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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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Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry.

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?

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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Home Market Research

Business Research: Methods, Types & Examples

Content Index

Business research: Definition

Quantitative research methods, qualitative research methods, advantages of business research, disadvantages of business research, importance of business research.

Business research is a process of acquiring detailed information on all the areas of business and using such information to maximize the sales and profit of the business. Such a study helps companies determine which product/service is most profitable or in demand. In simple words, it can be stated as the acquisition of information or knowledge for professional or commercial purposes to determine opportunities and goals for a business.

Business research can be done for anything and everything. In general, when people speak about business research design , it means asking research questions to know where the money can be spent to increase sales, profits, or market share. Such research is critical to make wise and informed decisions.

LEARN ABOUT: Research Process Steps

For example: A mobile company wants to launch a new model in the market. But they are not aware of what are the dimensions of a mobile that are in most demand. Hence, the company conducts business research using various methods to gather information, and the same is then evaluated, and conclusions are drawn as to what dimensions are most in demand.

This will enable the researcher to make wise decisions to position his phone at the right price in the market and hence acquire a larger market share.

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

Business research: Types and methodologies

Business research is a part of the business intelligence process. It is usually conducted to determine whether a company can succeed in a new region, to understand its competitors, or simply select a marketing approach for a product. This research can be carried out using steps in qualitative research methods or quantitative research methods.

Quantitative research methods are research methods that deal with numbers. It is a systematic empirical investigation using statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques . Such methods usually start with data collection and then proceed to statistical analysis using various methods. The following are some of the research methods used to carry out business research.

LEARN ABOUT: Data Management Framework

Survey research

Survey research is one of the most widely used methods to gather data, especially for conducting business research. Surveys involve asking various survey questions to a set of audiences through various types like online polls, online surveys, questionnaires, etc. Nowadays, most of the major corporations use this method to gather data and use it to understand the market and make appropriate business decisions.

Various types of surveys, like cross-sectional studies , which need to collect data from a set of audiences at a given point of time, or longitudinal surveys which are needed to collect data from a set of audiences across various time durations in order to understand changes in the respondents’ behavior are used to conduct survey research. With the advancement in technology, surveys can now be sent online through email or social media .

For example: A company wants to know the NPS score for their website i.e. how satisfied are people who are visiting their website. An increase in traffic to their website or the audience spending more time on a website can result in higher rankings on search engines which will enable the company to get more leads as well as increase its visibility.

Hence, the company can ask people who visit their website a few questions through an online survey to understand their opinions or gain feedback and hence make appropriate changes to the website to increase satisfaction.

Learn More:  Business Survey Template

Correlational research

Correlational research is conducted to understand the relationship between two entities and what impact each one of them has on the other. Using mathematical analysis methods, correlational research enables the researcher to correlate two or more variables .

Such research can help understand patterns, relationships, trends, etc. Manipulation of one variable is possible to get the desired results as well. Generally, a conclusion cannot be drawn only on the basis of correlational research.

For example: Research can be conducted to understand the relationship between colors and gender-based audiences. Using such research and identifying the target audience, a company can choose the production of particular color products to be released in the market. This can enable the company to understand the supply and demand requirements of its products.

Causal-Comparative research

Causal-comparative research is a method based on the comparison. It is used to deduce the cause-effect relationship between variables. Sometimes also known as quasi-experimental research, it involves establishing an independent variable and analyzing the effects on the dependent variable.

In such research, data manipulation is not done; however, changes are observed in the variables or groups under the influence of the same changes. Drawing conclusions through such research is a little tricky as independent and dependent variables will always exist in a group. Hence all other parameters have to be taken into consideration before drawing any inferences from the research.

LEARN ABOUT: Causal Research

For example: Research can be conducted to analyze the effect of good educational facilities in rural areas. Such a study can be done to analyze the changes in the group of people from rural areas when they are provided with good educational facilities and before that.

Another example can be to analyze the effect of having dams and how it will affect the farmers or the production of crops in that area.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research trends

Experimental research

Experimental research is based on trying to prove a theory. Such research may be useful in business research as it can let the product company know some behavioral traits of its consumers, which can lead to more revenue. In this method, an experiment is carried out on a set of audiences to observe and later analyze their behavior when impacted by certain parameters.

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Targeting

For example: Experimental research was conducted recently to understand if particular colors have an effect on consumers’ hunger. A set of the audience was then exposed to those particular colors while they were eating, and the subjects were observed. It was seen that certain colors like red or yellow increase hunger.

Hence, such research was a boon to the hospitality industry. You can see many food chains like Mcdonalds, KFC, etc., using such colors in their interiors, brands, as well as packaging.

Another example of inferences drawn from experimental research, which is used widely by most bars/pubs across the world, is that loud music in the workplace or anywhere makes a person drink more in less time. This was proven through experimental research and was a key finding for many business owners across the globe.

Online research / Literature research

Literature research is one of the oldest methods available. It is very economical, and a lot of information can be gathered using such research. Online research or literature research involves gathering information from existing documents and studies, which can be available at Libraries, annual reports, etc.

Nowadays, with the advancement in technology, such research has become even more simple and accessible to everyone. An individual can directly research online for any information that is needed, which will give him in-depth information about the topic or the organization.

Such research is used mostly by marketing and salespeople in the business sector to understand the market or their customers. Such research is carried out using existing information that is available from various sources. However, care has to be taken to validate the sources from where the information is going to be collected.

For example , a salesperson has heard a particular firm is looking for some solution that their company provides. Hence, the salesperson will first search for a decision maker from the company, investigate what department he is from, and understand what the target company is looking for and what they are into.

Using this research, he can cater his solution to be spot on when he pitches it to this client. He can also reach out to the customer directly by finding a means to communicate with him by researching online.’

LEARN ABOUT: 12 Best Tools for Researchers

Qualitative research is a method that has a high importance in business research. Qualitative research involves obtaining data through open-ended conversational means of communication. Such research enables the researcher to not only understand what the audience thinks but also why he thinks it.

In such research, in-depth information can be gathered from the subjects depending on their responses. There are various types of qualitative research methods, such as interviews, focus groups, ethnographic research, content analysis, and case study research, that are widely used.

Such methods are of very high importance in business research as they enable the researcher to understand the consumer. What motivates the consumer to buy and what does not is what will lead to higher sales, and that is the prime objective for any business.

Following are a few methods that are widely used in today’s world by most businesses.

Interviews are somewhat similar to surveys, like sometimes they may have the same types of questions used. The difference is that the respondent can answer these open-ended questions at length, and the direction of the conversation or the questions being asked can be changed depending on the response of the subject.

Such a method usually gives the researcher detailed information about the perspective or opinions of its subject. Carrying out interviews with subject matter experts can also give important information critical to some businesses.

For example: An interview was conducted by a telecom manufacturer with a group of women to understand why they have less number of female customers. After interviewing them, the researcher understood that there were fewer feminine colors in some of the models, and females preferred not to purchase them.

Such information can be critical to a business such as a  telecom manufacturer and hence it can be used to increase its market share by targeting women customers by launching some feminine colors in the market.

Another example would be to interview a subject matter expert in social media marketing. Such an interview can enable a researcher to understand why certain types of social media advertising strategies work for a company and why some of them don’t.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Interview

Focus groups

Focus groups are a set of individuals selected specifically to understand their opinions and behaviors. It is usually a small set of a group that is selected keeping in mind the parameters for their target market audience to discuss a particular product or service. Such a method enables a researcher with a larger sample than the interview or a case study while taking advantage of conversational communication.

Focus group is also one of the best examples of qualitative data in education . Nowadays, focus groups can be sent online surveys as well to collect data and answer why, what, and how questions. Such a method is very crucial to test new concepts or products before they are launched in the market.

For example: Research is conducted with a focus group to understand what dimension of screen size is preferred most by the current target market. Such a method can enable a researcher to dig deeper if the target market focuses more on the screen size, features, or colors of the phone. Using this data, a company can make wise decisions about its product line and secure a higher market share.

Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research is one of the most challenging research but can give extremely precise results. Such research is used quite rarely, as it is time-consuming and can be expensive as well. It involves the researcher adapting to the natural environment and observing its target audience to collect data. Such a method is generally used to understand cultures, challenges, or other things that can occur in that particular setting.

For example: The world-renowned show “Undercover Boss” would be an apt example of how ethnographic research can be used in businesses. In this show, the senior management of a large organization works in his own company as a regular employee to understand what improvements can be made, what is the culture in the organization, and to identify hard-working employees and reward them.

It can be seen that the researcher had to spend a good amount of time in the natural setting of the employees and adapt to their ways and processes. While observing in this setting, the researcher could find out the information he needed firsthand without losing any information or any bias and improve certain things that would impact his business.

LEARN ABOUT:   Workforce Planning Model

Case study research

Case study research is one of the most important in business research. It is also used as marketing collateral by most businesses to land up more clients. Case study research is conducted to assess customer satisfaction and document the challenges that were faced and the solutions that the firm gave them.

These inferences are made to point out the benefits that the customer enjoyed for choosing their specific firm. Such research is widely used in other fields like education, social sciences, and similar. Case studies are provided by businesses to new clients to showcase their capabilities, and hence such research plays a crucial role in the business sector.

For example: A services company has provided a testing solution to one of its clients. A case study research is conducted to find out what were the challenges faced during the project, what was the scope of their work, what objective was to be achieved, and what solutions were given to tackle the challenges.

The study can end with the benefits that the company provided through its solutions, like reduced time to test batches, easy implementation or integration of the system, or even cost reduction. Such a study showcases the capability of the company, and hence it can be stated as empirical evidence of the new prospect.

Website visitor profiling/research

Website intercept surveys or website visitor profiling/research is something new that has come up and is quite helpful in the business sector. It is an innovative approach to collect direct feedback from your website visitors using surveys. In recent times a lot of business generation happens online, and hence it is important to understand the visitors of your website as they are your potential customers.

Collecting feedback is critical to any business, as without understanding a customer, no business can be successful. A company has to keep its customers satisfied and try to make them loyal customers in order to stay on top.

A website intercept survey is an online survey that allows you to target visitors to understand their intent and collect feedback to evaluate the customers’ online experience. Information like visitor intention, behavior path, and satisfaction with the overall website can be collected using this.

Depending on what information a company is looking for, multiple forms of website intercept surveys can be used to gather responses. Some of the popular ones are Pop-ups, also called Modal boxes, and on-page surveys.

For example: A prospective customer is looking for a particular product that a company is selling. Once he is directed to the website, an intercept survey will start noting his intent and path. Once the transaction has been made, a pop-up or an on-page survey is provided to the customer to rate the website.

Such research enables the researcher to put this data to good use and hence understand the customers’ intent and path and improve any parts of the website depending on the responses, which in turn would lead to satisfied customers and hence, higher revenues and market share.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Research Questions and Questionnaires

• Business research helps to identify opportunities and threats.
• It helps identify research problems , and using this information, wise decisions can be made to tackle the issue appropriately.
• It helps to understand customers better and hence can be useful to communicate better with the customers or stakeholders.
• Risks and uncertainties can be minimized by conducting business research in advance.
• Financial outcomes and investments that will be needed can be planned effectively using business research.
• Such research can help track competition in the business sector.
• Business research can enable a company to make wise decisions as to where to spend and how much.
• Business research can enable a company to stay up-to-date with the market and its trends, and appropriate innovations can be made to stay ahead in the game.
• Business research helps to measure reputation management
• Business research can be a high-cost affair
• Most of the time, business research is based on assumptions
• Business research can be time-consuming
• Business research can sometimes give you inaccurate information because of a biased population or a small focus group.
• Business research results can quickly become obsolete because of the fast-changing markets

Business research is one of the most effective ways to understand customers, the market, and competitors. Such research helps companies to understand the demand and supply of the market. Using such research will help businesses reduce costs and create solutions or products that are targeted to the demand in the market and the correct audience.

In-house business research can enable senior management to build an effective team or train or mentor when needed. Business research enables the company to track its competitors and hence can give you the upper hand to stay ahead of them.

Failures can be avoided by conducting such research as it can give the researcher an idea if the time is right to launch its product/solution and also if the audience is right. It will help understand the brand value and measure customer satisfaction which is essential to continuously innovate and meet customer demands.

This will help the company grow its revenue and market share. Business research also helps recruit ideal candidates for various roles in the company. By conducting such research, a company can carry out a SWOT analysis , i.e. understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. With the help of this information, wise decisions can be made to ensure business success.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market research industry

Business research is the first step that any business owner needs to set up his business to survive or to excel in the market. The main reason why such research is of utmost importance is that it helps businesses to grow in terms of revenue, market share, and brand value.

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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.

Access your free e-book today.

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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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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Blog / Small business tips / How to conduct market research for your business idea

How to conduct market research for your business idea

If you don’t know who you’re selling to, you may miss important acquisition opportunities. Market research helps you to uncover key information about your target market so that you can reach, engage and ultimately convert your ideal customers into buyers.

The internet has made it easy for customers to find out information about brands online. The same is true for small business owners looking to figure out how to do market research for a business idea .

Market research will help you to discover who your ideal customers are, where they hang out online or in-person and how and why they make purchasing decisions. Armed with this information, you can get in front of your ideal audience in the right place at the right time, thus grabbing their attention and motivating buying behaviour.

In this article, we’ll explain what market research is and why it’s important, outline several types of market research and detail how to do your own market research to boost reach, drive conversions and increase revenue.

Top Tip: Conducting market research is a key part of ensuring that your start-up idea is something that people actually want and/or need. Once you’ve finished your research, you’ll need to get into the nitty gritty of creating a brand for your business, choosing your company formation structure, educating yourself on business laws and regulation, sourcing funding (if necessary), and marketing your business. You can learn how to do all of this and more in our guide to 10 effective steps to start your business in the UK 📌. 

Table of contents:

What is market research.

• Why is market research valuable? 

Types of market research

• How to conduct market research in 5 steps

5 common market research questions

Wrapping up.

Market research is the process of identifying information about your target industry as well as your target customers. 

When starting a new business, it will help you to answer the following questions:

• Demand: Is there a desire or need for your product or service? If so, what problem or pain points does your offering solve and how can you better align it to suit this demand? 
• Market saturation: How many similar options are already available to consumers?  Further, what are those businesses who are already in the space doing well and where are they missing opportunities? What can you do differently to fill in these gaps?
• Market size: How many people would be interested in your value proposition? This will help you to forecast your startup budget or, for businesses that are post-launch, this new product or service budget. From there, you can also predict revenue and profitability.
• Economic indicators: What’s the income range and employment rate of your target audience? This is the first step in customer research and it will help you to create detailed customer personas (more on these later on).
• Location: Where do your customers live and hang out, both geographically and online, and where and how can your business reach them?
• Pricing: What do potential customers pay to your competitors? This will help you to figure out exactly how to price your products or services so that you can stay competitive and achieve profitable markups. 

The results from this research will help you tailor your marketing efforts and brand messaging to better engage your audience. And, it will help you to design and package your product or services in a way that aligns with your audience’s needs. All of this leads to better conversion rates, sales and revenue. 

Why is market research valuable?

Understanding your customers is the most effective way to drive engagement and increase loyalty. Knowing their desires, needs and pain points helps you create a better user experience and cater to audience demand.

Market research is invaluable because it gives you compelling insights into user behaviour. While data and analytics give you a high-level overview of behaviours, market research goes a step deeper and uncovers what drives user intent. If you can unearth user intent, you can speak directly to your consumer with personalised messaging that motivates them to take action.

Market research also helps you uncover industry trends, ensuring you’re staying in line with what customers want and need out of similar products or services within the same industry. 

Competitor research like this helps you figure out what your competitors are doing well and where there are gaps in their strategy that you can fill. Plus, getting a sense of small business trends in your target market will help you to understand how they will impact your revenue and profits. 

There are two main types of market research methods: primary and secondary. Primary research entails speaking directly to the source, or direct-to-consumer, and secondary research is the act of gathering data from existing third-party sources. 

Both main types of research utilise qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.

Qualitative research focuses on data from first-hand observations, such as interviews, focus groups and questionnaires.

Quantitative market research , on the other hand, focuses on collecting and analysing big data from larger sample sizes, such as demographics, spending behaviour and opt-in rates.

To conduct the most well-rounded market research, you should incorporate both types of research and methodologies. It’s easier to start with secondary research and move into primary research once you have an idea of general industry and consumer trends. As secondary research has already been compiled and published by others, it’s less time-consuming and often cheaper than primary research. 

If you’re starting a new business, whether a full-time endeavour or a side business for extra income, this market research will be critical when creating a market analysis section in your business plan . Showcasing exactly what your competitors are doing, how your business will fill industry voids and your plan to attract your target audience will help to generate interest in your business idea.

Let’s dive into the two types of market research in more detail.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is third-party data that gives you a high-level overview of your target market. This data can be found in trend reports, market statistics, industry content, your own sales data if your business is post-launch, studies by government agencies, trade associates or other businesses. 

There are two main ways to access secondary research data.

• Public Sources: These include government statistics, academic databases, news sources, published books, published studies, and so on. Publicly sourced information is often free and you can find it online or in libraries. Such sources in the UK include the Office for National Statistics , the British Chambers of Commerce and the Federation of Small Businesses and more. 
• Commercial Sources: These sources are often in the form of statistics from private-groups that you have to pay money to gain access to. Such companies include Forrester , Gartner , International Data Corporation (IDC) , Everest Group , Mintel , Euromonitor , YouGov and more. You can also use online sources (both free and paid) that analyse online behaviour and trends like Google Trends , Product Hunt , Social Mention and SimilarWeb .

Primary Research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself in order to gather more detailed information about your specific target audience. You should begin primary research only after you’ve completed secondary research as it’s meant to fill any missed gaps from third-party sources.

There are three main ways to do primary research.

• Exploratory research: This involves talking directly with people. You should have an initial sense of your target audience from your secondary research, so this is the first time you’ll be communicating directly with them. Start with broad, open-ended interviews in an attempt to narrow down this group into a more niche audience.
• Specific Research: Once you’ve generated this smaller, more niche group, use the same methods that you applied to your exploratory research. But this time, ask more specific questions to get more valuable and intent-driven answers. 
• Internal Sources: If you’ve already launched your business and are conducting market research to see if the industry has changed since launch, collaborate in-house to see what your existing customers are saying. What were their challenges and pain points at launch and how have they changed? What are your customer’s biggest needs now? What do they say you can be doing better? The idea is to learn from and improve upon your original research by combining historical with updated customer-driven insights. 

How to conduct market research

There’s no one specific way to do market research. Generally, you want to start broad and narrow your research as you learn more. 

Once complete, you should be able to define your buyer persona, know their specific needs and pain points, understand how your competitors are positioning themselves in the market and identify your opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

Here are five steps you can follow to organise and optimise your market research process.

1. Define your buyer persona

The key to driving brand engagement and purchasing behaviour is the ability to connect with your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll be promoting your product or service to a wide array of potentially uninterested parties, wasting valuable time and money.

Defining your target audience is the first step of your primary research efforts. Once you understand who you are selling to and what their interests are, you can and subsequently reach out directly via your secondary research initiative (we will explain how to do this in step 2 below). 

From there, you can begin to create a buyer persona. Use your target audience research to create buyer personas that answer the following questions:

• Who are your customers and why are they interested in buying your product or service?
• What characteristics, interests, desires, pain points and needs do they share?
• Where do they live?
• How old are they?
• What is their education level?
• What is their income range?
• Which types of websites do they frequently visit?
• Where do they currently buy similar products?
• Which languages do they speak?
• What industry do they work in?

Use the aforementioned public and commercial resources to gather and compile this data. Once complete, you can build your customer persona. This step is important because you can distribute a detailed, shareable document amongst your team or potential investors to guarantee everybody clearly understands your target audience. 

You can use online tools like HubSpot’s customer persona creator , Xtensio , Userforge or Smaply to build basic buyer personas quickly. 

Top Tip: This is the first step in building a marketing strategy that will help you gain traction and boost brand awareness. To learn more about how to attract your ideal audience, read our guide on how to build a go-to-market strategy .

2. Engage with a small target sample

Now that you’ve completed your initial customer personas and market research, it’s time to dive deeper into your audience’s behaviours. This is where your secondary research efforts come into play.

You can reach out to your target audience in several ways across many mediums. Remember to begin with exploratory research by asking open-ended questions and follow up with specific research that unveils invaluable insights. 

• Surveys: Use online surveys to ask a group of people a set of questions. Often, an online survey is delivered via email, but it can also be posted on social media platforms or online forums. Surveys are easy and cheap to conduct, the results come in quickly and the data is straightforward to analyse. You can use platforms like Survey Monkey , JotForm , Google Forms , LimeSurvey and more.   
• Emails: Send a cold email asking if they will be open to answering some of your questions. You can attach your survey to this email and/or use it as a platform to schedule a more in-depth phone interview. 
• Phone calls: Phone interviews allow you to speak directly with your potential customers. Use their answers to formulate your follow up questions to dive deeper into intent and expose insightful trends. 
• Face-to-face: This will be exactly the same as the phone interview, but one-on-one in person. In-person or interviews via video conferencing can be more valuable than phone calls as they give you the opportunity to see body language. Sometimes, you can learn more about what a person is feeling based on their body language rather than their words. Observation is key in face-to-face meetings.
• Focus groups: Focus groups bring together a group of selected participants to answer questions in real-time. Usually, a trained moderator will lead the discussion and ask questions about your product or service, user experience, user expectations, competitor products or services, marketing and branding messaging and more. 
• Call for participants via social media: Post on social media platforms to generate interest about participating in any of the above methods. Make sure you are posting your questions in the places that your target audience hangs out online, such as LinkedIn , Facebook groups, Twitter , Reddit , and so on, so that you attract people that align with your unique customer personas.
• Leverage your network to get participants: Apply the same methodology as your social media call for participants when leveraging your own network. Reach out to friends, former coworkers, family members and more to see who among them fits into your customer persona and is willing to participate.

3. Identify competitors

Gathering information about your competitors helps you figure out who their audience is, how they communicate with them and how they position themselves in the marketplace. This will help you to learn from their successes and failures so that you can replicate the fruitful tactics and avoid messaging or branding that received negative feedback.

There are two types of competitors to identify.

• Industry competitors: Industry competitors are those that saturate your target marketplace. For example, if you are selling a SaaS video conferencing tool, your competitors will be businesses like Zoom or GoToMeeting.
• Content competitors: Content competitors may not be competing in terms of the products or services they sell, but they are competing in terms of content creation. For example, if you run a leadership training business, a content competitor will be a business that creates content about how to be a great leader. This content competitor could run a finance business, a retreat business, a SaaS business or so on, but because they create content that targets similar keywords, they are a competitor in that specific space. 

It’s important to understand as much as you can about your competitors so that you can make better decisions. Learn everything about your competitor’s audience and apply those insights to your branding and marketing strategy.

4. Analyse data

You will amass a ton of information throughout this process. Make sure that you are using a system that helps you organise it so that it doesn’t become overwhelming.

Here are some ideas on how to do this:

• Sort your data into groups to better understand the big picture
• Create several distinct customer personas if you learn that you have more than one audience type
• Build a matrix chart to see how often pain points, desires, needs and attributes overlap 
• Generate a customer journey map to outline the journey from awareness to purchase, using free or paid tools like LucidChart , HubSpot or Visual Paradigm .

Once organised, you can draw meaningful insights from your data collection. This will help you to further shape your offering and messaging. 

5. Summarise findings

Summarise your findings in a simple and shareable format. Draw inspiration from the common themes you discovered to help tell a story about your target audience. 

This will guide future marketing and branding efforts and help your team and potential investors develop a clear picture of who your ideal audience is in their minds.

Add in quotes, diagrams, call clips, video clips and more to amplify the audience’s voice. Outline who you talked to, common themes and if you will stay on course or pivot based on any common feedback threads. End the summary with immediate next steps and action items.

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The most effective questions get to the heart of the matter and help you obtain invaluable insights. These insights will affect who you target, where you position your brand, what your messaging will be, what voice and tone you will use and much more. 

Here are some common market research questions.

1. What do you look for in a brand?

This will help you figure out what matters the most, at a high-level. For example, does your audience care about engaging with brands that support a good cause, or do they prioritise quality above all?

From this answer, you’ll have a better idea of what to include in your messaging. If your audience prefers brands that support a good cause, you can forge partnerships with nonprofits or charities and commit to donating a portion of your proceeds to them. Then, add this messaging on your website or in your content to make sure your audience is aware of your stance.

2. What are the reasons or actions that drive you to make a purchase?

Based on that answer, you can ask more specific follow up questions such as:

• Do you prefer testing products with free trials, or are explainer videos sufficient to pique your interest? 
• Do you prefer when a company is active on social media or do you not care so much?
• How much does a business’s customer service response influence your brand loyalty?

Use these answers to uncover desires, expectations and experiences that influence your focus in these areas.

3. What problem were you trying to solve or what goal were you trying to achieve when you purchased from [COMPETITOR]?

This answer will help you understand your competitor’s audience to see what their intent was before making a purchase. You can use these insights to position your business as a better solution to their problems.

4. What challenge(s) at work has [COMPETITOR’S] solution failed to solve?

From this answer, you can identify pain points that your competitors have yet to build a solution to. Ideally, you can get to market before them and present your product or services as the solution that will fix their ongoing problem.

5. What does your day look like?

While broad and open-ended, this question will help you learn more about your target audience in general. You need to not only understand what drives their buying behaviour, but who they are in a larger sense. 

This will help you build empathy for your audience, which will only serve to help you when speaking directly to them and personalising messaging. Plus, you may uncover something you didn’t previously know about their buying habits from this answer.

Market research is crucial in order to identify, understand and segment your target audience. Further, it allows you to gain a high-level understanding of your target industry as a whole, giving you the data you need to competitively price your products and forecast revenue.

Without market research, you will be selling blind. The most successful companies not only understand their place in the market and exactly who they are selling to, but how and where to target them. 

Plus, they know why their target audience makes certain purchasing decisions, helping them to skew their messaging in a way that captivates, engages and produces results.

Photo by Startup Stock Photos, published on Pexels

Valentine Hutchings

Head of Community and small business enthusiast

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How to Do Market Research: A Definitive Guide

Article Snapshot

Section 1: introduction to market research.

Before we dive into the intricacies of market research, let's first establish a solid understanding of what it entails. Market research is the systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about a target market or industry. It involves gathering information about potential customers, their needs and preferences, as well as assessing the overall market landscape and identifying opportunities for growth.

Market research plays a vital role in shaping business strategies and decision-making processes. It helps businesses identify market trends, evaluate product or service viability, understand customer behavior, and develop effective marketing campaigns. By leveraging market research, companies can minimize risks, optimize resources, and increase their chances of success.

Section 2: Preparing for Market Research

Before embarking on any market research endeavor, it is crucial to establish clear objectives and determine the appropriate research methodology. In this section, we will guide you through the essential steps of preparing for market research.

Defining Research Objectives

The first step in any market research project is to define clear research objectives. These objectives should align with your business goals and provide a framework for your research efforts. Whether you aim to understand customer satisfaction, evaluate market potential for a new product, or analyze competitor strategies, defining specific and measurable objectives is essential to ensure the research is focused and effective.

Choosing the Right Research Methodology

Once you have defined your research objectives, the next step is to select the most appropriate research methodology. There are various methodologies available, each with its strengths and limitations. Qualitative research methods, such as interviews and focus groups, allow for in-depth exploration of customer opinions and perceptions. On the other hand, quantitative research methods, like surveys and data analysis, provide statistical insights and numerical data.

Creating a Research Plan

To ensure the success of your market research endeavor, it is essential to develop a comprehensive research plan. A research plan outlines the steps, timeline, budget, and resources required for your market research project. By creating a well-structured plan, you can effectively manage your research activities, allocate resources efficiently, and stay on track to achieve your research objectives.

Section 3: Conducting Primary Market Research

Primary market research involves collecting firsthand data directly from your target audience. This section will explore various primary research methods and provide insights into how to conduct effective primary market research.

Survey Research

Surveys are a popular and effective method for gathering primary research data. They allow businesses to collect a large volume of data from a diverse audience. Designing effective survey questions, selecting appropriate survey administration methods, and maximizing response rates are crucial elements to consider when conducting survey research.

Interviews and Focus Groups

Interviews and focus groups offer a more in-depth understanding of customer opinions and behaviors. By engaging directly with participants, businesses can explore complex topics and gain valuable insights. This section will cover techniques for conducting successful interviews and focus groups, as well as analyzing and interpreting the qualitative data obtained.

Observational Research

Observational research involves observing and analyzing consumer behavior in real-life situations. This method provides rich insights into consumer interactions, preferences, and decision-making processes. We will discuss different types of observational research and address ethical considerations associated with this methodology.

Section 4: Gathering and Analyzing Secondary Market Research

Secondary market research involves gathering existing data and information from various sources. This section will explore reliable sources for secondary research data, data collection methods, and techniques for analyzing and interpreting secondary research findings.

Sources of Secondary Research Data

Identifying reputable sources for secondary market research data is crucial for obtaining accurate and reliable information. We will explore a wide range of sources, including market research firms, industry reports, government publications, and online databases.

Data Collection and Analysis

Once you have gathered the secondary research data, the next step is to organize and analyze it effectively. This section will provide insights into various data collection methods and techniques for analyzing and interpreting secondary research findings. We will also discuss the utilization of data visualization tools to present data in a visually appealing and informative manner.

Section 5: Utilizing Market Research Findings

Market research findings hold immense value only when they are effectively utilized to drive business growth. In this section, we will explore how to interpret and apply research findings, communicate results, and continually monitor and evaluate market research efforts.

Interpreting and Applying Research Findings

Interpreting research findings accurately is vital to extract actionable insights. We will discuss techniques and strategies for interpreting research findings and applying them to make informed business decisions. Real-world case studies will be presented to illustrate the practical application of market research findings.

Communicating Research Results

Effectively communicating research results is essential for ensuring that the insights gained are understood and utilized by key stakeholders. This section will provide tips for creating visually appealing and informative research reports and delivering impactful presentations to stakeholders and decision-makers.

Monitoring and Evaluating Market Research

Market research is an ongoing process, and continuous monitoring and evaluation are crucial to stay abreast of market trends and changes. We will explore strategies for tracking market dynamics, monitoring the effectiveness of research efforts, and adjusting research strategies based on feedback and evolving market conditions.

Understanding the Importance of Market Research

Market research is an indispensable component of any successful business strategy. It provides crucial insights into customer behavior, market trends, and competitor analysis, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and gain a competitive edge. In this section, we will explore the significance of market research and its role in driving business success.

The Value of Market Research

Market research serves as a guiding light for businesses, helping them navigate the complex landscape of consumer demands and market dynamics. By conducting thorough research, businesses can gain a deep understanding of their target audience, identify unmet needs, and develop products or services that truly resonate with their customers.

One of the primary benefits of market research is its ability to minimize risk. By gathering data and insights before launching a new product or expanding into a new market, businesses can assess market potential, evaluate customer preferences, and anticipate potential challenges. This proactive approach reduces the likelihood of costly mistakes and increases the chances of success.

Moreover, market research plays a vital role in identifying and capitalizing on market opportunities. By staying attuned to market trends, businesses can spot emerging consumer needs, industry shifts, and technological advancements. Armed with this knowledge, they can adapt their strategies, develop innovative solutions, and stay ahead of the competition.

Market research also provides a solid foundation for effective marketing campaigns. By understanding the target audience's preferences, motivations, and pain points, businesses can tailor their messaging, positioning, and communication channels to effectively reach and engage their customers. This targeted approach not only increases customer acquisition but also enhances customer loyalty and brand advocacy.

The Risks of Neglecting Market Research

Failing to conduct market research can have dire consequences for businesses. Without a deep understanding of their target audience, businesses risk developing products or services that do not meet customer needs or preferences. This can lead to low customer satisfaction, decreased sales, and ultimately, business failure.

Additionally, neglecting market research can result in missed opportunities. In a rapidly evolving marketplace, failing to track consumer trends, competitor strategies, and industry shifts can leave businesses lagging behind. By the time they realize the need for change, it may be too late to catch up, leading to lost market share and diminished competitiveness.

Furthermore, without market research, businesses may struggle to effectively allocate their resources. They may invest in marketing campaigns that do not resonate with their target audience or allocate resources to markets with limited potential. This misalignment of resources can drain finances and hinder overall business growth.

The Role of Market Research in Decision-Making

Market research serves as a compass for decision-making, guiding businesses in making strategic choices based on data-driven insights. Whether it is launching a new product, entering a new market, or adjusting pricing strategies, market research provides the necessary information to make informed decisions.

By conducting market research, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their target audience's preferences, needs, and behaviors. This knowledge allows them to develop products or services that align with customer expectations, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.

Market research also empowers businesses to assess the competitive landscape. By studying competitors' strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning, businesses can identify gaps and opportunities for differentiation. This knowledge enables them to develop unique value propositions and competitive strategies that set them apart from their rivals.

Additionally, market research helps businesses evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. By measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) and analyzing consumer responses, businesses can identify areas for improvement and refine their marketing strategies. This iterative approach ensures that marketing budgets are optimized and yields the highest return on investment (ROI).

In conclusion, market research is an invaluable tool for businesses aiming to thrive in a competitive marketplace. By understanding the importance of market research and leveraging its insights, businesses can make informed decisions, minimize risks, seize opportunities, and ultimately drive sustainable growth. Now that we have established the significance of market research, let's delve into the practical steps of preparing for and conducting market research.

Preparing for Market Research

Before diving into market research, it is crucial to lay a solid foundation by preparing for the research process. This section will explore the essential steps involved in preparing for market research, including defining research objectives, selecting the appropriate research methodology, and creating a comprehensive research plan.

Clearly defining research objectives is the cornerstone of any successful market research project. Research objectives serve as guiding principles that outline the specific goals and outcomes you hope to achieve through your research efforts. These objectives should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

When defining your research objectives, consider what you aim to accomplish. Are you seeking to understand customer preferences for a new product? Do you want to assess market potential for a specific geographic region? Defining clear and focused research objectives will help you stay on track and ensure that your research efforts yield actionable insights.

Once you have defined your research objectives, the next step is to select the most appropriate research methodology. Different research methodologies offer unique advantages and are suited for different research objectives.

Qualitative research methods, such as interviews and focus groups, provide in-depth insights into customer opinions, attitudes, and perceptions. These methods allow for rich, nuanced data collection and are particularly useful for exploring complex topics or understanding the underlying motivations and emotions driving consumer behavior.

Quantitative research methods, on the other hand, involve the collection and analysis of numerical data. Surveys and questionnaires are common quantitative research tools that allow for large-scale data collection. These methods are useful for measuring customer satisfaction, analyzing customer preferences, and identifying statistical relationships between variables.

It's important to choose a research methodology that aligns with your research objectives, budget, and time constraints. Consider the advantages and limitations of each methodology and select the one that will provide the most relevant and accurate data for your specific research needs.

A well-structured research plan is essential for conducting market research efficiently and effectively. A research plan serves as a roadmap that outlines the steps, timeline, budget, and resources required for your research project.

By creating a comprehensive research plan, you can ensure that your market research efforts are well-organized, efficient, and yield valuable insights. The plan will also serve as a reference point to track progress and make adjustments as needed throughout the research process.

Now that you understand the importance of preparing for market research, we will delve into the practicalities of conducting primary market research in the next section.

Conducting Primary Market Research

Survey research is one of the most commonly used methods for collecting primary research data. Surveys allow businesses to gather a large volume of data from a diverse audience efficiently. They can be conducted through various channels, including online surveys, phone interviews, or in-person questionnaires.

When designing a survey, it is important to carefully craft the survey questions to ensure they are clear, unbiased, and relevant to the research objectives. Use a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. Open-ended questions provide respondents with the opportunity to express their opinions and provide detailed feedback, while closed-ended questions offer predefined response choices that can be easily analyzed.

To maximize response rates, it is essential to carefully consider the survey administration method. Online surveys are cost-effective and convenient, allowing respondents to complete the survey at their convenience. Phone interviews provide a personal touch and allow for follow-up questions, while in-person questionnaires enable businesses to interact directly with respondents. Choosing the appropriate survey administration method depends on factors such as target audience demographics, research objectives, and available resources.

Additionally, it is crucial to consider respondent fatigue and survey length. Long and tedious surveys can lead to decreased response rates and inaccuracies in responses. Keep the survey concise, focused, and engaging to ensure higher participation and reliable data.

Interviews and focus groups provide valuable qualitative insights into consumer opinions, preferences, and behaviors. These methods allow businesses to engage directly with participants and gain a deeper understanding of their thoughts and motivations.

Interviews can be conducted in-person, over the phone, or through video calls. They provide an opportunity to ask probing questions, delve into specific topics, and explore in-depth responses. The interviewer can adapt the questioning based on the participant's responses, allowing for a dynamic and personalized conversation.

Focus groups involve bringing together a small group of individuals to discuss a specific topic or product. This method allows participants to interact with one another, share their opinions, and generate insights through group discussions. Focus groups provide a unique perspective by capturing the collective thoughts and experiences of the participants.

To conduct successful interviews and focus groups, it is essential to carefully plan the session. Develop a discussion guide or interview script that includes a set of key questions or topics to cover. This will ensure consistency and enable comparability across interviews or focus groups. Actively listen to participants, encourage open and honest responses, and create a comfortable environment for sharing opinions.

Qualitative data obtained from interviews and focus groups require careful analysis. Use techniques such as thematic analysis or coding to identify recurring themes, patterns, and insights. These qualitative insights can provide valuable context and depth to complement quantitative data collected through surveys or other methods.

Observational research involves observing and analyzing consumer behavior in real-life settings. This method allows businesses to gain insights into consumer interactions, preferences, and decision-making processes. It can be particularly useful in retail environments, public spaces, or during product usage.

Participant observation involves immersing oneself in the context being studied and actively participating in the observed activities. This method allows researchers to gain firsthand experience and capture the nuances of behavior and interactions. Non-participant observation, on the other hand, involves observing from a distance without directly engaging with the participants. This method allows for more objective observations and avoids potential biases that may arise from researcher-participant interaction.

When conducting observational research, it is essential to consider ethical considerations and obtain necessary permissions, especially in public spaces or when observing sensitive behavior. Maintain confidentiality and anonymity of participants and ensure that the research does not infringe upon their privacy.

Observational research often involves recording observations through notes, photographs, or video recordings. These records serve as valuable data for analysis and interpretation. Analyze the collected data by identifying patterns, behaviors, and trends. Observational research findings can be used to supplement and validate other primary research methods, providing a comprehensive understanding of consumer behavior.

As we have explored the various primary research methods, it is important to note that choosing the appropriate method depends on the research objectives, target audience, available resources, and the depth of insights required. By carefully selecting and conducting primary market research methods, businesses can uncover valuable insights about their target audience, preferences, and behaviors.

Gathering and Analyzing Secondary Market Research

While primary market research provides valuable firsthand data, secondary market research involves gathering existing data and information from various sources. This section will explore the sources of secondary research data and provide insights into data collection methods and techniques for analyzing and interpreting secondary research findings.

Secondary market research relies on existing data and information that has been collected by others. There are various sources from which businesses can gather secondary research data, including:

When gathering secondary research data, it is crucial to consider the reliability and credibility of the sources. Ensure that the data comes from reputable sources and is up-to-date. Cross-referencing information from multiple sources can help validate the accuracy and consistency of the data.

Once you have gathered the relevant secondary research data, the next step is to organize and analyze it effectively. The process of data collection and analysis involves several key steps:

Secondary research findings should be interpreted and used in conjunction with primary research data to gain a comprehensive understanding of the market landscape. Combining primary and secondary research data allows for triangulation, validation, and a more holistic analysis of the research objectives.

By effectively gathering and analyzing secondary research data, businesses can gain valuable insights into market trends, consumer behavior, and industry dynamics. These insights serve as a foundation for informed decision-making, strategy formulation, and staying ahead of the competition.

Utilizing Market Research Findings

Interpreting and analyzing research findings is a critical step in extracting actionable insights that can drive business decisions. Here are some key considerations when interpreting and applying research findings:

Remember that market research is an iterative process, and new insights may emerge as you delve deeper into the data. Continuously revisit and refine your interpretation of the research findings to ensure that you capture the most accurate and valuable insights.

Effectively communicating research results is crucial to ensure that the insights gained are understood and utilized by key stakeholders. Here are some tips for communicating research results:

Market research is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and evaluation. Here are some key aspects to consider when monitoring and evaluating market research efforts:

By monitoring and evaluating market research efforts, you can ensure that the insights gained are effectively utilized and that your research strategies remain aligned with the evolving market landscape.

In conclusion, effectively utilizing market research findings is essential for driving business growth and staying ahead of the competition. By interpreting and applying research findings, communicating results effectively, and continuously monitoring and evaluating research efforts, businesses can make informed decisions, improve customer experiences, and seize market opportunities.

Conclusion: The Power of Market Research

Market research is a powerful tool that empowers businesses to make informed decisions, understand their target audience, and gain a competitive edge. Throughout this comprehensive guide, we have explored the various aspects of market research, from understanding its importance to conducting primary and secondary research, and utilizing research findings effectively. Now, let's recap the key points and emphasize the power of market research in driving business success.

Market research serves as a compass for businesses, guiding them through the complex landscape of consumer demands, market trends, and competitor analysis. By conducting thorough research, businesses can gain valuable insights into their target audience, identify market opportunities, and mitigate risks. Market research enables businesses to make informed decisions, optimize resources, and drive sustainable growth.

One of the primary benefits of market research is its ability to provide a deep understanding of customer preferences and needs. By gaining insights into customer behavior, businesses can develop products and services that truly resonate with their target audience, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Market research also enables businesses to stay ahead of the competition. By monitoring market trends, tracking competitor activities, and assessing industry dynamics, businesses can identify emerging opportunities and adapt their strategies accordingly. This flexibility allows businesses to maintain a competitive edge and seize market opportunities before their competitors.

Furthermore, market research plays a vital role in effective marketing campaigns. By understanding consumer preferences, motivations, and pain points, businesses can tailor their messaging, positioning, and communication channels to reach and engage their target audience more effectively. This targeted approach increases customer acquisition, enhances brand perception, and drives business growth.

However, market research is not a one-time endeavor. It requires continuous monitoring and evaluation to stay attuned to evolving market trends, consumer preferences, and competitive dynamics. By monitoring key metrics, tracking market trends, and gathering ongoing customer feedback, businesses can refine their strategies, identify areas for improvement, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

In conclusion, market research is an indispensable tool for businesses aiming to thrive in a competitive marketplace. By understanding the importance of market research, preparing thoroughly, conducting primary and secondary research effectively, interpreting and applying research findings, and continuously monitoring and evaluating research efforts, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their target audience, make informed decisions, and drive business growth. Embrace the power of market research and unlock the endless opportunities it holds for your organization.

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How to Do Market Research for a Business Plan Successfully

The entrepreneurial-minded folks may long have wondered how to do market research for a business plan. 

After all, a business plan lays out the foundation, purpose and expectations of a new business venture. Given that the risks of starting a new business are manifold , entrepreneurs must conduct market research.

20% of American businesses fail after only their first year of operation, a dismal reality that climbs to 30% after two years.

Newfound entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs alike should therefore carefully commit to and execute a business plan.

While market research applies to a wide breadth of applications that cover various business cycles and processes, including opening and operating a new business, it too can be used for producing a 

This article expounds upon how to do market research for a business plan — and succeed in your venture.

Defining A Business Plan and Its Needs

Before you set out to formulate a business plan, it is vital to fully understand all that it entails. Usually created for startups, it is necessary for all businesses to implement. 

A business plan is a written document that summarizes the main aspects of starting up and managing a business, making it the foundation for your business .

A business plan specifically details a business’s objectives, along with its financial, marketing and operational needs and a roadmap thereof. 

It is created to guide a business through each stage in its establishment and management.  As such, it allows business owners to lay out their needs and goals and track them as the business grows.

A business plan must be updated at regular intervals , as priorities and goals are subject to change. Additionally, when an established business moves in a different direction, it needs a new or completely updated business plan.  

The Importance of a Business Plan

A business plan is an important document and not merely for the purpose of monitoring your business as it develops. This is because this document is also needed to obtain investment , especially in the early stages of the business, in which it does not have an evidential track record.

Thus, a business plan shows investors whether your business is on the right course and is worth investing their funds into. Lenders will require proof of a business plan when they deliberate the approval of a loan. 

Here are several other reasons as to why creating and updating a business plan is important:

• Making important decisions. It allows you to answer difficult questions at the onset, before they emerge. Understanding these decisions helps you understand how they fit into your overall strategy.
• Addressing key issues to avoid future problems . These include pricing, competition evaluation, market demand, capital and team members.
• Proving the viability of your business . Planning your vision into a full-fledged business bridges the gap between an idea and reality. Market research is essential for this point, as it helps you find key insights on various aspects of your industry, including your competitors and customers. 
• Communicating objectives with team members and all those involved . This is important for larger teams, particularly for assistance when you are too busy to relay information or guidance to your team members. This may also help investors or partners who cannot reach you, as it lays out objectives and criteria.
• Standardizing and carrying out key objectives . Placing your objectives, criteria and other needs gives them more weight and attention. If they aren’t in your business plan, thereby, in writing, they can easily fall by the wayside. A business plan helps avoid this, standardizing key objectives and benchmarks.
• Guiding consultants, freelancers and other workers . When employing freelancers and contractors, you can turn to specific sections of a business plan to guide these workers, to ensure they understand your vision, goal and other key business aspects.
• Obtaining financial support. Whether it is via borrowing from a bank, turning to venture capitalists or putting your business up for an acquisition, a business plan makes your business and its viability clear for these key financial players. 
• Acclimating to market changes . Updating your business plan can help you during periods of critical change in your market. These changes include: changes in customer needs, new regulations, trends or updates in your industry.

Defining Market Research

Market Research is a wide-encompassing practice that involves gathering information to bolster knowledge about a business’s industry, niche and target market . 

It involves the systematic process of amassing, analyzing and interpreting data and information around the state of a business’s industry and its key actors . The key actors entail a business’s target market, competitors and the movers and shakers within its industry.

As such, it involves gathering research around the niche, trends and industry as a whole. 

This involves gathering secondary research , research that has already been conducted and made available, along with primary research , the kind that requires you to conduct yourself. These main types of research gathering involve various means, techniques and tools that researchers can use.

Market research largely deals with evaluating the viability of a new product or service, although this aspect is primarily referred to as customer development . By conducting market research, you can therefore gather information on virtually all areas of your business. 

Why a Business Plan Needs Market Research

A potent document, one that properly lays out the 7 components of a business plan , from the executive summary, to the market analysis, to the strategy, financial plan and all other in-betweens, most use market research to develop it. 

Market research provides the key data, information and nuances your business plan needs. Although a new business or business idea is born on intuition, a business plan must be backed up with data to prove its viability and positioning in its industry. 

As such, market research must be performed in the early stages of the business plan, as it is the phase in which you learn all about your niche, its trends and the demands of your target market (including the makeup of your target market via market segmentation ).

Only after analyzing all of your market research results, will you be able to populate the business plan within key areas such as market analysis, financial projections, strategy and implementation, marketing endeavors, pricing and location . 

A business plan must be comprehensive, another way in which market research is of utmost importance, in that there are various methods and tools you can use to conduct it. By consolidating all of the different market research techniques , you are establishing an exhaustive business plan, the kind that leaves no key consideration out.

The following presents the key data and information of a business plan that market research can extract:

• Demand : Does your product/service have enough market potential to justify a new business?
• Pricing : How will you determine the pricing of your offerings? 
• Target Market : Who makes up your target market? Do they have enough spending power to buy your product or service?
• Location : Does your business require opening a physical store or can it effectively reach its target market via ecommerce? Perhaps it needs both?
• Historic data on your product/ service : How have the products and services in your niche performed over time? How do they perform currently? 
• Marketing and Market Entry : How will you form an explanation on how you’ll enter the market? How will you promote your products/services to solidify your entry?
• Labor Requirements : Do you have enough manpower to form a business? How many employees and contractors will your business require?
• Financial Plan : Do you have the financial means to cover all operations?

How to Conduct Market Research for a Business Plan

Since a business plan ought to include concrete information to pave the way for business success, it requires thorough market research. Given that market research encompasses so many modes and forms, it can be overwhelming and even intimidating to begin to conduct it for your business plan.

The following provides a step-by-step guide on how to do market research for a business plan, so you can craft your plan in an informed manner, equipped with critical market research.

• First, search the secondary sources available; while some are free, there will be many that aren’t.
• Then, narrow it down to a specific niche, with suspected market segments.
• Focus your research via secondary sources on your market. Look at trade publications, new sites dedicated to your market, industry reports, local reports, statistics websites, blogs on the startups in your niche, including their stories of success and failure and other secondary resources.
• Conduct further secondary research on your priorities.
• Then, switch to primary research methods to zero in on your most critical research subjects.
• You can achieve this by conducting secondary research on your target market.
• Use an online survey, a focus group or a survey panel .
• Segment your target market further and start building personas from the shared characteristics they exhibit.
• Be sure to find similar offerings available to identify your competitors.
• Survey your target market on their needs and feelings towards similar products/services, along with their aversions and desires for updates.
• This will help you understand how to set up your prices as well.
• Research the costs of marketing and publicizing the launch of your business.
• Compare all costs and establish a preliminary business budget.
• Jot down their strengths and weaknesses.
• Compare your offering to theirs, does it fill any gaps or voids? Is it better price-wise?
• Break this down from high to low levels of research. Ex: From the general industry to the exact niche, from a large target market, to specific segments, to specific personas.
• Adjust your budget, goals and plans.
• The executive summary, company description, products and services, market analysis, strategy and implementation, organization and management, financial plan and projections.
• Assure that everything makes sense. If there are gaps in the information you have outlined, consider conducting more research.
• Highlight areas of opportunity, along with areas of risk. 
• Edit your business plan as needed.

Empowering Your Market Research-Powered Business Plan

Market research is a wide-reaching practice that blends consumer behavior and economic trends to help you validate and improve a business idea. It can also help you change the course or style of an already established business.

Thus, it is not solely for startups. Market research can be difficult to conduct and manage , as there are so many business aspects you’ll need to consider to lower your risk of failure. Concurrently, there is so many kinds of market research you can stand to conduct.

Even with the steps listed above, navigating through the jungle of market research can be a laborious and difficult task. While you can’t control secondary resources, you can wield control of your primary research endeavors via an online survey platform . 

This kind of market research tool allows you to take the reigns in every aspect: from asking the exact questions you seek answers to , to targeting a specific market segment , to deploying your surveys across the most-frequented websites and apps. 

A potent survey platform will complete all of these crucial tasks , making primary research an easy task. The trick is to find an online survey platform that can handle all of these tasks, along with making it easy to analyze the data.

Do you want to distribute your survey? Pollfish offers you access to millions of targeted consumers to get survey responses from $0.95 per complete. Launch your survey today.

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How to Do Market Research (+ Insights to Beat the Competition)

Why bother with market research for your business?

People have ideas all the time.

You may have had one last night in the shower, and you know that it is a billion-dollar idea that you need to build upon right now before someone steals it from you.

It is always exciting when you think of a new product, and spending hours on market research is the last thing on your mind.

You would rather spend your time creating strategies to build and launch your product.

But without proper market research, your product will be doomed even before you start. One of the main differences between successful and would-be entrepreneurs is failing to conduct appropriate market research.

Market research is not an add-on to your business; it is a necessity. It is the backbone of any powerful business strategy.

In this blog, I’ll explain the basic concepts of market research and why it is essential for your business . I’ll also tell you how to do market research and share resources to help you start your marketing research.

What is Market Research?

In simple terms, market research is all about understanding whether or not your idea for a product or service has a future.

With market research, you gain insights into your target audience and understand the motivation behind why they are interested in a particular offer.

Whether you are launching a new product or service or rebranding your business, analyzing risks is critical. Market research helps you reduce the risk involved with any decision.

Analyzing the market helps you develop a revenue forecast to see whether your investment will be justified and how much profit you would earn.

Market research is not just done before you launch a product or service. Successful businesses keep up with their market and continuously optimize their marketing strategy according to their insights.

In the last decade, the global market research industry has gone from $33.15 billion in 2009 to around $73.38 billion in 2019.

This shows how much businesses invest in market research to understand the current market trends accurately.

Market research helps you make an informed decision based on data and statistics instead of feeling and intuition.

How 3D TV failed due to the negligence of market research

Launching a product without market research is a recipe for disaster.

After the 3D movie ‘Avatar’ hit its second billion, companies like LG and Sony decided to strike when the iron was hot. They released 3D televisions backing on how successful the movie was, hoping they would gain the same traction and profit as the 3D movie.

3D TV failed spectacularly because what they didn’t consider was that people didn’t want to watch all their content in 3D.

With 3D TV, there was a lot of sales hype at the beginning, but when the product launched, it didn’t make much in terms of actual sales.

3D television required glasses and caused headaches, nausea, and neck strain.

After the market didn’t react as per their assumptions, 3D TV manufacturing ceased . 3D TV is considered one of the biggest market research failures of all time.

In this scenario, businesses downright neglected to conduct market research. But there are also instances where companies did do their research thoroughly, but their research was done in isolation.

Why Coca-Cola's ‘New Coke' Flopped

When Coca-Cola tested the market for its ‘New Coke,’ they received a hugely positive response. New Coke was a sweeter version of the original, and the results of the comparison were extremely favorable to the New Coke.

In fact, the taste tests showed that people favored the New Coke over both the original Coke and Pepsi.

The result? The product didn’t just fail, it was one of the biggest marketing debacles in history .

But if everything was perfect, why did the market crash when Coca-Cola launched their New Coke?

While consumers favored the New Coke's taste and flavor, what they did not know was that they would eventually have to choose between the original Coke and the New Coke.

Coca-cola didn't factor in people's enormous emotional connection with their original Coke when they launched a new product to replace it.

Though this was a colossal blunder, this fiasco increased their brand loyalty because people started asking for “their Coke.”

And till date, Coca-cola remains the best-selling soda on the planet.

Some of the strongest brands like Colgate , Pepsi , and Microsoft , have fallen prey to poorly researched marketing blunders.

But here is the thing.

These brands have the luxury to take such risks once in a while. For smaller businesses, such blunders can be fatal.

Why is Market Research Important for Business?

Market research is vital for businesses to realize whether or not the goals they set can be accomplished. Accurate statistics allows businesses to make the right business decisions that will maximize their profit.

Without research, businesses don't have specific directions to follow and hence, they proceed on intuition and assumptions.

There are many ways in which market research keeps businesses on track.

1. Understand your target audience.

People who are most likely to be interested in your product or service will fit into some typical demographic. Customer research provides answers to variables like age, gender, location, education, employment, and even income level.

Based on factual data and statistics, you can construct a finite build of your ideal customer and determine what triggers them.

Market research helps you identify how customers and prospects might view your business. You can recognize your customers' wants and needs and get to know why they chose your product or service over your competitors.

2. Understand your competitors.

Market research not only helps you keep a tab on your competitors, but also gives you knowledge about how you can stand out, be different, and rise above them.

Understanding their ups and downs will help you create a better strategy to succeed in your business. Analyzing their failures will tell you what pitfalls you should avoid.

A thorough understanding of your competitors will ensure you are always one step ahead in the game.

3. Keep up with market trends.

If you do not stay relevant, surviving will be a challenge.

Nokia was once the world's top mobile phone producer, but it fell because it failed to understand the change in market trends.

While on the other hand, its competitors like Apple and Samsung thrived because they stayed relevant.

You need to have thorough knowledge about where your industry is heading in the future and create strategies to ensure you are on the same path.

4. Determine the viability of a new product or service.

Before you launch anything, obtaining an objective opinion is a necessity. Basing your products on “our-customers-will-love-it” theories never work.

Testing the market before launching a product helps you determine the feasibility of the product.

Not every product can work for every person.

Effective market research can help you narrow down on your target audience and realize how much potential your product holds.

This will help you analyze how customers will connect with your product; what message creates the most impact; and how much value it holds in the real world.

5. Identify business challenges.

Market research helps you identify areas of difficulty in your business.

You can identify problems before they blow out of proportion and predict obstacles that can become an inconvenience for your business.

When you face an issue, more often than not, it has a ripple effect and affects more than just one aspect of your business.

If you do encounter an issue, market research helps ascertain the source of the problem and develop a strategy to overcome it.

6. Identify new opportunities.

Market research will help you identify areas your competitors have not addressed.

Consumers may not voice their opinion when they are satisfied with something, but they will charge without abandon when they are not happy with something.

With market research, you will be able to discover what your competitors are lacking in and target those pain points.

7. Significantly minimize risk and loss.

The data you acquire from market research may not be 100% accurate at all times, but you can significantly minimize risk and loss.

With market research, you can take calculated risks that your enterprise needs to grow. Your promotional campaigns will have a higher rate of success.

Types of Market Research: Primary versus Secondary Market Research

In terms of how you can collect research data, you can categorize market research into two types: primary and secondary.

Primary Market Research

Primary Market research is when you gather information directly from the source, i.e., your prospects and customers.

In this method, you carry out your own personal research and get realistic and personalized results about what will work for you.

You can narrow down your exact target audience and get real-time feedback about what exactly they're looking for.

This information you collect is for you alone and is not shared unless you decide otherwise. This offers your business an “information advantage” as your competitors will not be able to get hold of this inside information.

Primary market research is more time-consuming than secondary market research because you need to develop your own research plan and work on executing it.

This research technique may not be as cost-effective, but it always saves you money in the long run.

The process of collecting information with primary market research can be broken down into two methods.

• Quantitative Data Collection
• Qualitative Data Collection

Quantitative Market Research.

Quantitative market research focuses on the collection of numerical data. This technique offers concrete data that will help you quantify a research problem.

You can collect data in an organized manner using surveys, polls, or questionnaires.

The results obtained from quantitative research can be analyzed mathematically and can curate vital statistics to aid your business.

It is easy to draw conclusions from data collected by this method. You can implement this technique on a large market, and hence, the information obtained is more statistically valid.

There are various methods for obtaining quantitative data. Surveys are one of the most widely used quantitative methodologies in market research worldwide.

There are three main types of primary quantitative market research techniques.

• Questionnaires.
• Interviews.

1. Surveys.

Surveys are incredibly adept at providing data to analyze a large population. This research technique can offer a broad capability that is not provided by any other method.

The data collected via surveys is easy to analyze and interpret to make decisions.

If your survey includes checklists and rating scale type questions, it helps to quantify your audience’s behavior.

Always keep the questions of your survey to a bare minimum. The following statistical display by SurveyMonkey shows the average completion percentage by the number of questions.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you create your survey.

• Ensure your opening question is easy-to-answer.
• Only ask questions you need to be answered.
• Close-ended questions are easy for your audience to respond to.
• Your questions should be short, specific, and straightforward.

2. Questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are not the same, no matter how much people use these terms interchangeably.

Questionnaires are more focused on collecting information rather than drawing a conclusion.

Questionnaires are done in isolation. You have your audience answer a predetermined set of questions.

You do not look at any kind of bigger picture, try to spot trends, or statistically analyze this data.

You can create questionnaires with the objective of conducting a survey, or you may use a series of standardized questions and other prompts with the purpose of gathering information.

3. Interviews.

You can conduct a market research interview on telephone, video-call, or even face-to-face to collect quantitative and qualitative data.

Quantitative interviews can also be called survey interviews because they have the same standardized survey question-answer format to collect data.

You can contact existing customers and potential customers with information collected by lead generation forms or website analytics.

Qualitative Market Research.

Qualitative market research doesn’t often include data that can be statistically analyzed.

This method of research focuses on understanding why people behave in a certain way. What motivates them to make a particular decision? How will they respond to a new product or service?

While qualitative questions are more close-ended where specific answers can be expected, qualitative questions are more open-ended and give people the space to state their opinions and feelings.

This research produces data that is much harder to analyze. Researchers are required to interpret the gathered information without any numbers and figures.

Among the traditional qualitative research methodologies used worldwide, 58% of respondents said they used focus groups to be their most used method.

After focus groups, the in-depth interviews have been stated to be the most dominant research technique.

There are three main types of primary qualitative market research techniques.

• Focus Groups
• In-depth Interviews.
• Observations

1. Focus Groups.

Focus groups are organized sessions with around six to twelve people who share a common characteristic.

The main objective of conducting these sessions is to comprehend people’s opinions, perceptions, and beliefs about a particular service, product, or concept.

Focus groups can give you an in-depth understanding of how and why people respond to specific topics in a certain way.

Focus groups are not about merely reporting about a discussion; it is a market research technique that can give you powerful insights that reveal something you need.

How to select participants for a focus group?

The most crucial aspect of any focus group is the selection of participants. Randomly selecting participants for your focus group is simply foolish.

For example, if you are conducting a focus group for why people don’t use a vacuum cleaner, the discussion would yield much better results if you select homemakers who clean their own homes.

Clearly define, verify, and recruit people keeping your target audience for the focus group in mind.

2. In-depth interviews.

By conducting in-depth interviews, you can gather extensive information from the respondents.

You can create in-depth questionnaires for this research technique and discuss highly complex or sensitive topics.

While other primary market research methods can give you valuable insights, have you ever poured your heart out in an online survey?

With interviews, you can gain information that would be nearly impossible to attain otherwise.

• You can know how customers really use your product.
• What stops someone from making a purchase.
• What hidden emotions drive your target audience.

How an interview saved Febreze.

The marketing story of Febreze proves how powerful interviews can be.

Procter & Gamble launched Febreze with a strong marketing campaign.

Their message behind the campaign was that their product could eliminate the foulest stenches like smoky bars and the heavy odor caused by house pets and teenage boys.

The result? Their campaign failed drastically.

Their research showed that people often get desensitized to their surrounding smell due to constant exposure. The stench doesn’t bother them as much.

P&G then turned to interview their most devoted users to understand why exactly they used Febreze.

An interview with a woman in Scottsdale was what led to their breakthrough.

She said, “It's nice, you know? Spraying feels like a little mini-celebration when I’m done with a room.”

P&G realized people didn’t use Febreze for proper cleaning; they used it as a reward of sorts.

They had found their “Dopamine hook.”

They revamped their marketing strategy and positioned Febreze as a part of the cleaning routine, restaging it as a reward.

The result? Within two months, the sales of Febreze doubled.

P&G would never have come to this epiphany if not for their decision to conduct interviews.

3. Observations.

This market research technique focuses on observing people’s behavior in a natural or planned setting.

As a researcher, you may observe your customers’ behavior from the sidelines, or you may be an active participant by conversing with people and then observe their reactions.

In a clinical setting, people’s behavior can be influenced by external stimuli. What people say doesn’t always align with what they do.

Qualitative research by observation allows you to see their true self.

But this method is very time consuming and doesn’t allow you any control over the setting or environment.

Secondary Market Research.

Secondary market research is the process of analyzing existing data and statistics that are already available for you to consume for free.

This research method involves gathering information from secondary sources.

Businesses have already collected and compiled information for you, and all you need to do is know how to access this information.

The internet is one of the most apparent sources to conduct your secondary market research, as there are many resources available online for free, as well as in exchange for money.

There are various other resources available for this research, like libraries, colleges, universities, government data, competitor’s data, trade publications, media sources, etc.

Businesses often gather as much information as they can from various sources and put them together to analyze market trends and compile their own reports with this information.

But though there are so many resources available, secondary market research is not always as easy as it may sound.

Limitations of Secondary Market Research.

• It is a time-consuming process. While a vast amount of information helps a lot, not everything you find will be applicable to your goals. It is often a time-consuming task to filter through all this data to find what you are looking for.
• It is not always credible. Finding reliable information for free is exceedingly challenging. It is your responsibility to evaluate whether the data is reliable or not.
• Nature of data. The data you find will not always be specific to your needs. It is pointless if you spend your time and effort and then find information that may not fulfill your requirements.

Not everyone knows how to acquire accurate data and statistics. And knowing how significant gaining this information is, it is even more critical to get this data right!

If you do not evaluate your market research data, it could lead to bad business decisions.

Here are a few things to look for to access the authenticity of data.

Factors you need to consider when you evaluate secondary research data.

• The research provider’s purpose. Many biased reports are published, so it favors them in some way. This data holds their personal interests at heart and may not be entirely accurate.
• The source. Who has published the information plays a significant role. You can always rely on government sources as compared to sources like private companies or websites. If the name is big, they will have a reputation to keep up. Hence, they are much more reliable than other sources.
• When the data was collected. You need to make sure that the information is relevant. Outdated information will do more harm than good, and using this information will only lead to trouble.
• How the information was collected. Methods of data collection can help you analyze the consumer’s mindset. This is especially important when looking at qualitative data, which gives you information about your audience’s beliefs, opinions, and feelings.
• What information was collected. If you have a specific type of information in mind, it will not do if the data you get includes a much broader aspect. For example, if you want to know which mobile company is most popular amongst millennials, it would not help if the data is about the most popular mobile company.
• Cross verify with other sources. If you find a report that says something specific and can’t find any information regarding the same anywhere else, it might be dangerous to trust that information blindly. Or if information regarding the same topic varies from source to source, you need to dig deeper to find the most accurate information. Always check if the data you have is consistent with other sources.

Three ways of accessing secondary market research data.

• Public sources.
• Commercial sources.
• Educational institutions.

1. Public sources.

Public sources are open sources that are available for everyone to access.

Most governments collect and publish information about markets, growth rates, consumer behavior, current trends, economic factors, and other entities. This data is usually available for free for you to access.

Google Public Data Explorer is an excellent source to access public-interest datasets.

It provides public data from several different international organizations including, but not limited to

• ICT Statistics Database
• U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• International Monetary Fund
• U.S. Census Bureau

2. Commercial sources.

Commercial sources are those that offer marketing data and consumer insights for a cost.

They usually include research and trade associations and operate across nearly every industry.

Directory of Associations , National Trade and Professional Associations Directory , Equifax , and Dun & Bradstreet are major commercial data sources in the market.

3. Educational institutions.

Business departments of educational institutions like colleges and universities conduct research on various industries. They are the most overlooked sources for market research.

Right from graduate student projects and theses to faculty-based projects, the research material available is very vast.

To use this data, you may have to subscribe to a specific journal or pay a subscription fee to access their newsletter or website.

How to Do Market Research for Maximum Actionable Insights?

While most businesses understand the significance of market research, they sometimes skip this because they simply don’t know where to look and what to look for.

Compiling data for the sake of market research is one thing, actually doing market research, which will lead to actionable insights, is a different story altogether.

Define Your Buyer Persona.

With business, there is no “one-size-fits-all.” You need to connect with your audience if you want them to take you seriously, and that will not happen if you aim to form a connection with everybody.

If you do not create a personal appeal, people will most likely mark you as spam and move on without giving you a second glance.

This is why you need to build your ideal customer profile.

But who is an ideal customer?

An ideal customer is someone who has their wants and needs met by what you have to offer.

You need to have a detailed description of those who are likely to be interested in your products and services.

What are their goals? What are their backgrounds? What challenges do they face? Do you know what interests them? How old are they? Do they have kids? What does their daily routine look like?

This might seem more specific than you expected, but creating customer profiles that answer such intricate details will help you create much more personalized appeals.

The characteristics you define is what will give way to your business’ buyer personas.

What is a Buyer Persona?

Based on the data and statistics you collect from your potential and existing customers, you can map out a semi-fictional character of your ideal customer. This semi-fictional character is called a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a generalized representation of your target customers.

Amongst other information, there are a few key characteristics you should specify your buyer persona.

• Their gender
• Geographical location
• Their designation and job role
• Family size
• Annual income
• Major challenges they face

Here is an example of a buyer persona.

Why use a Buyer Persona?

When you create buyer personas for your business, it is much easier for marketers, sales representatives, and designers to optimize their content specific to their wants and needs.

Creating buyer personas can essentially help you get into your customer’s head and understand what makes them tick.

How many Buyer Personas should you create?

It’s very unusual for businesses to have only one category of target audience. If you have a business, chances are that your strategy would aim to target a range of people.

But how many buyer personas you create differs from business to business. Some businesses have as little as one or two personas or go as far as 15 to 20.

But creating too many personas will only lead to chaos.

I would suggest you create no more than four personas.

If you have more, chances are that your personas are very similar to each other. You can create three to four primary personas and categorize others under these primary personas in such cases.

If two personas seem similar to you, don’t hesitate to club them. If you do not have enough information on a persona, scrap it.

Your buyer personas are not set on stone. As you move on, add and remove personas with changing market trends.

Creating content as per your buyer personas will help you pitch the same product in different ways to your audience's categories.

Negative Buyer Personas.

Negative buyer personas are a representation of people you do not want to target. These personas are based on demographics and characteristics of people who are not your ideal customers.

While it is essential to know whom you want to target, it is equally important to know whom you should avoid.

You can create anti-buyer personas to be more accurate with your target audience.

If you know exactly what you do not want, you will stray away from messages that might appeal to the wrong audience.

This will save you money in the long run as you will not waste your resources to market to the wrong people. This helps increase your business’ efficiency and productivity.

How do buyer personas benefit a business?

According to NetProspex’s case study , their following results were observed after they implemented reinforced their buyer personas:

• 900% increase in the duration of visit.
• 46% increase in conversions.
• 111% increase in email open-rate.
• 100% increase in the number of pages visited.
• 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue.

Buyer personas help businesses identify and analyze their target audience’s behavior. You can use this real-time data to ensure your products and services consider your customers' desires.

Buyer personas benefit a business in a number of ways.

• Increase compatibility. Buyer personas bring your target audience to life in a memorable way that will help everyone in your business understand your users better. It will make sure everyone is on the same page and makes it easier to communicate and collaborate while creating strategies.
• Find the right platform. While researching for your buyer persona, you will understand which platform your target audience leans towards. This will help you focus your advertising and marketing strategies on these platforms to increase your reach.
• User-focused. Buyer personas will keep you from wasting your time and resources on products and services that would not interest your target audience. With a clear understanding of your buyer personas, your products and services will be focused on your customers and ensure high efficiency.
• Build product roadmaps. Buyer personas will help you identify what your customers want and use this to create a plan of action to ensure your product’s success.
• Product positioning. With your buyer personas, you will know how to market your product in a way that people will be inclined towards. You will know what campaign message will create the best connection with your audience.

Identify a Portion of That Persona to Engage

Now that you know what a buyer persona is, the next step is to create your buyer persona.

You must already have a rough idea about what you want in your target audience. With that as a guide, identify people whom you want to engage in your research.

This step involves researching your target audience to learn more about what characteristics make up your buyer persona.

How to Research Buyer Personas?

There are many ways of collecting information via primary and secondary market research.

Many businesses create surveys to study their customers’ inclinations.

But to create buyer personas, you need to get into people’s heads, and the most powerful market research technique is to conduct interviews.

You can interview existing customers, potential customers, and even third-party networks who are not in your existing pool of target audience but come close.

The interview should cover necessary demographic information to what triggers them to make purchasing decisions.

You need to dig as deep as you can and gather as much insight about them. The more you know, the stronger your buyer persona will be.

How to find participants for your buyer persona research?

• Existing Customers. These are the easiest people to target. You already have a point of contact, and they are familiar with your products. Interviewing them will help you notice patterns about the things that appeal to them and their challenges. Since they are already connected to your product, you may not need to offer any incentives to get feedback.
• Potential Customers. You typically must have acquired their contact information via lead generation forms or web analytics . These are people who may be interested in what you have to offer but haven’t taken the leap to purchase your products.
• Referrals. If you do not have an existing customer base or any contact information about your market audience, you need to work with your personal network. Reach out to your co-workers, social media contacts, even family members, and find people you can interview. LinkedIn is an excellent place to start if you are lost; type in keywords of your target audience into the search box and filter through your connections to see people you can contact.
• Third-party Networks. You can use platforms like Respondent , UserInterviews , UserTesting and PlaybookUX to find participants for your research.

But using these platforms does not give you a chance for one-on-one interaction. This may make it much more difficult for you to gather information to create your buyer personas.

How to get people to become interviewees?

• Offer Incentives. Of course, there’s always chocolate. And you may not even need to offer that for interviewing people who are already your customers. But while reaching out to people under other categories, you could provide simple gift cards. According to PeoplePulse , there is a 10 to 15% increase in response rate when offered incentives.

You can appeal directly to your social media network and get participants to approach you if your incentive is strong.

• Be honest about your purpose. Be clear at the very beginning that it is not a sales call. Tell them you are calling them because you want to get some information for your research. If you are honest from the beginning, they are more likely to trust you and open up about their lives, feelings, and opinions.
• Be flexible. Work according to their schedule and make it easy for them to say yes. Allow them to give you a time, and make sure you send them a reminder before your call to ensure you don't catch them off guard.

Questions you can ask participants during the interview.

Telephonic or face-to-face interviews can be a little daunting if you don’t know where to start.

This is just a sample list for inspiration to help you get started. You can optimize the questions according to your target audience (in fact, you definitely should.)

Personal Background

Describe your Personal Demographics.

• Marital status.
• What are your interests and hobbies?
• What is your educational background? Where did you complete your education?
• What is your career path? How did you end up where you are today?

Professional Background

• Which industry or industries does your company serve?
• What is the size of your company (revenue, employees)?
• What are the most common challenges in your industry?
• What are the most common objections to your product or service?
• What is your job role? And your job title?
• How many years of experience do you have?
• Whom do they report to? Who reports to them?
• How is your job measured?
• Describe a typical working day.
• Which specialized skills or tools are required to do your job?
• What frustrates you the most about your job?
• What do you enjoy the most about your job?

Goals & Challenges

• What are your biggest challenges?
• What are you responsible for?
• What does it mean to be successful in your role?
• What are your personal goals? Career goals?
• How do you prioritize them?

Decision Making

• Who do you consult with and trust for advice and information?
• What is the most important thing you look for when you buy a product?
• What are your biggest complaints about our product or service?
• What must happen for you to overcome these complaints?

Information Sources

• How do you learn about new information for your job?
• What publications, blogs, or social networks are you interested in?
• How did you find out about our company?

To gain an in-depth insight, the followup question of most of the above questions should be “why?”

Ask open-ended questions and encourage them to talk. The more they talk, the more you’ll understand what motivates them to do something.

How to create your Buyer Persona?

After you have collected all raw data about your target audience, it is time to analyze this information and look for patterns and commonalities.

Here is an example of a B2C buyer persona.

From this buyer persona, you can understand that Rachael has a busy life, and doesn’t spend excessively.

The most effective way to pitch your products to her would be to highlight how easy it would make her life. She would appreciate quick and easy solutions.

Creating in-depth personas with intricate details will help you better visualize your target audience and develop messages that they can instantly connect with.

After you are done with your research, it is time to map out your buyer personas and create a layout.

If you are not sure where to start, I’ve compiled examples, tips, and templates you can use as a guide to creating your buyer persona from scratch.

1. Create 2-4 primary buyer personas.

While you may create as many personas as your business needs, it is not advisable to create more than four.

You may, of course, create more, but you can categorize those personas under the primary personas you’ve created.

2. Highlight brands or products your audience already uses in your industry.

If your customer favors Nike or only uses Apple products, it speaks about your audience’s preferences. You will understand what they value, and this secondary information will help you deduce a lot about your customers.

3. Create a customer journey map

Creating a customer journey map will help you when you try to define your primary buyer personas.

You can categorize your buyer personas by how your audience uses your product or service.

4. Include icons and illustrations.

Visuals like icons and illustrations help add context to your content. You can use them to make complex ideas more straightforward to understand and remember.

5. Have a consistent layout.

A consistent layout for all your personas will help you spot differences better.

You can easily compare information instead of trying to locate things blindly just because your designer was overzealous.

Additionally, you can also highlight fundamental differences between your personas to make your work easier.

7. Create an infographic of your persona guide.

Creating a buyer persona means including as many essential insights as possible, and what better way to illustrate your buyer persona guide other than an infographic?

Infographics are an exciting and powerful way to display information.

You can use free templates offered by websites like Canva , Pictochart , and Venngage to create your infographic.

8. Include an introduction paragraph.

This paragraph will serve the purpose of giving your persona a backstory. Talk about what makes them tick, or it could be a simple narrative that is purely biographical.

9. Use sliding scales to understand your persona better.

You can’t define everyone in extremes; it is never always this or that . Using sliding scales and or other similar visual aids will help you understand your buyer persona better.

Willian is more of an introvert than an extrovert, but labeling him solely as an introvert would not do him justice.

10. Give your personas a real name.

As you would have noticed in the above examples, all the buyer personas have names. This makes them memorable and motivates you to think of them as an actual person rather than research metrics.

This works wonders when working on a campaign, for all you have to think about is to convince “Mike” or “William.”

This keeps your target audience in center focus every time you develop an idea.

11. Use a few keywords that summarize your persona effectively.

You can summarize your buyer persona with a few keywords that practically define them.

Keywords are powerful, and if you happen to use these images as posters around your desk or office, they will cement your target audience's characteristics in your mind.

12. Don’t use celebrity images as your persona.

When you think of Will Smith , what comes to mind?

• His determination and dedication.
• His humble nature even after achieving great heights.
• How he is unapologetically himself.

If you were to use Will Smith's face for your buyer persona, it would be challenging to stop his characteristics from overshadowing your target audience.

Using images of people you don’t know will help you start afresh.

Now that you know the features that would help make your buyer persona, here are a couple of tools to help you design your persona.

Tools to create your buyer personas.

You can use templates offered by Xtensio to create your buyer personas. The software is very user-friendly and also allows you to customize your layout as per your requirements.

Hubspot’s buyer persona tool walks you step-by-step to create your persona. One downside to using Hubspot is you can not add your own persona image and have to choose from a handful of character images offered.

If there are elements you want to add that are not included by default, you can add them using the “Add new section” button.

Engage Your Market Research Participant

One of the biggest challenges of conducting primary market research is finding people willing to participate in your study.

Finding participants seems like an exceedingly tedious task, which doesn’t have to be the case. There are various ways you can recruit people for your market research.

Channels you can use to recruit interviewees.

1. Crowdsourcing.

With crowdsourcing, you can engage a large volume of people in your market research. It is an excellent alternative to traditional human subject pools.

You can use platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit participants for reasonable rates. The average wage is $1.40 per hour .

Some other platforms you can use to source participants are Respondent and Testing Time .

2. Broadcast email.

Broadcast emails are sent to a large group of people at once. You can take advantage of your email list.

Keep note of people who have participated in your research so you can get in touch with them in the future in a similar scenario.

If you don’t have your own email list, narrow down on your interest group and approach organizations that focus on the same demographic.

Some organizations may be open to sharing their database for a price or some other inducements.

If not, at the very least, you could convince them to share an email containing your market research survey with their audience.

3. Snowball Sampling.

The best way to recruit more participants is to take advantage of your current participants. Word of mouth is one of the most potent tools of marketing.

Offer referral incentives to your current participants, and they will help recruit new people. This is called snowball sampling or chain-referral sampling.

4. Traditional and Internet Media.

You can use press releases and related print or TV/radio reports to recruit participants for your research.

If your research requires a specific pool of people, this may work really well. It does take a while to get a good volume of participants, and it may cost significantly more than other means of recruiting participants.

Another affordable and more effective alternative is to use internet media. You can research web portals and online forums that target your ideal market.

5. Search Engine Marketing (for example Google Adwords).

With online search engine ads, you can reach millions of people looking for information regarding your targeted keyword.

Depending on how strong your incentive is, you can recruit participants quickly using this method.

6. Social Media.

This is one of the best ways to source participants for your research. You can create pages or launch ads to recruit participants.

One of the best parts about using social media is that you can access people’s profiles and find extensive information about them to see if they are the right match for your research.

You can source on LinkedIn by searching for people who fit your criteria and use inMail and 2nd-degree intros to contact them.

7. Online Panels.

An online research panel is a group of selected individuals who have agreed to complete surveys via the Internet.

With online panels, it is effortless to recruit participants, and additionally, it is cost-effective.

I recommend using QuestionPro or Survey Monkey .

One drawback of using these online portals is that you can’t have immediate contact with your participants as most online panels don’t share their audience’s contact details.

8. Craigslist.

Using Craigslist may not be the best method, but you can still use it to recruit participants for low prices.

You can post an ad on Craigslist for free, but many marketers have stopped using this platform for the validity of the information provided is always in question.

Prepare Your Research Questions for Maximum Actionable Learnings

Even after you find the right participants, the most crucial part of the research is the questionnaire.

You can’t just note down questions from the top of your head. You need to ensure that each question you’ve included will help you progress with your research.

But how can you make sure all your questions are important? I’ll tell you how.

How to prepare survey research questions

1. Create a frame.

Before you write a single question, I need you to note down three things.

• The objective of your research.
• What is your desired outcome?
• Characteristics of your target audience.

This is the fundamental part of your research and will help you ground your questions. Cross-referencing your questions with these points will ensure you don’t sway away from the main objective.

2. Brainstorm Questions

You already have a list of questions you are dying to ask your customers, and it would be so convenient to include anything and everything just so you don’t miss out.

But that’s not the way to go. In this step, you write down all questions you have in mind.

Write down the silliest of questions because after you create momentum, you will find that your questions have much more depth.

But one crucial thing is to think about the questions “you already know” answers to.

How do you know the answer? Do you have any research to back your answer, or is it just your gut feeling?

Be wary of these traps where your mind says not to include a question because you already know the answer.

Learn to separate what you know and what you believe to be true.

3. Filter and find the best questions.

After you are done with brainstorming questions, it is time to review it against the frame you created in the first step.

Cross-check if your questions fulfill your objective, discard the questions that don’t, and club questions whenever necessary.

Only pick the best, juiciest questions that will give the most insights. Remember, you need actionable feedback.

Below is the result of a study conducted by Survey Monkey to understand how much time respondents spend on a survey.

It is recommended that your survey should not include more than 12 questions.

You need to hold the respondent’s attention, and for that, the survey should not take more than 5 minutes to complete.

But of course, if the incentive you offer is good enough, you can make the survey longer.

Types of Research Questions

1. Open-ended research questions.

Open-ended questions require the respondent to type in their answer into a comment box. These questions call for more depth and lengthier responses.

While open-ended questions allow the respondents the freedom and space to state their opinions, it is recommended that you don’t include many of these questions.

You can see an example of an open-ended survey question below:

2. Multiple choice research questions.

They are the most popular type of survey questions. They are easy for your participants to answer, and you receive clean data for analysis.

Below is an example of a multiple-choice research question with a multiple-select answer option:

3. Ranking research questions.

These questions help you understand your respondent’s preferences. Keep in mind that this type of question takes longer to answer, so don’t include too many of them.

For instance, in the question below, respondents need to be familiar with each feature and select a corresponding number to rank the features as per their preference.

4. Rating scale research questions.

These questions are used to get responses on a continuous scale to understand how your audience feels about something.

Here’s how a rating scale question can look:

5. Net promoter score research questions.

This is a type of rating scale question where the question has an answer that depicts a range (for example, 1 to 10, or 1 to 100.)

Always remember to give context to these questions. The numbers on the scale would not make any sense if you don’t explain the value of the numbers.

Like in the above example, 0 is ‘very unlikely,’ and 10 corresponds to ‘very likely.’

6. Likert scale research questions.

These are very popular questions for surveys. They help you understand exactly how your customer feels about something.

Below is a typical example of a Likert scale question:

7. Semantic differential scale research question

This is a type of Likert scale question which is extremely effective in quantifying how your audience feels about a particular brand, product, service, or organization.

8. Stapel scale research questions.

This type of rating scale question has an even number range with no neutral point.

For example, the question below has a range of +2 to -2, and your respondent’s answer accurately describes whether they are in agreement or disagreement with something.

9. Constant sum research questions.

In this type of question, the respondent can rate a particular entity, and you can compare the other entities using one as a reference.

This is useful for devising ratio data of different attributes.

10. Matrix table research questions.

Matrix table questions are presented in a grid and are usually easy to interpret for your respondents. This is because the answer options and scales remain consistent across all entities.

This is also highly efficient as you can make use of one question to gather significant data.

11. Image choice research questions.

These questions have images as your answer options. They dramatically increase response rates and also make your survey visually appealing.

I would recommend using this question type in between as they give your respondent a break from reading.

12. Dropdown research questions.

You can use dropdown questions when you have a long list of brief answer options. For example, if you want the respondent to pick their home town or their birth year.

Use them lightly as most people like to refer to the answer options as context when they read a question.

13. Click Map research questions.

If you want direct feedback on a product image or any other visual, this is the best approach.

Click Map question allows the user to click one spot on the image.

For example, the following is a product packaging image. You could ask the survey taker to click on the part of the packaging that appeals the most to them.

14. File Upload research questions.

In case you need supporting documents or images, you can use file upload questions.

Though, it is not recommended as it is tedious for the respondent, you can collect whatever file you require as a PNG, PDF, or Doc file.

Survey Pre-Launch Checklist.

Here is a checklist of things you need to take note of before you launch your survey.

• Ensure that your survey is compatible with all devices.
• Preview and test your survey.
• Check how long the survey takes to complete. The recommended time to finish a survey is 5 minutes.
• Check the structural components of your survey like the navigation buttons, page, and titles, etc.
• Make sure the answer format is in harmony with the question type. If the question requires multiple option selection, ensure the format allows the user to select all options that apply.
• Check the reporting value format. If you have customized your reporting value, check if the format for birth date, age, email address, etc. is set correctly.
• If you’re unsure how you can analyze the results, do a trial run, and familiarize yourself with how the results show up. Also, don’t forget to delete your test responses before you launch the survey.
• Make sure there are no grammatical or spelling errors.
• Ask someone else to cross-check the survey. A second pair of eyes might spot something you missed.

Reminder Emails.

Reminder Emails are an excellent strategy to boost your response rates.

But when do you send your first reminder email? The second? The third? When do you stop?

Survey Monkey recommends sending the first reminder email 48 to 72 hours after you have sent your first survey invite.

Below given table shows how the response rate drops exponentially after the first reminder email.

It is recommended that you send reminders only if necessary and don’t send more than four reminders.

Research Closure.

After you have closed the survey, send an email to all the respondents to thank them for participating in the survey.

Don’t forget to include the top two or three things you have found from the research and how you plan to act on them.

People like to know that their contribution created an impact and that the time they took to respond was worthwhile.

This closes the loop and sets you up with the respondents for the next time you decide to conduct a survey.

Analyze Your Findings and Identify Patterns

You finally have everything you need for your research; your results are in, and all you have to do is analyze everything you’ve found.

This next step is called Data Analysis. In this step, you bring together all the data you’ve collected, identify patterns, and draw conclusions.

You need to keep in mind a few things before you start analyzing your market research data.

• Don’t start analyzing the results before all your responses come in, and the survey is closed.
• Filter the results. There would be many low-quality responses that won’t help your research. These could be
• Incomplete survey responses.
• Responses from people who are not your target audience.
• People who completed the survey with supersonic speed. Yeah, they didn’t really read your questions.
• Unrealistic answers. For example, family size is 4700. Well, really?

Now that you have your data, what are you going to do about it? Read through hundreds of survey responses and interview notes?

The amount of data you receive can be quite overwhelming. To ensure your head doesn’t go spinning while analyzing this data, it is essential to use data organization and data reduction techniques.

These methods will be beneficial to compile and assemble data to interpret and analyze your findings.

You can segment your results to gain in-depth insights. Below are a few samples of segments you can utilize.

Types of Market Segmentation.

• Demographic Segmentation, like age, gender, and marital status.
• Geographic Segmentation, like country, state, and regions.
• Psychographic Segmentation, like personality traits, beliefs, values, lifestyle, opinions, and interests of consumers.
• Behavioral Segmentation, like decision-making patterns such as consumption, purchase, lifestyle, and usage.
• Firmographic Segmentation, like company size and the number of employees.

Online survey portals like Survey Monkey and Questionpro offer in-depth analysis with statistical data and visual charts to draw conclusions for your research.

However, not all platforms may offer such services, and additionally, you may have secondary research data to combine with your survey responses.

Here is a list of data analysis software programs that you can use to integrate your market research data, analyze your findings, and identify patterns.

Quantitative Data Analysis Software

Quantitative Data Analysis focuses on statistical, mathematical, and numerical analysis of data you have collected with market research.

Here is a list of quantitative analysis software programs.

SPSS stands for Statistical Package for Social Sciences. It is the most popular quantitative analysis tool used for editing, analyzing, and presenting numerical data.

With SPSS, you can perform analysis, interpret the results, and make sound statistical decisions.

SPSS is well-suited for all formats used for structured data analysis like Excel, plain text files, and relational (SQL) databases.

STATA is a powerful and flexible general-purpose statistical software package.

It is an interactive data analysis program that runs on a variety of platforms. It is easy to analyze, manage, and produce graphical visualizations of data.

You can use STATA for both simple and complex statistical analyses.

STATA offers several purchase options to fit your budget.

SAS is an acronym for Statistical Analysis System.

With the Market Research Application (MRA) of this software program, you are provided with advanced graphical and statistical data evaluation techniques.

R is a free software to download and use , especially for graphical and statistical computing.

If you are familiar with statistics and computing, you can add your own programs to it.

There are free software programs like JAMOVI and Jasp , both of which require no coding knowledge and are extremely easy and straightforward to use.

While all these tools can help you analyze numerical data and create statistics, they may not be of much help while trying to identify patterns in open-ended survey responses and interview comments.

The aforementioned tools are excellent for quantifiable data, but if you want to break down qualitative data, I have a list of tools to make your life easier.

Please note that most of these tools analyze both qualitative and quantitative market research data.

Qualitative Data Analysis Software.

NVivo is, by far, the largest player in the qualitative software field.

You can analyze the unstructured text, video, audio, and image data, including interviews, open-ended survey answers, focus groups, social media, and journal articles.

You can import text, audio, video, emails, spreadsheets, images, online surveys, web content, and social media from various sources and create a centralized base to conduct in-depth analysis.

NVivo offers a 14-day free trial . The price is variable .

Like NVivo, you can import data from interviews, focus groups, surveys, videos, and even social media from various sources into a simple, intuitive interface.

After you import your data, you can organize your data into different categories. You can even mark specific data and leave notes, and color-code your data for better organization.

MaxQDA offers a 30-day free trial . The price is variable according to your specifications.

Quirkos is designed to help researchers sort, manage, and comprehend large amounts of data. You can code or tag specific sections of data and even compare themes across various sources.

Quirkos does not offer as many extensive features as NVivo; its main focus is to provide simple tools for exploring qualitative data that are flexible and easier to use.

It has an extremely straightforward interface so you can focus on your work and not how to do it.

One of Quirkos’ best features is its text analyzer. This tool helps you find common keywords and phrases within various text documents.

One major drawback is Quirkos does not have support for integrated multimedia and quantitative analysis.

You can choose between a subscription service or a one-off license fee. Additionally, Quirkos offers a free trial of the full version.

With Dedoose, you organize research data in a broad range of formats, including qualitative data such as text, audio, images, or video, and quantitative data such as spreadsheets, surveys, test scores, ratings, or demographics.

It is easy to collaborate as it is a web-based software.

You can also import project data from other software like NVivo, Atlas.ti, MaxQDA, Saturate, HyperResearch, Quirkos, and others.

Dedoose pricing starts from $14.95 Per Active Month for an individual. They also offer plans for small and large groups and have a special package for students.

Regardless of the group size, Dedoose offers the first-month cycle of use is free for all users.

5. Atlas.ti

Atlas.ti is a web-based qualitative data analysis software program that allows you to capture perspectives & insights into primary or secondary research.

It is a powerful tool for efficient and effective work on your research data. You can organize data, add information, and create comments, codes, annotations, categories, and shows relationships among all of them.

Atlas.ti is an excellent tool if you want to analyze large bodies of textual, graphical, audio, and video data.

With Atlas.ti, you can import source materials as DOCX., CSV, PDF, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, and other audio/video formats.

This software program is easy to manage and gives you a lot of freedom to name categories according to your preferences.

Atlas.ti offers a free 14-day trial version . The price is variable according to your specifications.

6. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is an easy-to-use web-based software program that allows users to build surveys, analyze and interpret responses, and generate reports.

You do not require any coding knowledge. Their drag-and-drop interface is extremely simple and straightforward.

From setting up your project, managing it, finding respondents, and reporting on the results, Qualtrics offers all kinds of services.

Qualtrics’ Prediction Analysis tool uses historical and current survey responses to make predictions about customer behavior. This tool helps analyze how the market will react to new products or services you plan to launch.

Qualtrics offers a flexible service so that you can request a quote according to your requirements.

These are some of the best tools available for qualitative analysis.

However, if these tools are a bit pricey for your needs, here is a list of free tools you can use.

Free Qualitative Data Analysis Software Programs:

• Square Feedback
• QDA Miner Lite
• ConnectedText

Now you know the best ways to analyze your market research data and the tools you can leverage to make this process more efficient and systematic.

List Hyper-Specific Action Items and Follow-Up Research Questions to Maximize the Value from Your Market Research

Market Research helps you identify your customer’s requirements and expectations.

With research, you can benchmark yourself against your competitors and ensure you have a leading advantage.

One of the best ways to gain a better perspective is through follow-up questions.

Interviews via telephone or face-to-face and emails are your principal follow-up marketing tools.

After your customer fills out your survey, you already have their attention. You could ask them almost any question related to your product or service, and they would probably answer it.

You might choose to stay anonymous during your original survey to avoid the respondent to be influenced by your brand. So, in the follow-up section, you can ask your audience everything you want them to answer about your brand.

You also have the freedom to include as many open-ended questions as you like, for it gives them space to share how they feel directly.

Here is a list of follow up questions to find additional information specific to your brand and business.

• What could we do to increase your score by just one mark?
• If you could change one thing about our product, what would it be?
• What three of these features would you most like to see in the product’s future?
• Which of these words best describes our product?
• What problem would you like to solve with our product?
• How would you rate the value for money of the product?
• How easy is it to navigate on our website?
• Were you able to find the information you were looking for on our website?
• How did this effort compare to your expectations?
• How responsive have we been to your feedback about our products?
• Why did you choose our product rather than a competitor’s?

You may get answers to some of these questions in your original survey, but the follow-up survey gives your audience the chance to open up.

When you allow your customers to go deeper and speak about their experience and feelings, it builds a foundation for trust and loyalty.

This happens only when you take their responses into account and improve your products to meet their needs and wants.

Most people take surveys and never hear back apart from a stale, thank you note. They don’t know how their contribution helped; if the business did anything with the information in the first place.

Be sure to drop an email after your market research analysis to thank them sincerely. Additionally, include the top 2 or 3 three conclusions you have drawn from their surveys and how you plan to implement them.

People like to know how their contributions helped create an impact and assure your audience that they didn’t waste their time with you.

When you engage them in your research process, they will distinctly remember your brand and be more open to participating in your future research.

Best Market Research Methods for Small Businesses on a Low Budget.

Spending an outrageous amount of money is not the only way to do market research.

I’ll give you five cost-effective market research strategies that you can implement to gain actionable data.

1. Research Product Reviews on Amazon.

Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer.

Amazon accounts for 13.7% of worldwide e-commerce sales . In the United States, Amazon is projected to account for more than half of the local e-commerce market.

Amazon is the fastest and easiest way to uncover what your customers are looking for and what they are actually buying.

What people say and what they do can sometimes be miles apart, and amazon shows you their actions.

You can check out your competitor’s products and head over to the review section to know what people have to say regarding the product.

You can know exactly what products are working, and the positive reviews will tell you what aspects of the product people are benefitting from.

But what will help you the most is finding what people are complaining about.

Viola! You found their pain point.

Suppose your company manufactures helmets. You scroll through your competitor’s products on amazon and navigate to the customer reviews.

There’s your pain point!

Your competitor’s product does not offer proper gear to shield people’s nose from dust.

If your product works to satisfy those customers, you can effectively steal your competitor’s audience!

2. Use Quora for Your Market Research

Quora has over 300 million unique visitors each month.

Quora is an information-focused platform to ask questions, get answers, and share your knowledge on topics you are familiar with.

Quora’s online community is an excellent place to find views, opinions, advice, standpoints, beliefs, explanations, and answers to everything you want to know.

If you think you may not find what you need at Quora, you should note that there are over 400,000 topics on Quora right now.

Quora is a platform for real people seeking answers. There is no third party involved, and you can know what people want in their own words.

It is an excellent place to conduct your research.

How to use Quora for market research?

You can sign up for Quora using your Google or Facebook account, and you can start following topics you are interested in.

Quora also gives you relevant suggestions when you type in specific topics or keywords in the search bar.

Quora has a feature where you can follow topics you are interested in.

When you follow a topic, Quora will optimize your home page news feed to show you the latest activity within topics you are interested in.

You can also note topics related to your search result on the right section of the page.

When people post questions tagging topics you follow, Quora will notify you.

You can also get the latest questions sent to you via email.

Go to the Settings option and then navigate to Email and Notifications to optimize settings according to your preference.

You will be able to track relevant topics with notifications and learn about what people in your industry are saying and what your audience has to say about your industry.

To gain more insights about a topic, click on the meatballs menu button, and select Manage.

Quora will give you information about common misspellings, alternative names, and standard abbreviations for your chosen topic.

On Quora, very similar topics are merged. You can find topics that have been integrated with the subject you are interested in.

On the right section of the page, Quora gives you information about your chosen subject's parent topics and child topics .

When you look for a particular question , Quora ranks the answers based on the number of Upvotes a response received. This feature will help you understand customer pain points.

Use Quora for your product research.

Quora also has brand-based topics. If your business has products, you can use Quora to see what people have to say about your products or services.

You should follow topics and questions specific to your business and answer queries people might have about them.

Joining in on conversations where your products or services are involved will help you gain a deeper understanding of how people perceive your products.

You can use websites like QuestionsPro to find relevant questions and track your answers.

3. Look at Your Google Analytics Data and Email Marketing Data

Google analytics.

Google Analytics is an exceptional tool for market research that is available for free.

At first glance, Google Analytics can be quite daunting.

There is way too much data presented to you, and if you are not familiar with the tool, you will keep going around in circles and walk away with a spectacular headache.

To make your life easier, here is an overview of the features of Google Analytics that can help you with your market research.

Google Analytics has eight main sections: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions.

Out of all these, there are four sections you need to pay close attention to — Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions.

1. Audience Section

This section gives you detailed insights about your users.

In this section, you can find information regarding the gender, age, and location of visitors to your website.

To find this information, focus on sub-sections Demographics and Geo .

The Demographics section will give you information regarding your website visitors’ age range and gender.

To know where your website visitors are from, click on the Geo Dropdown, and select Location.

If you want more specific information, you can click on individual countries to know which states in those countries your visitors are from.

Furthermore, you can select individual states to obtain a list of cities.

This will help you create strategies for your campaigns to drive better results.

2. Acquisition Section

Do most of your visitors come from Google? Instagram ? Facebook ? Quora? Website referrals?

This section will give you detailed information about how people come to your website.

You can analyze where most of your traffic comes from and find keywords your visitors used to navigate them to your website.

But this Keywords tool of Google analytics may not always be useful because of Google’s decision to encrypt keyword data.

If you would like to obtain data about Google's organic search keywords, you can use Google Webmaster Tools (Go to Search Traffic, then select Search Queries. )

3. Behavior Section

This section will provide a rich understanding of how your audience interacts with individual pages on your website.

Google Analytics Behavior section includes nine sections and tools .

These tools will help you learn about your user behavior. You can know which is the most visited page on your website and what actions people are taking while visiting your website.

4. Conversion Section

If you have an online store , the Conversion section will give you insights regarding your leads and conversions.

This section provides eCommerce Analytics to get information regarding how your products are performing and how many sessions or days it takes before your prospects convert.

Email Marketing

People don’t give their personal information without reason, and if used right, your email list can develop a profound connection with your customers.

You have contact details of people interested in what you have to say and have directly interacted with your business by providing their contact information.

So why not make the best of it?

In 2020, roughly 306.4 billion emails were sent and received each day.

Social Media platforms come and go with changing market trends, but email has been an integral part of our daily lives for ages.

This is because, with emails, you have the freedom to reach out to your audience with no restrictions. There is no third-party who can impact how, when, or why you reach out.

As of 2020, there are over 4.03 billion email users worldwide.

That is more than half of the world’s population. So, if you are looking for a way to connect with people, email is the perfect place for you.

Many marketers have used email marketing to generate sales , but if you look at email marketing in terms of only leads and sales, you lose out on a lot.

One hidden capability of email marketing is market research.

Though it isn't as full-blown as other research tools, email marketing does help with market research and has advantages over cost-effectiveness and reciprocation speed.

Using Email Marketing Data for Market Research

Any email with a call-to-action gives insights to help your research.

If you have sent an email offering seven products to your subscribers, you can analyze which product has done the best and which hasn’t.

But this isn't only limited to knowing your product's popularity; you can gain a deeper understanding by analyzing who purchased which product.

Based on past purchases or demographics, you can see which customers like a certain kind of product.

Email marketing does have its limitations.

It does not offer anonymity, meaning your customers will know who has sent them the survey. So, if they choose to take up the survey, their answers could be influenced by how they perceive your brand.

So, how can you make the most of a survey delivered by email?

• Offer Incentives. When you offer a promo code or a gift card to someone in exchange for a few minutes of their time, they will be more inclined to help you out than if you just ask them to fill a survey.
• Survey Questionnaire. The survey you send via email to your subscribers can't include the same questions as your other surveys. You need to keep in mind that they already know who you are, including questions like, “According to you, who is the best brand in the XYZ industry?” will not be useful.
• Type of questions. Your questions should be clear and straightforward. Don’t include too many open-ended questions; make it as easy-to-answer for your audience as possible.
• Compare survey analysis. You can get deeper insights if you compare survey results according to specific categories like geographical location. This will provide you with information about which type of your audience favors what.

How to build your email list?

To build your email list, you need people to subscribe. As we have already established that people don’t give out their personal information for free, you could create lead magnets.

Types of lead magnets:

• Online Courses
• Whitepapers
• Reports or Studies
• Infographics

Email Marketing Tools

Using an email marketing service is tremendously important. These software programs help you optimize and personalize your emails.

I would suggest you choose either Getresponse or Convertkit .

They are simple to use and offer a variety of features that you can leverage to create email marketing campaigns.

Even if you do not have a technical bone in your body, you can create, personalize, and customize your emails by yourself.

These tools ensure that all your emails are optimized to display perfectly over all devices and give you detailed engagement analytics.

How to Use Competitor Research for Market Research

Why are your competitors doing better than you are? What is their marketing strategy? Who are they targeting? What keywords are bringing traffic to their website?

If you are not aware of what your competitors are doing, how do you expect to outrank them?

This is the reason why you need to conduct a competitor analysis.

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor Analysis (or competitive research) is the process where you identify your major competitors and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

The goal of conducting a competitor analysis is to replicate their successful strategies and exploit their weaknesses.

When you know what entities your competitors are targeting, you can develop strategies to target the same entities and generate better results.

These weaknesses could be a particular market they’re overlooking or even keywords that they’re not targeting to get traffic to their website.

Competitive Analysis in Marketing

Competitor analysis will:

• Help you create full-proof marketing strategies.
• Identify gaps in the market and opportunities that your competitors are overlooking.
• Replicate your competitor’s strengths and take advantage of their weaknesses.
• Help you make informed decisions for future investments.

How to conduct your competitive analysis?

1. Identify your major competitors.

Determining who you are competing with is an essential first step.

Social media and search engines have made market research a much easier process. You are only a search result away from knowing who the major competitors in your industry are.

What products or services do they offer?

Understanding what your competitors offer and its features are essential. Here are a few questions you can answer to understand your competitor better.

• What is the price range of their products?
• Who are their ideal customers?
• What is their primary customer demographic?
• How do they stand out from their competitors?
• How are they marketing their products or services?
• What are its most popular features?

You need to assess the market to identify both the major players and those steadily on the rise.

Porter’s Five Forces Model allows you to analyze the competition in the marketplace and helps you identify your standing among competitors.

Porter’s industry analysis method recognizes the following five fundamental for

• Competitive rivalry. How many firms compete, and how much is the market growing?
• Threat of substitute products. How likely is it for customers to switch to other firms?
• Bargaining power of buyers. How much power do customers have?
• Threat of new entrants. How easy is it to establish a new firm?
• Bargaining power of suppliers. How much power do suppliers have?

This market research analysis technique will give you a better understanding of your industry’s competitive landscape.

2. Acquire Competitors’ Credit Reports.

Business credit scores rank the creditworthiness of a business.

You can get access to your competitor’s credit reports online for free. While personal credit scores are not available online, business credit scores can be accessed by anyone.

Additionally, it is vital to create your business’ credit report to determine and prove your credibility.

According to a study published by The Wall Street Journal , around 25% of business credit reports you find online may contain errors or lack critical information.

Trusted Sources to Get a Free Business Credit Report.

• Nav You can gain access to free credit report services, including a summary of business credit reports from D&B , Equifax , and Experian . The business credit report also includes a letter grade with the credit-score range.
• Creditsafe . You can sign up at CreditSafe to gain a free credit report for your own business. After you fill out an online request, you have to talk to a Creditsafe representative to activate your business credit report.
• Dun & Bradstreet Credit Signal It is a free business credit reporting service provided by D&B. Credit Signal offers free monitoring service so you can be instantly notified of changes in your business’ D&B credit scores and ratings.

Sources for Paid Business Credit Reports.

• Dun & Bradstreet It is one of the oldest credit reporting companies in existence. For every business you research, D&B provides a credit summary, a credit score, and a financial stress score. With D&B, you can also check out payment comparisons between different businesses in an industry.
• Equifax This tool will give you access to public records information like bankruptcy and a business failure score, which is a forecast of how likely it is for a company to crash in the next year. Along with a business failure score, Equifax business credit reports also include possible reasons for failure. You can also gather information about other companies associated with your chosen business and even their business demographics and payment history.
• Experian It is one of the newest key players in the credit reporting industry. Their business credit reports are incredibly detailed, including information right from the basics to risk alerts, risk indicator ratings, and even business verification. You can gain as many credit reports on your targeted business and be notified whenever new information is updated.

Analyzing these reports can tell you if the businesses are financially stable and how much risk there is in the industry.

3. Analyze and compare competitor’s content.

Familiarize yourself with the kind of content your competitor is publishing. Take note of the type of content that is receiving the most engagement.

What kind of content are you publishing, and how is it different from their content? Are you making use of all formats, or are you missing out on opportunities?

What is your competitor's primary focus on content marketing?

Here is a list of content formats you should take note of:

• White papers
• Case studies
• Newsletters
• Press releases

Compare the quality of content and analyze how frequently they are publishing. Determine their content strategy and see how you can build about that to gain better results.

4. Analyze their Website.

98% of businesses have rated a competitor’s website as a valuable resource and the best source for obtaining competitive intelligence data.

What are consumers searching for? Why are your competitors outranking you in SERPs? What strategies are they using to do so?

An essential aspect you need to know is what keywords they are ranking for.

Let’s assume McDonald’s to be your competitor brand.

For your market research, you should, of course, consider a wide range of brands. I’m only considering one brand for the purpose of learning how to do competitor analysis.

Use Google Ads Keyword Planner to analyze your competitor market.

Go to Keyword Planner and paste your competitor’s website URLs.

Be sure to select Use the entire site for the keyword planner to analyze their entire site.

When you click on Get Results , the keyword planner will give you a list of keywords that your competitor’s website ranks for.

But as you can see, most of the results won't help you as they are specific to your competitor's brand.

You can exclude their brand name by

• Clicking on Filter.
• Select Keyword.
• Choose Does not contain from the drop-down menu.
• Enter your competitor’s brand name.

Now you can see a much more relevant list that you can target.

You can now do this individually for all your competitor brands and see what they rank for and which keywords they have in common.

Note: Google Ads Keyword Planner is a free tool that is primarily for advertisers, not SEOs. You can use SEO specific tools like SEMrush , Moz , and Ahrefs to gain in-depth insights about your competitor’s SEO.

Your main objective is to try and outrank your competitor in SERPs .

Once you know what keywords your competitor is ranking for, analyze where they are using these keywords.

• URL architecture
• Meta description
• Heading tags
• Content Body
• Inbound links
• Image alt text
• Social media

Additionally, also take note of the following:

• Page Speed Insights
• Domain Authority
• Root linking domains
• Sitemaps – HTML, image, XML, video
• Backlinking strategy
• Website responsiveness (Mobile and Desktop)

Analyze what keywords your competitor is ranking for that you are not. This is called keyword gap analysis.

Analyze how they are ranking for those keywords and build upon their strategy to give Google better content to consider.

5. Look at their social media engagement.

The next step is to analyze your competitor’s social media and see how they integrate it into their marketing strategy.

• Which social media platform are they focusing on?
• Where do they receive the most engagement?
• What kind of content are they posting?
• Which content format is working the best for them?
• How often do they post?
• What kind of profile pictures and cover images are they using?
• Check out their social media bio. What points have they mentioned in their overview section?
• What is their growth rate?
• Who are they following?
• How proactive are they? How well are they addressing consumer complaints?
• How are they interacting with their customers and brand advocates?
• What are their weaknesses? Is their response rate poor? Is it irregular posting? Spelling or grammatical errors? Lack of engagement? Poor imagery?

Find out areas you can exploit and use their social media strategies to successfully build your online presence.

6. Sentiment Analysis.

Sentiment Analysis is interpreting how customers feel about your business.

This is something that is often overlooked by businesses. It is crucial to track how the audience feels about your brand when compared to your competitors.

There are various free and paid tools that can help you assess the sentiment behind customer behavior.

Sentiment Analysis Tools.

• Quick Search
• Critical Mention
• Social Mention
• Sentiment Analyzer
• Social Searcher
• MonkeyLearn

Use these insights to gain the upper hand over your competition. And though you won't take the lead overnight, it is essential to track your progress with tools like Google Analytics , SEMrush , Moz , and Google Webmasters .

Analyze what is working and what isn’t, and optimize your strategy accordingly.

Ask Your Audience with Online Surveys

Conducting an online survey is probably the most effective means of getting direct feedback from your customers.

It is a straightforward, reliable, and affordable way of obtaining data.

You do not need any coding knowledge to conduct an online survey. You simply need to register on an online survey portal and create your survey.

These are hundreds of online survey platforms you can choose to conduct your market research. Each of them has its unique features, and it is important to filter through to find the one that fits your requirements.

I have compiled a list of leading SaaS online survey platforms for you to choose from.

Online Survey Platforms.

1. Typeform .

Typeform offers over 150+ survey templates for you to choose from. You can easily optimize them as per your specifications.

Many people abandon their surveys because they get bored. With Typeform, you can choose to project one question at a time to keep your audience engaged.

The free version of Typeform, nicknamed the CORE plan, offers various features.

• 3 typeforms.
• 10 questions per Typeform.
• 100 responses per month.
• Reports and metrics.
• Email notification when someone completes your Typeform.
• Embed your Typeform on a web page.

Price: Typeform plans start from $35 per month.

2. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is one of the leading online survey platforms in the market.

It is incredibly user-friendly, and you can get reports of your market research survey in minutes.

If you do not have a source of participants for your research, with SurveyMonkey, you can find people who fit your criteria from their global panel of respondents.

SurveyMonkey Basic (Free) plan features:

• 10 questions or elements per survey
• View either 40 or 100 responses per survey (depending on when you created an account and your billing location.)

Responses over your plan’s limit are hidden and will be deleted after 60 days unless you upgrade to a paid plan.

3. QuestionPro

With QuestionPro, you can not only create surveys but analyze your qualitative and quantitative research data.

As far as free survey tools go, you won’t find another that delivers as much value as QuestionPro’s free trial version.

Here are a few features of QuestionPro’s Essential (Free) plan :

• Unlimited surveys.
• Unlimited questions‪ per survey.
• Unlimited responses (however, each survey is limited to a maximum of 1000 responses.)
• 25+ question types‪.
• Add your own logo to the survey.
• Shareable dashboard reports‪.
• Customized thank you page‪.

Price: QuestionPro plans start from $85 per month

These are the best online survey platforms available. A few other notable survey platforms you should consider are:

• Google Forms
• Zoho Survey
• ProProfs Survey Maker
• Client Heartbeat
• Survey Gizmo
• Survey Planet

All the survey tools mentioned above have their advantages and limitations. Which platform you choose ultimately depends on your business requirements.

If you are not able to come to a conclusion, I would recommend starting with SurveyMonkey or QuestionPro .

Best Sites for Market Research Reports, Finding Users to Interview, and Surveying

Throughout the blog, I’ve mentioned several websites and software programs you can use for various stages of your market research.

In this section, I am going to list additional tools (free and paid) that will make your life much easier while conducting market research.

1. U.S Census Data Tools

U.S. Census Bureau data tools are excellent for conducting secondary market research.

It provides various market research tools and free industry research reports.

You can access economic, demographic, and population data and gain valuable insights for your research.

In fact, you can segment the user data by age, race, ethnicity, and even housing status and compare this information with other locations side by side.

Price: Free.

2. Pew Research Center

This is another excellent website for obtaining free industry reports and datasets.

Pew Research Center gathers data and creates reports based on public opinion polls, demographic analysis, content research, and other social science data-driven research.

Its Download Datasets page lists the direct links to access the datasets available.

By creating an account , you can download survey reports and be notified if there are any changes made to datasets you’ve previously accessed.

3. Statista

Statista is one of the largest statistics portals in the market. The site provides datasets for over 80,000 topics.

Statista conducts market research using a broad range of specialist tools and is excellent at transforming qualitative data into statistics.

Price: You can register to create a free basic account. However, the features offered are minimal. The pricing plans start from $39 per month for a single account.

4. Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the best tools available for market research.

With Google Trends, you can determine what consumers are searching about competing brands.

You can analyze the popularity of one search term in comparison with other terms simultaneously.

You can also use filter features like region and category to gain insights according to your specifications.

With Feedier, you can effectively engage your participants, export your data, and run insight reports for your market research.

Here are a few features of Feedier’s free trial version , also called Essentials.

• 100 monthly responses
• 1 Feedback Form
• Interactive Form builder
• 12+ question types (NPS)
• Participant actions
• Visual data insights

Price: Feedrier plans start from $150 per month.

6. Think With Google – Market Finder

Think With Google is another terrific research tool to uncover the latest marketing trends.

Think With Google’s Market Finder helps you gain insights based on in-depth national and global data and consumer insights.

7. SBA’s Office of Entrepreneurship Education Resources

SBA’s Office of Entrepreneurship Education provides access to various resources and business and economic statistics.

There is a variety of tools, reports, and resources available for conducting your market research analysis.

8. Social Mention

With billions of people using social media all over the world, it is challenging to analyze what is being said and done on these platforms.

Social Mention is a search engine that analyzes content across various social media platforms.

With Social Mention, you can enter a specific keyword and get a list of mentions related to your search term. You can filter your search results by source, date, and even location.

Social Mention also provides a score for sentiment, strength, reach, and passion with respect to your search term.

9. Testing Time

One of the biggest challenges of conducting primary market research is finding participants for your research.

With Testing Time, you can find participants by specifying your target audience's characteristics like their location and demographics. You can even include additional criteria specific for your research like, “must own a car.”

Price: Their pricing options depend on the number of test users and the test method.

10. Respondent

Most survey portals that provide a source for participants do not allow direct contact with the audience.

With Respondent, you can conduct video calls, phone calls, in-person discussions, or online research. It's up to you.

You decide on how much you are willing to pay per participant according to your budget.

Price: Respondent charges a 50% service fee per participant.

Market Research FAQ

There is no one size fits all when it comes to market research.  Four primary factors that define your market research cost: 1. The type of research to fulfill your specifications and the cost associated with it. 2. The number of participants you need for your research. 3. Incidence rate, i.e., the percentage of people who fit your target audience criteria. 4. Data collection method and the incentives you offer The average cost for Top-level reports: $100 to $1,000. These reports will provide basic insights into your industry. The average cost for Full-market reports: $1,500 to $8,000 (most commonly $3,500 to $4,000). These reports will be extremely detailed and cover various metrics about your industry from current market trends to future projections. But if you are willing to put in the effort and cut down labor costs, and conduct most of your research online, you can gain insightful data for $300 to $1,500.

The truth is, you can undoubtedly conduct your market research in-house, but it is incredibly tedious to try to do everything on your own. Extending your research by making use of market research firms and online marketing tools will make this process much smoother for you. While you may not want to outsource your entire research, there is too much work that goes into market research, and handing out a few tasks makes your research much more efficient.  Hiring a freelance researcher may be the best course of action for small-scale field research. Most marketing agencies do not undertake projects with a budget below $4,000. Before hiring a freelancer, run a thorough background check to analyze their credibility. Ensure they fit your business and have enough authority to conduct the research.

While conducting secondary market research, there are thousands of sources available online for free and a cost.  While it may be tempting to leverage free research reports, it is imperative to ensure that the source is credible.  Use government sources to access free reports that give basic insights about your industry. Statistics that will have a direct impact on your business decisions should be handled with caution. For example, economic projections or subjective analysis reports. To obtain accurate data for such statistics, the information must come from multiple credible sources. So, here is the baseline.  If the data is free, verify it. If you can’t verify it on your own, purchase it from a reputed and unbiased publisher. 

Ready to Understand Your Market Better Than Your Competitors?

When it comes to understanding your customers better than your competitors, you can’t rely on assumptions or feelings. You need hard numbers.

Market research may seem incredibly daunting at first glance.

It is time-consuming and tedious, but you wouldn’t be unnerved by conducting market research if you know the exact process.

In this blog, I’ve systematically broken down the entire market research process step-by-step, so you can conduct your research to attain maximum actionable insights.

You now know how to find gaps in the market and exploit your competitor’s weaknesses.

What market research methods you can use if you are on a budget.

How to understand your competitors’ strategies and build upon them to attain better success.

I’ve also listed several market research tools that you can use to conduct your research much more efficiently.

All you have to do is follow everything I’ve mentioned in this blog to understand the market and your consumers better.

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Anastasia belyh.

Anastasia has been a professional blogger and researcher since 2014. She loves to perform in-depth software reviews to help software buyers make informed decisions when choosing project management software, CRM tools, website builders, and everything around growing a startup business.

Anastasia worked in management consulting and tech startups, so she has lots of experience in helping professionals choosing the right business software.

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Start » strategy, sizing up the competition: how to conduct competitive research.

Competitive research can reveal trends in the marketplace and gaps in your own business plan.

Competitive research is a crucial part of any good marketing plan. This term may elicit some negative images but competitive research has nothing to do with spying. It has everything to do with paying attention to your competition and what they are doing.

Many people will lose out on business to competitors they have never even heard of simply because they’ve never taken the time to do competitive research. Understanding what your competition is doing will help you position yourself, and your product or service, within the market.

What is competitive research?

Competitive research involves identifying your competitors, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of their products and services. By looking at your biggest competitors, you can see how your own products and services stack up and what kind of threat they pose to your business. It also helps you identify industry trends you may have been missing.

Four benefits to doing competitive research are:

• Understanding your market . Competitive research can reveal trends in the marketplace that might have otherwise been missed. The ability to identify and predict trends is a huge asset for any business, helping to improve value proposition for customers. This is an important component of competitive research that you should constantly be doing.
• Improving your marketing . Your customers care about how your product or service is going to make their lives better. If they are leaving to go to one of your competitors, it’s probably because that company does a better job of explaining the benefits to the customer base, or does in fact provide a better product or service. Competitive research helps you understand why customers choose to buy from you or your competitors and how your competition is marketing their products. Over time, this can help you improve your own marketing programs.
• Identifying market gaps . When you do competitive research, you’re analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. You’ll often find that, by looking at the data, there is a segment of the population that is being underserved. This could put your business in a unique position to reach those customers.
• Planning for the future . The most important byproduct of competitive research is that it will help you create a strategic plan for your business. This includes things like improving your product or service, using more strategic pricing strategies, and improving the promotion of your products.

Good competitive research could put your business in a unique position to reach customers who are being underserved.

6 steps to competitive research

It may sound obvious, but the first step is to simply identify who your top competitors are . There are two different types of competitors to identify: direct and indirect.

Direct competitors are targeting the same customer base you’re targeting. They are solving the same problem that you are trying to solve and sell a similar product or service.

Indirect competitors may sell something similar to your product or service but target a different audience, or they may target your same customer base but have a slightly different product or service.

It’s important to understand this segment of your market for two reasons: (1) it could provide you with growth opportunities for your own business, and (2) it could also highlight a threat to your business of which you would otherwise be unaware.

Here are six steps to getting started on competitive research:

Identify main competitors.

The most obvious way to do this is simply by searching your product or service category on the web and seeing what comes up. You can also check websites like Crunchbase or Product Hunt . You may find competitors that you might not have noticed before.

The goal is to cast a wide net and get an idea of who your main competitors are. Another good way to identify direct and indirect competitors is to ask your potential customers what services they are already using.

Analyze competitors' online presence

Once you’ve identified your main competitors, you want to look at their website, the type of content they are publishing, and their social media presence. Then, look for any blogs, white papers, and social media content being provided about their products and how to use them. Ask yourself these questions:

• What is the user experience like on their website?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• Do you clearly understand the products or services they offer?
• Is their website mobile-optimized?
• How often do they blog and most importantly, is the quality of their content good?
• What topics do they blog about most frequently?
• What social platforms are they actively using to talk about their products and services?
• Is this content engaging their target audience?

The answers to these questions show you opportunities where you can outperform your competitors. You will want to pay close attention to anything they are doing well that you aren’t doing. This will help give you a better understanding of where you should be focusing your attention and resources.

Gather information

The best way to gather information about your competitors is by acting like one of their customers. Sign up for their email list so you can get an idea of how they communicate.

Also, follow their blog and social media accounts and watch how they interact with their customers online. What kind of experience do customers have with your competitors?

You should consider shopping from them so you can see what their product looks like and what the experience is like from a customer perspective.

Track your findings

Make sure you track your competitors' findings on a spreadsheet; it will help with ongoing monitoring. This isn’t a complicated process, you just need to keep track of what they are doing over time so that you can see how they change everything from pricing to marketing and promotional activities.

You’ll start by dividing your competitors into direct and indirect customer columns. You’ll then track the following information:

• Company name
• Social media sites
• Unique features
• Pros and cons
• Screenshots and additional links

Check online reviews

Try to find as many reviews of your competitors as possible. Read their social media reviews, comments on their blogs, and case studies on their website. If they offer and present Google reviews, read them as well. It’s a good idea to understand not only the good things that your competitors may be doing, but the bad things as well. Include mentions with the Better Business Bureau about them in your research.

How customer-focused are they? This could be an opportunity for you to stand out. And, if they sell a product similar to yours, this will be a good way to find out if a lot of people are interested in it.

Any negative feedback will help you identify areas where you can improve your own product or service.

Identify areas for improvement

Now that you’ve taken note of some of the biggest differences between you and your competitors, it’s time to think about how you can use this information to improve your own business results.

Your competitive research should reveal at least one area your business can stand to improve in. This will help you learn how to engage better with your customers and online followers.

Keep in mind that competitive research is never a "one-and-done" event. Ongoing monitoring, such as observing how competitors evolve, is necessary to ensure that you are staying competitive in the marketplace.

Tools for competitive research

Software and technology now make it easier than ever to conduct competitive research. However, there are hundreds of competitive research tools on the market and narrowing down the right software can feel overwhelming.

This is why we’ve done the legwork and narrowed it down for you. Here are four tools you should consider using to conduct your competitive research:

SEMrush : This is one of the best competitive research tools on the market. It contains over 30 tools that can track things like SEO, PPC, keyword research, competitive research, and more. SEMrush will help you discover new competitors, find their best-used keywords, and analyze their ad copy. They have flexible pricing plans depending on your business needs.

SpyFu : This search analytics tool reveals the keywords websites buy on Google. So, once you’ve identified your biggest competitors, you can track every keyword they’ve bought. Plus, you can track every keyword they are ranking for and find the content and backlinks that helped them rank in the first place.

BuzzSumo : BuzzSumo lets you see how your content is matching up to your competitors’ content. You can see which content is shared more frequently on social media compared to others, and you can even schedule alerts on your competitors’ content which will make it easier to continue tracking them.

Owletter : Owletter tracks and analyzes emails sent from a website. This allows you to track your competitors’ email marketing and see what is and isn’t working for them. To get started, you’ll need to sign up to join your competitors’ email list. Then, every time you receive an email, Owletter will take a screenshot, analyze it, and alert you to any useful information.

Competitive research can seem daunting at first but it’s an essential part of running a successful business. When you incorporate the right tools into your research, you may find that it’s not as difficult as you imagined.

On some level, understanding your competitors is just as important as understanding your customers. Your competitors have valuable lessons to teach you and it’s important to regularly monitor their online activity. Doing so will strengthen your business and improve your own value for your customers.

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Mastering B2B Market Research: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Discover your competitors' strengths and leverage them to achieve your own success

Market research is pivotal to any business’s success in the digital world. You need it to understand your customers’ needs and preferences, identify threats from competitors, track market trends, reduce churn risk…the list goes on and on.

However, your business type will dictate how you conduct market research and which metrics are most important to meeting your goals. For example, if you’re a B2C company, you’ll aim to understand individual consumer behavior and preferences. But if you sell primarily to other businesses, you must conduct B2B market research. The nuances between the two are subtle but important.

Keep reading as we walk you through the basics of B2B market research, including different methods and tools, so you can make informed decisions and stay competitive in an ever-evolving digital environment.

What is B2B market research?

The core of market research is all about collecting and analyzing data about a target market or defined segment . It’s an intricate process that gives you the insights you need to make the best decisions for your business, including product launches, market expansions, marketing campaigns, budget allocation, and more.

But who you are researching depends on your target audience . Business-to-business (B2B) market research focuses on understanding businesses’ needs, preferences, and behaviors rather than individual customers. You define your consumer as the business itself.

Unlike B2C market research, which focuses on the interactions between a business and individual people, with B2B market analysis, you’re studying how different businesses work together, what they can offer each other, and how to create a mutually beneficial relationship. While most of the time, B2B market research methods will focus on how you can sell to another business; you may also use it to find new opportunities for partnerships and collaborations.

The importance of market research to B2B companies

Like traditional online market research , B2B analysis is crucial as it helps you understand where you stand vis-a-vis competitors. With it, you can identify your market position and better understand where new opportunities lie. It will also help you find new customers and better engage with existing ones so you see a greater return on your investments.

B2B user research will help you make well-informed, data-driven decisions , especially if you follow a systematic approach using a market research tool like Similarweb.

Here are some of the main benefits of B2B market research:

Define your target audience –   In this case, your target audience is other businesses rather than individual customers. Like traditional audience analysis , you must define their pain points, preferences, and online behavior. Understanding their challenges is crucial for developing products and offering services that meet their needs.

Build loyal customer relationships – Customer satisfaction is important for any business, but for B2B businesses, it’s essential for retaining customers. You’ll be able to build strong relationships by continuously meeting their needs.

Pinpoint promising market opportunities – Which geos are you looking to go after primarily? Are there new areas that could increase your market share , or should you focus on a more niche audience with less competition? Determining where your book of business is largest will affect how you run campaigns and where you invest the most effort. B2B user research will also help you understand if there are any regulatory or cultural differences in the regions you’re hoping to expand to.

Conduct competitive analysis – Any good strategy starts with competitive analysis . Find out what your competitors are offering their customers and how your offering compares.

Optimize your pricing strategy – B2B research can help you understand how much your customers expect to pay for your service, given market conditions and competitor pricing. Make sure that the price you offer is comparable to the service you are providing.

Mitigate any risk – When launching a new product, entering a new market , or attempting to reach a new audience, you need reliable data and insights-driven research to mitigate risks.

Uncover industry trends – Detect, monitor, and analyze any trends in your industry that could affect what customers are looking for. This includes emerging players, new technologies, the state of the economy, and more.

And then innovate – Once you have a better idea of the trends shaping consumer behavior, you can improve your existing products or create new services to keep up with ever-changing demand.

Different types of B2B market research methods

There are a variety of methods you can use to conduct your research. We suggest using a mix so you’re not limited to only one strategy, as each will help you answer different questions.

Let’s take a look at the four main types of B2B market research :

Primary market research

Primary market research is the first-hand collection of data. This data can be obtained through a variety of B2B market research tools, but your main focus is looking directly at your customers’:

Web Metrics – Use website traffic analytics to understand how you perform online compared to your competitors. You should check if specific market segments outperform others and try to find out if it’s because of a specific offering or UX. Don’t forget to measure engagement metrics , such as bounce rate , pages per visit, and session duration , to understand how your audience interacts with your website.

Web metrics analysis using the Similarweb platform.

Observation – Install software that records visits and creates heatmaps of your website so you can understand your user’s journey through your site. This type of research can work in parallel with website analytics, qualifying any findings that you make about user experience on certain pages.

What are you waiting for?

Start using digital intelligence and build a winning market research strategy.

Customer surveys – Surveys are an extremely effective form of B2B user research to help you learn more about your current customers. Distribute questionnaires and polls to your database via email, site chatbot, or social media. Ask questions that can give you qualitative data ( what type of business are they? ) and quantitative data ( how many employees do they currently have working for them? ). You should include both open-ended and multiple choice questions so you can get some personal feedback from your customer ( what’s a new product or feature you’d like to see us offer? ), as well as answers to important pre-determined questions ( how many people in your team currently use our product? ).

Focus groups – If you want to get even more personal, then focus groups are a great way to get a small group together to discuss your business. You can choose either customers or prospects depending on the questions you’d like to ask and the conclusions you want to make.

Secondary market research

Secondary market research uses data that has already been published. Unlike primary market research, which is for your eyes only, secondary market research is available to anyone. While it’s not exclusively yours, this data type is preferred for anyone hoping to keep costs low or have quick access to the information they need.

Government reports and census data – Government organizations frequently publish reports that are great high-level overviews, including the state of the economy and the conditions of financial markets. Most of these reports are published annually or quarterly, so check often for the most updated version to get the freshest data.

Competitor websites – Imitation is the highest form of flattery! A great source of secondary market research is to look at what your competitors are doing. Check out how they highlight competing features, cover blog topics, and target SEO keywords. You could also conduct a SWOT analysis to pinpoint your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Competitor marketing channel mix using the Similarweb platform

Media outlets – Check the news and other media publications to see if any major events are affecting your industry. It’s a great way to keep up with current events impacting your customers.

Qualitative market research

Qualitative market research is one of the best ways to understand customers’ feelings about a brand, product, or service. It measures what comes to their mind whenever they hear your company’s name. It takes more time to analyze the results than other market research types, as it’s more about emotions- and opinions-based.

By understanding the sentiments of your customers, you will be able to shape and develop products, services, and digital strategies that are most important to them.

Here are a few methods for B2B qualitative research:

• Focus groups
• Case study or whitepaper
• Online forums
• Ethnography

Quantitative market research

Last on our list is quantitative market research , which focuses solely on collecting, analyzing, and comparing data. This is where you’re crunching the numbers. This data can forecast trends, size a new market , validate a market entry plan, or establish customer patterns.

Since the data you collect will be reliable, you can replicate and automate processes with a similar methodology. Often, there are fewer variables in data collection compared to qualitative research. There are three core methods of data collection that you’ll use to conduct quantitative research:

ABM campaigns

ABM stands for Account-Based Marketing. Although ABM campaigns can be considered more of a marketing tactic than traditional B2B research, it’s important to understand the high-value accounts that can drive the most impact for your business.

For example, let’s say you’re Hubspot , a software company that sells a content management platform for ecommerce businesses. With your platform, these companies can list inventory, track sales, follow up on deliveries, and even collect payments in one place. After conducting market research, you discover an up-and-coming ecommerce player that fits your target audience. This company has the chance to bring with it a substantial pipeline.

Finding up-and-coming ecommerce players for ABM using the Similarweb platform.

Rather than casting a wide net and launching a new marketing campaign in the hopes that someone at this company will click on your LinkedIn Ad or open an email, you run an ABM campaign.

Because ABM campaigns are more personalized, your marketing efforts will complement that company’s pain points, products, and even staff. For ABM campaigns to be effective, you want to make sure that you focus on strategic high-value accounts, use tailored messaging to build stronger relationships, and align your efforts with sales to nurture the relationship further.

How to conduct B2B market research using Similarweb

Now that you know the ins and outs, it’s time to learn how to do B2B market research.

You may not know where to begin or which metrics are the most important, but having a market research tool like Similarweb is invaluable.

The tools you’ll find inside help you make sense of all that data so you can solve the most complex business challenges with data-driven decisions. Although the uses are endless, here are four ways you can use Similarweb to conduct B2B market research:

1. Company research

Use the company research tool to understand how your customers are performing online while also pinpointing new potential prospects based on their digital footprint.

With Similarweb, you can uncover the digital strategies and tactics of any company by device, country, and marketing channel, compare full-funnel traffic , engagement, and conversion metrics.

This is an important step of B2B market research for two reasons. First, you can show your customers how your product or service directly impacts their growth online by monitoring changes in metrics from before and after they started working with you. Suppose you’re trying to find new prospects. In that case, you can use Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence to analyze the industry you’re targeting and discover the top-performing companies that would be lucrative business partners. Once you’ve identified these companies, you can also use Similarweb Sales Intelligence to validate and find the best leads.

2. Competitive benchmarking

While most of your B2B market research will look at your customers, you always want to watch the competition. That’s where business benchmarking comes in. Our Benchmarking tool compares and measures your business’s digital performance against competitors or the industry average. It’s a great way to determine industry best practices and identify opportunities for improvement.

You can use this data to pinpoint underperforming marketing or sales strategies , optimize your content , and even find areas for new market growth.

Here are some KPI ideas we recommend when benchmarking your business as part of your B2B research strategy:

• Increase web traffic by __%
• Launch x new products into a new target market within the next ½ year.
• Increase monthly active users on a mobile app by 5%
• Engage users – improve session duration or growth rate by __%
• Increase app store ranking by 5% on Android and/or iOS
• Reach top 2 results on ranking on (define keywords)
• Improve share of voice in ___ topic from __% to __%.
• Increase brand awareness – improve branded traffic share by __%

Benchmarking Traffic and Engagement metrics with Similarweb

3. Audience analysis

Knowing who you sell to is pivotal to your B2B market research strategy. That’s where audience analysis comes in. Understanding your target demographics allows you to build customized product offerings and personal marketing strategies.

Here’s an example of using Similarweb to conduct audience analysis. Unpack demographics for any site or industry you choose, including data on gender, age, location, interests, browsing habits, and more.

Using Similarweb to understand your audience’s demographics

4. Marketing channel performance

With insight into how different marketing channels are performing , you can find out the most effective ways to reach potential customers and ensure that you’re allocating the right budget for paid advertising.

Similarweb Marketing Intelligence makes this type of research easy. Look below at a snapshot from within our Marketing Channels tab, providing an overview of performance across direct , organic search, social media, email, paid search, and display ads. Check which convert the most and where the highest channel traffic comes from. For the ecommerce industry in the US, direct and organic search drive the most traffic to the top websites , whereas referrals and paid search are the most effective paid marketing channels.

Take the first step in acing B2B market research

B2B market analysis is key to staying ahead in the digital landscape. It will guide you through customer needs, competitor landscapes, and market trends.

Empower your business with comprehensive market insights and stay ahead of the curve with Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence. Whether you’re just starting or consider yourself a seasoned market research pro, we have all the necessary tools.

Take the next step in refining your B2B market strategy – sign up for Similarweb today.

Become a market research pro

Start using digital intelligence to grow your business online.

B2B market research is the process of studying a business’s needs, preferences, and behaviors as a whole rather than individual customers. You define your target customer as the business itself.

Why is B2B market research important?

B2B market research is important as it helps you understand where you stand vis-a-vis competitors. With it you can identify threats, get a better picture of new opportunities, and find out how to connect more with your customers. It will also help you find new prospects to increase ROI.

What are the four main types of B2B market research? 

The four main types of B2B market research include primary, secondary, qualitative, and quantitative.

How can you use Similarweb to support your B2B market research? 

You can use Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence in various ways to support your B2B market research, including company research, competitive benchmarking, audience analysis, marketing channel performance, and more.

by Molly Winik

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Molly has 8+ years of experience in marketing, content creation, and PR. Her work has been featured on Mention, The Times of Israel, and Culture Trip.

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The Steps in a Business Research Process

• Small Business
• Business Planning & Strategy
• Business Steps
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How Is a Market Defined & Segmented?

The consumer research process, the advantages of benchmarking for an organization.

• Difference Between Marketing Research and Marketing Intelligence
• What Is Segmenting in Consumer Markets?

The business research process entails learning everything possible about a company's customers, competitors and the industry. The major objectives of the process are determining what products or services to offer, which customers are most likely to buy them, where to sell them and how to price and promote them. Various steps in the business research process help a company achieve these objectives.

Identify Industry Competition

The first step is identifying key competitors in the industry. One way to garner information on the competition is through secondary research. Secondary research information is data that are already available about the industry: market share and total market sales. Secondary research may also provide detailed information about competitors, such as number of employees, products they sell and their key strengths.

Secondary research can be obtained through various sources, depending on the industry. For example, the NPD Group uses their CREST analysis for restaurants. Nielsen provides data about consumer package goods.

Learn the Demographic

The process continues with a study of the consumer or business customer. It is important to determine what the customer wants and needs before developing products to meet those needs. The consumer will usually dictate which products will sell. If consumers' needs are not met, they will usually buy competitive products.

The best way to determine customer needs is through primary research. Primary research includes phone surveys, personal interviews and even mail surveys. With these surveys, marketing research professionals test certain product concepts, measure customer satisfaction and determine the best features and prices for their products.

Perform a SWOT Analysis

Once detailed information on customers and the competition has been garnered, a SWOT analysis can be used to study the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A strength may be the company's market share or a good reputation among customers, according to "SWOT Analysis" at quickmba.com, a popular business reference site.

A weakness may be inexperienced management. Additionally, a company may have an opportunity to purchase another company. Threats may include new government regulation in the industry or a well-financed new competitor.

A company uses the SWOT analysis to exploit its strengths via available opportunities. For example, a company with strong financial backing could purchase another company to increase its distribution and market share. A business can also minimize its weaknesses against potential threats, for example by hiring more experienced marketing people to deal with an increase in competition.

Studying the Target Audience

At least part of the business research process should be devoted to studying a company's target audience – the customers who are most likely to purchase the company's products. For example, a small radio station's primary target audience may be white professional women between the ages of 35 and 54. A company can determine its target audience through primary research.

Applying What Has Been Learned

The steps taken during the business research process are effective only if the company uses them to develop marketing strategies. Also, business research is a constant endeavor. Technologies change, as do customer tastes. Therefore, it is important to conduct business research throughout the year.

• Management Help: Basic Advice About Planning Your Research
• Quick MBA: SWOT Analysis
• Entrepreneur.com: The Best Ways to Do Market Research for Your Business Plan
• Score.org:How to Conduct Market and Competitor Research for Your Business Plan

Related Articles

Why is the business research process necessary to assist managers, what is a business research process, about companies & marketing research, process of industry analysis, industry analysis and strategy, a formula for analyzing a business, consumer research analysis, customer data strategies, marketing strategies of firms, most popular.

• 1 Why Is the Business Research Process Necessary to Assist Managers?
• 2 What Is a Business Research Process?
• 3 About Companies & Marketing Research
• 4 Process of Industry Analysis

What is market research?

Market research involves learning about your:

• competitors

Why research your market

Market research is essential for starting and running a successful business. It gives your business direction and helps you stay on top of what your customers want.

Market research is useful to assess:

• the viability of a business or product idea
• whether you can grow into a new market or location
• industry or economic influences

You can also use your findings to:

• start a new business
• write or update your marketing plan
• measure the success of your marketing plan

How to do market research

To run a successful business, you need to learn about your customers, your competitors and your industry.

Market research involves asking the right questions, in the right way, to the right people. This gives your business directions and helps you stay on top of what your customers want, and how much they're willing to pay for it.

When you undertake market research, you can use your findings in two ways:

• Start a new business and write your marketing plan.
• Measure the success of your current marketing plan.

Market research involves asking the right questions, in the right way, to the right people.

Follow these 5 steps to research your market:

1. Define your research objective

The first step in the market research process is to define your research objectives. Ask yourself:

• What is the key information you would like your research to uncover?
• What do you want to know about your customers or your market?

By defining your research aims, you'll be able to keep your research focused and effective.

For example, you might want to decide whether to launch a new product or service. Your research process would then be to assess whether the market will accept your new product or service, and how much they'll be willing to pay for it.

2. Develop your research questions

Once you've identified an objective, come up with a list of research questions for your market, customers and competitors. For example:

Questions for your market:

• What are your market's key demographics (for example, as age and gender)?
• If you're starting a new business or product, how will your entrance affect the market and customers?
• Does the region where you operate have a stable economy?

Questions for your customers:

• Who are your target customers and how do they behave?
• Where are they located?
• What's the profile of an ideal customer for your business?

Questions for your competitors:

• What's the profile of a typical competitor for your business?
• What are your competitors' main strengths?
• What are your competitors' main weaknesses?

Read industry reports on the IBISWorld website as a starting point.

3. Gather your research

There are 2 types of data collection, and both are based on asking questions:

• Qualitative information is more investigative and involves a fewer number of respondents (focus groups and in-depth interviews).
• Quantitative information is used to draw specific conclusions and involves a large number of respondents (surveys and questionnaires).

Ways to conduct research

Some common methods for data collection include:

• telephone polling
• mailed questionnaires
• online surveys
• personal interviews

You can conduct a simple 'yes or no' survey over the phone, but might need a face-to-face meeting to understand personal choices such as colour preferences.

There are some cheap ways to conduct online surveys, such as:

• SurveyMonkey , or
• by creating forms using Google Docs

4. Interpret your findings

This step is about organising your results and interpreting your findings. Basically, what have you discovered?

Keep your research objectives front-of-mind when organising and grouping your data. Look for ways you can improve your data organisation – this will make it easier to come to a conclusion down the track.

Here are some tips for data organisation:

• Identify any major trends – consider using lists, tables, diagrams and mind-maps to organise your data.
• Use your marketing plan to analyse your data to determine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). You can do a SWOT analysis as part of your business plan .

One of the most important steps in the market research process is interpreting your findings. What is the research telling you? By answering this question, you'll be able to understand what the research has uncovered.

5. Draw conclusions and make decisions

Once you have your findings, ask:

• What do your findings mean for your business?
• What are you going to do about it?

Any conclusions you reach should align with your research objectives and your goals for your business.

Review all the data collected:

• Ensure there aren't any gaps in your data.
• Examine the major trends or problems in your industry or market.
• Analyse any strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
• Use your research to decide on the tactics that will make up your marketing mix .

How to Write a Business Report: A Step By Step Guide with Examples

Table of contents

To see what Databox can do for you, including how it helps you track and visualize your performance data in real-time, check out our home page. Click here .

With so much experience under your belt, you already know a lot about business reporting.

So, we don’t want to waste your time pointing out the obvious because we know what you need.

Secrets. Tricks. Best practices.sales rep drilldown business report

The answer to how to write a mind-blowing business report that you don’t need to spend hours and days writing.

A business report that will immediately allow you to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

A report that’ll help you learn more about your business and do more accurate forecasting and planning for the future.

We believe we have just that right here.

With this comprehensive guide, you’ll create effective sales, analytical, and informative business reports (and business dashboards ) that will help you improve your strategies, achieve your goals, and grow your business.

So, let’s dive in.

What Is a Business Report?

Importance of creating business reports, types of business reports, what should be included in a business report, how to write a business report: an 11-step guide.

• Business Report Examples

Although there’s a variety of business reports that differ in many aspects, in short, a business report definition would be the following:

A business report is an informative document that contains important data such as facts, analyses, research findings, and statistics about a business with the goal to make this information accessible to people within a company.

Their main purpose is to facilitate the decision-making process related to the future of the business, as well as to maintain effective communication between people who create the reports and those they report to.

A good business report is concise and well-organized, looks professional, and displays the relevant data you can act on. The point is to reflect upon what you’ve achieved so far (typically, over the past month, quarter or year) and to use the data to create a new strategy or adjust the current one to reach even more business goals.

Business reports should be objective and based on the data. When stating the facts, people rely on numbers rather than giving descriptions. For instance, instead of saying “our conversion rate skyrocketed”, you would display the exact percentages that back up that claim.

Business reporting matters for several reasons, among which the most important ones are:

Recognizing Opportunities to Grow

Detecting issues and solving them quickly, evaluating a potential partner, having a paper trail, keeping things transparent for the stakeholders, setting new company goals.

In fact, over half of the companies that contributed to Databox’s state of business reporting research confirmed that regular monitoring and reporting brought them significant concrete benefits.

If you never look back at what you’ve achieved, you can’t figure out what you’ve done well and what you can leverage in the future for even better results.

When you analyze a specific aspect of your business over a specific time period and present the data you gathered in a report, you can detect an opportunity to grow more easily because you have all the information in one place and organized neatly.

Is it time to introduce new products or services? Is there a way to enhance your marketing strategy? Prepare a report. Can you optimize your finances? Write a financial business report . Whatever decision you need to make, it’s easier when you base it on a report.

Reports are essential for crisis management because they can introduce a sense of calmness into your team. Putting everything on paper makes it easier to encompass all the relevant information and when you know all the facts, you can make a more accurate and effective decision about what to do next.

Writing business reports regularly will also help you identify potential issues or risks and act timely to prevent damage and stop it from escalating. That’s why monthly reporting is better than doing it only once a year.

Having an insight into your finances , operations and other business aspects more regularly allows you to have better control over them and mitigate potential risks more effectively.

Different types of business reports may be accessible to the general public. And if they’re not, specific situations may require a company to send them over to the person requesting them. That may happen if you’re considering a partnership with another company. Before making the final decision, you should learn about their financial health as every partnership poses a certain risk for your finances and/or reputation. Will this decision be profitable?

Having an insight into a company’s business report helps you establish vital business relationships. And it goes the other way around – any potential partner can request that you pull a business report for them to see, so writing business reports can help you prove you’re a suitable business partner.

In business, and especially in large companies, it’s easy to misplace information when it’s communicated verbally. Having a written report about any aspect of your business doesn’t only prevent you from losing important data, but it also helps you keep records so you can return to them at any given moment and use them in the future.

That’s why it’s always good to have a paper trail of anything important you want to share with colleagues, managers, clients, or investors. Nowadays, of course, it doesn’t have to literally be a paper trail, since we keep the data in electronic form.

Writing business reports helps you keep things transparent for the stakeholders, which is the foundation of efficient communication between these two sides.

You typically need to report to different people – sometimes they’re your managers, sometimes they’re a client. But your company’s stakeholders will also require an insight into the performance of your business, and relying on reports will help you maintain favorable business relationships. A business report shows you clearly how your company is performing and there isn’t room for manipulation.

Once you set business goals and the KPIs that help you track your progress towards them, you should remember they’re not set in stone. From time to time, you’ll need to revisit your goals and critical metrics and determine whether they’re still relevant.

When you write a business report and go through it with your team members or managers, you have a chance to do just that and determine if you’re efficient in reaching your goals. Sometimes, new insights will come up while writing these reports and help you identify new objectives that may have emerged.

Depending on your goals and needs, you’ll be writing different types of business reports. Here are five basic types of business reports .

Informational Report

Analytical report, research report, explanatory report, progress report.

Informational reports provide you with strictly objective data without getting into the details, such as explaining why something happened or what the result may be – just pure facts.

An example of this type of business report is a statement where you describe a department within your company: the report contains the list of people working in this department, what their titles are, and what they’re responsible for.

Another example related to a company’s website could look like this Google Analytics website traffic engagement report . As we explained above, this report shows objective data without getting too much into the details, so in this case, just the most important website engagement metrics such as average session duration, bounce rate, sessions, sessions by channel, and so on. Overall, you can use this report to monitor your website traffic, see which keywords are most successful, or how many returning users you have, but without further, in-depth analysis.

Analytical reports help you understand the data you’ve collected and plan for the future based on these insights. You can’t make business decisions based on facts only, so analytical reports are crucial for the decision-making process.

This type of business report is commonly used for sales forecasting. For instance, if you write a report where you identify a drop or an increase in sales, you’ll want to find out why it happened. This HubSpot’s sales analytics report is a good example of what metrics should be included in such a report, like average revenue per new client or average time to close the deal. You can find more web analytics dashboard examples here.

From these business reports, you can find out if you will reach your goals by implementing your current strategy or if you need to make adjustments.

Research is critical when you’re about to introduce a change to your business. Whether it’s a new strategy or a new partner, you need an extensive report to have an overview of all important details. These reports usually analyze new target markets and competition, and contain a lot of statistical data.

While not the same, here is an example of an ecommerce dashboard that could help track each part of a campaign in detail, no matter whether you are launching a new product, testing a new strategy, and similar. Similar to a research report, it contains key data on your audience (target market), shows your top-selling products, conversion rate and more. If you are an online store owner who is using paid ads, you can rely on this report to monitor key online sales stats in line with Facebook Ads and Google Analytics. See more ecommerce dashboards here.

As you might guess from its name, you write the explanatory report when it’s necessary for you to explain a specific situation or a project you’ve done to your team members. It’s important to write this report in a way that everyone will be able to understand.

Explanatory reports include elements like research results, reasons and goals of the research, facts, methodology, and more. While not exactly an explanatory report, this example of a HubSpot marketing drilldown report is the closest thing to it, as it helps marketers drill into an individual landing page performance, and identify how good their best landing pages are at converting, or which ones have the best performance.

A progress report is actually an update for your manager or client – it informs them about where you stand at the moment and how things are going. It’s like a checkpoint on your way towards your goal.

These reports may be the least demanding to write since you don’t need to do comprehensive research before submitting them. You just need to sum up your progress up to the point when the report was requested. This business report may include your current results, the strategy you’re implementing, the obstacles you’ve come across, etc. If this is a marketing progress report you can use marketing report templates to provide a more comprehensive overview.

In many companies, progress reports are done on a weekly or even daily basis. Here is an example of a daily sales report from Databox. HubSpot users can rely on this sales rep drilldown business report to see how individual each sales rep is performing and measure performance against goals. Browse through all our KPI dashboards here.

What does a great business report look like? If you’re not sure what sections your report should have, you’ll learn what to include in the following lines.

Business Report Formatting

Different types of reports require different lengths and structures, so your business report format may depend on what elements your report needs to have. For example, progress reports are typically pretty simple, while analytical or explanatory reports are a different story.

However, most reports will start with a title and a table of contents, so the person reading the report knows what to expect. Then, add a summary and move on to the introduction. After you’ve written the body and the conclusion, don’t forget to include suggestions based on your findings that will help your team create an actionable plan as you move forward.

After that, list the references you used while creating the report, and attach any additional documents or images that can help the person reading the report understand it better.

This outline may vary depending on what kind of report you’re writing. Short business reports may not need a table of contents, and informative reports won’t contain any analyses. Also, less formal reports don’t need to follow a strict structure in every situation.

Business Report Contents

When it comes to the contents of your report, keep in mind the person who’s going to read it and try to balance between including all the relevant information, but not overwhelming the reader with too many details.

• The introduction to the report should state the reason why you’re writing it, and what its main goal is. Also, mention what methodology and reporting software you’ve used, if applicable.
• The body of the report is where you’ll expose all your key findings, explain your methodology, share the important data and statistics, and present your results and conclusion.
• The conclusion , similarly to the summary you’ll add at the beginning of the report, briefly singles out the most important points and findings of the report.

If you decide to include more sections like recommendations, this is where you’ll suggest the next steps your team or the company may want to take to improve the results or take advantage of them if they’re favorable.

PRO TIP: Are You Tracking the Right Metrics for Your SaaS Company?

As a SaaS business leader, there’s no shortage of metrics you could be monitoring, but the real question is, which metrics should you be paying most attention to? To monitor the health of your SaaS business, you want to identify any obstacles to growth and determine which elements of your growth strategy require improvements. To do that, you can track the following key metrics in a convenient dashboard with data from Profitwell:

• Recurring Revenue. See the portion of your company’s revenue that is expected to grow month-over-month.
• MRR overview. View the different contributions to and losses from MRR from different kinds of customer engagements.
• Customer overview . View the total number of clients your company has at any given point in time and the gains and losses from different customer transactions.
• Growth Overview . Summarize all of the different kinds of customer transactions and their impact on revenue growth.
• Churn overview. Measure the number and percentage of customers or subscribers you lost during a given time period.

If you want to track these in ProfitWell, you can do it easily by building a plug-and-play dashboard that takes your customer data from ProfitWell and automatically visualizes the right metrics to allow you to monitor your SaaS revenue performance at a glance.

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Profitwell account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Note : Other than text, make sure you include images, graphs, charts, and tables. These elements will make your report more readable and illustrate your points.

Whether you’re writing a specific type of business report for the first time or you simply want to improve the quality of your reports, make sure you follow this comprehensive guide to writing an effective business report.

• Do Your Research
• Create an Outline
• Determine Formatting Guidelines
• Think of an Engaging Title
• Write the Introduction
• Divide the Body of the Report into Sections
• Choose Illustrations
• Conclude Effectively
• Gather Additional Documentation
• Add a Summary
• Proofread Your Work

Step 1: Do Your Research

A well-planned report is a job half done. That means you need to do research before you start writing: you need to know who you’re writing for and how much they know about the topic of your report. You need to explore the best business dashboard software and templates you can use for your report.

Also, if you believe you will need additional resources and documents to add in the appendix, you should do it during this phase of report writing.

Step 2: Create an Outline

Once you’ve gathered the resources, it’s time to plan the report. Before you start writing, create an outline that will help you stick to the right structure. A business report is complex writing in which you can get lost very easily if you don’t have a clear plan.

Moreover, the report shouldn’t be complicated to read, so sticking to a plan will allow you to keep it concise and clear, without straying from the topic.

Step 3: Determine Formatting Guidelines

Most companies have their in-house formatting that every official document has to follow. If you’re not sure if such rules exist in your company, it’s time you checked with your managers.

If there arent’ any guidelines regarding formatting, make sure you set your own rules to make the report look professional. Choose a simple and readable format and make sure it supports all the symbols you may need to use in the report. Set up proper headings, spacing, and all the other elements you may need in Word or Google Docs.

Pro tip: Google Docs may be easier to share with people who are supposed to read your business report.

Step 4: Think of an Engaging Title

Even if you’re writing a formal business report, the title should be clear and engaging. Reports are typically considered dull as they’re a part of official business documentation, but there’s no reason why you can’t make them interesting to read. Your title should suit the report topic and be in different font size so the reader can recognize it’s a title. Underneath the title, you should add the name of the author of the report.

Step 5: Write the Introduction

A good introductory paragraph for a business report should explain to the reader why you’ve written the report. Use the introduction to provide a bit of background on the report’s topic and mention the past results if there’s been a significant improvement since your last report.

Step 6: Divide the Body of the Report into Sections

As this will be the most comprehensive part of your report, make sure you separate the data into logical sections. Your report is supposed to tell a story about your business, and these sections (such as methodology, hypothesis, survey, findings, and more) will help the data look well-organized and easy to read.

Step 7: Choose Illustrations

Of course, each of these sections should be followed with charts, graphs, tables, or other illustrations that help you make a point. Survey results are typically best displayed in pie charts and graphs, and these enable the reader to visualize the data better. From the formatting point of view, breaking the long text sections with illustrations makes the report more readable.

Pro tip: Using centralized dashboard solutions like Databox can bring your reporting game to the next level. Sign up for a forever-free trial now to see how you can use Databox to track and visualize performance easier than ever before .

Step 8: Conclude Effectively

Finish your report with a to-the-point conclusion that will highlight all the main data from the report. Make sure it’s not too long, as it’s supposed to be a summary of the body of the report. In case you don’t want to add a specific section for recommendations, this is where you can include them, along with your assessments.

Step 9: Gather Additional Documentation

If you’ve determined what additional documents, images, surveys, or other attachments you may need for your report, now is the time to collect them. Request access to those you may not be able to get on time, so you have everything you need by the deadline. Copy the documents you can use in the original form, and scan the documents you need in electronic format.

Step 10: Add a Summary

The summary is usually at the top of the report, but it’s actually something you should write after your report is completed. Only then will you know exactly what your most relevant information and findings are, so you can include them in this brief paragraph that summarizes your report’s main points.

The summary should tell the reader about the objective of the report, the methodology used, and even mention some of the key findings and conclusions.

Step 11: Proofread Your Work

It may seem like common sense, but this final step of the process is often overlooked. Proofreading your work is how you make sure your report will look professional because errors can ruin the overall impression the reader will form about your work, no matter how great the report is.

Look for any spelling or grammatical mistakes you can fix, and if you’re not sure about specific expressions or terminology, use Google to double-check it. Make sure your writing is to-the-point and clear, especially if you’re writing for people who may not know the industry so well. Also, double-check the facts and numbers you’ve included in the report before you send it out or start your reporting meeting.

Business Report Examples (with Ready-to-Use Templates)

Here, we’re sharing a few business reporting examples that you can copy, along with ready-to-use and free-to-download templates. If you don’t know where to start and what to include in different types of business reports, these business report examples are a great way to get started or at least get some inspiration to create yours.

Activity Report Example

Annual report example, project status report example, financial report example, sales report example, marketing report example.

Note : Each of the business report templates shared below can be customized to fit your individual needs with our DIY Dashboard Designer . No coding or design skills are necessary.

For reporting on sales activity, HubSpot users can rely this streamlined sales activity report that includes key sales metrics, such as calls, meetings, or emails logged by owner. This way, you can easily track the number of calls, meetings, and emails for each sales rep and identify potential leaks in your sales funnel. Check all our sales team activity dashboards here. Or if you are looking for dashboards that track general sales performance, browse through all Databox sales dashboards here.

If you’re preparing for annual reporting, you will benefit from choosing this HubSpot annual performance report . It contains all the relevant metrics, such as email and landing page performance, new contacts, top blog posts by page views, and more. See all our performance dashboard templates here.

Project status reports can be very similar to progress reports. If you’re in need of one of those, here’s an example of a Project overview dashboard from Harvest that shows that can help you create simple, but well-organized report based on metrics that matter: hours tracked, billable hours, billable amount split by team members., and more. Check out more project management dashboard templates we offer here.

Are you creating a financial report? You will find this QuickBooks + HubSpot integration a great choice for a financial performance dashboard that makes creating a report simple. This dashboard focuses on the essential financial report

ting metrics and answers all your revenue-related questions. See all Databox financial dashboards here.

If you’re tracking your sales team’s monthly performance, this sales report template will help you prepare an outstanding report. Check out all the vital productivity KPIs, track your progress towards your goals, and understand well how your current sales pipeline is performing. See all sales performance dashboards we have available here.

Marketing reports can be easily prepared by using this monthly marketing report template . With HubSpot’s reporting, you can determine where your website traffic is coming from, how your landing pages and specific blog posts are performing, and how successful your email campaigns are. Browse all Databox marketing dashboards or marketing report examples here.

Create a Professional Business Report in No Time with Databox

Does creating a business report still sound like a daunting task? It doesn’t have to be with Databox.

In times when we’re all trying to save our time and energy for things that matter rather than scattering valuable resources on tedious, repetitive tasks, it’s critical to optimize your business process. And we want to help you do just that.

Using a business reporting dashboard enables you to track data from all the different tools you’re using – but in one place. With Databox, you can monitor and report on performance in a single dashboard that is optimized for all your favorite devices and you can create streamlined and beautiful dashboards even if you are not that tech-savvy. (no coding or design skills are required).

Automating business reporting has never been easier. And with Databox, you can do exactly that in just a few clicks. Sign up now and get your first 3 business dashboards for free.

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Stefana Zarić is a freelance writer & content marketer. Other than writing for SaaS and fintech clients, she educates future writers who want to build a career in marketing. When not working, Stefana loves to read books, play with her kid, travel, and dance.

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How to Conduct Effective Research: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

• 11 July 2023

Introduction

Research serves as the foundation for advances in every conceivable subject and is the cornerstone of progress. Starting a research journey can be intimidating for novices. But if you have the correct tools and approaches, it may be a worthwhile endeavor. This blog article seeks to instruct new researchers on how to conduct fruitful research by offering helpful advice and strategies to help them become productive researchers.

1. Define Your Research Question

Determining your research question is the first stage in conducting successful research. A well-crafted question gives you direction and helps you focus your efforts on a certain objective. Ask a question that is as specific as you can. A better inquiry may be, “How is climate change affecting crop production in California?” rather than, “What are the effects of climate change?”

2. Develop a Research Plan

A roadmap is essential for effective research. Describe your strategy while considering the type of information you require, potential sources, and a rough time frame. You can effectively manage your time by taking this step, which will also give your research structure and keep you on track.

3. Understand the Types of Research

There are two basic categories of research: primary and secondary. Primary research is when you collect your own first-hand information, such as through surveys or experiments. Using information gathered by another person, such as data from books, papers, or scholarly articles, is known as secondary research. Knowing the difference can help you choose the approach that best fits your research issue and available resources.

4. Use a Variety of Sources

Your research’s scope and depth are constrained if you rely solely on one type of source. Utilize a variety of credible websites, books, scholarly articles, podcasts, and even multimedia sources like documentaries. Remember that the trustworthiness of your study is influenced by the caliber of your sources.

5. Learn How to Use Databases Effectively

Your time will be much reduced if you learn how to use databases. Scholarly articles can be found in abundance in databases like JSTOR, PubMed, and Google Scholar, among others. Recall that various databases have various advantages; thus, investigate a few to determine which ones best meet your requirements.

6. Master Effective Search Techniques

The research process can be significantly sped up by using excellent search techniques. Learn how to broaden or narrow your search using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), phrase searching using quotation marks, and truncation symbols. You can quickly uncover additional pertinent sources using these methods.

7. Evaluate Your Sources

Information is not all created equal. Always assess the trustworthiness and veracity of your sources. Verify the author’s credentials, the publishing date, and the veracity of the information. Websites with the.edu,.gov, or.org extensions are usually more trustworthy than those with the.com extension.

8. Keep Track of Your Sources

To properly reference your sources and prevent plagiarism, keeping track of them is crucial. Making a system (such as a spreadsheet) where you enter all the relevant citation data as you go is an excellent practice. Also very beneficial are reference management programs like EndNote, Mendeley, or Zotero..

9. Take Effective Notes

Making thorough notes can help you remember knowledge and draw connections across sources. To improve understanding, try to summarise the main ideas in your own words. To show the data and connections, you can also utilize charts, mind maps, or colors.

10. Analyze and Synthesize Your Findings

Making meaning of the information you have gathered involves analysis and synthesis. You must comprehend the situation, evaluate many points of view, spot trends, and reach conclusions. The development of your arguments or the development of your hypotheses depends on this step.

11. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help

Finally, if you are stuck, don’t be afraid to seek for assistance. Teachers, classmates with more expertise, and librarians can all offer helpful advice. Keep in mind that even experienced researchers occasionally require help.

One size does not fit all when it comes to research. Different projects call for various approaches and plans. However, you can become a successful researcher by defining your question, creating a plan, utilizing a variety of sources, learning efficient search strategies, evaluating your sources, keeping track of references, taking good notes, analyzing and synthesizing data, and asking for assistance when necessary. The most crucial advice is to always be curious and to keep learning. Enjoy your research!

It’s important to keep in mind that understanding how to perform excellent research is a journey that requires constant practice, learning, and development. Research can be a fulfilling and enlightening experience as you gain experience and get more familiar with the procedure. Wishing you well as you pursue your research!

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How to Do Research

Last Updated: March 13, 2023 References

This article was co-authored by Matthew Snipp, PhD and by wikiHow staff writer, Jennifer Mueller, JD . C. Matthew Snipp is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He is also the Director for the Institute for Research in the Social Science’s Secure Data Center. He has been a Research Fellow at the U.S. Bureau of the Census and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has published 3 books and over 70 articles and book chapters on demography, economic development, poverty and unemployment. He is also currently serving on the National Institute of Child Health and Development’s Population Science Subcommittee. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. This article has been viewed 229,633 times.

The idea of doing research may seem daunting, but as long as you keep yourself organized and focus on the question you want to answer, you'll be fine. If you're curious and interested in the topic, you might even find it fun! We here at wikiHow have gathered answers to all your most common questions about how to do research, from finding a good topic to identifying the best sources and writing your final paper.

How do I find a topic to research?

• For example, if you're researching in the political science field, you might be interested in determining what leads people to believe that the 2020 US presidential election was illegitimate.

How do I get started on my research?

• For example, if you're researching the 2020 election, you might find that "absentee ballots" and "voting by mail" come up frequently. Those are issues you could look into further to figure out how they impacted the final election results.
• You don't necessarily have to use the overview articles you look at as resources in your actual paper. Even Wikipedia articles can be a good way to learn more about a topic and you can check the references for more reputable sources that might work for your paper.

What's the best way to keep track of my sources?

• Research papers typically discuss 2 or 3 separate things that work together to answer the research question. You might also want to make a note on the front of which thing that source relates to. That'll make it easier for you to organize your sources later.
• For example, if you're researching the 2020 election, you might have a section of your paper discussing voting by mail. For the sources that directly address that issue, write "voting by mail" in the corner.

What kind of notes should I be taking as I research?

• If you find something that you think would make a good quote, copy it out exactly with quote marks around it, then add the page number where it appears so you can correctly cite it in your paper without having to go back and hunt for it again.

How do I evaluate the quality of a source?

• Does the article discuss or reference another article? (If so, use that article instead.)
• What expertise or authority does the author have?
• When was the material written? (Is it the most up-to-date reference you could use?)
• Why was the article published? (Is it trying to sell you something or persuade you to adopt a certain viewpoint?)
• Are the research methods used consistent and reliable? (Appropriate research methods depend on what was studied.)

What if I'm having a hard time finding good sources?

• For example, if you're writing about the 2020 election, you might find tons of stories online, but very little that is reputable enough for you to use in your paper. Because the election happened so recently, it might be too soon for there to be a lot of solid academic research on it. Instead, you might focus on the 2016 election.
• You can also ask for help. Your instructor might be able to point you toward good sources. Research librarians are also happy to help you.

How do I organize my research for my paper?

• For example, if you're researching the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 election, you might have sections on social distancing and cleaning at in-person voting locations, the accessibility of mail-in ballots, and early voting.

What's the best way to start writing my paper?

• Include an in-text citation for everything that needs one, even in your initial rough draft. That'll help you make sure that you don't inadvertently misattribute or fail to cite something as you work your way through substantive drafts.
• Write your introduction and conclusion only after you're satisfied that the body of your paper is essentially what you want to turn in. Then, you can polish everything up for the final draft.

How can I make sure I'm not plagiarizing?

• If you have any doubt over whether you should cite something, go ahead and do it. You're better off to err on the side of over-citing than to look like you're taking credit for an idea that isn't yours.
• ↑ https://www.nhcc.edu/student-resources/library/doinglibraryresearch/basic-steps-in-the-research-process
• ↑ Matthew Snipp, PhD. Sociology Professor, Stanford University. Expert Interview. 26 March 2020.
• ↑ https://library.taylor.edu/eng-212/research-paper
• ↑ http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/research/research_paper.html
• ↑ https://www.potsdam.edu/sites/default/files/documents/support/tutoring/cwc/6-Simple-Steps-for-Writing-a-Research-Paper.pdf
• ↑ https://www.umgc.edu/current-students/learning-resources/writing-center/online-guide-to-writing/tutorial/chapter4/ch4-05.html

Expert Q&A

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About This Article

If you need to do research on a particular topic, start by searching the internet for any information you can find on the subject. In particular, look for sites that are sourced by universities, scientists, academic journals, and government agencies. Next, visit your local library and use the electric card catalog to research which books, magazines, and journals will have information on your topic. Take notes as you read, and write down all of the information you’ll need to cite your sources in your final project. To learn how interviewing a first-hand source can help you during your research, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Write a Research Paper

If you already have a headache trying to understand what research paper is all about, we have created an ultimate guide for you on how to write a research paper. You will find all the answers to your questions regarding structure, planning, doing investigation, finding the topic that appeals to you. Plus, you will find out the secret to an excellent paper. Are you at the edge of your seat? Let us start with the basics then.

• What is a Research Paper
• Reasons for Writing a Research Paper
• Report Papers and Thesis Papers
• How to Start a Research Paper
• How to Choose a Topic for a Research Paper
• How to Write a Proposal for a Research Paper
• How to Write a Research Plan
• How to Do Research
• How to Write an Outline for a Research Paper
• How to Write a Thesis Statement for a Research Paper
• How to Write a Research Paper Rough Draft
• How to Write an Introduction for a Research Paper
• How to Write a Body of a Research Paper
• How to Write a Conclusion for a Research Paper
• How to Write an Abstract for a Research Paper
• How to Revise and Edit a Research Paper
• How to Write a Bibliography for a Research Paper
• What Makes a Good Research Paper

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What is a research paper.

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You probably know the saying ‘the devil is not as black as he is painted’. This particular saying is absolutely true when it comes to writing a research paper. Your feet are cold even with the thought of this assignment. You have heard terrifying stories from older students. You have never done this before, so certainly you are scared. What is a research paper? How should I start? What are all these requirements about?

Luckily, you have a friend in need. That is our writing service. First and foremost, let us clarify the definition. A research paper is a piece of academic writing that provides information about a particular topic that you’ve researched . In other words, you choose a topic: about historical events, the work of some artist, some social issues etc. Then you collect data on the given topic and analyze it. Finally, you put your analysis on paper. See, it is not as scary as it seems. If you are still having doubts, whether you can handle it yourself, we are here to help you. Our team of writers can help you choose the topic, or give you advice on how to plan your work, or how to start, or craft a paper for you. Just contact us 24/7 and see everything yourself.

5 Reasons for Writing a Research Paper

Why should I spend my time writing some academic paper? What is the use of it? Is not some practical knowledge more important? The list of questions is endless when it comes to a research paper. That is why we have outlined 5 main reasons why writing a research paper is a good thing.

• You will learn how to organize your time

If you want to write a research paper, you will have to learn how to manage your time. This type of assignment cannot be done overnight. It requires careful planning and you will need to learn how to do it. Later, you will be able to use these time-managing skills in your personal life, so why not developing them?

• You will discover your writing skills

You cannot know something before you try it. This rule relates to writing as well. You cannot claim that you cannot write until you try it yourself. It will be really difficult at the beginning, but then the words will come to your head themselves.

• You will improve your analytical skills

Writing a research paper is all about investigation and analysis. You will need to collect data, examine and classify it. These skills are needed in modern life more than anything else is.

• You will gain confidence

Once you do your own research, it gives you the feeling of confidence in yourself. The reason is simple human brain likes solving puzzles and your assignment is just another puzzle to be solved.

• You will learn how to persuade the reader

When you write your paper, you should always remember that you are writing it for someone to read. Moreover, you want this someone to believe in your ideas. For this reason, you will have to learn different convincing methods and techniques. You will learn how to make your writing persuasive. In turns, you will be able to use these methods in real life.

What is the Difference between Report and Thesis Papers?

A common question is ‘what is the difference between a report paper and a thesis paper?’ The difference lies in the aim of these two assignments. While the former aims at presenting the information, the latter aims at providing your opinion on the matter. In other words, in a report paper you have to summarize your findings. In a thesis paper, you choose some issue and defend your point of view by persuading the reader. It is that simple.

A thesis paper is a more common assignment than a report paper. This task will help a professor to evaluate your analytical skills and skills to present your ideas logically. These skills are more important than just the ability to collect and summarize data.

How to Write a Research Paper Step by Step

Research comes from the French word  rechercher , meaning “to seek out.” Writing a research paper requires you to seek out information about a subject, take a stand on it, and back it up with the opinions, ideas, and views of others. What results is a printed paper variously known as a term paper or library paper, usually between five and fifteen pages long—most instructors specify a minimum length—in which you present your views and findings on the chosen subject.

It is not a secret that the majority of students hate writing a research paper. The reason is simple it steals your time and energy. Not to mention, constant anxiety that you will not be able to meet the deadline or that you will forget about some academic requirement.

We will not lie to you; a research paper is a difficult assignment. You will have to spend a lot of time. You will need to read, to analyze, and to search for the material. You will probably be stuck sometimes. However, if you organize your work smart, you will gain something that is worth all the effort – knowledge, experience, and high grades.

The reason why many students fail writing a research paper is that nobody explained them how to start and how to plan their work. Luckily, you have found our writing service and we are ready to shed the light on this dark matter.

We have created a step by step guide for you on how to write a research paper. We will dwell upon the structure, the writing tips, the writing strategies as well as academic requirements. Read this whole article and you will see that you can handle writing this assignment and our team of writers is here to assist you.

How to Start a Research Paper?

It all starts with the assignment. Your professor gives you the task. It may be either some general issue or specific topic to write about. Your assignment is your first guide to success. If you understand what you need to do according to the assignment, you are on the road to high results. Do not be scared to clarify your task if you need to. There is nothing wrong in asking a question if you want to do something right. You can ask your professor or you can ask our writers who know a thing or two in academic writing.

It is essential to understand the assignment. A good beginning makes a good ending, so start smart.

Learn how to start a research paper .

Choosing a Topic for a Research Paper

We have already mentioned that it is not enough to do great research. You need to persuade the reader that you have made some great research. What convinces better that an eye-catching topic? That is why it is important to understand how to choose a topic for a research paper.

First, you need to delimit the general idea to a more specific one. Secondly, you need to find what makes this topic interesting for you and for the academia. Finally, you need to refine you topic. Remember, it is not something you will do in one day. You can be reshaping your topic throughout your whole writing process. Still, reshaping not changing it completely. That is why keep in your head one main idea: your topic should be precise and compelling .

Learn how to choose a topic for a research paper .

How to Write a Proposal for a Research Paper?

If you do not know what a proposal is, let us explain it to you. A proposal should answer three main questions:

• What is the main aim of your investigation?
• Why is your investigation important?
• How are you going to achieve the results?

In other words, proposal should show why your topic is interesting and how you are going to prove it. As to writing requirements, they may differ. That is why make sure you find out all the details at your department. You can ask your departmental administrator or find information online at department’s site. It is crucial to follow all the administrative requirements, as it will influence your grade.

Learn how to write a proposal for a research paper .

How to Write a Research Plan?

The next step is writing a plan. You have already decided on the main issues, you have chosen the bibliography, and you have clarified the methods. Here comes the planning. If you want to avoid writer’s block, you have to structure you work. Discuss your strategies and ideas with your instructor. Think thoroughly why you need to present some data and ideas first and others second. Remember that there are basic structure elements that your research paper should include:

• Thesis Statement
• Introduction
• Bibliography

You should keep in mind this skeleton when planning your work. This will keep your mind sharp and your ideas will flow logically.

Learn how to write a research plan .

How to Do Research?

Your research will include three stages: collecting data, reading and analyzing it, and writing itself.

First, you need to collect all the material that you will need for you investigation: films, documents, surveys, interviews, and others. Secondly, you will have to read and analyze. This step is tricky, as you need to do this part smart. It is not enough just to read, as you cannot keep in mind all the information. It is essential that you make notes and write down your ideas while analyzing some data. When you get down to the stage number three, writing itself, you will already have the main ideas written on your notes. Plus, remember to jot down the reference details. You will then appreciate this trick when you will have to write the bibliography.

If you do your research this way, it will be much easier for you to write the paper. You will already have blocks of your ideas written down and you will just need to add some material and refine your paper.

Learn how to do research .

How to Write an Outline for a Research Paper?

To make your paper well organized you need to write an outline. Your outline will serve as your guiding star through the writing process. With a great outline you will not get sidetracked, because you will have a structured plan to follow. Both you and the reader will benefit from your outline. You present your ideas logically and you make your writing coherent according to your plan. As a result, this outline guides the reader through your paper and the reader enjoys the way you demonstrate your ideas.

Learn how to write an outline for a research paper . See research paper outline examples .

How to Write a Thesis Statement for a Research Paper?

Briefly, the thesis is the main argument of your research paper. It should be precise, convincing and logical. Your thesis statement should include your point of view supported by evidence or logic. Still, remember it should be precise. You should not beat around the bush, or provide all the possible evidence you have found. It is usually a single sentence that shows your argument. In on sentence you should make a claim, explain why it significant and convince the reader that your point of view is important.

Learn how to write a thesis statement for a research paper . See research paper thesis statement examples .

Should I Write a Rough Draft for a Research Paper?

Do you know any writer who put their ideas on paper, then never edited them and just published? Probably, no writer did so. Writing a research paper is no exception. It is impossible to cope with this assignment without writing a rough draft.

Your draft will help you understand what you need to polish to make your paper perfect. All the requirements, academic standards make it difficult to do everything flawlessly at the first attempt. Make sure you know all the formatting requirements: margins, words quantity, reference requirements, formatting styles etc.

Learn how to write a rough draft for a research paper .

How to Write an Introduction for a Research Paper?

Let us make it more vivid for you. We have narrowed down the tips on writing an introduction to the three main ones:

• Include your thesis in your introduction

Remember to include the thesis statement in your introduction. Usually, it goes at the end of the first paragraph.

• Present the main ideas of the body

You should tell the main topics you are going to discuss in the main body. For this reason, before writing this part of introduction, make sure you know what is your main body is going to be about. It should include your main ideas.

• Polish your thesis and introduction

When you finish the main body of your paper, come back to the thesis statement and introduction. Restate something if needed. Just make it perfect; because introduction is like the trailer to your paper, it should make the reader want to read the whole piece.

Learn how to write an introduction for a research paper . See research paper introduction examples .

How to Write a Body of a Research Paper?

A body is the main part of your research paper. In this part, you will include all the needed evidence; you will provide the examples and support your argument.

It is important to structure your paragraphs thoroughly. That is to say, topic sentence and the evidence supporting the topic. Stay focused and do not be sidetracked. You have your outline, so follow it.

Here are the main tips to keep in head when writing a body of a research paper:

• Let the ideas flow logically
• Include only relevant information
• Provide the evidence
• Structure the paragraphs
• Make the coherent transition from one paragraph to another

See? When it is all structured, it is not as scary as it seemed at the beginning. Still, if you have doubts, you can always ask our writers for help.

Learn how to write a body of a research paper . See research paper transition examples .

How to Write a Conclusion for a Research Paper?

Writing a good conclusion is important as writing any other part of the paper. Remember that conclusion is not a summary of what you have mentioned before. A good conclusion should include your last strong statement.

If you have written everything according to the plan, the reader already knows why your investigation is important. The reader has already seen the evidence. The only thing left is a strong concluding thought that will organize all your findings.

Never include any new information in conclusion. You need to conclude, not to start a new discussion.

Learn how to write a conclusion for a research paper .

How to Write an Abstract for a Research Paper?

An abstract is a brief summary of your paper, usually 100-200 words. You should provide the main gist of your paper in this short summary. An abstract can be informative, descriptive or proposal. Depending on the type of abstract, you need to write, the requirements will differ.

To write an informative abstract you have to provide the summary of the whole paper. Informative summary. In other words, you need to tell about the main points of your work, the methods used, the results and the conclusion of your research.

To write a descriptive abstract you will not have to provide any summery. You should write a short teaser of your paper. That is to say, you need to write an overview of your paper. The aim of a descriptive abstract is to interest the reader.

Finally, to write a proposal abstract you will need to write the basic summary as for the informative abstract. However, the difference is the following: you aim at persuading someone to let you write on the topic. That is why, a proposal abstract should present your topic as the one worth investigating.

Learn how to write an abstract for a research paper .

Should I Revise and Edit a Research Paper?

Revising and editing your paper is essential if you want to get high grades. Let us help you revise your paper smart:

• Check your paper for spelling and grammar mistakes
• Sharpen the vocabulary
• Make sure there are no slang words in your paper
• Examine your paper in terms of structure
• Compare your topic, thesis statement to the whole piece
• Check your paper for plagiarism

If you need assistance with proofreading and editing your paper, you can turn to the professional editors at our service. They will help you polish your paper to perfection.

Learn how to revise and edit a research paper .

How to Write a Bibliography for a Research Paper?

First, let us make it clear that bibliography and works cited are two different things. Works cited are those that you cited in your paper. Bibliography should include all the materials you used to do your research. Still, remember that bibliography requirements differ depending on the formatting style of your paper. For this reason, make sure you ask you professor all the requirements you need to meet to avoid any misunderstanding.

Learn how to write a bibliography for a research paper .

The Key Secret to a Good Research Paper

Now when you know all the stages of writing a research paper, you are ready to find the key to a good research paper:

• Choose the topic that really interests you
• Make the topic interesting for you even if it is not at the beginning
• Follow the step by step guide and do not get sidetracked
• Be persistent and believe in yourself
• Really do research and write your paper from scratch
• Learn the convincing writing techniques and use them
• Follow the requirements of your assignment
• Ask for help if needed from real professionals

Feeling more confident about your paper now? We are sure you do. Still, if you need help, you can always rely on us 24/7.

We hope we have made writing a research paper much easier for you. We realize that it requires lots of time and energy. We believe when you say that you cannot handle it anymore. For this reason, we have been helping students like you for years. Our professional team of writers is ready to tackle any challenge.

All our authors are experienced writers crafting excellent academic papers. We help students meet the deadline and get the top grades they want. You can see everything yourself. All you need to do is to place your order online and we will contact you. Writing a research paper with us is truly easy, so why do not you check it yourself?

Additional Resources for Research Paper Writing:

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Research: Consumers Spend Loyalty Points and Cash Differently

• So Yeon Chun,
• Freddy Lim,
• Ville Satopää

Your loyalty strategy needs to consider four ways people value points.

Do consumers treat loyalty points the same way that they treat traditional money? And, how do they choose to spend one versus the other?  The authors of this article present research findings from their analysis of  data describing over 29,000 unique loyalty points earning and spending transactions made during two recent years by 500 airline loyalty program consumers.  They found that points users fell into four distinct categories: 1) Money advocates, who prefer cash over points, even when their value is identical in terms of purchasing power; 2)  Currency impartialists, who regard points and cash interchangeably, valuing them equally based on their financial worth; 3) Point gamers, who actively seek out the most advantageous point redemption opportunities, opting to spend points particularly when their value significantly surpasses that of cash; and 4) Point lovers, who value points more than money even if their purchase power is the same or lower. This article explores the strategic implications of these findings for companies that manage loyalty programs.

In the years since The Economist  spotlighted the astonishing scale of loyalty points — particularly frequent-flyer miles — as a potential global currency rivaling traditional money in 2005, usage has grown rapidly in size and scope. For example, the number of flight redemptions at Southwest Airlines doubled from 5.4 million in 2013 (representing 9.5% of revenue passenger miles) to 10.9 million in 2023 (representing 16.3% of revenue passenger miles).

• SC So Yeon Chun is an Associate Professor of Technology & Operations Management at INSEAD, a  global business school with campuses in Abu Dhabi, France, and Singapore.
• FL Freddy Lim is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Analytics at the National University of Singapore, School of Computing in Singapore
• VS Ville Satopää is an Associate Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD, a  global business school with campuses in Abu Dhabi, France, and Singapore.

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Is Flying Business Class Always Worth It?

Published on Aug. 27, 2024

By: Lyle Daly

• Business class is expensive, especially if you want to book it every time you fly.
• Only do this if you can afford it, either with travel rewards or cash, and if you won't need to go into debt to finance it.
• Most people don't travel much, so it could be worth splurging on business class when you do.

People often say that the hardest thing about flying business class is going back to economy. Once you've experienced a lie-flat bed in the sky, a cramped economy seat is even less appealing than before.

I don't think that's true. While business class is a luxury, that doesn't mean it's a waste of money. There are, however, a few factors to consider first.

What to consider before booking business class

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself if you're planning to book business class, or if you want to make it your preferred way to fly.

Can I pay for it with travel rewards?

The most affordable way to book business class is with travel rewards. A business-class ticket may cost $3,000, or you could pay for it with 70,000 miles plus taxes and fees. I've been flying business class regularly for years, and I usually book with travel rewards to get it nearly for free.

By making the most of travel cards, you could fly business class multiple times per year without spending a lot of money. If you're new to this, check out the best travel rewards cards to find one and get started.

Can I afford it?

If you aren't using travel rewards, then the decision to book business class depends on whether you can afford to pay for it in cash. That will depend on your income and how much money you have saved for travel.

For someone who makes $250,000 a year and has dedicated travel savings, business-class airfare could be a reasonable expense. For someone who makes a below-average salary, it might not be a good idea.

How often do I travel?

The more you travel, the harder it is to fly business class on a regular basis. If you take one trip per year, you might be able to save enough for a business-class seat or earn enough travel rewards to cover it.

It's a different story if you fly five or six times per year. Booking business class each time could end up costing you over $10,000, or over 300,000 travel points.

How long is the flight?

While business class is always nice, it's a gamechanger on long flights. If you're going overseas on an eight- or 10-hour flight, a lie-flat seat is much more comfortable. It's well worth trying to fly at the front of the plane in that situation.

On shorter flights, it doesn't have as much of an impact. If you'll only be in the air two or three hours, think about whether the amenities are really worth the added cost.

How you fly is up to you -- and what you can afford

Most people don't travel often. Americans took an average of 1.4 air trips in 2021, according to Gallup. When travel isn't a frequent activity, it's understandable if you want to be as comfortable as possible to take advantage.

There's nothing wrong with booking business class if that's what you value when you travel. However, this is only true if you can afford it, without it impacting your financial goals. A nicer seat on an airplane can be worth the cash or the travel points it costs, but it's never worth going into credit card debt.

If you'd like to fly business class more often, using travel credit cards is a great way to make it happen. You could also shop around for airfare deals. There are often bargains available, especially if you're flexible about your travel dates.

Last but not least, you can always start off with an economy ticket and see if it's possible to upgrade later. This tends to be much cheaper than booking business class from the beginning.

Our Research Expert

Lyle Daly is a freelance writer who has been covering personal finance since 2016.

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We're firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent, a Motley Fool service, does not cover all offers on the market. The Ascent has a dedicated team of editors and analysts focused on personal finance, and they follow the same set of publishing standards and editorial integrity while maintaining professional separation from the analysts and editors on other Motley Fool brands.

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What's Zyn, and why there was a shortage this summer

All about the zyn-sation of nicotine pouches.

Zyn nicotine pouches come in some 10 flavors, in both 3-milligram and 6-milligram dosages. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images hide caption

Nicotine pouches, most notably Zyn, have become very popular lately.

While they've been sold in the U.S. for about a decade, demand has soared recently as fans spread the word online. Here's what you need to know about the nicotine craze that sparked a shortage this summer.

So what exactly is Zyn?

Zyn comes in puck-shaped containers that look like Ice Breakers. Each container holds 15 pouches, and they come in about 10 flavors, ranging from coffee to cinnamon, each sold in a different bright-colored package.

The pouches contain powdered nicotine, which enters the bloodstream after dissolving in the mouth. Users call it "packing a lip," which basically means inserting the pouch between a user's gum and upper lip.

Zyn was originally intended to help existing nicotine users kick the habit. While the pouches don't contain cancer-causing tobacco, Zyn is quite addictive and it has raised alarm bells among regulators who worry that it is being marketed to underage users.

In April, the Food and Drug Administration issued warnings to 119 retail stores for selling Zyn to minors. However, Philip Morris International, the owner of Zyn, told NPR that consumer research found that the average age of Zyn users is 39 years old.

Social media's "Tucker Carl-Zyn"

Still, lately the appeal of Zyn has taken off on social media.

On TikTok and podcasts, "Zynfluencers" have raved about the 10 flavors. In a statement to NPR, Philip Morris International said that none of the influencers are paid by the company.

One of the most active advocates is conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, whom some members of Generation Z have jokingly called Tucker Carl-Zyn .

Some of the attraction stems from the fact that the pouches don't pose the same respiratory risks associated with inhalable devices like vapes. Some users like that the pouches are discreet: no telltale clouds of smoke like those that come with smoking, plus users don't need to spit as you do when chewing tobacco.

Josh Hadden, a senior at Texas A&M University, started using Zyn two years ago when trying to quit vaping. He likes the array of flavors and uses peppermint and coffee pouches simultaneously. He says he also likes to use it on campus without the stigma of vapes.

"I hate being the guy, like, walking around campus blowing clouds. I just hate the way it looks," says Hadden. "But Zyn is very subtle, which is probably honestly a bigger draw to it for me than protecting my lungs."

Big sales and shortages

Users like Hadden have helped the tobacco company Philip Morris International, which owns Zyn, after acquiring its producer, Swedish Match, in 2022.

In just the first quarter of this year, Philip Morris said, it sold 131.6 million cans of Zyn, up 80% from the same time last year. Other U.S. nicotine pouch brands include Rogue, on! and Velo, but Zyn accounts for almost three-quarters of nicotine pouch sales, according to Philip Morris.

But recent legal troubles led to a nationwide Zyn shortage this summer.

In June, Washington, D.C.'s attorney general issued a subpoena to Philip Morris, alleging that its online sales violated the District of Columbia's ban on flavored nicotine. In response, the company suspended all online sales . This led to a nationwide shortage.

However, demand hasn't abated, and Philip Morris told NPR that its Kentucky factory was increasing production. The company also announced a $600 million investment to build a new facility in Colorado.

Zyn could continue to face legal barriers as lawmakers worry about underage use. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has called for federal action against the pouches, warning parents of their appeal to minors.

Lawmakers have been imposing measures to discourage its use too. For instance, in July, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz's state of Minnesota added "tobacco-free products containing nicotine" to its list of tobacco products that are charged a 95% tax .

Some health experts recognize the product's addictive nature but feel that it offers benefits to adult tobacco users who may be addicted to even more harmful nicotine products like cigarettes.

"There's definitely a place for them," says Tory Spindle, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who has a Ph.D. in experimental health psychology. "But the challenge is how do you make them accessible to those kind of people and encourage use, without also making people use them who otherwise would not use nicotine."

It's unknown how federal regulators will rule. Philip Morris says it filed an application in 2020 to market Zyn in the United States. While the FDA continues its review of that application, it has allowed the product to stay on the market.

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• nicotine addiction

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