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; this information includes factors like 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. Typical market research methods include the following:
   1. Surveys: Email, text, social media, online 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 analyze it to spot purchasing or industry trends, identify opportunities, and uncover any challenges. Data visualization software solutions are excellent tools 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 seem to have a demand for a feature your product lacks — but competitors offer — start 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 pays off with valuable insights that improve decision-making.

Develop buyer personas.

Market research gives you an intimate look at your customers, their buying behavior and the market they’re interested in. Buyer personas, also known as customer personas, give you a much more thorough understanding of who your customers are. They are essentially fictional creations based on reality — you imagine your ideal customer and build a realistic persona around them.

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, problems and lifestyles. The more personas you have, the better — understanding why customers buy from you is incredibly valuable information. Do they buy to meet a need or desire, address a problem, or exploit an opportunity to its fullest?

Your marketers can harness buyer persona details to create advertising campaigns that generate inquiries by appealing to customers’ needs and wants. Likewise, this insight will help your sales team to sell more and your development team to iterate better in the future. Buyer persona information can also help you develop a communication style and tone that resonates with customers.

2. Conduct effective surveys.

Want to gather more information about the people who buy — or may buy — your product? Then consider adding a survey form to your website or sending a survey to subscribers to your email marketing messages. There’s no better way to evaluate your customers’ needs and wants — and pivot if need be — than by listening directly to them.

Surveys allow you to solicit feedback from prospective and existing customers. When you create a questionnaire, include a mix of multiple-choice questions and open-ended ones with text boxes. This way, respondents can type in their answers. You want to solicit as much information as possible without making your survey so overwhelming that people won’t want to take it. Then, you can use the answers to build successful, accurate profiles for your market research.

You can also use surveys as a means to increase sales. Some business owners find that adding the option to do a survey in exchange for a discount is enough incentive for customers to answer your questions. Everybody benefits: You learn more about your customers, and they receive added value.

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, the Facebook Ads program can yield valuable insights. Here’s how it works:

1. Go to your Meta Business Manager dashboard and find the feature called Custom Audiences.
2. Upload your customer email list.
3. The platform will automatically locate your subscribers’ profiles and analyze their Facebook pages.
4. The tool will build charts that showcase trends among your subscribers, allowing you to see their habits and interests.

This tool will provide crucial data to help direct your advertising and marketing efforts. For example, it may tell you that many of your customers are active YouTube users. If that’s the case, consider advertising on YouTube and creating a YouTube channel to appeal to your target audience.

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

• X Analytics: X (formerly Twitter) can help you identify your followers’ demographics, activity, and engagement, and offer insights into their preferences and behaviors.
• LinkedIn Audience Insights: LinkedIn’s Audience Insights tool is a great option for B2B businesses. You can discover detailed information about clients’ job titles, industries and professional interests.
• Instagram Insights: If you use Instagram for business, this free analytics tool provides data on follower demographics (e.g., age, gender, location) and how they’ve engaged with your posts.
• TikTok Creator Marketplace: This brand and creator collaboration platform is an excellent tool for businesses with younger audiences. You’ll learn about content trends and influencers who appeal to your customers.

Using a mix of social media tools ensures you gather diverse insights. Also, the practice can adapt your strategies across platforms where your audience is most active.

4. Study your competitors.

All businesses benefit from understanding their competitors better — especially when a bigger company offers products similar to your offerings. They didn’t get big by accident; they must have done something consistently well over an extended period to grow so large. 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 how to approach studying your competitors. What:

• Are they currently doing? On an operational level, there are important insights you can extract by studying your competition. Where are they advertising? What new products or improvements for existing products are they working on? They may have spotted an opportunity before you did.
• Can you learn from their website? Research competitors’ websites for clues on why they have a greater market share. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you understand their content marketing aspects that cause their sites to rank so highly. These tools can also provide insights into their technical SEO strategies, including keyword usage and backlinks.
• Do they do better than you? Your rivals likely do some things better than you. Try to uncover what their clients value most and incorporate those elements into your products and services. Consider researching their online reviews and customer feedback to understand what their clients 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, internet habits. 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 line into your most coveted supplier of information: 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 using third-party research to review broader market trends and conduct a competitive analysis to see where you stand in the market.

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 is time-consuming, yet it’s essential for launching and expanding a successful business. When you know your customers, what they want and understand the market you’re competing in, then you can help grow your company. It will also win sales and build strong relationships with those who buy your product.

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

Cheryl Regan, a digital marketing specialist at Sugarsnap Digital, 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 discover that people are complex and diverse. They have specific wants and needs that they want someone to solve. If you use your data properly, you can build great products that truly help people while fostering long-term customer loyalty and business growth.

Andy Cuneo and Syed Balkhi contributed to this article.