Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.
Written by: Debbie Farese5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research
Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.
Enter: Market Research.
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Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.
As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.
By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.
Market research also provides insight into the following:
Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.
As a result, you can make better business decisions.
To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get, consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.
Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.
Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.
That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.
Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.
It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.
Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:
Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).
Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors. The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:
Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.
Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.
Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.
Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX, and which aspects of it could be improved.
Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.
Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.
Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy. It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.
Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition.
Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs, rewards, remarkable customer service).
Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.
Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.
You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.
This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Buyer personas — sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.
Some key characteristics you should be keen on including in your buyer persona are:
The idea is to use your persona(s) as a guideline for how to effectively reach and learn about the real audience members in your industry. If possible, reinforce new personas with concrete data from your already existing audiences.
For example, you can use marketing analytics tools to monitor website traffic and uncover key details, like your visitors’ location, the type of devices they use, through what particular traffic sources they landed on your web pages, and more.
To get started with creating your personas, check out these free templates, as well as this helpful tool.
Now that you know who your buyer personas are, use that information to help you identify a group to engage to conduct your market research with.
This should be a representative sample of your target customers so you can better understand their actual characteristics, challenges, and buying habits.
When choosing who to engage for your market research, you should:
5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research
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List your primary competitors — keep in mind listing the competition isn't always as simple as Company X versus Company Y.
Sometimes, a division of a company might compete with your main product or service, even though that company's brand might put more effort in another area.
For example, Apple is known for its laptops and mobile devices but Apple Music competes with Spotify over its music streaming service.
From a content standpoint, you might compete with a blog, YouTube channel, or similar publication for inbound website visitors — even though their products don't overlap with yours at all.
For example, a toothpaste company might compete with magazines like Health.com or Prevention on certain blog topics related to health and hygiene even though the magazines don't actually sell oral care products.
To identify competitors whose products or services overlap with yours, determine which industry or industries you're pursuing.
Start high-level, using terms like education, construction, media & entertainment, food service, healthcare, retail, financial services, telecommunications, and agriculture.
You can build your list the following ways:
Search engines are your best friends in this area of secondary market research.
To find the online publications with which you compete, take the overarching industry term you identified in the section above, and come up with a handful of more specific industry terms your company identifies with.
A catering business, for example, might generally be a “food service” company, but also consider itself a vendor in “event catering,” “cake catering,” or “baked goods.” Once you have this list, do the following:
Feeling overwhelmed by the notes you took? We suggest looking for common themes that will help you tell a story and create a list of action items.
To make the process easier, try using your favorite presentation software to make a report, as it will make it easy to add in quotes, diagrams, or call clips.
Feel free to add your own flair, but the following outline should help you craft a clear summary:
5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research
