5 Tips to Market Research Like a Pro

How to conduct effective market research

If your business is new to market research, Tyler York, CEO of AdLeg, recommends taking the following steps to get started:

1. Set clear market research goals: Before starting, establish what you want to achieve with your market research efforts. Are you trying to understand your target audience and its needs better, identify competitors or test a new product or service idea? Clear goals will guide your process and ensure you collect relevant data.
2. Define your target audience: Knowing who you’re researching is critical. Identify your target audience by pinpointing its demographics, including age, gender, location, income and buying behaviors. A well-defined audience ensures your research focuses on the right people.
3. Determine your research method: Decide how you’ll collect your market research data. Common market research methods include the following:
   1. Surveys: Online, email, text, social media and even phone surveys can yield valuable survey data to inform marketing and product decisions. Consider using easy methods like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to get started collecting quantitative data from a broad audience.
   2. Interviews: If you have local customers or can reach buyers by phone, one-on-one discussions can yield deep, direct insights.
   3. Focus groups: Focus groups are an excellent source of valuable insights, opinions and preferences. Gather a small group to discuss your offerings and how they’re perceived. Remember that customer feedback — both positive and negative — is incredibly valuable.
4. Collect and analyze the data: Your chosen market research methods will dictate how you gather data. Regardless of your platform or survey method, frame questions clearly and avoid leading or biased language to ensure reliable data. Gathering reliable insights is the goal, and unclear prompts won’t deliver usable data. Carefully evaluate the data you gather to spot purchasing or industry trends, identify opportunities and uncover any challenges. Data visualization tools are excellent for interpreting the data you gather, but even simple spreadsheets can help.
5. Determine your next steps: Use the insights from your market research analysis to guide your business decision-making. For example, if your customers are concerned about product quality, look into your manufacturing process to see where you can improve. If your customers want more convenience, implement ways to simplify your product or service delivery. If your audience balks at your pricing, look for ways to make your price point more competitive. If many respondents want a feature your competitors already offer, consider prioritizing its development.
6. Revisit regularly to adapt to market changes: Market research isn’t a one-and-done process. Regularly revisit your research to stay updated on shifting trends, changing customer preferences and new competition. Continuous research helps you adapt and ensures your business stays relevant.

Jonathan Pirc, founder and managing director of operations at market research firm Lab42, emphasized the importance of revisiting market research often to keep a pulse on the market. “I like to compare it to changing your car’s oil,” Pirc explained. “Like regular car maintenance prevents costly repairs down the road, strategic research reduces the risk of expensive mistakes.”

Best strategies for conducting market research

Consider the following best practices to ensure your market research delivers valuable insights that improve decision-making.

1. Develop buyer personas.

Market research gives you a deeper understanding of your customers, their buying behavior and the market they’re interested in. Buyer personas, also known as customer personas, help you better understand who your customers are. They are fictional profiles based on real customer data that represent your ideal customers.

Consider the following when creating buyer personas:

• Age
• Location
• Education level
• Parental status
• Income levels
• Cultural nuances
• Consumption patterns
• Attitudes
• Product or service preferences

Market research tools can help you build buyer personas based on your target customers’ interests, challenges and lifestyles. The more detailed your personas, the better. Understanding why customers buy from you can help shape everything from your marketing strategy to future product decisions. Do they buy to meet a need or desire, address a problem or take full advantage of an opportunity?

Your marketing team can use buyer persona insights to create campaigns that resonate with customers and generate more leads. These insights can also help your sales team connect with prospects and guide your product team as it refines future offerings. Buyer persona information can also help you develop a communication style and tone that resonates with customers.

2. Conduct effective surveys.

Want to learn more about the people who buy — or might buy — your product? Consider adding a survey to your website or sending one to your email subscribers. There’s no better way to understand your customers’ needs and wants — and adjust your strategy if necessary — than by listening directly to them.

Surveys let you gather feedback from both prospective and existing customers. Include a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended questions so respondents can elaborate when needed. Aim to gather meaningful information without making your survey so long that people lose interest or abandon it. You can then use those responses to refine your buyer personas and strengthen your market research.

Surveys can also help increase sales. Some business owners find that offering a discount in exchange for completing a survey encourages more customers to participate. In return, you gain valuable feedback that can help improve your products, services and marketing efforts.

3. Utilize social media tools for market research.

Social media marketing tools are an effective way to conduct market research on your audience. For example, Meta Ads Manager can yield valuable insights. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to Meta Ads Manager and open the Audiences tab.
2. Select Create a custom audience.
3. In the “Choose a custom audience source” window, select Customer list, then click Next.
4. Upload your customer list (CSV/TXT with identifiers like email or phone) and map the fields.
5. Select Submit. Meta matches your list against its user base before the audience is ready to use. Processing time varies but is often completed within 24 hours.

Other social media market research tools to consider include the following:

• X Analytics: Available with an X Premium subscription, X’s analytics dashboard shows engagement metrics like impressions, profile visits and follower growth. Free accounts only see basic per-post stats (likes, reposts, replies).
• LinkedIn Audience Insights: LinkedIn Campaign Manager’s Audience Insights is a great option for B2B businesses. It can provide information about professional audiences, including job titles, seniority, industries and company sizes.
• Instagram Insights: If you use Instagram for business, this free analytics tool provides data on audience demographics (e.g., age, gender, location) and how they’ve engaged with your posts.
• TikTok Analytics: TikTok’s built-in analytics dashboard gives businesses a closer look at audience demographics, content performance and trending topics. It’s especially useful for brands targeting younger consumers, helping you identify the types of content and creators that resonate most with your customers.

Using a mix of social media tools helps you gather more diverse insights and adapt your strategy to the platforms where your audience is most active.

4. Study your competitors.

All businesses benefit from understanding their competitors better — especially when larger competitors offer products or services similar to theirs. They didn’t become successful by accident. Chances are, they’ve done something consistently well over time to earn their position in the market. You want to learn what that is and find ways to stand out from the competition.

Yevhenii Tymoshenko, chief marketing officer of Ukraine-based Skylum, says the most important goal of market research is finding gaps to fill. “This includes researching what competitors are doing and what they’re missing,” Tymoshenko advised. “Plus, even more importantly, understanding what consumers need and what their pain points are will point you in the direction of an untapped niche.”

Here’s what to look for when studying your competitors:

• What are they doing? On an operational level, there are important insights you can extract by studying your competition. Where are they advertising? What new products, services or features are they introducing? They may have spotted an opportunity before you did.
• Can you learn from their website? Research competitors’ websites for clues about what’s helping them succeed. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can help you understand the content marketing strategies that cause their sites to rank so highly. These tools can also provide insights into their technical SEO strategies, including keyword usage, backlink profiles and organic traffic trends.
• Do they do better than you? Your rivals likely do some things better than you. Try to uncover what their customers value most and incorporate those elements into your products and services. Consider researching their online reviews and customer feedback to understand what their customers appreciate most.
• Do you do better than them? On the flip side, you likely outperform the competition in some ways. Ask your customers where you shine and build on those elements to retain your competitive advantage.

5. Set up multiple small email campaigns.

Small email marketing campaigns are a great way to test your market research. After gathering customer data, send campaigns that cater to your target audience and gauge their effectiveness.

For more accurate data, segment your email subscriber list into groups that share certain characteristics — e.g., average spend, frequency of purchase, age, annual income and online behavior. Market to each group separately to see which marketing efforts generate the highest click-through rate (CTR) and prompt the most purchases.

These small tests can provide detailed insight into the marketing methods that best resonate with your customers. Run them over a few weeks to measure trends and adjust your approach.

All customer segments will likely buy at some point. But you can spend more time experimenting with the most active groups to incrementally increase engagement with each subsequent campaign.

Types of market research

There are two types of market research: primary and secondary. Your goals will determine which is right for your organization.

• Primary market research: This is a direct way to gather information from your most valuable source: your customers. This type of research gathers information through surveys, polls, focus groups or even observational studies. “It’s a great approach when you’re seeking firsthand insights about customer preferences or testing reactions to a new product or service,” York explained.
• Secondary market research: This involves analyzing existing third-party research to understand broader market trends and conduct a competitive analysis to better understand where your business stands in the marketplace.

Each type of research can be categorized into two groups: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research focuses on observational data and subjective insights; quantitative research examines numerical trends that can reveal specific buyer behavior patterns.

“In most cases, I recommend starting with secondary research to establish a foundation and then using primary research to dive deeper into specific questions,” York advised. “Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches provides both depth and measurable insights.”

Why market research is important

Market research takes time, but it’s essential for launching and growing a successful business. When you truly know your customers, understand what they want and have a clear picture of the competitive landscape you’re operating in, you’re far better positioned to drive growth. Strong research also helps you attract customers, increase sales and build lasting relationships with the people who buy your products or services.

“[Market research] empowers companies to make informed decisions by understanding customer needs, identifying market trends and refining strategies to stay competitive,” York explained.

Digital marketing specialist Cheryl Regan agrees that market research is crucial. “It’s the difference between standing in a pitch-black street throwing money into the dark and hoping you’ll make a return on your investment and actually using your cash wisely to make sure you get your product to the people who’ll buy it,” Regan noted.

As you conduct your market research, you’ll find that people are complex and wonderfully diverse. They have specific wants and needs they’re hoping someone will solve. If you use your data wisely, you can build products that genuinely help people while building lasting customer loyalty and sustainable business growth.

Andy Cuneo and Syed Balkhi contributed to this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.