Market Research: The All-in-One Guide to Conducting Market Research

Market research is the process of collecting information about your target audience, from things like interviews, focus groups, observations, and surveys, as well as the analysis of wider industry data.

It provides powerful insights which you can then use to make informed decisions about your customers and prospects across your business. And while market research is often used to create effective advertising and marketing campaigns, it is also useful for honing all your external communication.

Marketing is fundamentally the process of getting people interested in your company and keeping them engaged, while market research refers to the activity of gathering information about their needs and preferences.

As such, market research is an important subcategory of marketing. It refers to the analysis of the entire market, and how consumers think and behave within it, which you can then use to create a marketing strategy - and carry it out effectively.

While market research can be divided many different ways, it is most commonly categorized into four key types. You’ll find more information further down about which ones are most compatible with your marketing goals at any given time, but let’s run through what each type is:

Primary market research is research that you either conduct yourself, or hire someone to do for you. This makes it a practical option for anyone, whether you’re an individual, small marketing team, or large company.

It involves going straight to the source in order to get answers and results. This can be done using surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and observation - you’ll need to choose the channel that best suits your goals, and to prepare the questions in a way that will ensure that you can pull the best insights from them.

If you decide to hire an expert to help you make sure to evaluate their skills and expertise, and discuss the numbers they will see in their real pay stub as well as the compensation packages they will be offered.

Secondary market research is research that has already been carried out by others. It includes reports and studies that have been done by government agencies, market research companies, trade associations, and so forth.

This method is commonly used by businesses that don’t have the budget to invest in research, since all you have to do is find the research and apply it to whatever issue your research is focused on, but it is also a useful way to enrich the data you already have on hand.

Quantitative Market Research is the technique of asking questions to your target audience in a structured way through surveys, polls, and questionnaires. You can use this method if you want to find patterns of behavior, market trends, and determine averages.

This research typically relies on closed-ended questions with the purpose of collecting reliable, standardized facts and figures that you can then use to find answers to key business questions.

Qualitative market research is the study of what influences consumer behavior within a specific market. It’s made up of primary and secondary research methods, and its purpose is to help you understand customers’ perceptions, opinions, experiences, and interactions.

Qualitative market research can be collected in various different ways, like focus groups, online surveys, and in-depth interviews. It goes deep into the key facts you can pull from quantitative research, enabling you to identify why customers act in the way that they do.

Qualitative research is non-numerical and hard to measure, and it helps you to find out information about your target audience rather than pinpointing any exact, quantifiable truth.

Market research is a powerful tool when used properly, but this means that it needs to be done as part of a wider process. Let’s run through the major steps involved in here, and which you’ll need to implement in the correct manner:

Any action taken by your business needs a well-defined purpose behind it, and market research is no different. As such, it’s best to start this process by deciding exactly what you want to achieve from it. This could be anything from enhancing your brand to selling more products, or identifying key performance indicators that you want to improve on.

Once you’ve pinpointed your goal, you can use it to identify a particular problem area that needs to be solved - for instance, you may find that you have a lot of negative reviews online, a low conversion rate or a high churn rate. Ultimately, it’s good practice to decide on one, so that you can pull practical insights from the research.

Now that you’ve identified the exact pain point that you want to investigate, you’re in a good position to choose the right market research approach that will make your findings as useful as possible. 

You can choose to collect primary and secondary research, and use a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods, depending on the data you need. 

You can choose from the many research instruments available to you, like surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and so forth.

Now that you know the issue to study and what method you are going to use, the next step is to narrow down the list of people you’ll contact to those that can provide you with the answers you need.

If, for instance, you’re worried about the number of negative reviews your products get online, you would naturally target new customers. Alternatively, if you’re looking to understand why a particular webpage isn’t converting enough people, you would then only focus on people that have navigated there.

This step may seem fairly clear cut most of the time, but thought here will ultimately dictate how useful the results actually are. 

This is the key stage of market research, and involves (finally) putting all your planning into action - and using whatever research instruments that you selected earlier in the process.

You can of course get this work outsourced to a third-party company that specializes in market research, but if you do it in-house, you’ll need to ensure that the people responsible have a basic understanding of the techniques involved, and that they carry out the work diligently. One way to gather valuable insights for market research is by utilizing a Linkedin scraper to extract data from relevant industry professionals and companies.

Once you’ve collected your market research, you’ll need to find some way to analyze it effectively. Practically, what this means is bringing together all the qualitative and quantitative data that you have collected, so that you can draw holistic insights from it.

This can be tricky if you’re pulling data from multiple sources, but website analytics tools like TWIPLA include a survey module that enables you to carry out market research, and integrate it together with the data collected elsewhere - simple!

If you’ve carried out your market research process effectively, you should now have insights about customer behavior, preferences and concerns that you can then use to guide optimization work across your business.

That’s the seven key strategies of your market research process covered, but it’s important to remember that this is not a one-off activity that you can do and forget about. To streamline this process, consider using creative project management software.

Instead, market research should be done regularly, and incorporated into every area of your business, to ensure that the data that informs your business strategies remains as accurate as possible.

Unfortunately, there is no all-in-one solution that can help you conduct the entire market research, but each has its strengths. However, there’s still a wide range of options available to you, and we’ve run through four of the best below:

There are many challenges and opportunities in the future of market research. If we think about new technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, we see opportunities in faster analysis and report development. 

As previously mentioned, for a business to be successful, it must embrace market research and new technologies that improve the process of collecting and analyzing data. Market researchers and businesses will need to learn new tools and expand their skills to future technologies. 

The future looks bright for digital marketing too. With the potential augmented reality and virtual reality to build virtual worlds, change consumer behavior, and add an extra dimension to marketing, the importance of creating a good UX for customers will only increase. A digital world created to improve our lives will integrate brands, healthcare, entertainment, and education. 

As humans get more used to navigating these new technologies, content as we currently know it will become richer. The days of emphasizing SEO-friendly websites will probably give way to improved AR experiences that rely on content-rich encounters to improve brand perception.

Market research companies need to find people who are prepared to fill out surveys and questionnaires, and they find these respondents through the following channels:

• Online advertisements
• Co-registration on partner website signup pages
• Affiliate networks
• Email lists
• Website popups
• Social media

You can write one by following the five simple steps outlined below:

Start this step by grouping all the data you’ve collected into one place in a way that highlights commonalities and reduces differences. And by organizing data about your product, service or target audience in this way, you’ll be better able to use this report to determine your focus area.

Start this step by defining your target audience, and whatever pain-point you’re trying to solve. You’ll then need to explain the instruments and methodology used to conduct the research and why you chose them. Continue writing about the results and findings, and conclude with a summary of the report, as well as recommendations for the future.

This is where you go in depth into details on the research type, sample size, and study limitations, as well as research design, sample selection, data collection procedures, and any statistical analyses used.

Visual data representations like graphs and charts are a great addition, because they will make your report easier to understand. Identify your key facts and figures, and turn these into visual elements that will help bring your report to life.

The goal of this report and the market research that you’ve done is to solve a problem - meaning that this final section should cover recommendations that you can then turn into actionable tasks in your wider marketing strategy.

If you’ve made it all the way down here, then you’ll have a much better idea of just how vital market research is to the ultimate objective of getting people interested in your company, and keeping their engagement high.

If you’re interested in adding market research to your marketing work, our TWIPLA Survey tool is a great place to start. It enables you to communicate directly with your target audience, and to easily integrate this feedback into your wider dataset.

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