customer personas and even trends shaping your industry.

Taking time out of your schedule to conduct research is crucial for your brand health. Here are some of the key benefits of market research:

Understand your customers’ motivations and pain points

Most marketers are out of touch with what their customers want. Moreover, these marketers are missing key information on what products their audience wants to buy.

Simply put, you can’t run a business if you don’t know what motivates your customers.

And spoiler alert: Your customers’ wants and needs change. Your customers’ behaviors today might be night and day from what they were a few years ago.

Market research holds the key to understanding your customers better. It helps you uncover their key pain points and motivations and understand how they shape their interests and behavior.

Figure out how to position your brand

Positioning is becoming increasingly important as more and more brands enter the marketplace. Market research enables you to spot opportunities to define yourself against your competitors.

Maybe you’re able to emphasize a lower price point. Perhaps your product has a feature that’s one of a kind. Finding those opportunities goes hand in hand with researching your market.

Maintain a strong pulse on your industry at large

Today’s marketing world evolves at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with.

Fresh products. Up-and-coming brands. New marketing tools. Consumers get bombarded with sales messages from all angles. This can be confusing and overwhelming.

By monitoring market trends, you can figure out the best tactics for reaching your target audience.

Not everyone conducts market research for the same reason. While some may want to understand their audience better, others may want to see how their competitors are doing. As such, there are different types of market research you can conduct depending on your goal.

Interview-based market research allows for one-on-one interactions. This helps the conversation to flow naturally, making it easier to add context. Whether this takes place in person or virtually, it enables you to gather more in-depth qualitative data.

Buyer persona research

Buyer persona research lets you take a closer look at the people who make up your target audience. You can discover the needs, challenges and pain points of each buyer persona to understand what they need from your business. This will then allow you to craft products or campaigns to resonate better with each persona.

Pricing research

In this type of research, brands compare similar products or services with a particular focus on pricing. They look at how much those products or services typically sell for so they can get more competitive with their pricing strategy.

Competitive analysis research

Competitor analysis gives you a realistic understanding of where you stand in the market and how your competitors are doing. You can use this analysis to find out what’s working in your industry and which competitors to watch out for. It even gives you an idea of how well those competitors are meeting consumer needs.

Depending on the competitor analysis tool you use, you can get as granular as you need with your research. For instance, Sprout Social lets you analyze your competitors’ social strategies. You can see what types of content they’re posting and even benchmark your growth against theirs.

Brand awareness research

Conducting brand awareness research allows you to assess your brand’s standing in the market. It tells you how well-known your brand is among your target audience and what they associate with it. This can help you gauge people’s sentiments toward your brand and whether you need to rebrand or reposition.

If you don’t know where to start with your research, you’re in the right place.

There’s no shortage of market research methods out there. In this section, we’ve highlighted research channels for small and big businesses alike.

Considering that Google sees a staggering 8.5 billion searches each day, there’s perhaps no better place to start.

A quick Google search is a potential goldmine for all sorts of questions to kick off your market research. Who’s ranking for keywords related to your industry? Which products and pieces of content are the hottest right now? Who’s running ads related to your business?

For example, Google Product Listing Ads can help highlight all of the above for B2C brands.

The same applies to B2B brands looking to keep tabs on who’s running industry-related ads and ranking for keyword terms too.

There’s no denying that email represents both an aggressive and effective marketing channel for marketers today. Case in point, 44% of online shoppers consider email as the most influential channel in their buying decisions.

Looking through industry and competitor emails is a brilliant way to learn more about your market. For example, what types of offers and deals are your competitors running? How often are they sending emails?

Email is also invaluable for gathering information directly from your customers. This survey message from Asana is a great example of how to pick your customers’ brains to figure out how you can improve your quality of service.

Industry journals, reports and blogs

Don’t neglect the importance of big-picture market research when it comes to tactics and marketing channels to explore. Look to marketing resources such as reports and blogs as well as industry journals

Keeping your ear to the ground on new trends and technologies is a smart move for any business. Sites such as Statista, Marketing Charts, AdWeek and Emarketer are treasure troves of up-to-date data and news for marketers.

And of course, there’s the  Sprout Insights blog . And invaluable resources like The Sprout Social Index™  can keep you updated on the latest social trends.

Social media

If you want to learn more about your target market, look no further than social media. Social offers a place to discover what your customers want to see in future products or which brands are killin’ it. In fact, social media is become more important for businesses than ever with the level of data available.

It represents a massive repository of real-time data and insights that are instantly accessible. Brand monitoring and social listening are effective ways to conduct social media research . You can even be more direct with your approach. Ask questions directly or even poll your audience to understand their needs and preferences.

The 5 steps for how to do market research

Now that we’ve covered the why and where, it’s time to get into the practical aspects of market research. Here are five essential steps on how to do market research effectively.

Step 1: Identify your research topic

First off, what are you researching about? What do you want to find out? Narrow down on a specific research topic so you can start with a clear idea of what to look for.

For example, you may want to learn more about how well your product features are satisfying the needs of existing users. This might potentially lead to feature updates and improvements. Or it might even result in new feature introductions.

Similarly, your research topic may be related to your product or service launch or customer experience. Or you may want to conduct research for an upcoming marketing campaign.

Step 2: Choose a buyer persona to engage

If you’re planning to focus your research on a specific type of audience, decide which buyer persona you want to engage. This persona group will serve as a representative sample of your target audience.

Engaging a specific group of audience lets you streamline your research efforts. As such, it can be a much more effective and organized approach than researching thousands (if not millions) of individuals.

You may be directing your research toward existing users of your product. To get even more granular, you may want to focus on users who have been familiar with the product for at least a year, for example.

Step 3: Start collecting data

The next step is one of the most critical as it involves collecting the data you need for your research. Before you begin, make sure you’ve chosen the right research methods that will uncover the type of data you need. This largely depends on your research topic and goals.

Remember that you don’t necessarily have to stick to one research method. You may use a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. So for example, you could use interviews to supplement the data from your surveys. Or you may stick to insights from your social listening efforts.

To keep things consistent, let’s look at this in the context of the example from earlier. Perhaps you can send out a survey to your existing users asking them a bunch of questions. This might include questions like which features they use the most and how often they use them. You can get them to choose an answer from one to five and collect quantitative data.

Plus, for qualitative insights, you could even include a few open-ended questions with the option to write their answers. For instance, you might ask them if there’s any improvement they wish to see in your product.

Step 4: Analyze results

Once you have all the data you need, it’s time to analyze it keeping your research topic in mind. This involves trying to interpret the data to look for a wider meaning, particularly in relation to your research goal.

So let’s say a large percentage of responses were four or five in the satisfaction rating. This means your existing users are mostly satisfied with your current product features. On the other hand, if the responses were mostly ones and twos, you may look for opportunities to improve. The responses to your open-ended questions can give you further context as to why people are disappointed.

Step 5: Make decisions for your business

Now it’s time to take your findings and turn them into actionable insights for your business. In this final step, you need to decide how you want to move forward with your new market insight.

What did you find in your research that would require action? How can you put those findings to good use?

The market research tools you should be using

To wrap things up, let’s talk about the various tools available to conduct speedy, in-depth market research. These tools are essential for conducting market research faster and more efficiently.

Social listening and analytics

Social analytics tools like Sprout can help you keep track of engagement across social media. This goes beyond your own engagement data but also includes that of your competitors. Considering how quickly social media moves, using a third-party analytics tool is ideal. It allows you to make sense of your social data at a glance and ensure that you’re never missing out on important trends.

Email marketing research tools

Keeping track of brand emails is a good idea for any brand looking to stand out in its audience’s inbox.

Tools such as MailCharts ,  Really Good Emails  and  Milled  can show you how different brands run their email campaigns.

Meanwhile, tools like  Owletter  allow you to monitor metrics such as frequency and send-timing. These metrics can help you understand email marketing strategies among competing brands.

Content marketing research

If you’re looking to conduct research on content marketing, tools such as  BuzzSumo  can be of great help. This tool shows you the top-performing industry content based on keywords. Here you can see relevant industry sites and influencers as well as which brands in your industry are scoring the most buzz. It shows you exactly which pieces of content are ranking well in terms of engagements and shares and on which social networks.

SEO and keyword tracking

Monitoring industry keywords is a great way to uncover competitors. It can also help you discover opportunities to advertise your products via organic search. Tools such as  Ahrefs  provide a comprehensive keyword report to help you see how your search efforts stack up against the competition.

Competitor comparison template

For the sake of organizing your market research, consider creating a competitive matrix. The idea is to highlight how you stack up side-by-side against others in your market. Use a  social media competitive analysis template  to track your competitors’ social presence. That way, you can easily compare tactics, messaging and performance. Once you understand your strengths and weaknesses next to your competitors, you’ll find opportunities as well.

Customer persona creator

Finally, customer personas represent a place where all of your market research comes together. You’d need to create a profile of your ideal customer that you can easily refer to. Tools like  Xtensio  can help in outlining your customer motivations and demographics as you zero in on your target market.

Build a solid market research strategy

Having a deeper understanding of the market gives you leverage in a sea of competitors. Use the steps and market research tools we shared above to build an effective market research strategy.

But keep in mind that the accuracy of your research findings depends on the quality of data collected. Turn to Sprout’s social media analytics tools to uncover heaps of high-quality data across social networks.

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5 reasons why marketing research is important to your business

Marketing research is a critical tool that businesses and organisations use to gather valuable information about their target market and industry. By conducting research, companies can gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and behaviour, as well as market trends and the competitive landscape. In this article, we'll explore five reasons why marketing research is important for businesses and organisations.

5 reasons why marketing research is important

Is your company on the fence about investing in marketing research? If so, read on for five reasons why marketing research is important to the viability and longevity of your business.

1. Marketing research helps businesses understand their customers.

Knowing your customers is the first step in running a successful business. And while this may sound simple enough, it can be difficult to look inside the consumer psyche—one whose needs, preferences, and behaviours are ever-evolving.

Fortunately, marketing research can give you a peek behind the curtain, helping you understand what motivates current as well as potential customers. A marketing research survey , for example, can provide insight into pricing sensitivity among a segment of your target population. The data yielded may suggest that boomers are more likely to purchase a product based on price alone while millennials are more motivated by the values of the respective company. Based on this information, you can tailor your offerings to better meet these needs.

Let’s take a closer look at what else marketing research can tell you about your target audience.

a. Marketing research reveals demographic data.

Through conducting surveys, you can better understand characteristics of your buyers, like age, gender, race, and ethnicity. You can also collect socioeconomic information like education, income, and employment status. These variables can help you engage in audience segmentation, which essentially involves tweaking your brand messaging to appeal to various subgroups.

b. Marketing research illustrates purchasing behaviour.

Marketing research tools like surveys, transaction tracking, and social media tracking can also shed light on when, why, how, and what consumers are buying. A better understanding of purchasing behaviour can help your company develop brand messaging that strikes a chord with its target audience. If consumers tend to shop between the hours of 5 and 8 p.m., for instance, your company may send an email coupon at 4:45 p.m. to prime that behaviour.

c. Marketing research helps companies appeal to potential customers.

It’s important to learn as much as possible about your current customers. However, it’s equally important to learn about people who are at the beginning of the customer journey. A deeper understanding of what motivates these individuals can help your business turn clicks into conversions.

2. Marketing research helps businesses manage risk.

Risk is an intrinsic part of the business world. However, by understanding market trends and customer behaviour, businesses can anticipate changes in demand and adjust their strategies accordingly. Market research can also help businesses identify potential obstacles or challenges and develop contingency plans to mitigate those risks.

For example, let’s say a company hopes to introduce a new product to the market. Before investing significant time and financial resources into product development, market researchers may conduct a series of surveys to determine if consumers are even interested in the respective product. This mitigates the risk of introducing a good for which there is no demand.

Other examples in which marketing research can be used as a tool for mitigating risk include:

• Conducting ad testing to determine if brand messaging resonates with consumers
• Hosting product development focus groups to receive feedback before revealing a new product to the larger market
• Organising customer satisfaction surveys at various points of the customer journey to determine any issues affecting sales
• Administering price testing to determine the ideal price for a new product

3. Marketing research helps businesses stay competitive.

Marketing research gives companies a competitive edge in many ways, one being a greater awareness of the industry itself. By understanding what other businesses are doing, your company can develop strategies to differentiate itself and stay ahead of the curve. For example, if research indicates that laundry detergent manufacturers are increasing prices, a company can either decide to a) keep up with the times and increase costs, b) keep costs the same, or c) decrease pricing to appeal to a specific target market.

Marketing research also helps companies determine areas where they may be falling behind. If several healthcare conglomerates are expanding telehealth services, it would be wise for a hospital to also make moves to provide digital appointments. Otherwise, patients may take their business elsewhere.

How else can marketing research help your business stay competitive?

a. Marketing research aids in trendspotting.

It’s important for companies to keep up with industry patterns. However, it’s also important for companies to predict patterns before they even happen. The fashion industry provides a good example of this. Trend forecasters analyse decades—centuries even—of socio-cultural data in an attempt to be the first company to put out a ‘hot’ new product that appeals to modern sensibilities.

b. Marketing research allows businesses to identify gaps in the industry.

Similarly, marketing research can help companies realise a demand that has yet to be satisfied. Through marketing research surveys, for instance, an organic snack food company may see that consumers are craving more savoury gluten-free snack options. Using this data, the company can one-up competitors by introducing a new product.

4. Marketing research gives businesses the tools to measure success.

Net profit is an important indicator of a company’s success. However, if profits are plummeting, it can be difficult to know if this is because of your company’s performance or industry-wide factors like increased materials costs and decreased demand. Because of this, businesses must rely on a more holistic approach to evaluating success.

Fortunately, marketing research can be a helpful tool if you want to measure business health using more than dollar signs. Here’s how marketing research can help you gauge company success.

a. Marketing research provides insight into customer satisfaction.

Sure, your company could be making money. But if your customers aren’t satisfied, your financial gains are likely to be short-lived. To determine if customers are happy with your products or services, you can conduct a customer feedback survey questionnaire.

Alternatively, you may choose to conduct a longitudinal panel survey . Unlike an ad hoc survey, which takes a snapshot of consumer opinions and behaviours, longitudinal studies (like monthly or quarterly trackers) monitor how consumer attitudes change over time. This tool is especially helpful if you want to see how customer satisfaction changes after the introduction of new protocols or training methods.

b. Marketing research helps businesses assess employee satisfaction.

A financially profitable company isn’t necessarily successful if its employees aren’t satisfied. To assess this metric of success, you can conduct surveys, in-person interviews, or focus groups. The results from these marketing research assessments may also shed light on the efficiency of your staff.

c. Marketing research provides insight into the performance of competitors.

It can be constructive to compare your company’s performance to that of competitors. This can help you understand if dips or rises in profit are unique to your company or simply an industry trend.

5. Marketing research helps businesses make informed decisions.

For decades, companies have made key business decisions based on gut feelings alone. But the new age of marketing revolves around data-driven decision-making: a process in which business decisions are informed by metrics and analytics. This contemporary model helps companies make solid choices that reduce risk while improving performance.

Since marketing research lends itself to data generation, it’s an integral part of this equation. For example, data yielded from a brand awareness survey may illustrate that men aged 50 to 65 in a specific geographic area are the least familiar with the brand. Using this information, the company can invest marketing dollars in a way that will yield true results.

Other examples of using marketing research to support data-driven decision-making include:

• During a focus group, a company discovers that 60% of women are dissatisfied with the playback speed options of an audiobook app. In response, software developers dedicate time and financial resources to adjusting that feature.
• Survey data reveals that as the price of microwaves increases, so does customers’ perceived value of the product. With this in mind, a company chooses to increase prices by 30%.
• A popular food chain conducts a series of phone interviews to assess customer service at various locations. Afterward, the company mandates that employees at the restaurants with the lowest reviews take customer service training courses.

All this to say, marketing research has many different applications. By gathering data about customer preferences, market trends, and industry dynamics, businesses can make decisions based on facts rather than assumptions or intuition. This can help businesses avoid costly mistakes and increase their chances of success.

Conduct high-quality marketing research with Kantar

Marketing research is a critical tool that businesses and organisations can use to gather valuable information about their target market and industry. By conducting research, businesses can gain insights into customer needs and behaviour, stay competitive, make informed decisions, manage risk, and measure success.

And during VUCA times (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), keeping a consistent pulse on consumer sentiment and behaviour is essential to driving the right decisions for business growth.

However, in today's rapidly changing business landscape, marketing research can feel complicated and overwhelming. That’s where Kantar comes in. As an industry leader, we provide tips and tools to help you navigate each step of the marketing research process, from survey design to data visualisation.

Want to get started? Speak to our award-winning team  to learn how we can help you conduct marketing research.

For research tips direct to your inbox each month, sign up using the form below.

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Market Research: What It Is and How to Do It

In other words, it’s the process of understanding who your business is targeting so you can better position your marketing strategy.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• The role of market research in a marketing strategy
• When to conduct market research

Types of market research

• Market research methods and their benefits
• How to conduct market research (example included)
• Market research tools and resources

What is the role of market research in a marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy is a business’s overall game plan for reaching consumers and turning them into customers.

The key word in the above definition is “game plan”. Entering a market with a product is like starting a new game. Since you’re new to the game, you don’t know the rules, and you don’t know who you’re playing against.

This is exactly where market research comes in . Market research allows you to discover the rules of the marketing game by understanding your target audience. Moreover, it allows you to understand who your opponent is by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your competition.

Research is what marketing pros do to plan their moves, and outperform their competition.  It’s also what marketing pros use to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their own marketing strategy .

But is market research the ultimate business oracle? Unfortunately no. Even companies that specialize in market research admit it - here’s a quote from one of them :

(…) it cannot be assumed that market research is an exact science, as it would be unrealistic and unreasonable to expect market researchers to predict the precise demand for a new concept, given that there are numerous variables that can impact demand outside of the market researchers’ remit.

That’s why market research with all of its significance is “only” a part of marketing, and it’s “only” an experiment.  It’s up to you whether you will conduct your experiment, and when you will end it.

For example, Crystal Pepsi seemed very promising in the market research phase, yet it failed when released onto the market (a similar thing happened to New Coke). Xerox’s idea for a commercial photocopier was a no-go in the eyes of research analysts; Xerox did it anyway, and the rest is history.

When should you conduct market research?

Paul N. Hauge and Peter Jackson in their book “Do Your Own Market Research” point to three specific situations when market research is really useful:

• Setting goals . Knowing things like the size of the market, or defining your potential customers can help you set your sales goals.
• Problem-solving . Low sales? Low profitability? Market research will help you understand whether your problems are internal, like a low-quality product, or external, like aggressive competition.
• Supporting company growth.  Understanding how and why consumers decide on products will help you decide what products to introduce to the market.

Another answer to the “when” is the importance of the decision that you need to make. The more important the marketing issue you’re tackling, the more market research comes in handy.

For example, launching a new car on the market is quite a big event, right? So maybe Ford could have avoided losing 350 million dollars with the Ford Edsel if they had done their research properly. I mean, with the right methods in place it shouldn’t be that hard to predict that consumers will deem the car overpriced and ugly.

That said, market research doesn’t always have to be a large, complex project. The relatively new trend of agile market research  allows you to research the market regularly and in a cost-effective way. This is where you employ bite-size, iterative, and evolutionary methods to react to fast-changing circumstances and adapt to unknown market territories.

Furthermore, if you’re working in startup conditions, especially if you’re developing an innovative product, you may be interested in customer development . In this methodology market research is at its “agilest” and it’s tightly woven into the product development process.

Take Ahrefs for example. We stick to agile market research hacks anyone can use. As you will see later in the article, we use simple (but effective!) stuff like social media polls, crowdsourcing, in-house competitive analysis, or just tracking the pricing of our competitors.

Case in point, just recently we asked our fellow marketers on Twitter how they go about researching the market. It seems that market research comes in all shapes and sizes:

Have you ever performed “market research?“ What was it for? — Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) May 3, 2021

Just because somebody does market research in a certain way doesn’t mean that you need to copy that. You should know your options, and they start with the different types of market research.

Primary research

Whenever the research is done by you or on your behalf, and you need to create the data to solve a given problem, that is called primary market research.

Examples:  Focus groups, interviews, surveys (more on those later in the article).

Key benefits: It’s specific to your brand and products or services, and you can control the quality of the data.

Secondary research

Whenever you’re using already existing data, such as that put together by other businesses and organizations, you’re doing secondary market research.

Examples: Second-party and third-party sources like articles, whitepapers, reports, industry statistics, already collected internal data.

Key benefits: Get a macro perspective of your marketplace, as secondary research includes other players in the market, and most probably utilizes a bigger set of data than your primary sources.

Primary research vs. secondary research

Primary and secondary market research are different but by no means opposite. It’s actually recommended to use both.

While primary sources will give you a focused, micro perspective of your business, secondary research will tell you how other businesses are doing and how your research findings compare to bigger research sample sizes. 

Market research subtypes

A bit more theory for all you marketing geeks out there. Professional market researchers distinguish between the following primary and secondary market research subtypes:

• Qualitative research.  Think interviews, open-ended questions, results expressed in words rather than numbers and graphs. This type of research is used to understand underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations.
• Quantitative research. Think surveys, polls, usually closed-ended questions, results expressed in numbers and statistics. This type of research is used to test or confirm hypotheses or assumptions by quantifying defined variables (such as opinions or behaviours) and generalizing results from larger data samples.

Overview of market research methods

Let’s go over some popular market research methods you can use yourself and/or outsource.

Internal data analysis

The data you’ve already collected in your company is an invaluable secondary research data source. The more time you’re in the business, the more data you have on your hands.

The best thing about your internal data is that it’s been put into practice in real-life market conditions, so you just need to find the patterns and draw conclusions.

Here are some internal data sources you can leverage :

• Website data (like Google Analytics)
• Past campaigns performance data
• Internal interviews with employees

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions and are great for exploratory qualitative research.

In unstructured interviews, you have an informal, free-flowing conversation on a given set of topics.

In structured interviews, you prepare a detailed, rigorous interview protocol where you list every question you want to ask and you can’t divert from them.

You can also choose the “middle way” with semi-structured interviews which revolve around predefined themes or questions, but allow for open-ended discussion.

A word of advice here would be to always remain neutral and unbiased, even during unstructured interviews. Also, it’s helpful to perform a pilot test of the interview to quickly spot some defects of your protocol.

Recording the interview may influence the answers, so use it wisely.

Focus groups

Focus groups are where 5 to 10 people with common characteristics take part in an interactive discussion with a moderator. They’re used to learn how a particular group thinks about a given issue or to provide feedback on a product.

Now, you might know that Steve Jobs famously hated focus groups. He’s on record saying:

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

If you’re trying to create a leapfrog product like the iPhone, there’s probably some validity to this statement. But most of us aren’t wrestling with that level of ambition. We just want to know if customers will like a proposed new feature or not. For this, focus groups are super useful.

Surveys involve polling your audience. They’re usually performed online for customer satisfaction and loyalty research, and are one of the most popular and cost-effective market research methods.

Some of the tried and tested use cases of online surveys  are:

• Product feature desirability
• User satisfaction feedback
• Quantitative analysis of certain issue occurrences
• Identifying friction points in your customer journey
• Discovering the reasons to convert to or cancel your service
• During product onboarding to create a customer profile (and for marketing automation)
• Opinion about a recently made change

An interesting example of surveying the market is crowdsourcing . That’s what Ahrefs does to understand what features to build, how important they are, and what customers expect from them.

What’s unique about crowdsourcing is that it allows the users to add their own ideas, and upvote or comment on existing ideas rather than answer predetermined questions, so this method leaves less room for marketing myopia. You improve your business, and the users get a better product—everybody wins.

How we crowdsource ideas at Ahrefs

Social media is another great place to survey the marketplace.

How many of you have disavowed links in GSC this year? — Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 8, 2020

Market segmentation

Market segmentation is the practice of categorizing a market into homogeneous groups based on specific criteria, also called segmentation variables (like age, sex, company size, country, etc.).

If you think you’re building a product for everyone, think again. Not everyone will want to buy from you.

Smart companies pick their target audience carefully. They pinpoint groups of people or organizations that could be valuable customers for the business. That way they also discover their non-ideal customers and develop a plan to attract customer segments gradually. 

Ever wondered why Procter and Gamble creates so many, often competing, brands? You guessed it: market segmentation. P&G simply divides and conquers. Different people have different needs, so they need different products (and possibly brands).

Competitive analysis

Another powerful, yet often overlooked, market research method is the process of understanding one’s market environment. Seriously, if there’s only one thing you could do to learn what works and what doesn’t in your market, you should do a competitive analysis.

“Whenever we discuss building a certain feature, we would definitely research our competitors and see how they do it.” Tim Soulo, CMO

You’d be surprised by how much you can learn about and from your competition and how much of it can be done online. There are certain tried and tested techniques, hacks, and tools for this type of research, and you can find them in this guide .

Analyze commercial data

Secondary market research data is relatively affordable, fast to acquire, and easy to use. Think market reports, industry insights, and a ton of research data someone has already gathered and analyzed so you don’t have to.

The most reputable sources are Gartner , Forrester , and Pew . Apart from those, make sure to check if there is a trustworthy commercial data source specific to your niche.

Sites like G2, Capterra and Trust Pilot also count. Not only do they give you an overview of your industry, but you can also find some real gems in your users’ reviews and your competitors’ reviews as well. Ahrefs uses that data source regularly internally and externally, like for this section of our Ahrefs vs Semrush vs Moz  landing page:

Benefits of market research - a comparison

Let’s quickly summarize the above 7 different methods of market research by their key benefits.

How to do market research process in 5 key steps

So now we know what market research is, why and when to do it, and we’ve learned about all of the important types and methods.

Let’s see how we can use that knowledge to conduct any type of market research in 5 steps.  As an example of market research, I’ll tell you about some of my past experiences with a 3D printing company.

• Identify the market research problem
• Choose the sample and research method
• Collect the data
• Analyze the data
• Interpret and present conclusions

1. Identify the market research problem

This is where every research project starts. You will also find that market research, in general, follows the pattern of the scientific method . First, you need to establish what exactly you are researching.

Do you have a question about your business you want to answer? Maybe you see an opportunity in the market. Or maybe you’ve observed something curious about your product use and you have a hypothesis that you want to validate? State that in the first step of the market research process.

Let me share an example.

In the past, I ran marketing for a few companies, and one of them was a 3D printer manufacturer. Early on I stumbled upon two problems with that company.

First: one of our market segments was saturated with similar products of similar quality at significantly lower price (classic, right?). Second: more and more 3D printing manufacturers seemed to be drifting away from the hobby segment to tackle the professional segments with more expensive products, yet we remained in the hobby/DIY niche. So we were too expensive for hobbyists but too hobbyist for customers who could afford us.

The hypothesis that I wanted to verify was that if the marketplace was showing a trend towards more professional use cases of 3D printing, our company should follow that trend. In other words, I wanted to check the viability of shifting the brand positioning into the professional/premium sector.

2. Choose the sample and research method

We’ve already covered the main types and methods of market research. You should already have a good idea of the differences between primary and secondary research, or whether qualitative or quantitative methods would best suit your needs.

As for the sample of your research, this refers to the portion of the entire data source in question that you will use. For example, if you want to run a survey among your customers, the sample will refer to the selection of customers you will include in your survey. There are a few options for choosing a sample:

• Use the entire data source . Obviously, it’s not a sample per se. Nevertheless, if sending a survey to all of your customers is doable (and reasonable), this is a perfectly good choice.
• Choose a random sample. Systematic sampling is the easiest way to choose a random sample. This is where you select every x/nth individual for the sample, where x is the population, n is the sample. For example, if you want a sample size of 100 from a population of 1000, select every 1000/100 = 10th member of the population.
• Convenience sampling: choose respondents available and willing to take part in the survey.
• Purposive sampling: choose respondents that in your judgement will be representative or possess some other feature that is important to the research.
• Quota sampling:  choose some arbitrary quota of respondents, e.g. 10 non-paying customers, 10 paying small companies and 10 paying large companies.

Back to our example. As a method for verifying my hypotheses, I chose a mix of:

• Surveys sent to all of our resellers.  We wanted to see if they also had seen a paradigm shift in the market and what segment of clients they had encountered the most. We also wanted to know their perspective on the longevity of that trend, and whether they potentially be interested in a more premium version of our product.
• In-depth interviews  on the phone with our resellers conducted by our sales team. We used purposive sampling here. Our sample comprised resellers with which we had the best relations (we knew they would be more eager to share).
• Competitive analysis.  We were mostly interested in market players who tried to penetrate the professional/industrial segment, so this was our sample ( purposive sampling ). We were interested in stuff like: what features were they building into their 3D printers, what was their brand positioning, what was their pricing, what language they used to communicate with their target audience, etc.
• Wohler’s industry report, anything 3D printing from Gartner and the like, reports by 3D printing services providers, and basically any scrape of serious data we could find ( convenience sampling ).
• Internal data:  customer satisfaction issues, and just general current customer profile based on Google Analytics and Facebook data.

3. Collect the data

Once you’ve got your problem, method, and sample nailed, all you need to do is to gather the data. This is the step where you send out your surveys, conduct your interviews, or reach out for industry insights.

A word of advice, choose your market research tool carefully; it will greatly influence the amount of work you will have with analyzing the data. For example, Google Forms  automatically makes graphs out of quantifiable data (plus it’s free).

Here’s the data we collected for the 3D printing company:

• Reseller survey data (both quantitative and qualitative data).
• Reseller interview data (qualitative data).
• Customer satisfaction issues (qualitative data gathered through all customer support channels, we analysed about 200 issues and requests).
• Competitive analysis data (from about 10 competitors).
• We managed to gather 3 comprehensive, independent industry reports, a few smaller reports made by other 3D printing companies, and dozens of scrapes of data, like statistics and noteworthy insights. We pulled out data like: 3D printer manufacturer market share, market growth in time, market segmentation, key 3D printing applications, 3D printing adoption by region, key players’ sales numbers.
• Any demographic, sociographic and psychographic data on customers and website visitors we could find in our internal data.

4. Analyze the data

Now that you have your data collected, the next step is to look for patterns, trends, concepts, or often repeated words—all dependent on whether your method was qualitative or quantitative (or both).

Simple research performed on a small sample will be relatively easy to analyze, or even analyzed automatically, like with the aforementioned Google Forms. Sometimes you will have to use expensive and harder to master software like Tableau , NVivo , PowerBI , or SPSS . Or you can use Python or R for data analysis (if you have a data analyst or data scientist on board, you’re in luck).

Continuing the example: Google Forms made it easy for us to spot patterns in surveys since quantitative data was calculated automatically. The most time-consuming part was reading through all of the responses and manually looking for patterns (back then I wasn’t aware of any tool that could do the job). Both sales and marketing teams worked on analyzing some of the qualitative data to have more than one reference point.

When it comes to researching the competition, coming up with some kind of data structure makes the work more comprehensive (and saner). We put our competitors’ data in specific categories, like products & services (prices included), target market, benefits, values, and brand message. We also used something called a brand positioning map which looks like this:

Analyzing secondary data was probably the easiest part, as the data we needed was already prepared in ready-to-use graphs, statistics and insights. We just had to sift through the contents to look for answers to our questions.

5. Interpret and present conclusions

Analyzing the data is not enough. You need to compile your data in a communicative, actionable way for the decision makers. A good practice is to include in your report: all your information, a description of your research process, the results, conclusions, and recommended actions.

Summing up my 3D printing example, I hypothesised that our market was experiencing a major shift and that the company should follow that trend. The research we did verified that hypothesis positively:

• Our resellers were getting more and more inquiries about professional/industrial use cases and machines. As you can imagine, the budget of this kind of client was significantly higher than hobbyists but so were the expectations.
• Our resellers indicated that this phenomenon is here to stay. Moreover, they declared interest in a new 3D printer tailored to the needs of their more demanding clientele.
• Our customers were outgrowing their early-adopter habits and wanted something easier to use, something plug-and-play that just worked reliably. Tinkering with the printer was something only hardcore makers were interested in.
• The companies we were interested in had already started adapting to the professional/premium market both with their offer and smart marketing communication.
• We also found a ton of other interesting data that we used later on. For example, we found that apart from engineers and designers, an equally interesting segment was educational institutions.

Our initial market research lasted for about two months. We also came back to it whenever we had the chance (or the necessity) and reiterated it to see if we were on the right track.

Was it worth it? Let me tell you this: it saved the company. Our research showed us that this was the last call to reposition the brand and the product. Our original target segment was being gradually dominated by companies we couldn’t compete with.

It took us some time to get buy-in from key stakeholders and implement the conclusions throughout the whole company (eventually, we got it right). As a result, we increased sales, increased customer satisfaction and put ourselves on a more profitable growth track—a win-win for everyone. We even went as far as merging with another manufacturer to shorten the time to get to that sweet market spot.

Looking back, no one from our close competitors survived. They didn’t adapt as we did, and we owed everything to market research.

Whatever you do, avoid these common market research mistakes :

• Poor sampling.
• Ambiguous questions.
• Leading or loaded questions (questions that show bias or contain controversial assumptions).
• Unclear or too many research objectives.
• Mixing correlation with causation.
• Ignoring competitive analysis.
• Allowing biases to influence your research ( confirmation bias  being arguably the most common and the most dangerous one).
• Not tracking data on a regular basis.

Online market research tools and resources

Market research reaches back to the 1930s and it’s probably rooted even “deeper” than the 20th century. Everything you could do then you can do now better, faster and cheaper thanks to these online tools and resources.

SEO tools - research the market with Ahrefs

I’ve put together 3 quick wins that can help with your market research—and that’s only a taste of what you can do with Ahrefs.

1. Brand awareness

In the early 20th century, you’d have to hire market researchers to spend days or even weeks asking people “have you heard about brand X”. Today, you can simply look up the search volume for that brand.

So let’s say you run a drone manufacturing brand, and you want to check out your competitors’ brand awareness in France. Go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer , input the names of the brands, select “France” as your market, and in a flash you get:

The branded keyword volume indicates the brand awareness of that brand in a particular market. You can also keep track of that data by performing this search regularly to see if there are significant changes over time (for example, impacted by a recent campaign).

2. Feature demand

The next game-changing feature for electric cars will concern batteries, charging time, and charging cost (and not autopilot). How do I know?

Well, I opened Ahrefs Keywords Explorer , typed in “electric cars”, and went to the Questions report to find out what people search for. This gave me an idea of what problems electric car owners have (and potential owners worry about). You can easily perform similar research for your niche.

3. Understand the language of your market

Gerald Zaltman in his popular book “How Customers Think” proposes the idea that one of the major erroneous assumptions of marketing is that consumers think in words.

On the other hand, when consumers Google something they have to think in words. And when we market to those consumers we have to think in words as well. The question is: which words?

Let’s say that you want to enter a new and innovative market in the USA, for example the synthetic fermentation-derived dairy industry, also called animal-free dairy.

To you, this set of words “animal-free dairy” may be the very center of your business and marketing efforts. But let’s see what other people think. Let’s use Keywords Explorer  to see how many people search Google in the U.S. just for that phrase:

Whoops! Looks like your product category has disappointingly low awareness. Does this mean you’re doomed? Not necessarily. 

Let’s try other words. Words that mean something different, but still closely related to your new product.

Now we’re onto something. People search for “vegan dairy” and “lactose free dairy” more often. Not the same, but closely related. Yet, look at the difference in search volume.

Words make a huge difference.  And Google knows that.

The only reason you were able to put all of those three phrases in the same bucket was that you knew the connection between those words. The problem is that your target audience may not know that connection; they may not even know that this kind of product exists. This quick analysis of search volume shows that you may want to make that connection, for example with content marketing .

If you create content around related higher volume keywords, you can potentially get more organic traffic than simply focusing on the keyword designating your product category.  Look, even though you might believe the main benefit of your animal-free product is something unrelated to lactose, e.g., cruelty-free production, you might want to address the problem of lactose intolerance to appeal to people with this condition.

But that’s not all. You may have noticed “low lactose cheese” in the bottom right corner. This refers to the nifty feature of Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer called “Parent topic”. Parent topic indicates that Google sees a given keyword as part of a broader topic.

If we click on this Parent topic, we uncover even more search demand:

We can see that the search for the topic “low lactose cheese” exceeds the “vegan dairy” topic by almost 300% in the US. Also, uncovering that parent topic gave us 879 potential keyword ideas (some of them have even higher search volume, like “lactose free cheese”).

Want to discover even more topic associations? No problem. You can dive deeper into this research by using other features of Ahrefs’ Keyword explorer. For example,the  Also rank for  report allows you to see which other keywords (and topics) the top 100 ranking pages for your target keyword also rank for.

This market research quick-win ties into the broader topic of keyword research. If you want to uncover even more keyword ideas and learn how to analyze them, read  our keyword research guide .

Source: https://hubspot.com

Customer Relationship Management software is used to manage and track interactions between a company and its customers and prospects. Usually, it works in tandem with sales or marketing automation software (or has integrations for them). If used properly, it is a true cornucopia of market insight.

As I pointed out earlier, it’s one of those primary data sources that you can leverage to discover patterns in your customer behaviour or characteristics. Popular choices are Hubspot, Salesforce, Intercom, but there is a ton of CRM software out there, so check out a software comparison like G2  to see what best suits your needs.

User feedback tools

This type of tool allows you to carry out our aforementioned survey research method online.

Create targeted, user-specific surveys and analyze answers with tools like Google Forms , SurveyMonkey , Typeform , or Qualaroo .  

Sending out your typical email with a survey is not the only option, for example with Qualaroo you can display surveys:

• In your digital product
• In your SaaS product
• Inside your web app
• Inside your mobile app
• On your website
• On your mobile site
• On your prototypes.
• On most public URLs. Even competitor sites

Need more? No problem, check out SurveyMonkey’s Market Research solution . It taps into the agile market research models we’ve discussed. They’ve got 14 online solutions that help you stay on top of your game, including customer segmentation, monitoring market dynamics, brand, creative analysis, feature importance, finding the right price for your products, and more.

So you think you have a tough business challenge? This daring gentleman is trying to disrupt… eggs. Extremely hard, but doable with market research on his side.

Website/app analytics

Tracking your website or app traffic is absolute marketing basics. Just look at some data dimensions Google Analytics offers:

• Demographics

Sounds familiar? Yup, that sounds like good ol’ market segmentation. Here’s the best part: it’s free, quick to perform and it’s based on your primary data.

If you’ve never dug deeper into Google Analytics, or similar analytics software (e.g., Matomo , Woopra ) here are some questions that this marketing technology can answer for you: 

• What do people search for once they’re on my site?
• What differentiates customers who have made a purchase from the ones that haven’t?
• What are my top countries by revenue?
• What are my best selling products?

If you’re already using Google Analytics, see if you’re not making these Google Analytics tracking mistakes. 

User experience research tools

Commonly used by UX designers, but just listen to the value propositions of these tools:

• “See and hear real people using your website, online shop or app.” ( https://userpeek.com/ )
• “Real-time feedback. From real customers. Wherever you work. So you can create experiences that get real results.” ( https://www.usertesting.com/ )
• “Scalable & Customized User Research” ( https://www.userlytics.com/ )
• “Record video and audio of your users, so you see and hear their exact experience with your product.” ( https://www.loop11.com/ )

Again, sounds much like our market research methods, right? And it’s no joke, thousands of companies use these tools.

User experience research tools allow you to get user feedback and insights on your products, prototypes, websites, and apps.

Testing is based on tasks your test-takers perform. You can either use your own user base or define a custom base using their services. You’ll get written reports and even recorded videos that you can incorporate into your market research and make sure you’re properly taking advantage of that market opportunity.

Ad planning tools

That’s right—the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter ad planner you already use for running ads can give you some insight into the numbers behind the market segments you’re interested in.

30+ males with higher education interested in technology gadgets? No problem. Female C-suite decision-makers from Europe? It’s all there.

Census data

The availability of this kind of data may vary based on your target market. For example, in the US the Census Bureau  offers a free resource for searching the country’s census data. You can filter the data by topics, years, geography, surveys, or industry codes. You can also access premade interactive tables (which you can also download) or simply explore certain regions of the country using their maps.

Business intelligence tools

With business intelligence tools like Tableau , Looker or Sisense , you can connect to any data source to perform data cleaning, statistical operations, and data visualization. They are designed to allow you to glean insights into your data, and communicate effectively with your stakeholders. It’s like SQL combined with R, but you don’t need coding skills and you get a user-friendly interface.

Because these tools are overflowing with functionality and because they are usually pricey, they are overkill for small companies with basic market research needs. Often you will find that the tool that you are already using for your research method comes with some data analysis and visualization functions. And if not, you can always import your data to Excel or Google Docs and use Google Data Studio for a shareable interactive presentation.

Other noteworthy tools and services

• Think with Google
• Living Facts

Final thoughts

Market research is no easy feat. If you feel intimidated by it, you’re not the only one. But don’t shy away from it. The benefits of conducting even sporadic market research can have benefits for your business you simply can’t ignore. You won’t turn into a market research pro overnight, but the good news is you don’t have to. You can go the agile way (like Ahrefs), use affordable self-service online tools and resources, or you can even outsource your research. As long as you base your marketing game plan on valid data, you dramatically improve your chances for success.

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter .

Why Is Market Research Important: We Give You 7 Reasons

Planning and conducting market research is a critical component of any business. It provides decision-makers with important information to decide the course of the company, launch a new product, or to keep a tab on what competitors are doing.

Data indicates that market research is a growing industry of 47.36bn USD , globally – and rightly so. For a business to succeed, all its resources – financial and otherwise – must be invested in areas where they are needed the most. Conducting market research helps you identify those areas. It also helps you discover and understand your customers’ needs so you can innovate better, expand when the time is right, and work with more focus.

In this article below, we will share a few pointers with you about why market research is important for every business – big and small. But first, let’s talk about the types of market research.

Types Of Market Research

Depending on the purpose of your research, you can choose either of the two main types of market research. These are primary research and secondary research.

– Primary Research

Primary research is direct research that you conduct yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. It involves reaching out to your target market, asking them questions, collecting data, and analyzing the information gathered. Based on the data, strategies are devised, decisions are made, and policies are created.

Primary research helps you explore issues, dig deeper, and ask specific questions that are relevant to what you are looking for. Because it takes more time and effort, it may also cost a bit more than secondary research but it is more effective and helps you gain a solid picture of what’s going on.

– Secondary Research

Secondary research is using somebody else’s primary research for your business purposes. Research that is already conducted, organized, and published is often used by small businesses to gauge market trends, current economies, and to devise plans.

A lot of government agencies conduct market research for various purposes. If you’re on a budget, going to one of those agencies may help you out a lot as most of that research is freely available to the public. If you want to access a private market research company’s report, you may have to pay a fee to access the complete file.

However, there are private companies that publish their reports publicly. Additionally, you can also go online and conduct Google searches looking for specific phrases relevant to your research purpose to find valuable data.

Why Is It Important?

Now that we know what market research is and what different kinds it has, it’s time to learn why it is important, and why you should invest in it if you want to become a successful entrepreneur.

1. It Helps You Identify The Problem Areas As Well As Strong Areas

Knowing what you are good at and what you’re not, help you take profitable risks in life. It’s true in business too. Accurate market research helps you identify business areas that are performing well, those that need more attention, and also those that you should perhaps give up.

Back in 2010 , two young tech enthusiasts launched a location-based app – Burbn – that would allow consumers to check-in, make plans of hangouts with friends, share pictures, and more. Few weeks into the launch, they realized through internal discussions and reevaluation of the market, that Burbn is cluttered and their target market is more into Foursquare and they won’t be able to budge them.

They took a long, hard look at their app again – which had already been launched – and started working on it from scratch, removing all the features and only letting the photo-sharing, liking, and commenting options intact. And thus, Instagram was born.

It also helps you discover and understand your customers’ needs so you can innovate better, expand when the time is right, and work with more focus. For example, if you plan on starting a digital marketing agency, you’d know that there’s more need for social media in your area, than for PPC services. Thus, you’ll hire more social media experts.

2. It Helps You Understand Your Customers’ Needs

It is not enough that you know your business; you got to know what your customers are saying about you – and about your competitors. If you have got your pulse on what your customer is thinking, you’d create products that solve their issues, reach out to them when they are most ready to listen, and help them become your loyal ambassadors.

A huge part of business market research is always dedicated to gauging customer satisfaction rates, their reactions to a new product, and what they are looking for next.

In 2005, when YouTube initially launched, it was for a very different purpose : dating. Pretty soon into launch, however, and by investing in robust market research (a part of which they conducted themselves) the founders realized that their video dating app is not what their customers are looking for. Analyzing the data, they discovered that there is no app or platform in the market for video sharing. The websites that were offering this service were patchy at best and not intuitive at all.

Being attuned to their customers’ needs and spotting a wide space in the market, they tweaked their video platform and launched YouTube .

Following what your customers are talking about, listening to them, and then delivering on their needs is an important task that you can fulfill with timely customer-centered market research.

3. Helps You Conduct Your Marketing Based On Informed Decisions

Launching and running a business means making decisions every day – about products, services, expansions, HR, and so much more. Without solid market research backing your decisions, all you are doing is guess-work, hoping the results will be in your favor.

With research helping your business, you are better informed about areas to invest in, gauge the potential success of new products, test new markets to expand into, and to determine what kinds of products/services will be most favored by your customers.

This is certainly what Starbucks does. The company has a whole dedicated platform ‘My Starbucks Idea’ where employees and customers and anyone who wants can pitch in and share what they think the company should do next, the flavors it should try, the new products it should launch, bring back some old favorites, and more.

The platform helps them remain informed on all important aspects of business investment and propels them towards ventures and venues that hold the most potential.

If you aren’t a humungous company like Starbucks and cannot afford to host dedicated platforms to gain important information, invest in market research whenever you have a big decision coming up. It isn’t as expensive as you think and doesn’t take that much time. Plus the results can be relevant for a lot of related areas that you may want information on.

4. Helps You Keep An Eye On Your Competitors

As a startup founder, you may think being original is all about being focused on what you’re doing and not worry about what everyone else may be up to. This approach spells long-term disaster. While you should certainly keep your focus on your own efforts, it is critical – and smart – to keep tabs on your rivals and know what they are thinking or planning.

With sound market research on your side, you can better prepare for what your competitor may be about to do next and make sure they aren’t able to put a dent in your market share. With regular research, you can not only learn to anticipate their next move but be in a better position to avert any possible damage from their end.

In addition to conducting market research, you can pair it up with regularly monitoring their social media or to increase Instagram followers , blog posts, and seeing what is trending in your market. Here is a great resource on how you can go about it.

5. Helps You Expand And Innovate

Market research can help you identify markets and geographical areas where you can expand to. It can also help you to invest in ideas that have the most potential to succeed based on what customers are looking for and what the market is lacking.

For example, if you are a retail company, conducting market research can help you identify locations where your store can profit the most. If you are planning to buy a business to increase your market share, market research can help you point towards businesses that may be ripe for acquiring. Not only that, conducting market research before you launch your business can help you figure out ways to put your best foot forward.

It guides you towards opportunities where you have the most room to innovate and take risks with the highest return potential. For example, if your competition is employing cutting edge tech such as VoIP Phone to get better results, you can also employ the same to improve your customer care and business goals.

6. Helps You Set Business Goals

Goal-setting is one of the major parts of running a business – big and small. Goals give you directions, help you remain in sight of the bigger picture, and set you on the path of continued success. Goals can be of different kinds: short-term, long-term, department-oriented, over-arching, and such.

To set all these kinds of goals and get ready to meet them, businesses need to have a thorough and complete knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses. They need to be aware of how the market is behaving and predict what may come next.

All of this is only possible after conducting market research. With the help of focused market research, you can set achievable business goals and not follow some vague notions of instant success. These often include how to improve productivity, customer satisfaction, and business’ financial health. You can also use market research to learn ways you can reduce expenses without hurting the business, find out how to amplify your digital marketing, generate copywriting tips for research paper writers , or introduce a new employee incentive program.

7. Helps You Know Which Risks To Take And Increases Earning Potential

Risk-taking is an important component of the business. Without it, you can become stagnant and a sitting-duck for a more ambitious rival. But risk-taking cannot be a shot in the dark. To know which risks to take and when to take the plunge are attributes of successful innovators. From Dropbox’s Drew Houston who refused Steve Jobs to Google’s buying of YouTube when it was a fledgling startup, the history of business success and innovating is packed full of stories of ambitious – but informed – risk-taking.

Using market research, you can also join the ranks of informed-decision makers who do not shy away from taking risks. It prevents you from making costly mistakes that could have been avoided and take steps that result in massive profits.

Take the example of Frito-Lay . When the potato chip maker wanted to introduce a new brand, it launched online market research conducted through Facebook to ask its customer-base which flavor they would like the best. The results showed that beer-battered onion-ring flavor is a hit in California and Ohio, while New Yorkers preferred the Churros flavor idea. This research also helped him increase Instagram followers as his posts became popular over the internet.

The research helped the company come up with different flavors and market them strategically to different states. If the research would not have been done, the company would have come up with a new flavor that could have been a hit – or a miss.

Popular Instruments Of Market Research

As technology keeps advancing, market research keeps evolving. Where before you had to rely on face-to-face interviews, telephone surveys, or lengthy online questionnaires, now it’s all about short online surveys, instant case studies aided by technologies, and focused groups that are already available on your social media channels.

Below we talk about 4 popular instruments of market research that are frequently used by companies worldwide with excellent results.

– Surveys

The survey is a quantitative method of research which means it gives you numerical scores. These scores pertain to specific answers and don’t leave much room for multiple interpretations. Because they are precise, provide specific answers, and immediate interpretation, quantitative methods are popular to conduct research when you are looking for exact information: to find out how to solve a particular problem, etc.

According to a study conducted by Statista.com , 26% of all market research is conducted through online quantitative methods, with online surveys accounting for a major share of 79%.

If you know how to create an easy survey online for your company, here is a great resource to get you started.

– Case Studies

Case studies are usually qualitative research methods; however, you can incorporate a mixed approach with a quantitative questionnaire thrown in for additional information. Using case studies, you focus on a single individual or single entity to research them thoroughly. The purpose of using case studies in business market research is usually to test theories of what went wrong in a particular situation or what went right.

Case studies are time-taking but provide extremely valuable information, detailed data, and in-depth analysis opportunities.

– Focus Groups

Focus groups are another popular instrument to conduct market research in business. A focus group consists of a small portion of your target audience that you can study in detail. It is a qualitative method of research and allows you to bring together a group of individuals that can take part in a guided form of discussion.

You can give them one or more focus questions that the group can talk about and share their views on. Focus groups are great to use when you’re creating a new product, researching a particular market segment, or want to know what your customers are thinking about you or your market.

Similar to case studies, focus groups give you a comprehensive view of a situation and allow you to conduct an in-depth analysis of different business elements.

The Future Of Market Research

The future of market research is bright. As a budding and burgeoning industry, it shows all the trends of continued growth. But as technology becomes more accessible and mobile devices more popular than desktops, market research is also evolving to fulfill the shifting customer needs.

The surveys are becoming shorter as nobody has got the time or interest to fill out a 10-page questionnaire. Artificial Intelligence is making the data collection process quicker and more intuitive, including contact database . And as time passes, you’ll see more and more market surveys being optimized for mobile.

So use all that modern market research has to offer you and use it to propel your business for the success you’d always dreamed of.

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About The Author Kelvin Stiles

Kelvin Stiles is a tech enthusiast and works as a marketing consultant at SurveyCrest – FREE online survey software and publishing tools for academic and business use. He is also an avid blogger and a comic book fanatic.

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Why Market Research Is Important

2022-06-02 Market Research

A consumer sees an ad for a product that seems perfect for them and rejoices over their luck, but this scenario likely didn’t (and shouldn’t) come down to luck. Companies make these scenarios possible through strategic market research. Equipped with valuable information about its target market, a company can develop products and create marketing campaigns that appeal directly to consumers. And the benefits don’t stop there. You can leverage the data procured through market research to propel your company to success in a variety of ways.

We’ll break down the basics of market research below to show how companies use it and explore some of the key benefits. If you’re not taking full advantage of market research to make data-driven decisions, you should start considering the ways it could help your company grow.

What Is Market Research in Business?

Market research involves gathering data to learn more about target demographics and consumers so a business can market itself more effectively and, ultimately, succeed in the market. Market research is a vital part of any business strategy, whether that business is B2B or B2C, big or small, new or old. It provides the answers companies need to make decisions that will move them forward instead of back by empowering them to base decisions on data.

Most companies know what market research is and acknowledge its importance in a general sense, but they may not realize just how crucial market research is to the success of their business. When you need to identify market trends, understand your core customer better, or achieve a long list of other important goals, market research is the answer.

Types of Market Research

Market research is a broad category. In fact, there are many varieties of market research that you can use to meet the specific goals of your business. Below, we’ll explore the different benefits of each type of market research.

• Brand research:  Brand research is focused on creating or refining your company brand to make a bold and favorable impression on your target market. You could look into the level of brand awareness among your target audience, how loyal customers are to your brand, what sorts of qualities people associate with your brand, and other aspects of customers’ relationship with your brand.
• Marketing campaign evaluation:  Some market research focuses specifically on  marketing campaign effectiveness . You can evaluate how many people have seen your online ads and what the click-through rate has been, for example. This type of information can help you make adjustments if needed and inform future campaigns so you reach consumers effectively and keep customer-acquisition costs down.
• Competitor research:  Competitor research focuses on the competition to help you gain insights into how your company can pull ahead. Looking into a competitor’s marketing campaigns, brand reputation, revenue or sales volume, and other important data points can help you learn from their strengths and weaknesses.
• Customer segmentation research:  An important type of market research, especially for new businesses, is customer segmentation. These studies divide your larger consumer base into different groups or personas. Understanding the different types of consumers you want to connect with can help you create individualized campaigns tailored for each group.
• Consumer research:  Nearly all market research involves the consumer in some fashion, but some research is focused specifically on understanding consumers within a certain segment better. You may want to learn about their purchasing habits, interests, motivations, and more. The better you understand your consumers, the more effectively you can appeal to them.
• Product development:  Developing products calls for market research first to ensure the concept has value and then to refine the product over time. For example, you may see sales dipping on a flagship product and discover that customers’ needs have shifted and this product should offer a new feature to be more useful or convenient.
• Usability testing:  Similar to product development research, usability testing is focused on products. However, the focus here is on how consumers use your product. You may release a beta version of your mobile app, for example, and get feedback from users to find out if there are any bugs or other problems you need to work out.

The Benefits of Market Research

Market research can deliver valuable benefits to companies like yours. Let’s look at some of the most impactful ways market research can empower your company to succeed.

1. Maintain a Customer-Centric Approach

Market research is all about understanding your consumer base better, and that is an essential step to creating a customer-centric business. Customer-centric companies keep the customer experience at the forefront of all they do. Research has shown that customer-centric  businesses are 60% more profitable . It’s easy to see why prioritizing the customer’s needs and desires is a recipe for success.

Market research is how you come to understand those needs and desires in the first place, along with other important aspects of your target customers. You can’t effectively build a customer-centric business unless you understand your customers. Conducting market research allows you to appeal more specifically to your customers’ pain points and preferences. It’s a win-win for your customers and your business.

One of the most effective ways to be customer-centric in your market research is by using a segmentation-targeting-positioning (STP) model. This marketing model involves:

• Segmentation:  Brainstorm the possible segments your product or service may appeal to. These segments can be defined geographically, demographically, or otherwise.
• Targeting:  Determine which segment or segments offer the most profitable opportunities for your company so you can focus on marketing to these segments.
• Positioning:  Develop a strategy for addressing your target segment’s needs and do it better than your competitors. You can also consider the best way to promote your solution to the target segment.

2. Connect With Your Audience More Effectively

When you understand your target customers better, that means you’ll be able to more effectively reach them. When it comes to your marketing campaign, you don’t want to waste time and money on trial and error — you want to have an informed marketing strategy. There are two main elements of effectively connecting with your audience: the marketing channels you use and the content you share.

Using a one-size-fits-all approach, regardless of your audience, can be a costly mistake when it comes to marketing channels. The print publications your audience reads, the television shows they watch, and the websites they spend time on can dramatically differ from those of the target audience for your last product.

For instance, you can reach  close to half of the urban population  by advertising or marketing on Instagram, but you’ll only reach approximately a fifth of the rural population this way. So advertising your farm equipment on Instagram is likely a poor choice.

Choosing the right marketing channels is an important first step to reach your audience, but to truly connect with them, you also need to tailor the content of your marketing materials. Everything from the features of your product you advertise to the tone and visuals you use should be crafted to speak to your target audience. When customers feel you’re “speaking their language,” they’re more likely to pay attention to what you have to say.

3. Identify Opportunities for Growth

Market research isn’t just an important step for new companies or companies launching new products. Conducting market research periodically can help you discover new opportunities to improve and grow. For example, you may discover:

• Unreached segments:  You may come across unreached segments that, like your current customers, could benefit from your products or services. Perhaps they just don’t know about your brand yet, or they think your products are intended for someone else. This segment could be consumers of a different age, gender, income level, or geographical region, for example. A simple modification in your product or marketing strategy may be all it takes to unlock a whole new customer base.
• Business partnerships:  Through market research, you may also discover opportunities to partner with other businesses that already have an established connection with your target audience. Joint promotions can be mutually beneficial for you and the partner company. Essentially, you can combine the power of both your brands to expand and strengthen your reach.
• Product improvements:  Market research can reveal possible shortcomings in your product or services that, if remedied, would allow you to appeal to more customers and improve customer satisfaction. You may also discover opportunities for add-ons, product bundles, or other upsells that appeal to customers’ preferences and help you increase profits.

4. Reduce Risks by Testing Concepts

Risk is a necessary part of any business venture. If businesses didn’t take on risks, they would also limit the potential for reward. However, successful businesses tend to mitigate their risks in strategic ways. The way to avoid risk is not to avoid doing anything. Instead, businesses should use market research to minimize risks and maximize rewards.

A major way you can minimize risks is by ensuring there’s demand for a product. The reality is that many products fail. Some experts place the  failure rate as high as 95% . While that estimate is likely too high, it remains true that many new products fail to connect with consumers and end up in clearance bins. One study found that, of the 9,000 new products that were broadly distributed at a national retailer,  60% were no longer sold  within three years.

Because of the high risk involved, you should never create a product based on a mere hunch. Use thorough market research to predict whether a product concept has real potential for success. Will your product meet a need or desire your customers have, and will it do so more effectively than your competitors are doing? When you have proof of concept, you can be more confident in your efforts and more effectively attract investors.

After you’ve created your product, whether it’s a prototype or a limited run, you can employ market research again to help you refine your strategy before an official product launch. For example, you could give samples of a new food product to passersby in exchange for their feedback. You can also use market research to test reactions to a new logo, new packaging, or any number of other business decisions.

5. Make More Informed Decisions

Market research empowers companies to make more informed decisions that are backed by data. Gut feelings are not reliable means of making decisions. For instance, you may think releasing a luxury version of your product at a higher price point is a great business idea, but consumers willing to pay that price may associate your brand with budget-friendly products and opt for luxury products from luxury brands instead. The only way to know for sure is to conduct market research.

Market research data can serve as a compass, steering each choice a company makes to take them one step closer to their goal of successfully converting and retaining their target customers.

Here are some examples of decisions you can make more accurately with the help of market research:

• Choosing a different consumer base to target through a new marketing campaign
• Determining which channels to include in your advertising campaign
• Selecting design and personality elements to form a brand persona that will connect with your audience
• Choosing whether to open a new retail location
• Deciding whether a product should be discontinued or modified
• Pricing products in a way that maintains margins and appeals to customers

Through market research, you can make these and other decisions based on data rather than guesses and, as a result, boost your chances of getting it right the first time.

6. Compete More Effectively

Solid market research can be the difference that gives you a competitive edge in the marketplace. For one, by understanding your customers better, you may be able to engage them more effectively than your competitor is doing. Additionally, competitor research can give you direct insight into your competitors so you can understand how you fit into the marketplace.

If you’re a newcomer and want to know the best ways to draw customers away from legacy brands, market research can help you find out where consumers are dissatisfied with these brands and their offerings. By pinpointing these gaps, you can appeal directly to consumers’ desires and market yourself as a disruptive company with a superior solution.

You can also use market research to help you discover underserved segments of the market. By targeting these underserved consumers, you can carve out a place in the market for yourself where you’ll excel. For example,  the founder of War Paint, a cosmetic company  marketed to men, said, “Growing up, I never felt there was a brand for me, that spoke to me.” War Paint and some other emerging cosmetic brands target male consumers who were previously not part of the equation in the makeup market.

7. Stay on Top of Trends

Market research isn’t just important for new businesses. As consumers evolve, companies must also evolve to optimize the way they connect with customers. Market research is a valuable means of staying up on relevant trends. Researching trends can often be done through secondary research. Industry reports or research from your competitors, for example, can reveal what new product features consumers are interested in.

Today’s culture changes rapidly, and market research is essential if you want to keep up. You need to stay aware of trends regarding your consumers’ purchasing behavior, the most popular advertising channels, packaging preferences, product features, relevant messaging, and much more. Mimicking what your competitor did last year isn’t a good strategy.

Trends are especially important and cycle more frequently in some industries, such as fashion and design. If your company sells light fixtures, for example, you need to conduct research frequently to see what styles appeal to modern interior designers and homeowners. You also need to be aware of any new technology you can incorporate into your product to help you stay at the cutting edge and deliver the latest and greatest products to your consumers.

How to Conduct Market Research

Companies can conduct market research through various means. First, it’s helpful to understand the difference between two main categories of sourcing market research data — primary and secondary research:

• Primary research  is the data a company collects or an expert collects on the company’s behalf for their market research purposes. In other words, it’s field research. Some primary research is exploratory, meaning it’s more open-ended, and other forms of primary research aim to provide insight into specific questions or issues.
• Secondary research  involves using data that already exists and is at your disposal for market research purposes. For example, you could consult government census data, industry data reports or statistics on market trends. This type of research can provide a good starting point for understanding the market more broadly and learning about the competition.

Secondary research tends to be a starting point before conducting primary research.

There are several methods of primary research companies use to learn from consumers. Some of the most popular methods include:

• Surveys:  Surveys involve asking consumers questions they can quickly answer. Survey questions can be multiple choice or more open-ended. Surveys can be conducted in-person, over the phone, through the mail or  online . They provide a fast and simple way of reaching a large audience and getting their feedback.
• Focus groups:  Focus groups tend not to involve as many participants as a survey. Instead, a market researcher leads a small group of consumers in a discussion to get a window into consumers’ thoughts. Because the groups are small, most companies will assemble multiple focus groups and take all the results into account. They may observe through a one-way mirror or watch a recording.
• Interviews:  Interviews are similar to focus groups but may involve even fewer people. A one-on-one interview can be a valuable way of gaining detailed insight from one customer. These insights can be helpful, but they don’t provide statistically reliable data as you can get with a large survey.
• Observation:  Market observation involves watching consumers to see how they behave under natural conditions, such as a retail store. These consumers may or may not know they are being observed. For example, researchers may watch security footage taken from a store to see which departments customers tend to go to first and whether they stop to look at point-of-purchase displays.
• Field trials:  Field trials involve making a business move but doing so on a smaller scale and observing the results. For example, a restaurant chain may try a new menu item at a handful of locations and see how popular it is. If it’s a success, the company can feel more confident about adding the item to their menus throughout the region.

Companies can conduct their own market research in-house, but many choose to share their goals with a third-party expert who can create a market research strategy and execute it. By outsourcing your market research, you can streamline the process, focus on your core competencies, and receive valuable data from the experts that you can then leverage to drive your business forward.

Does Market Research Work?

Market research takes time, effort, and finances to complete, so it makes sense to spend these resources only if you’re going to get a positive return. The reality is that market research remains a crucial part of running a successful business because it is indeed worth the investment. Of course, market research alone won’t cause your business to succeed — but it will give you the information you need to make strategic decisions that will steer your company to success.

We looked at several benefits of market research but consider the inverse reality. Without market research, you could fail to connect with customers, miss out on growth opportunities, be vulnerable to risks, make poor business decisions, and ultimately lose your customers to your competitors. Some businesses get lucky without doing their research, but these instances are rare. Market research can help you avoid common pitfalls and grow your business.

Learn More About Our Market Research Tools

Market research should be a key part of your company’s recipe for success. Surveys are one of the most popular and effective means of reaching consumers and gaining insight into their values, preferences, opinions, and more. At Cint, we help brands and agencies conduct online studies that can empower them with the market research data they need. We can connect your company with millions of consumers, deliver fast results, and ensure those results are accurate through robust quality checks. Cint can help you produce the primary data you need on a tight timetable so you can make informed decisions to help you connect with customers and grow your business. To learn more about our market research tools, contact our team today.

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What Is Market Research?

• How It Works
• Primary vs. Secondary
• How to Conduct Research

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Market research examines consumer behavior and trends in the economy to help a business develop and fine-tune its business idea and strategy. It helps a business understand its target market by gathering and analyzing data.

Market research is the process of evaluating the viability of a new service or product through research conducted directly with potential customers. It allows a company to define its target market and get opinions and other feedback from consumers about their interest in a product or service.

Research may be conducted in-house or by a third party that specializes in market research. It can be done through surveys and focus groups, among other ways. Test subjects are usually compensated with product samples or a small stipend for their time.

Key Takeaways

• Companies conduct market research before introducing new products to determine their appeal to potential customers.
• Tools include focus groups, telephone interviews, and questionnaires.
• The results of market research inform the final design of the product and determine how it will be positioned in the marketplace.
• Market research usually combines primary information, gathered directly from consumers, and secondary information, which is data available from external sources.

Market Research

How market research works.

Market research is used to determine the viability of a new product or service. The results may be used to revise the product design and fine-tune the strategy for introducing it to the public. This can include information gathered for the purpose of determining market segmentation . It also informs product differentiation , which is used to tailor advertising.

A business engages in various tasks to complete the market research process. It gathers information based on the market sector being targeted by the product. This information is then analyzed and relevant data points are interpreted to draw conclusions about how the product may be optimally designed and marketed to the market segment for which it is intended.

It is a critical component in the research and development (R&D) phase of a new product or service introduction. Market research can be conducted in many different ways, including surveys, product testing, interviews, and focus groups.

Market research is a critical tool that companies use to understand what consumers want, develop products that those consumers will use, and maintain a competitive advantage over other companies in their industry.

Primary Market Research vs. Secondary Market Research

Market research usually consists of a combination of:

• Primary research, gathered by the company or by an outside company that it hires
• Secondary research, which draws on external sources of data

Primary Market Research

Primary research generally falls into two categories: exploratory and specific research.

• Exploratory research is less structured and functions via open-ended questions. The questions may be posed in a focus group setting, telephone interviews, or questionnaires. It results in questions or issues that the company needs to address about a product that it has under development.
• Specific research delves more deeply into the problems or issues identified in exploratory research.

Secondary Market Research

All market research is informed by the findings of other researchers about the needs and wants of consumers. Today, much of this research can be found online.

Secondary research can include population information from government census data , trade association research reports , polling results, and research from other businesses operating in the same market sector.

History of Market Research

Formal market research began in Germany during the 1920s. In the United States, it soon took off with the advent of the Golden Age of Radio.

Companies that created advertisements for this new entertainment medium began to look at the demographics of the audiences who listened to each of the radio plays, music programs, and comedy skits that were presented.

They had once tried to reach the widest possible audience by placing their messages on billboards or in the most popular magazines. With radio programming, they had the chance to target rural or urban consumers, teenagers or families, and judge the results by the sales numbers that followed.

Types of Market Research

Face-to-face interviews.

From their earliest days, market research companies would interview people on the street about the newspapers and magazines that they read regularly and ask whether they recalled any of the ads or brands that were published in them. Data collected from these interviews were compared to the circulation of the publication to determine the effectiveness of those ads.

Market research and surveys were adapted from these early techniques.

To get a strong understanding of your market, it’s essential to understand demand, market size, economic indicators, location, market saturation, and pricing.

Focus Groups

A focus group is a small number of representative consumers chosen to try a product or watch an advertisement.

Afterward, the group is asked for feedback on their perceptions of the product, the company’s brand, or competing products. The company then takes that information and makes decisions about what to do with the product or service, whether that's releasing it, making changes, or abandoning it altogether.

Phone Research

The man-on-the-street interview technique soon gave way to the telephone interview. A telephone interviewer could collect information in a more efficient and cost-effective fashion.

Telephone research was a preferred tactic of market researchers for many years. It has become much more difficult in recent years as landline phone service dwindles and is replaced by less accessible mobile phones.

Survey Research

As an alternative to focus groups, surveys represent a cost-effective way to determine consumer attitudes without having to interview anyone in person. Consumers are sent surveys in the mail, usually with a coupon or voucher to incentivize participation. These surveys help determine how consumers feel about the product, brand, and price point.

Online Market Research

With people spending more time online, market research activities have shifted online as well. Data collection still uses a survey-style form. But instead of companies actively seeking participants by finding them on the street or cold calling them on the phone, people can choose to sign up, take surveys, and offer opinions when they have time.

This makes the process far less intrusive and less rushed, since people can participate on their own time and of their own volition.

How to Conduct Market Research

The first step to effective market research is to determine the goals of the study. Each study should seek to answer a clear, well-defined problem. For example, a company might seek to identify consumer preferences, brand recognition, or the comparative effectiveness of different types of ad campaigns.

After that, the next step is to determine who will be included in the research. Market research is an expensive process, and a company cannot waste resources collecting unnecessary data. The firm should decide in advance which types of consumers will be included in the research, and how the data will be collected. They should also account for the probability of statistical errors or sampling bias .

The next step is to collect the data and analyze the results. If the two previous steps have been completed accurately, this should be straightforward. The researchers will collect the results of their study, keeping track of the ages, gender, and other relevant data of each respondent. This is then analyzed in a marketing report that explains the results of their research.

The last step is for company executives to use their market research to make business decisions. Depending on the results of their research, they may choose to target a different group of consumers, or they may change their price point or some product features.

The results of these changes may eventually be measured in further market research, and the process will begin all over again.

Benefits of Market Research

Market research is essential for developing brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Since it is unlikely for a product to appeal equally to every consumer, a strong market research program can help identify the key demographics and market segments that are most likely to use a given product.

Market research is also important for developing a company’s advertising efforts. For example, if a company’s market research determines that its consumers are more likely to use Facebook than X (formerly Twitter), it can then target its advertisements to one platform instead of another. Or, if they determine that their target market is value-sensitive rather than price-sensitive, they can work on improving the product rather than reducing their prices.

Market research only works when subjects are honest and open to participating.

Example of Market Research

Many companies use market research to test new products or get information from consumers about what kinds of products or services they need and don’t currently have.

For example, a company that’s considering starting a business might conduct market research to test the viability of its product or service. If the market research confirms consumer interest, the business can proceed confidently with its business plan . If not, the company can use the results of the market research to make adjustments to the product to bring it in line with customer desires.

What Are the Main Types of Market Research?

The main types of market research are primary research and secondary research. Primary research includes focus groups, polls, and surveys. Secondary research includes academic articles, infographics, and white papers.

Qualitative research gives insights into how customers feel and think. Quantitative research uses data and statistics such as website views, social media engagement, and subscriber numbers.

What Is Online Market Research?

Online market research uses the same strategies and techniques as traditional primary and secondary market research, but it is conducted on the Internet. Potential customers may be asked to participate in a survey or give feedback on a product. The responses may help the researchers create a profile of the likely customer for a new product.

What Are Paid Market Research Surveys?

Paid market research involves rewarding individuals who agree to participate in a study. They may be offered a small payment for their time or a discount coupon in return for filling out a questionnaire or participating in a focus group.

What Is a Market Study?

A market study is an analysis of consumer demand for a product or service. It looks at all of the factors that influence demand for a product or service. These include the product’s price, location, competition, and substitutes as well as general economic factors that could influence the new product’s adoption, for better or worse.

Market research is a key component of a company’s research and development (R&D) stage. It helps companies understand in advance the viability of a new product that they have in development and to see how it might perform in the real world.

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Why Market Research Is Important for Strategic Decision Making

by Sarah Schmidt , on May 29, 2018

Consider the following scenarios:

• A CEO who is thinking about making a large acquisition to enter a new market
• A product developer working to stay ahead of shifting trends
• A management consultant advising a client on how to reboot their business
• A brand manager creating buyer personas to shape marketing efforts
• An entrepreneur building a pitch to secure funding from venture capitalists

Each of these individuals may have previous experiences and gut instincts that inform their thinking and planning, but they must also incorporate high-quality data and analysis into their decision-making process in order to understand the bigger picture, persuade key stakeholders, and back up their conclusions.

Risk is inherent in each of these situations, and a fumble at the wrong moment can lead to serious consequences for an individual’s career success and a company’s longevity. When the competition is fierce and the margin of error is thin, relying on faulty assumptions can be fatal.

As we explore in the white paper The Importance of Market Research for Validation and Decision Making , high-quality industry research can mitigate these risks by helping to test your hypotheses, validate your insights, and build your sense of confidence.

Why You Need an Outside Point of View

Since 2000, more than half of the companies in the Fortune 500 have merged, gone bankrupt, or been acquired, according to Forbes . A new generation of innovative companies has sprung up, creating unique business paradigms for the organizations of tomorrow.

In this volatile environment, it’s not enough to just predict or forecast within the existing scope of business (though you should). To avoid getting “Ubered” like the cab industry, companies must leverage accurate data and qualitative assessments about the industry direction and identify gaping holes in customer satisfaction that outsiders may prey on. Rigorous analysis should be used to drive decision making and adapt in a timely manner, and in this regard, third-party market research can protect you in more ways than one.

Market research can open your eyes to products and trends beyond your own company and help you become more aware of influential variables such as:

• New technology
• Rising competitors
• Shifting consumer preferences
• Socio-economic changes
• New regulations
• Growing and shrinking markets
• Potential new partners and suppliers

With adequate research, you can seize valuable opportunities for product development and new market entry. You can also make more prudent investments — increasing spending on markets that still have room for growth and re-evaluating investments in markets with lower demand.

Market research can also give you the foundation you need to make other pivotal shifts in your business. For example, you may find that you need to build new external partnerships to quickly adapt to technological changes (such as cloud computing, virtual reality, or automation), or it may be in the best interest of your company to acquire a start-up to maintain a foothold in an evolving industry (such as Walmart acquiring Jet.com to boost its e-commerce side of the business).

Making smart business decisions — and gaining buy-in from stakeholders along the way — is much easier when you have credible evidence to back up your strategies.

Interested to learn more? Download MarketResearch.com's free white paper for more practical insights and recommendations.

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How to Conduct Market Research for a Startup

• 17 Mar 2022

With every innovative product idea comes the pressing question: “Will people want to buy it?”

As an entrepreneur with a big idea, what’s the best way to determine how potential customers will react to your product? Conducting market research can provide the data needed to decide whether your product fits your target market.

Before launching a new venture, you should understand market research. Here’s how to conduct market research for a startup and why it’s important.

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What Is Market Research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about customers and the market as a whole to determine a product or service’s viability. Market research includes interviews, surveys, focus groups, and industry data analyses.

The goal of market research is to better understand potential customers, how well your product or service fits their needs, and how it compares to competitors’ offerings.

There are two types of research you can conduct: primary and secondary.

• Primary research requires collecting data to learn about your specific customers or target market segment. It’s useful for creating buyer personas, segmenting your market, and improving your product to cater to customers’ needs .
• Secondary research is conducted using data you didn’t collect yourself. Industry reports, public databases, and other companies’ proprietary data can be used to gain insights into your target market segment and industry.

Why Is Market Research Important for Entrepreneurs?

Before launching your venture, it’s wise to conduct market research to ensure your product or service will be well received. Feedback from people who fall into your target demographics can be invaluable as you iterate on and improve your product.

Performing market research can also help you determine a pricing strategy by gauging customers’ willingness to pay for your product. Additionally, it can improve the user experience by revealing what features matter most to potential customers.

When assessing which startups to fund, investors place heavy importance on thorough market research that indicates promising potential. Providing tangible proof that your product fulfills a market need and demonstrating you’ve taken the time to iterate on and improve it signal that your startup could be a worthwhile investment.

Related: How to Talk to Potential Investors: 5 Tips

How to Do Market Research for a Startup

1. form hypotheses.

What questions do you aim to answer through market research? Using those questions, you can make predictions called hypotheses . Defining your hypotheses upfront can help guide your approach to selecting subjects, researching questions, and testing designs.

An example question you may ask is: “How much are people in my target demographic willing to pay for the current version of my product?” Your hypothesis could be: “If my product contains all its current features, customers will be willing to pay $500 for it.”

Another example question you may ask is: “What’s the user’s biggest pain point, and is my product meeting their needs?” Your hypothesis could be: “I believe the user’s biggest pain point is needing an easy, unintimidating way to learn basic car maintenance, and I predict that my product meets that need.”

You can and should test multiple hypotheses, but try to select no more than a few per test, so the research stays focused.

Related: A Beginner’s Guide to Hypothesis Testing in Business

2. Select the Type of Research Needed to Test Hypotheses

Once you’ve formed your hypotheses, determine which type of research to conduct.

If your hypotheses focus on determining your startup’s place in the broader market, start with secondary research. This can include using existing data to determine market size, how much of that market your startup could reasonably own, who your biggest competitors are, and how your brand and product compare to theirs.

If your hypotheses require primary research, decide which data collection method best fits your needs. These can include one-on-one interviews, surveys, focus groups, and polls. Primary research allows you to gather insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty, brand awareness and perception, and real-time product usability.

3. Identify Target Demographics and Recruit Subjects

To gather meaningful insights, you need to understand your target demographic. Do you aim to cater to working parents, young athletes, or pet owners? Determine the type of person who can benefit from your product.

If you conduct primary research, you need to recruit subjects. This can be done in several ways, including:

• Word of mouth: The simplest but least reliable way to recruit participants is by word of mouth. Ask people you know to refer others to be research subjects, then screen them to confirm they fit your target demographic.
• Promoting the study on social media: Many social media platforms enable you to show an ad to people who fall into specific demographic categories or have certain interests. This allows you to get the word out to a large number of people who qualify.
• Hiring a third-party market research company: Some companies provide full market research services and recruit participants and conduct research on your behalf.

However you recruit subjects, ensure they take a screener survey beforehand, which allows you to determine whether they fit the specific demographic you want to study or have a trait that eliminates them from the research pool. It also provides demographic data—such as age and race—that enables you to select a diverse subset of your target demographic.

In addition, you can offer compensation to boost participation, such as money, meal vouchers, gift cards, or early access to your product. Make it clear that compensation is in appreciation for subjects’ time and honest feedback.

4. Conduct the Research

Once you’ve determined the type of research and target demographic necessary to test your hypotheses, conduct your research. To reduce bias, enlist someone unfamiliar with your hypotheses to perform interviews or lead focus groups.

Ask questions based on your audience and hypotheses. For instance, if you’re aiming to test existing customers’ purchase motivations, you may ask: “What challenge were you trying to solve when you first bought the product?”

If examining brand perception, your audience should consist of potential customers who don’t yet know your brand. Present them with a list of competitor logos—with yours in the mix—and ask them to rank the brands by perceived reliability.

While the questions you ask are vehicles to prove or disprove hypotheses, ensure they don’t lead subjects in one direction. To craft unbiased research questions , use neutral language and vary the order of options in multiple-choice questions. This can keep subjects from selecting the same option each time if they sense the third option is always mapped to a certain outcome. It also helps account for primacy bias (the tendency to select the first option in a list) and recency bias (the tendency to select the final option in a list).

Once you’ve collected data, ensure it’s organized efficiently and securely so you can protect subjects’ identities .

Related: 3 Examples of Bad Survey Questions and How to Fix Them

5. Gather Insights and Determine Action Items

After you’ve organized your data, analyze it to extract actionable insights. While some of the data will be qualitative rather than quantitative, you can detect patterns in responses to make it quantifiable. For instance, noting that 15 of 20 subjects mentioned feeling overwhelmed when attempting to assemble your product.

Once you’ve analyzed the data and communicated emerging trends using data visualizations , outline action items.

If the majority of users in your target demographic reported feeling overwhelmed while assembling your product, action items might include:

• Creating different versions of assembly instructions to test with other groups, varying diagrams and instructional language
• Researching instruction manual best practices

Each round of market research can offer more information about how your product is perceived and experienced by potential users.

Market Research as an Ongoing Endeavor

While it’s useful to conduct market research before launching your product, you should revisit your hypotheses and form new ones over the course of building your venture.

By conducting market research with each version of your product, you can gradually improve it and ensure it continues to fit target customers’ needs.

Are you interested in bolstering your entrepreneurship skills? Explore our four-week online course Entrepreneurship Essentials and our other entrepreneurship and innovation courses to learn to speak the language of the startup world.

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5 Tips to Market Research Like a Pro

A thriving business requires constant market research to improve your products and continually appeal to customers.

Table of Contents

Market research provides businesses with valuable insights into their competitors, customers and industry trends. Do it well and you can spot new opportunities before others. You’ll also be better able to anticipate future trends and improve profitability. But where to get started? Five simple strategies can form the basis of your market research plan .

How to conduct effective market research

Most effective market research strategies don’t cost anything but time and labor. Others, however, may require spending some ad dollars or ponying up for a survey platform. All are worthwhile, however, for better understanding the market your business is in and the customers you want to reach. We specifically recommend the following research methods.

1. Develop buyer personas.

Buyer personas, also known as customer personas , give you a much more thorough understanding of your customers and who they are. They are essentially fictional creations based in reality — you imagine your ideal customer and build a realistic persona around them.

Market research tools can help you develop buyer personas based on your target customers’ interests, problems and lifestyles. The more personas you have, the better, as understanding why customers buy from you is perhaps the most valuable piece of information any business owner could have. Do they buy to meet a need or desire, address a problem, or exploit an opportunity to its fullest? Your marketers can zero in on this information to create advertising campaigns that generate inquiries by appealing to customers’ needs and wants. Likewise, this insight will help your sales team sell more and your development team iterate better in the future.

As you build buyer personas, harnessing demographic details like age, location, education level, parental status and income levels is very useful. These details can help you develop a communication style and tone of voice that connects with customers. An appreciation of cultural nuances, especially in a diverse country like America, can also benefit you through a better understanding of consumption patterns, attitudes, and product or service preferences.

Buyer personas can also shed light on the people, organizations and institutions that shape customers’ views and opinions. Take influencer marketing as an example. Partnering with an influencer your customers like and respect can generate a lot of sales. Identifying the influences, values and psychology of your audience can help you understand how emotions play a part in their decision-making. [Read related article: The Psychology of Sales ]

2. Conduct a survey.

A problem that many new businesses face is they don’t have a lot of customer information to use for their own market research. To gather more information about the people who buy — or may buy — your product, consider adding a survey form to your website or sending a survey to email addresses you collect.

Surveys allow you to solicit feedback from prospective and existing customers. When you create a questionnaire, try to include a few questions with text boxes so respondents can type in their own answers. You want to solicit as much information as possible — without making your survey so overwhelming that people won’t want to take it — so you can use the answers to build successful, accurate profiles for your market research.

You can also use surveys as a means to get more sales. Some business owners find that adding the option to do a survey in exchange for a discount, such as giving 10 percent off an order, is enough incentive for customers to answer your questions. Everybody benefits. You learn more about your customers and generate revenue at the same time.

3. Upload your lead list to Facebook Ads.

Social media marketing tools, specifically the Facebook Ads program, are an effective way to carry out market research on your audience.

Look for a feature called “Custom Audiences” on your Meta Business Manager dashboard and upload your customer email list to it. The platform then automatically finds the profiles of the people on your list. After analyzing their Facebook pages, it builds charts that showcase trends among the people you added. You can see what habits and interests these people have and use this information to conduct more precise market research. 

For example, Facebook may tell you that many of your customers use YouTube. If that’s the case, you may want to advertise on it as well as create video content and a YouTube channel for your target audience.

4. Study your competitors.

All businesses benefit from a better understanding of their competitors. That’s especially so with larger companies that offer similar products to you. They didn’t get big by accident — they must have done something very well consistently over an extended period to grow so large. You want to learn what that is.

Competitors’ websites are a good place to start when researching why they have a greater market share. You can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to understand the aspects of their content marketing that cause their sites to rank so highly. This is great for technical SEO planning , and it’s also good for getting an idea of why their content resonates so well with the target audiences you have in common. 

There are certain things your rivals do better than you that their customers appreciate. Try to uncover what their clients value the most and make those products or services part of your proposition. On the flip side, there are some things you do better than everyone else in the minds of consumers. Find out from your customers what they are and then build on them further to retain your competitive advantage.

On an operational level, there are important insights you can extract by studying your competition. Where are they advertising? What new products or improvements for existing products are they working on? They may have spotted an opportunity before you did.

5. Set up multiple small email campaigns.

Another way to enhance your market research is through conducting small email campaigns. Once you’ve gathered customer data using the above strategies, you can develop applicable email marketing campaigns and gauge their performance. [See our top picks for high-quality email marketing and survey software .]

Segment your email database into groups that share certain characteristics (like average spend, frequency of purchase, age, annual income, internet habits and so on). Market to each group separately to see who interacts with your emails more by clicking through to your site and making a purchase.

These small tests can provide detailed insight into what kind of marketing works with your audience. While you’re likely to make sales from all segments of customers you contact, you can focus more time on experimenting with the most active groups to incrementally increase engagement with each subsequent campaign.

Why market research is important

Market research is time-consuming, yet it’s important for launching and expanding a successful business. When you know your customers and what they want — and you understand the market you’re competing in — the information you collect can help you grow your company, win sales, and build strong relationships with the people who buy your product.

As you conduct your market research, you’ll discover that people are complex and diverse. They have specific wants and needs that they want someone to solve for them. If you use your data properly, you can build great products that truly help people.

Take the five strategies above and start to implement them in your market research activities. Gather data, keep notes, learn what people like, and you could soon build in future success and stability to your business. 

Syed Balkhi contributed to this article. 

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More From Forbes

Understanding market research for your business plan.

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When you’re building a business plan, market research needs to happen pretty early in the process. It’s where you learn about your audience’s wants and needs and the financial trends in your industry, and where you combine the data, and uncover trends that tell you what customers want and how to provide it most effectively.

The results of that research and analysis will shape aspects of the rest of your business plan. Assessments of your market and competition inform critical decisions in areas such as product design or service offerings, price, marketing methods, and business location.

That means accurate and comprehensive market research matters. To be comprehensive, your information and analysis should answer every possible question about the market you plan to enter and the consumers you believe will buy your product or service, including (but not limited to):

• Demand: Do consumers want what you’re offering?

• Economic indicators: Do they have the money to buy your product/service?

• Pricing: How much will they pay for your product/service?

• Location: Where do they live, and where are they likely to make their purchases?

• Saturation: How many other options do they currently have for that product/service?

First Steps: Budget

You can spend a lot answering these questions. Many large businesses hire firms to do the research and analysis, employing large-scale surveys, focus groups and statistical models, among other methods. However, for entrepreneurs just starting out, marketing budgets are typically too slim to cover that kind of research.

So, the work needs to stay in-house and fit a small marketing budget. Affordable, effective market research is possible. It may not be as specific to your market as the big-budget stuff, but it can get you the information you need to work out a solid understanding of your market.

First Steps: Market-Research Objectives

Before you start your research and analysis, determine your objectives. Decide what you want to learn from the process. It will guide the data you search for and how you use it, so be specific. Write down actual goals – what would give you the most accurate, comprehensive and useful picture of your market? This could include areas such as demographics, competitor offerings and customer pain points.

First Steps: Research Terminology

In market research, you’re basically dealing with two types of research and two types of data:

• Primary research: This is research you perform yourself in order to get very specific insights into your very specific business. It includes methods such as surveys, interviews and direct observations (by visiting competitor locations, for instance). It can help you gather qualitative data. This is data that goes beyond statistics and market trends. It can tell you what your consumers want, what they don’t want and how they feel about your offerings.

• Secondary research: This is research other people have performed and analyzed. To conduct secondary research, you can visit government websites such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as private data collectors such as Google and market-research companies. It can help you gather quantitative data. This is generally statistical data and can reveal insights on consumer demographics, spending patterns, market trends and earnings projections.

Where To Start Your Market Research

There’s a ton of existing research out there, and a lot of it is totally free. The Small Business Administration website has a list of free government sources for various types of quantitative data, such as industry statistics, consumer demographics, consumer demand and spending, and sales indicators. Much of it comes from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A simple search will turn up enough places to start gathering secondary research to build a picture of your market.

With a good understanding of your market from secondary sources, you’re in a good position to know which types of primary research, if any, would be worth an investment of your time and energy. Maybe a well-designed survey completed by everyone you know could help fill in some holes.

You can also conduct primary research by visiting and speaking with your would-be competition and their customers; through crowdsourcing forums such as Quora, where you can glean raw data from comments and responses and post questions related to your product, service and market; on social-media websites such as Facebook, where you can parse conversations in relevant interest groups; and by reading product and service reviews on sites such as Amazon or Yelp.

Analyzing Your Market Research

Armed with all your data, you’ll draw conclusions that will help guide many of your business decisions.

But first, make sure all of your data will benefit those decisions. Don’t start analyzing until you weed out extraneous information that will waste your time and hinder focused insights. If it doesn’t relate directly to your business and your market, set it aside.

Then organize the relevant data into tables, graphs, lists and pie charts, and see what trends emerge. What do those trends mean for your business? Your product? Your location? Your planned promotions?

Be open to whatever the data tells you. Even if your research findings are unexpected, embrace them, and make any necessary adjustments. Listening to good market research can save you a lot of headaches down the road: The better you know your consumers, the better your chances of successfully selling to them.

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10 Reasons Why Marketing Research Is Important to a Business

It’s easy to dismiss the importance of marketing research. But new businesses need sales and customers as soon as possible, and market research can ensure that those sales and customers don’t stop coming.

When you get caught by the creative spark, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of market research. But there’s a real need for market research before you bring a product to your customers.

Today, I’ll take you through some basic marketing research concepts. I’ll also explain why marketing research is important and share some resources to help you get started on your own marketing research.

If you want to stay up to date, you should also read the in-depth guide to the latest marketing trends on the Envato Blog.

What Is Marketing Research?

Before you can understand the importance of marketing research, you need to know what it is. Market research isn’t about a specific method or activity—it’s just what businesses call their attempt to learn more about their target customers.

While tasks like surveys and focus groups can help, they aren’t absolutely necessary, and they aren’t the only things you can do to research your target market. Here are some tasks that can be part of your market research:

• Have short conversations with contacts who are part of your target market . Let’s say you’re looking to launch a wedding photography service. Talk to your contacts who have been married or who are engaged and ask them about their experience in hiring and working with a wedding photographer. Even a five-minute conversation can give you insights on how to run your business.
• Look up Facebook groups relevant to your target market . This can provide a free, low-effort way to reach target customers online and ask them questions. Eventually, you can go back to these groups to promote your business, if the group rules allow for it.
• Add a survey form to your website . If you already have a website for your small business, you can offer potential customers a small discount in exchange for completing a survey. This tutorial on online market research forms can help you get started.

The above activities are just a handful of tasks that could be part of your market research. In fact, you can classify any task as a market research activity as long as you end up knowing your target market’s needs, behaviors, and preferences.

The Importance of Marketing Research

These are the ten reasons why market research is important, especially for smaller teams and businesses:

1. Better Understand Customer Needs

While every business has many stakeholders, the customer is always at the center of what you do. Conducting market research helps keep your customer as your business’s focus.

Here is where you can avoid the disconnect that businesses of all sizes can have with their customers. Learning their perspective from first-hand accounts has its benefits, including understanding what their needs and wants are. Taking this information into consideration will help guide your strategy better.

2. Uncover Emerging Trends

Understanding customer needs also means uncovering industry trends. When interpreting your findings, it’s not uncommon to identify where businesses like yours will be headed in the future.

Staying ahead of the curve has its benefits. It allows you to better serve your customers in the future. Your business will be able to better position itself as an industry leader. There’s also increased trust in a business that can cater to its customers’ current and future needs.

3. Identify Potential Issues

While it’s great to keep an eye on the future in market research, it’s also important to pick up on any pain points your customers have. Pain points are the issues that stand in the way of your customers having a smooth experience when interacting with your business.

The more pain points you can identify, the better. After all, you can’t solve a problem you don’t know you have. This is why marketing research is so important: you’ll be able to work on solutions that have been bothering your customers with the data to support your efforts.

4. Easily Spot Business Opportunities

After you’ve done your market research, it’ll be clear who you want to reach out to (your target customers), where you can reach them (your marketing channels), and what they’re interested in. Once you’ve defined these, you’ll be able to easily spot business opportunities. For example:

• Form partnerships with other businesses . Learning about who your customers are, such as their demographics, can help you find other small businesses that serve them. You can approach these businesses for joint promotions that’ll be mutually beneficial.
• Create profitable order upgrades . Knowing the other products and services that your customers tend to buy can help you come up with add-ons, product bundles, and upsells that increase the average value of each order.
• Find new locations to sell to . Knowing the geographical areas where most of your target customers live will allow you to create compelling targeted campaigns that suit the needs and culture of that area.

5. Lower Business Risks

Around half of businesses with employees don’t survive past the fifth year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics . The way to make sure that your business survives for longer is to ensure that you’ve got a steady stream of sales and customers. To do that, you need market research.

Regular market research will be your way to check in with your current customers and potential customers to ensure that you’re still meeting their needs. Here’s how you can apply this:

• Test new designs and products before launching . Before you go all-in on a dramatic change for your business, you can test it on a smaller subset of your audience to see if the change would be welcome. For example, if you plan to do a redesign of a popular product, show the new design to your most frequent buyers. Test or ask them if they’re more likely to buy the new design versus an alternative new design or the old design.
• Find out why customers don’t come back . Ideally, your small business should have recurring customers. If they don’t come back, you can conduct a survey of previous customers or set up a focus group to find out why you’re not making any repeat sales.
• Get insights on problem areas . If your most popular product sees a big drop in sales for three consecutive months, you need to find out how to fix it before it ruins your profits completely. Survey your most frequent customers about the product and find out where the problem lies. It could be anything from a decline in the product quality to a glitch on your online store. You’ll never know unless you ask.

6. Create Relevant Promotional Materials

If you’ve ever wondered what text or images to put on your fliers, website, or social media accounts thorough market research will tell you exactly what to do. Since target customers have already expressed all their wants, needs, and frustrations with you, you’ll know exactly what to address and how to address it when you start creating your marketing materials.

For example, author Tiffany Sun surveyed her readers to find out which problems they were trying to solve. Instead of coming up with blog topics or headlines in a vacuum, she used the results of this survey to brainstorm compelling topics.

Here are some other ways your marketing materials will be easier to create:

• Knowing whether customers see your products and services as a necessity or as a luxury can help you design your product labels, brochures, and a website that fits their perception.
• Identifying the age range of your customers can tell you the type of language you’ll be using in your promotional materials. You’ll write differently when addressing retired Baby Boomers than you would when addressing young professionals.

7. Know Where to Advertise

One of the problems that small business owners face is a limited budget. Because of this, your marketing budget should be optimized to give you the best returns possible. Your market research can help ensure that you’re reaching your intended audience in the channels where they’re most likely to see your message.

These are some of the budgetary tasks that your market research can help with:

• Buying ads on social media . If your market research shows that your target audience spends most of their time on Instagram and almost never uses X, you’ll know to direct most of your social media ad budget to Instagram and forget about X.
• Placing flyers and posters . Knowing the physical spaces where your customer spends their time will tell you where you can best place your advertising. For example, university students are likely to be on campus, so placing ads for that market means that you can try bulletin boards on campus or outside local establishments that their crowd tends to frequent.
• Targeting ads . Online ads such as social media ads and pay-per-click ads can often be targeted with precision. This means that you can target based not just on the usual demographic data, but also based on online behaviors, life stage, and interests. If you truly know your customers, you’ll be able to maximize the potential for targeting. For example: here are some of the targeting options for Facebook Ads :

8. Outsell Competitors

Businesses that know their customers better tend to win more. If you can beat your competitors at finding out your customers’ needs and you aim to fulfill those needs, you’ve got a better chance of standing out from the competition. Here are some ways you can use market research to outsell competitors:

• Target dissatisfied customers . Asking target customers about their frustrations with your competitors’ products or reading their product reviews can help you improve your own products and market them to an audience that’s ready to switch brands.
• Find an underserved customer segment . Your market research might reveal that there’s a segment of the market that your competition has neglected. This will give you a new customer segment to reach out to.
• Identify unaddressed customer needs . During your market research, you might uncover some customer pain points or desires that you don’t see addressed in your competitors’ marketing materials. Try including them in your own marketing and see if the results show an increase in sales.

If you need to know more about conducting market research with competitors in mind, check out this guide on how to write a competitive analysis . You can also learn more about finding out who’s buying from your competitors .

9. Set Better Goals for Your Business

When business owners set goals for their business, they’re typically related to growth in sales or customers. But without market research, you won’t be able to know if your goals are achievable and how to achieve them in the first place.

You might say that you want to double sales by the end of the next quarter. How would you know if this goal is feasible if you don’t know whether the size of your target market is more than twice the size of your current customer base? Without knowing the current size of your potential market, you’ll just be setting arbitrary goals.

With market research, you’ll be able to determine the specific ways you want to expand your customer base. For example, do you want to reach new customers via a new untapped market segment? Or do you still have room for growth among your current target audience?

If you need help setting growth goals for your business, check out this guide on small business growth strategies . You can also learn how to set effective goals for your freelance business .

10. Decision-Making Becomes Simple

The importance of marketing research frequently comes up when making tough business decisions. Instead of having arbitrary criteria for the decisions you make as a business owner, you can always go back to your market research report. Based on that report, will this decision lead to more customers? Will you be able to reach more people who are likely to buy from you? Will it be clear to them that your business can meet their needs?

While not all decisions should be solved by market research, many of them can be, such as:

• where to spend your advertising or marketing budget
• whether there’s a demand for a new product you want to make
• if you should open a storefront in a new location
• which products to discontinue and which ones to merely improve
• how to price all your offers

There’s a real need for market research because it provides you with solid facts. Through market research, you’ll make more informed decisions rather than resting the fate of your business on guesswork.

Discover the Importance of Market Research for Your Business

Now that you understand the importance of market research, you’re ready to get started. Your business doesn’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on focus groups and extensive surveys to conduct market research. But it’s important that you do market research in the first place, and present your research findings with your team.

As long as you end up with a thorough list of your target market’s demographics, needs, and frustrations, you’ll be able to reap the above benefits as you grow your business. Why not get started with your marketing research today?

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Related Articles

5 reasons why marketing research is important to your business

Marketing research is a critical tool that businesses and organizations use to gather valuable information about their target market and industry. By conducting research, companies can gain insights into customer needs, preferences, and behavior, as well as market trends and the competitive landscape. In this article, we'll explore five reasons why marketing research is important for businesses and organizations.

5 reasons why marketing research is important

Is your company on the fence about investing in marketing research? If so, read on for five reasons why marketing research is important to the viability and longevity of your business.

1. Marketing research helps businesses understand their customers.

Knowing your customers is the first step in running a successful business. And while this may sound simple enough, it can be difficult to look inside the consumer psyche—one whose needs, preferences, and behaviors are ever-evolving.

Fortunately, marketing research can give you a peek behind the curtain, helping you understand what motivates current as well as potential customers. A marketing research survey , for example, can provide insight into pricing sensitivity among a segment of your target population. The data yielded may suggest that boomers are more likely to purchase a product based on price alone while millennials are more motivated by the values of the respective company. Based on this information, you can tailor your offerings to better meet these needs.

Let’s take a closer look at what else marketing research can tell you about your target audience.

a. Marketing research reveals demographic data.

Through conducting surveys, you can better understand characteristics of your buyers, like age, gender, race, and ethnicity. You can also collect socioeconomic information like education, income, and employment status. These variables can help you engage in audience segmentation, which essentially involves tweaking your brand messaging to appeal to various subgroups.

b. Marketing research illustrates purchasing behavior.

Marketing research tools like surveys, transaction tracking, and social media tracking can also shed light on when, why, how, and what consumers are buying. A better understanding of purchasing behavior can help your company develop brand messaging that strikes a chord with its target audience. If consumers tend to shop between the hours of 5 and 8 p.m., for instance, your company may send an email coupon at 4:45 p.m. to prime that behavior.

c. Marketing research helps companies appeal to potential customers.

It’s important to learn as much as possible about your current customers. However, it’s equally important to learn about people who are at the beginning of the customer journey. A deeper understanding of what motivates these individuals can help your business turn clicks into conversions.

2. Marketing research helps businesses manage risk.

Risk is an intrinsic part of the business world. However, by understanding market trends and customer behavior, businesses can anticipate changes in demand and adjust their strategies accordingly. Market research can also help businesses identify potential obstacles or challenges and develop contingency plans to mitigate those risks.

For example, let’s say a company hopes to introduce a new product to the market. Before investing significant time and financial resources into product development, market researchers may conduct a series of surveys to determine if consumers are even interested in the respective product. This mitigates the risk of introducing a good for which there is no demand.

Other examples in which marketing research can be used as a tool for mitigating risk include:

• Conducting ad testing to determine if brand messaging resonates with consumers
• Hosting product development focus groups to receive feedback before revealing a new product to the larger market
• Organizing customer satisfaction surveys at various points of the customer journey to determine any issues affecting sales
• Administering price testing to determine the ideal price for a new product

3. Marketing research helps businesses stay competitive.

Marketing research gives companies a competitive edge in many ways, one being a greater awareness of the industry itself. By understanding what other businesses are doing, your company can develop strategies to differentiate itself and stay ahead of the curve. For example, if research indicates that laundry detergent manufacturers are increasing prices, a company can either decide to a) keep up with the times and increase costs, b) keep costs the same, or c) decrease pricing to appeal to a specific target market.

Marketing research also helps companies determine areas where they may be falling behind. If several healthcare conglomerates are expanding telehealth services, it would be wise for a hospital to also make moves to provide digital appointments. Otherwise, patients may take their business elsewhere.

How else can marketing research help your business stay competitive?

a. Marketing research aids in trendspotting.

It’s important for companies to keep up with industry patterns. However, it’s also important for companies to predict patterns before they even happen. The fashion industry provides a good example of this. Trend forecasters analyze decades—centuries even—of socio-cultural data in an attempt to be the first company to put out a ‘hot’ new product that appeals to modern sensibilities.

b. Marketing research allows businesses to identify gaps in the industry.

Similarly, marketing research can help companies realize a demand that has yet to be satisfied. Through marketing research surveys, for instance, an organic snack food company may see that consumers are craving more savory gluten-free snack options. Using this data, the company can one-up competitors by introducing a new product.

4. Marketing research gives businesses the tools to measure success.

Net profit is an important indicator of a company’s success. However, if profits are plummeting, it can be difficult to know if this is because of your company’s performance or industry-wide factors like increased materials costs and decreased demand. Because of this, businesses must rely on a more holistic approach to evaluating success.

Fortunately, marketing research can be a helpful tool if you want to measure business health using more than dollar signs. Here’s how marketing research can help you gauge company success.

a. Marketing research provides insight into customer satisfaction.

Sure, your company could be making money. But if your customers aren’t satisfied, your financial gains are likely to be short-lived. To determine if customers are happy with your products or services, you can conduct a customer feedback survey questionnaire.

Alternatively, you may choose to conduct a longitudinal panel survey . Unlike an ad hoc survey, which takes a snapshot of consumer opinions and behaviors, longitudinal studies (like monthly or quarterly trackers) monitor how consumer attitudes change over time. This tool is especially helpful if you want to see how customer satisfaction changes after the introduction of new protocols or training methods.

b. Marketing research helps businesses assess employee satisfaction.

A financially profitable company isn’t necessarily successful if its employees aren’t satisfied. To assess this metric of success, you can conduct surveys, in-person interviews, or focus groups. The results from these marketing research assessments may also shed light on the efficiency of your staff.

c. Marketing research provides insight into the performance of competitors.

It can be constructive to compare your company’s performance to that of competitors. This can help you understand if dips or rises in profit are unique to your company or simply an industry trend.

5. Marketing research helps businesses make informed decisions.

For decades, companies have made key business decisions based on gut feelings alone. But the new age of marketing revolves around data-driven decision-making: a process in which business decisions are informed by metrics and analytics. This contemporary model helps companies make solid choices that reduce risk while improving performance.

Since marketing research lends itself to data generation, it’s an integral part of this equation. For example, data yielded from a brand awareness survey may illustrate that men aged 50 to 65 in a specific geographic area are the least familiar with the brand. Using this information, the company can invest marketing dollars in a way that will yield true results.

Other examples of using marketing research to support data-driven decision-making include:

• During a focus group, a company discovers that 60% of women are dissatisfied with the playback speed options of an audiobook app. In response, software developers dedicate time and financial resources to adjusting that feature.
• Survey data reveals that as the price of microwaves increases, so does customers’ perceived value of the product. With this in mind, a company chooses to increase prices by 30%.
• A popular food chain conducts a series of phone interviews to assess customer service at various locations. Afterward, the company mandates that employees at the restaurants with the lowest reviews take customer service training courses.

All this to say, marketing research has many different applications. By gathering data about customer preferences, market trends, and industry dynamics, businesses can make decisions based on facts rather than assumptions or intuition. This can help businesses avoid costly mistakes and increase their chances of success.

Conduct high-quality marketing research with Kantar

Marketing research is a critical tool that businesses and organizations can use to gather valuable information about their target market and industry. By conducting research, businesses can gain insights into customer needs and behavior, stay competitive, make informed decisions, manage risk, and measure success.

And during VUCA times (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), keeping a consistent pulse on consumer sentiment and behavior is essential to driving the right decisions for business growth.

However, in today's rapidly changing business landscape, marketing research can feel complicated and overwhelming. That’s where Kantar comes in. As an industry leader, we provide tips and tools to help you navigate each step of the marketing research process, from survey design to data visualization.

Want to get started? Speak to our award-winning team  to learn how we can help you conduct marketing research.

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Why is Market Research Important?

Posted november 10, 2023 by makenna crocker.

Your favorite grocery store items are placed at eye level on shelves for a reason.

Those ads for cat trees you see in your Instagram feed know you’re planning on adopting a kitten.

The emails popping into your inbox offering meal kit delivery discounts were targeted to your specific consumer behavior. 

What do all of these scenarios have in common? 

Market research into our buying habits informed those marketing decisions.

Why market research is important for your business

Market research arms your business with insights into customers and competitors. During times of economic uncertainty, it’s even more critical for businesses to ensure their marketing strategies are targeted specifically to their customers’ needs. 

“Market research is any data and information that informs the market that your business is in,” says Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software. 

“It helps you understand that market from an industry, customer, and competitor perspective.”

Understand your target audience

At its simplest, market research helps you figure out who wants to buy what you are selling . Like a reality check for your business ideas, it tells you if there’s an audience who is actually interested in what you’re doing.

It uncovers basic information about your target customers , like:

• Age and gender breakdown
• Income and education levels
• Interests and hobbies

It also addresses behavioral insights into their purchasing decisions :

• Where do they shop? 
• How do they use products? 
• What makes them choose one brand over another? 

Conducting this research ensures that your marketing strategy aligns with what your target market is looking for and meets them where they’re looking for it. 

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Is there even a market for your business?

Market research plays a critical role in validating your business idea . Researching your customers helps you assess their reactions to your idea and gives you an objective evaluation of your concept’s potential. 

Here’s how research contributes to the validation process:

🧪Concept Testing : Market research facilitates testing your idea in the real world, enabling you to understand its appeal and functionality.

🍽Market Appetite : It reveals the true level of demand for your product or service, offering a glimpse into expected market performance.

📉Risk Reduction : By validating your idea through research, you can sidestep the pitfalls of investing in a concept that the market may not welcome.

🤔Informed Business Decisions : With insights gained from market research, you’re better equipped to make data-backed decisions that increase the likelihood of your business’s success.

Minimize business risks

Market research is not about getting rid of all risks — it’s about acquiring enough knowledge to manage them intelligently. 

“If you do market research correctly, you can minimize your risk by understanding what your competitors are doing,” Sabrina says. “And if you understand what your competitors are doing, then you know what you bring to the table.”

Although risk is inherent in any business , conducting market research before you make big decisions gives you a sense of the risks and opportunities of any possible move.

Stay competitive

Monitoring the competitive landscape requires continuous market research. It can be as simple as keeping track of businesses in your area that offer similar products or services. 

But taking time to dig deeper into your competitors can uncover valuable data points to inform your decisions:

• Track Competitor Moves : Understand competitor strategies for product launches and market positioning.
• Evaluate Your Standing : Compare your offerings to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
• Identify Gaps : Spot unaddressed market needs and create a plan to fill them.
• Improve Offerings : Assess competitor weaknesses to enhance your services or products.
• Adapt Quickly : Use fresh data to swiftly adjust to market changes and consumer trends.

Optimize marketing efforts

Marketing your business does more than increase your visibility for potential customers. It informs them exactly how your product or service will address their pain points . 

Your messaging needs to resonate with them. So you’ll need to identify the right channels to get their attention. 

That’s where research informs effective marketing tactics :

💌Tailor Messages : Use market research to understand customer needs and craft messages that connect.

📲Select Channels : Determine where your audience is most active (social media, email, blogs, etc.)

💰Budget Efficiency : Allocate your marketing spend to channels and messaging that yield the best ROI.

By fine-tuning your marketing strategies with the guidance of solid market research, your marketing budget is spent more efficiently.

Allocate resources based on market realities

Setting realistic targets is essential for the growth and sustainability of your business:

“When you look at customer information and competitor and pricing, that’s what you need to set realistic expectations,” Sabrina says. “You really need to understand how many potential customers there are in the area that you’re selling. Finding that is all based on market research.”

You only have so much money to dedicate to marketing. So you need to make sure you’re putting your resources where they’ll really help your business grow . 

Here’s how market research aids in this process:

• Market Understanding : Gauge the market size and potential to set informed goals.
• Areas of Focus : Depending on market conditions, concentrate on market share expansion, customer retention, or increasing customer lifetime value.
• Informed Investments : Direct resources towards products and services showing high profitability and demand.
• Refined Offerings : Focus on enhancing and expanding services that receive positive customer feedback.

Market research provides the intelligence to make strategic decisions about where to invest in your business. It tells you which parts of your business are worth the extra budget and which parts need to be trimmed down.

Build credibility with investors

Any business owner writing a business plan for a bank loan or investor must create forward-looking financial projections forecasting how their business will grow .

Grounding that financial plan in market research shows potential funders that you’re prepared for the realities of ongoing business management.

“Investors are going to ask you questions. If you can talk them through the answers, they’ll know you’ve done your homework,” Sabrina says. 

“Sometimes people just pull numbers out of nowhere. But you need to validate those numbers. That bottom-up forecasting shows that you understand how many customers there are, so you can outline what percentage of them you’ll reach and what you’ll charge them. 

So that research gives you an actual revenue number based on data and facts.”

Measure business success

Understanding if your business is doing well isn’t just about tallying your cash flows. It’s also about understanding why things are going the way they are.

Are customers who purchase from your business returning to you? What types of feedback are you getting, and how does that feedback compare to what people say publicly about competing businesses?

Ongoing market research gives you the clear picture you need to measure the success of your business:

• Establish KPIs : Identify crucial metrics like sales, market share, and customer loyalty.
• Monitor Performance : Consistently compare these metrics against collected market data to gauge progress.
• Identify Preferences : Determine what customers value where they want to see improvement.
• Refine Tactics : Utilize the insights gained to fine-tune or overhaul strategies as necessary.

Going forward

Market research is critical for any business plan—providing a clear view of what customers want and the competitive landscape. 

Integrating market insights into your business plan allows for agility and relevance in a changing environment – it transforms your plan into a dynamic tool that helps your business evolve and thrive.

Ready to get started? Check out our guide covering the basics of market research for beginners.

You can also get instant access to industry benchmarks and statistics with LivePlan to help you create realistic budgets and forecasts.

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Why is market research important? Here are 7 reasons

Doing your own market research on a regular basis is essential for keeping up with current market trends and maintaining a competitive edge. Whether you are starting a new business, expanding, or developing new products, conducting market research is essential. It helps you to understand your target market, increase sales, and spearhead business growth. In this article, we share 7 reasons why you should be investing in market research .

Use Netigate to send your market research surveys .

1. Identify new customers

In order to identify potential new customers, you must first understand who your customers are. You will also need to know key demographics.

When looking at your product or service, it’s important to consider questions such as:

• Who will use your product or service?
• What is the age range of your customers?
• What is their income level, marital status, and geographical location?

Using market research to understand these factors will enable you to target customers more effectively.

• Create surveys based on our templates
• Send surveys via email, links, API or individual logins
• Analyse responses with filters & AI

2. Get to know your existing customers

Similar to the above point, you should also take the time to understand who your existing customers are. Here are some questions to ask:

• Why do your customers choose your products over your competition?
• How do your customers use your products?
• How do your products solve a challenge?
• Who or what influences their purchase decisions?
• What do your customers enjoy doing, watching, and reading?

Understanding how your existing customers use your products as well as what challenges your products solve will help businesses improve their products as well as identify upsell opportunities with existing customers.

3. Set realistic targets for your business

Now that you are armed with information about your target customers and existing customers, you can use this data to set achievable and realistic goals for continuous improvement and business growth.

Being customer-centric in your approach is essential in today’s business climate. The most common approach in market research is to use an STP model: Segmentation – Targeting – Positioning.

Segmentation : Who will your product appeal to in terms of demographic, location, or other factors?

Targeting : How can you target and reach those sectors that your products appeal to?

Positioning : How can you position yourself in front of your competitors as your target market’s choice?

4. Develop new and effective strategies 

Data from market research will help you to make more informed decisions. For example, relating to pricing, distribution channels, marketing mediums, or to identify opportunities to introduce a new product or service. These results will also help you to make more informed decisions about your existing operations and activities.

• Should you expand or reduce?
• Is there room in your current operations to diversify?
• Are you targeting the right audience with your marketing activities

Casio used market research to get better insights on customers & resellers and adjusted the marketing strategies to be more effective.

5. Solve your biggest business challenges

If you have already identified a problem in your business, conducting market research will help you determine the source of the issue. For example, you can determine if a new competitor has entered the market or if brand awareness has fallen short, causing a decrease in sales. There are several types of market research that can help you identify different shortcomings: brand research, consumer research, product development and usability testing, consumer research, and many other areas.

Get started with our free market research survey templates.

6. Investigate expansion opportunities

Market research helps you identify areas for possible business expansion. Given that it offers the opportunity to test markets to determine if there is room for a new product or service. You can also conduct market research to find the best location to open a new store.

7. Identify how to expand your offering

Market research may help you discover new markets that are under-serviced or in demand. For example, you can identify changing market trends due to new housing construction, increased levels of education, or other changes that will bring new opportunities for your business.

All in all, market research isn’t just for new startup businesses. Businesses of all shapes, sizes, scope, industry and experience levels can benefit from market research. Market research can help you to learn about new and existing customers, identify issues and solve problems, and even help explore new opportunities that pave the way for business growth.

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How To Conduct Marketing Research That Improves Business Outcomes

Would you send marketing emails about retirement home options to people who have just graduated college? Or run beer commercials during Saturday morning cartoons? Probably not, because the people who would see those emails and ads are not the audience for those products. 

Marketing research helps you target the best audiences for your product and identify the types of campaigns that will appeal to them. Observing demographic trends and competitor strategies will provide you with valuable insights that can innovate and expand your product offerings.

Depending on their budgets and requirements, every organization will conduct their market research uniquely. However, they generally include the following steps (though they may differ in name or approach):

• Identify your target audience
• Analyze your competitors’ marketing activities
• Find opportunities for stronger markets
• Evaluate engagement
• Identify problems and create solutions
• Run tests based on your findings
• Restructure your marketing efforts based on your results

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Say you have a coffee brand and you want to maximize your marketing dollars. Targeting the entirety of the coffee-drinking population is too wide-reaching to be an effective strategy, and you’ll end up wasting money trying to engage people who are unlikely to want your product. Fans of frozen, heavily sweetened coffee drinks aren’t likely to resonate with an advertisement for a simple, unsweetened shot of espresso, after all.

Start identifying your target audience by using primary data (also known as direct data) and secondary data. Focus groups, surveys, interviews, and questionnaires are forms of primary data that give you control over who you talk to and the questions you ask.

There are plenty of sources you can use for secondary research , such as census data, articles and reports in industry publications, and online databases. You can also search and monitor social media platforms to see what people are saying about products and services similar to yours. 

After analyzing and segmenting this data, you can create buyer personas —fictional representations of your target markets that incorporate their demographic information, pain points, and preferred methods of communication. These will be useful guides to help you develop your strategies and messaging.

2. Analyze Your Competitors’ Marketing Activities 

See what other businesses in your industry are doing by conducting a competitive analysis to get an overview of the landscape and identify trends and tactics you may be able to leverage in your own efforts. Study what their ads are like and where they appear. Who do they seem to be targeting? What social media platforms do they use? What kinds of content do they create, and how often? Do they get a lot of mentions and pieces in the press? What is their overall brand profile and market share?

3. Find Opportunities for Stronger Markets

Consider functionality, features, pricing, performance, customer service, and brand reputation. Brainstorm strategies to position your product or service in a way that will appeal to an underserved or overlooked target market. One way you might do this is by offering a low-cost option targeted toward people facing socioeconomic hardship. There may even be an opportunity to provide a complementary product or service, which is not only a kind and generous thing to do, but also a great opportunity for brand awareness and perception.

4. Evaluate Engagement

Different audiences prefer to engage with brands on different platforms. Some consumers spend a lot of time on X or Instagram, while others prefer reading newsletters via email. The social management platform Sprout Social has some useful information on the demographics of various social media platforms . 

Content formats play a part in engagement as well. Some audiences like reading copy, while others prefer short-form video. If your target audience isn’t very active in certain channels, pull back and invest in the ones they do use.

5. Identify Problems and Create Solutions

If you find areas where your efforts are falling short and you’re not seeing the response or conversion rate you’d hoped for, check whether the problem might be your messaging, the format, timing, or other factors. For example, you might be using an ineffective channel. 

If you’re struggling with consumer engagement or creating products that aren’t optimized for your market, you may be facing a value proposition issue. The Pace University MBA offers Value Creation as an elective or Marketing Management course that will teach you how to find innovative opportunities for consumer engagement through the use of technology. 

6. Run Tests Based on Your Findings

Rather than spend a lot of marketing dollars on a tweak that might not work, test it first. A/B testing is everywhere in digital marketing—these tests are easy and cheap to run, and they can deliver valuable results quickly.

For example, try A/B tests by sending emails with two different subject headings or creating two slightly different landing pages to see which one gets more engagement. 

7. Restructure Your Marketing Efforts to Better Connect to Your Target Audience

You may only need to make small changes, such as emphasizing a certain feature of your product in messaging or focusing more on social channels with a wider audience of younger users, such as TikTok. Or you may need to completely rethink your marketing strategy or even adapt your product or service to meet customer needs and preferences. In our hypothetical coffee example, you may find that your target audience prizes convenience. That may lead you to offer your coffee in pods and adapt your messaging to highlight the ease and speed of making your coffee in a pod machine. 

The Value of Marketing Research

Marketing research is a critical part of strategic planning. It helps business leaders make informed decisions that minimize risks, maximize returns, and ensure that resources are allocated efficiently.

Marketing isn’t static, especially in a crowded and competitive business landscape. Businesses must engage in market research activities consistently to A) add or refine products and services and B) monitor how their target market might be changing. Customer tastes and needs evolve, and external factors such as new technologies , economic developments, and changes in cultural norms can completely shift the market. Well-executed marketing research can help ensure you always know who your target audience is, what they want, and what you need to do to attract them.

How an MBA Prepares You To Make an Impact

An MBA can provide you with an advanced understanding of business operations, including marketing, to prepare you for leadership and management roles. Pace University’s MBA program offers a Marketing Management concentration that enables you to dive deeper into marketing research, including learning frameworks for gathering and analyzing information. All of the marketing-focused courses in the program will integrate research in some way, and the concentration overall is dedicated to teaching you how to create and improve the performance of your marketing campaigns. Armed with this expertise, you can make an ongoing impact on organizational objectives as well as the trajectory of your career over a lifetime.

About the Pace University Online MBA and Lubin School of Business

The Pace University online Master of Business Administration (MBA) gives professionals a hands-on learning experience to master the ins and outs of business theory through real world application. This 100% online program has been handcrafted by expert faculty to ensure that students are career-ready upon completion. Choose a Corporate Finance, Marketing Management, or general business concentration.

For over a century, Pace University’s Lubin School of Business has been preparing professionals for fulfilling careers in business. From responsive professor communication to hands-on, project-based learning, we do everything we can to help students succeed.

Pace’s Lubin School of Business has dual accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International, an elite distinction shared by fewer than 2% of business schools in the world. With graduates thriving in companies like AIG, Nickelodeon, L’Oreal, Tesla, and many others, Pace equips students with vital business knowledge, while also creating innovative thinkers that companies want.

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Related Categories

• Business Strategy
• How to Start a Business in 10 Easy Steps
• Marketing for Startups
• Market Research: The Basics

Why Do Market Research?

• It can give you an accurate view of your business and your marketplace. For example, you can see how you are perceived in comparison to your competitors, and evaluate what your competitors are doing to attract customers.
• It can help you determine who and where your customers are, and which customers are most likely to do business with you. (In fact, for customers who indicate that they don’t want to do business with you, market research is your opportunity to ask them “why not?”.)
• It can reveal how customers and prospects view your existing business and products, and show you if you are or are not meeting your customers’ needs. It’s even possible you may uncover some opinions about your business and/or products that you weren’t aware of.
• It can help you decide whether a new idea for a business or product will fly – that is, if customers will find it appealing – based on how similar products have performed in the marketplace.
• It can help you make wise product packaging and promotional decisions, as well as effective marketing messages.
• Market research can be valuable to your company’s growth and success. Here’s a way to start:  
• First, identify your competitors. This can be simple if there are one or two other companies that do what you do. Sometimes, it’s more complex. Work with your company leaders to identify where else customers go for the product or service you offer.
• Think about your business goals. Are you trying to grow? Introduce a new product? Enhance service or move locations?
• Consider research needs and goals. Do you want perspective on your business, or are you considering a major shift in your business strategy?
• These informative articles offer more detail on the role and benefits of market research:  
• “ About Market Research ”
• “The Best Ways to Do Market Research for Your Business Plan”

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Marketing Research Process: A Comprehensive Guide

• May 22, 2024

The marketing research process is crucial for companies to understand the customers’ requirements and the current trends in the market. Companies use this research to collect, analyse and understand the data related to a certain market or industry. Additionally, through this process, companies can know customer preferences, evaluate market size and estimate competition, allowing them to increase popularity and drive growth and success. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the details of the marketing research process , along with its benefits for companies.

What is Marketing Research?

Marketing research involves an array of activities that aim at collecting information and data to help your company understand its market condition. After gathering market research data, you can influence it to announce or enhance products, boost the customer experience, create an acute marketing position or help manage business decisions.  

Furthermore, the marketing research process emphasises on understanding your target audience, such as their opinions and behaviours. This information helps you assess the performance of the market’s existing products, launch new items and improve the customer’s satisfaction. It can also determine customer observations about your company.

Types of Marketing Research

Primarily, there are two types of marketing research , and each one has its own process. These include:

• Primary Research: Primary research includes collecting information and modifying it as needed. Rather than depending on the earlier conducted research, primary research is done completely from scratch.
• Secondary Research: Already prepared data, collected and published by others are secondary research. It includes research and data reports from government companies, industry trade groups and other organisations. Secondary research is a popular option for many businesses and organisations due to its affordability. 

What are the Benefits of Marketing Research?

The following are the key benefits of marketing research :

• One of the main benefits of marketing research is a better understanding the of market. This helps the company enhance their products and services that are related to the customers.   
• If you know your target customers perfectly, then you can make investments in related business developments, ensuring higher returns on investments. 
• With the knowledge of what fits appropriately in the market, you can stay ahead of your competitors. By influencing the current trends in the market, your company can increase popularity and make a unique position in the market. 

What are the Steps to Conduct the Marketing Research Process?

The following are the steps to conduct the marketing research process effectively.

• Identifying and Defining the Issue: The first step in the marketing research process is identifying and defining the issues. Researchers express the marketing and business issues that need to be addressed. For this, additional information is required to solve the problems. And, it is important to understand the actual research question that needs to be explored. 

On the basis of this analysis , we need to find the missing information. In this process, researchers create primary questions to base the research around it. Thus, it is crucial to define the issue, correctly and effectively.

• Developing an Approach: Preparing objectives or theoretical framework, making analytical models and creating research questions are all part of this process. This also includes recognising the factors that can affect research design. In this process, management and industry experts talk about simulations and case studies, analyse secondary data, and involve in qualitative research. 

In this process, the researchers formulate the general problem and identify certain elements of the marketing research issue. For this process, it is important to communicate in the research brief form between marketing researchers and decision-makers . And, marketing researchers reply to this research brief with the research suggestion. This suggestion comprises the idea to solve the research issue.

• Creating a Research Strategy: After creating an approach, research points and problem-related questions, the next process is creating a research strategy. In this strategy, you need to outline your requirements for detailed research. This comprises customer opinion, information on competitors, data requirements and market trends. 
• Conducting the Research: The most crucial part of the marketing research process is conducting research as correct and suitable information can be collected only after this. First of all, existing research and data are analysed if the problem is relevant. After this, one can understand the problem for which conducting research is being done. 

Once the information is collected through secondary research, researchers must run primary research to understand the genuine condition of the market and the demand of consumers. During this process, they conduct different types of interviews, surveys and polls. Hence, there should be an appropriate way to gain information from respondents. 

• Analysing the Data: Data analysis identifies trends that may affect the market performance of the company. Analysing data for a market survey involves transforming primary or secondary data into expressive information. As per the required study outputs, this process includes basic or advanced techniques. Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive or prescriptive analytics can be applied. Other common analytical methods comprise predictive modelling, regression analysis and conjoint analysis.

To make sure that the information is suitable for the analytical procedures, you should format, clean and modify the information. It is important to conduct the proper analysis as it affects the interpretation of study outputs. This helps discover the preferences, behaviour and opinions of your target audience related to your data. Since the data either supports or disproves your primary research issue, it is crucial to be open to both chances.

• Producing a Report: The analysed data is summarised into a format, generally a presentation or in-depth report, that can be easily used by the management. A formal research report includes the main topic, targeted audience, research approach, data-gathering plan, audience profile and conclusion. Also, it’s important to describe your results and clearly state whether your research problem is proved or refuted. 

In order to ensure that you understand your customers’ behaviours well, the marketing research process is vital. On the basis of reports, you can improve your products and provide solutions as per the customers’ requirements. This way, you can satisfy your customers and drive growth and long-term success in the ever-increasing market.

So, willing to make a career in marketing? Then, enrol now in the Global Senior Leadership Programme Specialisation: Chief Marketing Officer offered by IIM Lucknow in collaboration with Imarticus Learning. This programme will help aspiring Chief Marketing Officers obtain the required skills to define an approach, achieve goals by overcoming problems, make informed decisions, accomplish performance and empower progress.

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+44 (0)1458 253536, explore top 10 benefits of effective market research, top 10 key benefits of market research for business.

Any business, service provider, person, or organization can benefit from market research as a service to assist them in making better, more informed decisions. A company can better adapt to its changing operating environment when more research is incorporated into its strategic planning. The following is a summary of the key advantages of funding marketing research :

1. Fortifying market position through knowledge

Market research aids companies in strengthening their positions. Power comes from knowledge. Use market research to keep your company ahead of the competition and to obtain a better perspective and understanding of your industry or target audience.

2. Reducing investment risk

Any investment risk is reduced. This is a straightforward but crucially important—and frequently crucial—business factor. It makes good financial sense to invest what is typically only a tiny fraction of your investment in market research and testing, product development, and idea testing.

3. Recognizing opportunities and possible dangers

It recognizes opportunities and possible dangers. Primary research, which involves fieldwork, and secondary research, which requires desk research, can be used as insurance against the two most evident risks that lie ahead. For a more in-depth investigation, combine this with some qualitative research to identify potential red flags or possibilities that could have gone unnoticed otherwise.

4. Understanding competitive landscape

Finding the advantages and disadvantages of both you and your rival is helpful. Working with a market research agency is generally advised to ensure entirely unbiased reporting because it’s crucial to approach any project with an “eye’s wide open” mentality. Utilize study results to adjust and grow from your shortcomings while leveraging the insights you’ve gained from competitor analysis to get an advantage and advance the competition.

5. Making strategic planning more accessible

It makes strategic planning more accessible. What forms the cornerstone of your business plan? If it’s evidence-based and you invest the time in your own, ideally continuous, research, you know you’ve given yourself the best chance to reach your business objectives.

6. Identifying new trends

It aids in identifying new trends. Being the first and the best or coming up with an idea that no one else has considered are frequently the keys to staying ahead of the competition in business. An essential discipline is keeping a regular eye on what’s popular rather than in your sector. Ask your research consultant or agency about the various methods you can use to identify and take advantage of these trends.

7. Staying one step ahead of rivals

It helps companies stay one step ahead of their rivals. To be the best, one must be insatiably focused on mastering the fundamentals, possess curiosity, and be eager to try new things. Gaining and maintaining an advantage depends on applying the conclusions and insights drawn from audience, market, and data research.

8. Offering revenue estimates

It offers estimates of revenue. An essential part of a market analysis is a market forecast, which projects your target market’s size, makeup, and trends in the future. Subsets of potential clients can then be identified. Your primary emphasis should be on the market that best fits your company’s profile; this market may be smaller with the fastest development.

9. Focusing on customer requests and wants

Customer requests and wants are the main focus. Placing your consumers at the center of everything you do in business, including research, is crucial for numerous reasons. With so many options for connecting with consumers—including focus groups, web communities, phone surveys, in-depth interviews, and online panels—market research helps you stay aware of areas where your proposal, customer support, or product offering may be strengthened.

10. Benchmarking success against industry norms

Comparing a company’s success to industry norms is helpful. According to a PWC report, businesses that benchmark grow 69% quicker and are 45% more productive than those that don’t. Utilize market research to identify areas for possible expansion, identify performance or knowledge gaps, and conduct employee engagement surveys and competitor analysis. This will allow your organization to consider fresh approaches, concepts, and resources to increase operational efficiency.

Wrapping up

Market research is vital to strategic planning, providing valuable insights to guide business decisions. Companies can strengthen their market position and develop effective growth strategies by understanding customer needs, trends, and the competitive landscape. Investing in comprehensive market research is a wise decision that can pay dividends for any organization, regardless of size or industry. By leveraging these key benefits, businesses can gain a competitive edge and achieve long-term success.

Ready to elevate your market research game? Choose Research Optimus for expert insights and comprehensive market analysis tailored to your business needs. Contact us today!

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What Is Product-Market Fit? Examples, Tips, and How to Measure

Find it by placing customers at the center of your strategy, conducting marketplace research & inviting continuous feedback.

Richard Harris

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You know you’ve struck gold when your customers sell for you. People are not only signing up and renewing with you but they’re telling their friends about your product or service as well. It’s a dream come true — a product-market fit (PMF). You’ve created a product or service that solves your target audience’s pain points. Now these satisfied customers understand how valuable you are to their business success. They are spreading the word about their experience, and new prospects are lining up.

If you’re wondering how to achieve product-market fit, you’re in the right place to learn. Let’s get started.

What you’ll learn:

What is product-market fit, steps to product-market fit, why is it important, how do you measure it, product-market fit questions to ask, goals to determine your product-market fit, two examples of product-market fit, when do you have product-market fit, what to do after you achieve product-market fit, drive pipe faster with a single source of truth.

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Product-market fit is when your product or service solves a universal and unmet challenge within the marketplace where there are enough customers to build a successful business. In short, you have a large TAM (total addressable market). People are consistently buying your product, your revenue is growing, and you have low churn because your customers stick around year after year. You’ve successfully filled your industry’s pains or service gaps by securing proper alignment with your buyer personas. Now, you can use this roadmap to scale your business to meet more ideal customer expectations.

Product-market fit can only be accomplished when you put your customer at the center of your strategy. You know you’re on the right track when your business has reached a place where you:

1: Recognize an obstacle in your industry that must be solved

Why it matters: The obstacle prevents your target audience from achieving its goals. Recognizing it is especially crucial for startup success. If you don’t identify a problem, you risk creating a solution nobody needs — and no one will buy what you’re selling.

Example: You’re a customer relationship management (CRM) service provider who notices your customer base struggles to balance administrative work and redundant tasks, or your customer wants greater insights into their own customer data to leverage for finding even more new customers. 

2: Develop a minimum viable product (MVP) that solves specific pains head-on

Why it matters: This is where you directly address the obstacle. Your product offers a clear value proposition — which highlights the pictures of pain a customer feels when they don’t have a solution, and then a description of the positive outcomes from using your product. You demonstrate how it will solve your prospect’s pain points and why your product is indispensable to your target audience’s businesses.

How it’s done: 

• You develop a hypothesis: “We believe our product will solve X pain points felt by Y companies in Z industries.” 
• Then, set a predetermined goal of speaking to at least 100 people to prove your hypothesis. This list should include conversations with the various titles you feel will be using your products or services.  Track this information deeply, you will be coming back to them very soon.
• Make adjustments to your hypothesis as you learn.

Example: You create a CRM tool that integrates with current tech stacks, optimizes workflows, and automates important tasks such as lead scoring, prospect follow-up, and forecasting because they want to use this information to measure their own success as well as create a consistent roadmap for finding new customers.

( Back to top )

3: Product-Market Validation 

Now that you’ve done your research you want to get real world validation on your potential solution. There is a difference between 100 people liking your idea and telling you it’s something they would want and need and then actually having a product in the marketplace they actually use. 

MVP – Minimum Viable Product

Based on all the research you’ve done you can now start to build something. This is called an MVP. It is the very first version of your solution. It does not need to be perfect, it simply needs to be something that works and something potential customers can tinker around with.  Think of it as a solid B, it’s not an A, and it’s definitely not a C+. It will solve the problems you have learned your potential customers have shared with you. And yes, you can also include a few solutions you believe they don’t even know they may need and want.

Alpha Testing

With an MVP in hand you can now go and find your early adopters, usually the people you interviewed when doing research. At this point, you are testing out your Alpha version.

Your goal now is to get real user feedback based on what you’ve built. The most important piece of feedback will be on how much they feel your product or service will help them on a regular basis. And more specifically, how do they quantify that satisfaction in time and dollars. Yes, you will also get feedback on bugs, functionality, user interface, additional features they would want in a complete version. However, we must remember we are driving to product-market-validation with the hopes of achieving product-market-fit. 

Too often, people take all the product functionality feedback, make those changes, and think they have product-market fit. But all that does is build a product for a handful of customers. Don’t fall into that trap.

Monetization 

Now that you’ve gathered initial feedback, it’s time to research pricing.  How much is the market willing to pay for your solution?

At this phase, you are not coming up with your actual pricing. That comes later. You are simply creating a hypothesis for the value you are providing and conducting research with real users on what they would be willing to pay. You also want to pinpoint the specific challenges you’re solving and the right customers to target. Here are some tips:

• Study market trends to gain a better understanding of the needs of your target audience. You can use a few of those measurement signals we discussed above, such as surveys, customer count, and search engine keywords.
• Ask for feedback from users during your Alpha testing. By testing the product this way, you’ll fix technical bugs and fine-tune the features before general release.
• Once you have about 10 companies using your products or services, you should have enough validation to move forward.

When you reach your goal, move on to phase two.

4: Test your hypothesis

As you advance from your Alpha product, you are now adding more features and functionality, so you can start looking for real customers. This is your Beta version. Now, you are trying to get traction in the marketplace.

To confirm product-market validation, you will need 20-30 paying customers. These are different from your initial Alpha users.

You begin slowly introducing your product or service into the marketplace for greater adoption by more customers. You can now start to confirm your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Offer them demos and free trials of the service with confirmation that after a successful trial, they will convert to paying customers. 

The demos are Beta versions of the product, meaning you are now in the final stages of testing. You’ll want to continue getting feedback from users to:

• Confirm your solution aligns with the pains they want solved.
• Confirm that the pain they have is worth paying for, especially in relation to other projects or pains they may also have internally.
• Cement your hypothesis with customer stories and use cases. The best source of accreditation is your customers. You can promote the value of your product with a case study demonstrating how it solved a real-world challenge.
• Narrow your customer base to the top verticals you want to target.

This is the longest stage of the process. A high churn rate — the percentage of users who stop engaging with your product — suggests your hypothesis might be incorrect. If this is the case, you’ll need to start back at the discovery phase. Don’t be dismayed. This is another opportunity to refine your target-audience research to ensure you are connecting with the right customers.

Let’s assume phases one and two were a success. Now what?

Well, you now have product-market validation

5. Product-market validation to product-market fit 

Now you are really focusing on the marketplace. Your hypothesis may still feel true, but you need more information to confirm it. Your customers’ validation ensures you’re addressing a genuine need and not wasting time building something they don’t care about. The real question is whether the rest of the market feels the same way.

Example: It’s an urgent problem when sales reps cannot focus on selling. Now, your customers are back to closing deals while your CRM tool handles all the administrative tasks standing in the way.

You are growing your customer base because you built a product or service that your target audience finds useful. Your prospects now become customers.

Every business wants to achieve product-market fit because it is how you get your product or service in front of the right prospects. Let’s explore why your product must find its niche and fit into a market segment.

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Think of your product as a giant toolbox — you fill it with screwdrivers, hammers, saws, and nails. Then you’ll target anyone in the construction and maintenance field. But is a screwdriver going to help a plumber when they need a wrench? Product-market fit helps inform strategies that can:

• Help sell your product: Product-market fit helps your sales reps with solution selling . Your sellers understand how your customers view their pain points and how your product or service solves them. It is a customer-centric approach to selling. This helps increase the trust that must exist between your sales people and your prospects. This builds an authentic relationship between both parties and creates a higher probability for closing deals.
• Better position your product: Product-market fit is about being specific and intentional with your target customer. Just because your product has many features doesn’t mean it’s a great fit for every industry. If you don’t find your product-market fit, you risk losing time and budget on a go-to market strategy that doesn’t pay off.
• Improve customer loyalty: Customers spend time, money, and research trying to find solutions. You can help them by creating products meant to solve their specific pains that happen over and over again. In fact, returning customers spend 67% more than new customers because they know that what you’re offering works. This doesn’t just benefit your bottom line; it also helps you optimize your products. The more people use your product, the more you can understand what features are valuable and what needs improvement.
• Grow your business: Happy customers are returning customers. These users will also share your product with associates, organically expanding your product reach with word-of-mouth advertising. The more people buy your product, the more your revenue increases.

Achieving product-market fit is about getting inside the minds of your customers. You don’t have to be a mind reader; you just have to ask the right questions.

When people ask me how I measure product-market fit, they want to know what its signals are. Signals are confirmation that a large enough part of the marketplace needs your solution. Here are some ways you know you are satisfying the market:

• Interviews – Because you have real data from testing and paying customers, you can continue to research the marketplace. You can discover what your target audience feels is a necessary feature of your solution, how much they are willing to pay, and how willing or reluctant they are to handle organizational change to implement your solution. (Further down, I’ve supplied a few questions you can include in your research to ensure you get the answers you need.)
• Customer count: At some point, customer count will matter. How many customers use your product or a similar solution from a competitor? A new entry into the marketplace could be popular initially, but putter out over time. You need to see whether your customer count is sustainable. Do people continue to use the product? If they stop after a year or two, this could indicate a poor product-market fit.
• Use cases: This refers to how customers use your product to solve problems. A wide range of use cases demonstrates the product’s value to different customer needs within the target market. This strengthens the product’s value proposition because it benefits multiple audiences.
• Multiple verticals: If a product is adaptable and sold across various industries (verticals), it suggests a broad market need and potentially strong product-market fit. Your product is so versatile that multiple audiences are clamoring for it.
• Price stabilization: A stable price point suggests customers perceive the product’s value to be consistent with its cost. This can be a sign of product-market fit. Frequent price drops or difficulty maintaining a desired price point indicate customers’ resistance to the pricing strategy . That could mean a potential mismatch between perceived value and actual cost.
• Timing: It is not unusual for a product or service to be ahead of the curve. The question is whether it’s too far ahead. Did you know the first electric cars appeared on the market in 1891? They didn’t achieve mass market appeal for many reasons. The proper infrastructure wasn’t in place to support the cars’ maintenance. And not many people at the time could afford personal automobiles.

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Interviews are just one of the tools you can use to gauge your product-market fit. Asking your target audience specific questions can help you better understand your customers’ challenges. You can structure your surveys using multiple-choice or open-ended questions.

Multiple-choice questions

Multiple-choice questions are great for understanding your target audience’s demographics, geographies, occupations, and industries.

How big is your company? 

A)Less than 50 employees

B) 51-100 employees

C) 101-250 employees 

D) 251-500 employees

E) 501- 1000 employees 

F) 1000+ employees

Note: You could also segment by company revenue

Who are the end users that would want to use this service 

A) Front Line 

B) Manager 

C) Director 

D) VP 

E) C-Level 

Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions allow your target audience to voice their opinions in detail. It is best to use this format to understand how customers will use your product. And these questions should be based on your hypothesis

• ) How hard is it to do _____ currently?
• ) How much time is that currently taking you?
• ) If you got a percentage of that time back, what could you do with that time?  
• What’s the difference between the number you gave and a 10 that would make it mission critical?

These answers tell you what is important to potential customers. After all, the last thing you want to create is something no one wants. That’s where having a set of goals is key.

Setting goals will help you keep on track with your product-market fit before you launch. Consider:

Who are your prospects?

Defining your target customer is essential to building, marketing, and selling a product. To build your buyer personas, or identify the types of people most likely to buy your product, you can conduct research that includes:

• Competitors: What is already out on the market and how well is it doing? Competitor research will help determine who is buying this product and at what price point.
• Customers: Customer research digs into individual industries. For startups, it’s important to focus on customers in one vertical. You want to be smart with your budget and sales strategies. Focus on solving the challenges within a single industry so you can target a highly specific customer base.

What are their pain points?

Survey your ideal customers to discover exactly what is standing in their way. You can conduct interviews or use SEO (organic search) and SEM (paid search) research. What type of solution are people looking for? How are they describing their challenges when they type it into a search bar?

How will your product help (value proposition)?

You need to know the ins and outs of your product. You won’t be able to solve every challenge for everyone. Keep your product roadmap top of mind — it will help you stay on schedule with specific solutions you can offer now and products in development for later. A simple value proposition will help convey your product’s purpose and an efficient selling strategy .

For example: A sleep device company wants to give customers the best sleep without medication. Its value proposition is, “Sleep soundly, naturally. Block noise, not your dreams.”

Measure your efforts

A great indicator of a healthy product-market fit is your total addressable market (TAM). TAM is everyone who will benefit from your product. A large TAM suggests there’s a significant customer base for the product. However, even a small TAM can be profitable if the product has a strong fit within that industry.

To find your TAM, follow these steps:

• ) Find your average revenue per user (ARPU): Let’s say you have a subscription service that charges a monthly $10 fee and, after a month of operation, you have 1,000 paying users.

Total revenue / total number of users in a set time frame = ARPU

($10/month x 1,000 users) / 1,000 users = $10/month

• ) Estimate the total number of customers in the market: Through market research, you estimate that there are 500,000 prospects in your industry who might benefit from your product.
• ) Solve for TAM.

(Total customers in the market) x (ARPU) = TAM

500,000 users x ($10/month) = $5,000,000/month

From here, you can find what percentage of your TAM is current customers. Reach out to them for feedback on the product or service.

Important note: Ensure your product or service stays relevant to your intended audience. Innovations are created every day. Maintain your product-market fit by aligning your product’s features with changing customer needs.

Here are a couple examples of product-market fit to consider.

Consumer Packaged Goods

• Pain point: Some men prefer a shaven face, while others diligently maintain their beards. However, buying razor blades in stores can get expensive, especially when you need fresh razors weekly for a safe, clean cut. Let’s not forget the inconvenience of traveling to and from the store to search for your ideal razor.
• Target audience: An online consumer packaged goods business decided to tap into the pain points felt by millennial men and other folks tired of expensive and over-hyped razors.
• Solution: The business offers high-quality razor blades delivered directly to subscribers’ doorsteps at a fraction of the cost of traditional brands. They offer a subscription model to promote consistent affordability and customer retention. Their direct-to-consumer shipping cuts out the middlemen, lowering prices and increasing convenience.
• Pain point: You’re out to dinner with friends and the check arrives. You want a convenient and safe way to split the check or pay back your friends that will deposit the cash right into their bank accounts.
• Target audience: Tech-savvy millennials and Gen Z consumers comfortable with mobile technology searching for a seamless way to send and receive payments.
• Solution: A fintech startup creates a social payment app. Users can easily send and receive money with friends and contacts. The app is intuitive with a great user experience.

How businesses find their product-market fit can be broken into two phases: validation and traction.

It will take two or three years to determine true product-market fit. This is because you need to know how many of your customers will renew to make a call. If you’re a SaaS organization with annual contracts, you need your customers to stick around for at least three years to be truly profitable with a significant growth trajectory. Typically, a 5-7% churn rate is considered good. Your churn rate may be higher during the product-market validation stage, and that’s okay.

In addition, you need to have about 100 paying customers at fair-market value. Aim to get at least 10 publishable case studies from these customers.

Don’t let this discourage you. It’s a good thing to have product-market validation. With validation it is possible to seek additional funding to grow your startup. VC’s want to see product-market fit before making an investment. Once they see you have market validation, they will take the risk alongside you.

Congratulations! You made it!  

If you’ve reached this point, you’ve found your product-market fit.

Don’t overlook your own professional development. As your organization grows, so will your responsibilities. This means you simply may not be able to dig into all the weeds you did before. So it’s important for you to learn how to let go, delegate with trust, and realize you cannot do it all. If you are still stuck in the weeds of tinkering with the code, micromanaging every deal in the pipeline, you will not survive. Your company may survive, they will simply do it without you.

Now it’s time to scale from start-up and expansion stage to growth stage.  This means you need to start scaling everything up. Here’s how.

Deepen customer understanding

Increase customer engagement by regularly collecting customer feedback. Stimulate customer success by providing resources, educational content, and active support. As your audience base grows, consider segmenting your user base by demographics, needs, and usage patterns. This allows you to tailor your messaging, features, and support.

Power your growth engine

When you know what is working, make it repeatable and scalable as you prepare to grow. Invest in infrastructure, customer support, and processes to handle an influx of new customers without compromising quality or service. Build up resources for research and development. This allows you to explore new features and business models that can fuel future growth and potentially disrupt the market.

Increase customer loyalty

Finding new customers is important, but keeping them is crucial. Implement strategies such as loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and top-notch customer service to keep users engaged and prevent churn.

Dominate the marketplace

At this point, you should be an expert in three or four verticals with the customers you have. Now you can consider expanding to new markets or user segments. Explore opportunities for product line extensions or complementary offerings that cater to a broader range of customer needs.

Find success with your product-market fit

Product-market fit is crucial to the success of any startup or new product launch. It involves recognizing a challenge in the marketplace and developing a product or service that delivers a solution. You can find your product-market fit by placing your customers at the center of your strategy, conducting marketplace research, and inviting continuous feedback. When a product works — and works well — you’ll retain your current customers. And those customers will become your best sellers.

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Richard has more than 20 years of SaaS experience and teaches revenue teams how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask, and when to do it. Richard’s clients include Zoom, Salesforce, Google Cloud, PagerDuty, DoorDash, Salesloft, and Gainsight. He’s also the co-founder of Surf ... Read More & Sales. Learn more at theharrisconsultinggroup.com.

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1. Start a business by working from home 

Many businesses can be started by working from home, like legendary tech companies that started in someone's garage. Unless you're trying to start a business that requires floorspace and a real-life storefront from Day One, many businesses can be started from a spare room in your house, or from a laptop on your couch. 

The only exception to this is if you need to follow licensing or permitting requirements for your business. Some locations might not allow you to run a commercial food business or other regulated business out of your home. Don't run afoul of any regulations (or break the rules of the lease on your apartment). But for many would-be entrepreneurs, using your home as company headquarters can be the best way to start a business without a lot of start-up capital. 

2. Use a shared workspace to start a business 

When you start a business, one of the best ways to do small business marketing for your company at a low-cost is to network with other business owners. Go find the local community of entrepreneurs where you live. Many cities have startup incubators, small business development centers, co-working spaces, or other shared spaces where people like you are trying to build businesses. 

There might be a membership fee for joining a shared workspace or some amount that you have to pay each month for rent. But using shared workspaces for your business can often be cheaper than paying rent for commercial real estate all on your own. And you might meet some inspiring new peers and colleagues -- you can help each other learn, grow, and succeed.  

3. Start a business with website builders

Unless you want to run your company entirely via social media channels, pretty much every small business needs a website. Your small business website is a must-have home base to connect with customers, sell your products, and be found online. 

Fortunately, you don't need much money to launch a small business website. The best website builders can give you professional-looking website designs for just a few dollars per month. 

4. Use low-cost business marketing software 

Even if your small business is just getting started, or you don't have much money in the bank, you can make your business look bigger and well-established with small business marketing tools. There is a wide range of effective, low-cost, professional-grade marketing software available to help small business owners automate their marketing, find new customers, and close more sales. 

5. Form an LLC or other business entity for (nearly) free 

You might not want to commit to taking this step right away, but if you're serious about making money with your small business idea -- especially if your business might go from a side hustle to a full-time income -- you should form an LLC (limited liability company) or other corporate entity. 

Forming a legal entity for your business (like an LLC) is essential if you want to make your business more legitimate in the eyes of the law and the banking system. Forming an LLC can help you get a business bank account , and potentially save yourself money on taxes. If you use an LLC or other business entity for your small business, this can also help separate your personal finances from your company finances -- and might help protect you from some worst-case scenarios (like a lawsuit). 

The exact cost of forming an LLC varies by state. Check with your state's Secretary of State office, or other state-level regulator that manages business formations. But many states charge less than $100 for forming an LLC or other small business entity. 

Bottom line 

Starting a business doesn't have to cost a lot of money. The most important thing you need is a good idea for how to deliver an in-demand product, or how to deliver a lucrative service that solves problems. 

You can often start by working from home with a low-cost website and easy-to-use marketing tools. Don't let a lack of start-up capital hold you back -- find your target market of customers who are willing to pay for what you offer. 

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Ben Gran is a freelance writer based in Des Moines, Iowa. He has written for regional banks, fintechs, and major financial services companies. Ben is a graduate of Rice University.

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Explained: Why is Sebi probing Quant MF and how will it impact investors?

Sebi's investigation stems from red flags raised by their surveillance system. these flags indicated a potential pattern where trades by certain entities closely mirrored those of quant mutual fund.

• Sebi noticed discrepancies during their regular inspections of Quant MF.
• These concerns could be related to activities like front-running, where someone uses privileged information to make trades before clients, giving themselves an unfair advantage.
• Front-running is a deceptive practice where someone with advanced knowledge of upcoming trades uses that information to make personal securities purchases before executing client orders. This allows them to profit unfairly by manipulating the market.
• Imagine "ABC Mutual Fund" decides to invest heavily in a particular mid-cap stock called "XYZ Ltd." due to its strong growth potential.
• A fund manager at ABC, aware of this upcoming large purchase order, might be tempted to engage in front-running:
• Before placing the official order for ABC Mutual Fund, the fund manager uses their own personal brokerage account to buy a significant amount of XYZ Ltd. shares at the current market price.Once ABC Mutual Fund places its large order, the demand for XYZ Ltd. stock skyrockets due to the sheer volume. This drives the price up significantly .
•  The fund manager then quickly sells their own shares of XYZ Ltd. at the inflated price, profiting from the information they had about the upcoming large purchase by their own fund.
• If the fund managers are involved in this front running scam, they are going to be penalized and will be removed from their current roles, which will raise a question mark on the performance of the funds.
• If this is done by the dealers or other employees who are not engaged in the stock shortlisting exercise. They will also be removed from their current roles. However, this won’t have a significant impact on the fund performance.
• In both of these scenarios, Asset Management Company will adopt strict and advanced measures to ensure this kind of instances do not repeat in future and investors interest is safeguarded.

Who is Sandeep Tandon, what is front running? All about Quant Mutual Fund

Pharma stock rallies 9% as quant smallcap mf buys 0.5% stake via bulk deal, quant money managers gets rbi nod to acquire up to 9.98% in rbl bank, sebi debars tv experts and research analysts for 'stock manipulation', explained: what is pump and dump scheme in stock market and how to be safe, the h-1b shakeup: new, proposed rules target degrees, fees, and indian it, engine protection cover: must-have in areas prone to heavy rains, pr in canada: country announces express entry draw for foreigners, irdai bars unit-linked policies from being advertised as investment product, lifetime free credit card is for a select few: how to get one for yourself.

• Search and Seizure : Sebi conducted raids at Quant's headquarters in Mumbai and the suspected beneficiaries' location in Hyderabad.
• Digital Device Seizure : Sebi allegedly  seized mobile phones and computers to analyze digital communication and potentially uncover suspicious activity.
• To prevent such practices in the future, SEBI recently announced new rules. These rules require mutual fund companies (AMCs) to have better monitoring systems and internal controls. This will help identify suspicious activity and prevent insider trading and front-running. 
• Sebi is also placing more responsibility on AMC management to ensure ethical practices.
• To encourage whistleblowing and transparency, AMCs will need to implement mechanisms for employees to report suspicious activity.
• SEBI already extended insider trading regulations to cover mutual funds.
• This prevents employees from using unpublished price-sensitive information for personal gain.

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First Published: Jun 24 2024 | 11:13 AM IST

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Nvidia Reverses Lower From New High; Is The Stock A Buy Now?

• VIDYA RAMAKRISHNAN
• 03:12 PM ET 06/20/2024

Nvidia ( NVDA ) stock reversed lower Thursday as other chip stocks with artificial intelligence exposure also fell . For investors, the question is whether Nvidia stock is a buy now .

On Tuesday, analysts at Barclays, Susquehanna and TD Cowen increased their price targets on the stock. With investors still loving Nvidia, the stock climbed to a record high Thursday before pulling back.

Barclay's analyst Tom O'Malley and Susquehanna analyst Christopher Rolland raised the price target to 145 from 120, split adjusted. Supply chain checks were reassuring and showed that the transition from Hopper chips to Blackwell will be smooth .

Demand Rising For AI Chips In Servers

Earlier this month, Nvidia said it plans to roll out its most advanced artificial intelligence platform in 2026 . The AI chip leader will also use next generation memory to improve process time.

Also in early June, Foxconn announced its plans to build an advanced computing center in Taiwan using Nvidia's Blackwell chips. Nvidia has teamed up with Foxconn to build data centers to expand into autonomous driving and the electric vehicles market. While leading electric-vehicle player Tesla ( TSLA ) uses Nvidia's chips, it plans to custom build them in-house in the future.

Nvidia Stock Split Takes Effect

Shares started trading on a split-adjusted basis on June 1o.

But the split could go beyond just lowering the price of each share. A lower price would make Nvidia a candidate for the Dow 30, which is a price-weighted index.

Previously, Apple ( AAPL ) and Amazon.com ( AMZN ) joined the Dow after stock splits .

The stock split will build further momentum for the AI chip leader and present what one analyst called a " generational buying opportunity ."

In late May, Nvidia shares soared above the pre-split 1,100 level for the first time after Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk indicated the AI chip leader would be a supplier for his AI startup xAI. Musk's startup raised $6 billion in the latest round of funding over the weekend and it plans to build a supercomputer to support its AI chatbot.

First-Quarter Results Shine

Shares of Nvidia rose to record highs after fiscal first-quarter results beat estimates yet again on May 22. Sales grew 262% to $26 billion while earnings of $6.12 per share were 461% higher.

The AI leader has also teamed up with Microsoft to make the latest AI software available on Nvidia's graphic processing units.

Earlier, Nvidia shares rose past a handle buy point after the Google AI Conference showed different ways in which artificial intelligence will improve search. The search giant also previewed an Android feature that will alert users to scams during a phone call. While Google's tensor processing units are rivals to Nvidia's chips, Nvidia dominates the data center AI chips market.

Ahead of the earnings report, analysts at Baird, Susquehanna and Barclays increased their price targets  on Nvidia.

Nvidia stock holds an Accumulation/Distribution Rating of B- on an A+ to E scale.

AI Products Drive Growth

Nvidia has earned a reputation for being a trailblazer. The company was an early pioneer in the graphics processors that many say drastically improved computer gaming. Along with gaming, Nvidia chips now are used in such industries as health care, automobiles and robotics.

In March 2023, generative AI took a leap forward with OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, Nvidia's AI-capable supercomputer paved the way for the "iPhone moment of AI."

That helped Nvidia turn the tide on its results. It reported three quarters of declining year-over-year sales and four quarters of tapering earnings in late 2022 and early 2023. But then the company achieved record top- and bottom-line growth in the two most recent quarters.

Overall worldwide AI chip revenue will grow 26% from $53.4 billion in 2023 to $67.1 billion in 2024, according to a recent report from research firm Gartner. That is expected to double to $119 billion by 2027.

Nvidia's graphic processing units help accelerate computing in data centers and AI applications.

Top Ratings For Nvidia

Nvidia stock still boasts a best-possible score of 99 on its Composite Rating , EPS Rating and Relative Strength Rating .

Nvidia also is one of the Magnificent Seven stocks that led the 2023 stock rally. The other stocks are Apple, Microsoft , Alphabet ( GOOGL ), Meta Platforms ( META ), Tesla and Amazon.com. Some of these tech titans are customers that rely on Nvidia's advanced chips. Nvidia is also one of the stocks that are forecast to outperform the market in 2024 .

Is Nvidia A Buy?

Chart patterns are a good way of telling when to buy or sell a stock. Nvidia's chart shows the stock has cleared a 92.22 buy point . The stock is already extended, according to IBD MarketSurge.

In 2023, AI stock Nvidia had a huge 239% run and it's up more than 190% so far this year.

Nvidia has climbed above profit-taking targets at 20% and 25% from 92.20 and an alternative buy point at  97.40. It's best now to wait for another base or follow-on buy point to make an initial position in the AI chip stock. It is not a buy right now.

Juan Carlos Arancibia also contributed to this article.

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