template for market research

Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.

MARKET RESEARCH KIT

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

Updated: 02/21/24

Published: 02/21/24

Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.

Enter: Market Research.

Whether you're new to market research or not, I created this guide to help you conduct a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is market research?

Primary vs. secondary research, types of market research, how to do market research, market research report template, market research examples.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value effectively.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry. But if you ask me, it's hardly a crystal ball that marketers can rely on for insights on their customers.

Market researchers investigate several areas of the market, and it can take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the business landscape.

However, researching just one of those areas can make you more intuitive to who your buyers are and how to deliver value that no other business is offering them right now.

How? Consider these two things:

• Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It‘s very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition’s immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge.
• Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand.

The market research services market is growing rapidly, which signifies a strong interest in market research as we enter 2024. The market is expected to grow from roughly $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 .

Free Market Research Kit

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.

As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.

By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into the following:

• Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
• Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
• What's trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
• Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
• What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience
• Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
• Whether there‘s demand for the business initiatives you’re investing in
• Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
• Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.

As a result, you can make better business decisions.

To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get , consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.

Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.

That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.

It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.

Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:

• Exploratory Primary Research: This kind of primary market research normally takes place as a first step — before any specific research has been performed — and may involve open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of people.
• Specific Primary Research: This type of research often follows exploratory research. In specific research, you take a smaller or more precise segment of your audience and ask questions aimed at solving a suspected problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).

Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors . The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:

• Public Sources: These sources are your first and most-accessible layer of material when conducting secondary market research. They're often free to find and review — like government statistics (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau ).
• Commercial Sources: These sources often come in the form of pay-to-access market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew , Gartner , or Forrester .
• Internal Sources: This is the market data your organization already has like average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data that can help you draw conclusions on buyer needs.
• Focus Groups
• Product/ Service Use Research
• Observation-Based Research
• Buyer Persona Research
• Market Segmentation Research
• Pricing Research
• Competitive Analysis Research
• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
• Brand Awareness Research
• Campaign Research

1. Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.

3. Product/Service Use Research

Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.

4. Observation-Based Research

Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX , and which aspects of it could be improved.

5. Buyer Persona Research

Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.

6. Market Segmentation Research

Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.

7. Pricing Research

Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy . It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.

8. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition .

9. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs , rewards, remarkable customer service).

10. Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.

11. Campaign Research

Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.

• Define your buyer persona.
• Identify a persona group to engage.
• Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
• List your primary competitors.
• Summarize your findings.

1. Define your buyer persona.

You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.

This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Buyer personas — sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Use a free tool to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Free Guide & Templates to Help Your Market Research

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Market research templates: what they are and how to use them.

18 min read Interested in market research but need some templates to start with? In this guide, we unpack market research, survey planning best practice and share some of our best templates for brand, customer, product and employee research.

What is a market research template?

While you’re no doubt familiar with the concept of market research and how it can help you to reach your target audiences and improve your product or service , the real challenge is designing a market research plan that is conducive to excellent results.

All of this starts with the right market research template(s) to help you analyze specific target audiences, collect the right data and uncover insights that can drive actionable change.

In this article, we’re going to:

• talk about market research and its use cases,
• provide you with a standard template that allows you to plan your research,
• and share several other templates to help you with specific types of market research

You can also check out our free template library.

But first, let’s revisit market research.

What is market research?

Market research is the process of determining the viability of a new service or product through surveys and questionnaires with prospects and/or customers. It involves gathering information about market needs and prospect/customer preferences .

Through market research, you can discover and/or refine your target market, get opinions and feedback on what you provide to them and uncover further prospect/customer pain points and expectations of your service or product .

Market research can be conducted in-house, either by you and your research team, or through a third-party company that specializes in it (they will typically have their own research panels or be capable of creating a research panel to suit your requirements).

The four common types of market research

There are lots of different ways to conduct market research to collect customer data and feedback , test product concepts , and do brand research, but the four most common are:

The most commonly used form of market research, surveys are a form of qualitative research that asks respondents a series of open or closed-ended questions , delivered either as an on-screen questionnaire or email.

Surveys are incredibly popular because they’re cheap, easy to produce, and can capture data very quickly, leading to faster insights.

2) Focus groups

Why not bring together a carefully selected group of people in your target market using focus groups? Though more expensive and complex than surveys and interviews, focus groups can offer deeper insight into prospect and customer behavior – from how users experience your products and services to what marketing messages really resonate with them.

Of course, as a market research method that’s reliant on a moderator to steer conversation, it can be subject to bias (as different moderators might have preferred questions or be more forceful) and if you cut corners (not asking all the necessary questions or making assumptions based on responses), the data could get skewed.

3) Observation

As if you were a fly-on-the-wall, the observation market research method can be incredibly powerful. Rather than interviewing or surveying users, you simply take notes while someone from your target market/target audience engages with your product . How are they using it? What are they struggling with? Do they look as though they have concerns?

Observing your target audience/target market in this fashion is a great alternative to the other more traditional methods on this list. It’s less expensive and far more natural as it isn’t guided by a moderator or a predefined set of questions. The only issue is that you can’t get feedback directly from the mouth of the user, so it’s worth combining this type of research with interviews, surveys, and/or focus groups.

4) Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions (both in-person and virtually), allowing for more natural conversations with participants.

For gleaning deeper insights (especially with non-verbal cues giving greater weight to opinions), there’s nothing better than face-to-face interviews. Any kind of interview will provide excellent information, helping you to better understand your prospects and target audience/target market.

Use cases for market research

When you want to understand your prospects and/or customers, but have no existing data to set a benchmark – or want to improve your products and services quickly – market research is often the go-to.

Market research (as mentioned above), helps you to discover how prospects and customers feel about your products and services, as well as what they would like to see .

But there are more use cases and benefits to market research than the above.

Reduce risk of product and business failure

With any new venture, there’s no guarantee that the new idea will be successful. As such, it’s up to you to establish the market’s appetite for your product or service. The easiest way to do this is through market research – you can understand the challenges prospects face and quickly identify where you can help. With the data from your market survey, you can then create a solution that addresses the needs and expectations of would-be customers.

Forecast future trends

Market research doesn’t just help you to understand the current market – it also helps you to forecast future needs. As you conduct your research and analyze the findings, you can identify trends – for example, how brands and businesses are adopting new technology to improve customer experiences or how sustainability is becoming a core focus for packaging. Whatever it is you’re looking to understand about the future of business in your market, comprehensive market research can help you to identify it.

Stay ahead of the competition

Understanding your market and what prospects and customers want from you will help to keep you ahead of the competition . The fact is that the top businesses frequently invest in market research to get an edge, and those that don’t tap into the insights of their audience are missing low-hanging fruit.

As well as helping you to stay in front, you can also use market research to identify gaps in the market, e.g. your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses . Just have participants answer questions about competitor products/services – or even use the products/services – and work out how you can refine your offerings to address these issues.

Plan more strategically

What’s the foundation of your business strategy? If it’s based on evidence, e.g. what people expect of your products and services, it’ll be much easier to deliver something that works. Rather than making assumptions about what you should do, market research gives you a clear, concrete understanding of what people want to see.

Check out our guide to market research for a more comprehensive breakdown.

How do you write a market research plan/template?

A market research plan is very similar to a brief in that it documents the most vital information and steps about your project. Consider it a blueprint that outlines your main objective (summary), key questions and outcomes, target audience and size, your timeline, budget, and other key variables.

Let’s talk about them in more detail.

Elements of a great market research plan

1) overview or summary.

Use the first section of your market research plan to outline the background to the problem that you are attempting to solve (this is usually your problem statement or problem question). Include background information on the study’s purpose and the business to provide context to those who would read the report, as well as the need for the research. Keep the overview simple and concise; focus on the most salient elements.

2) Objectives

What is it that you hope to achieve with this survey? Your objectives are the most important part of the survey. Make sure to list 3-5 of the decisions or initiatives that the research will influence.

For example:

Understand the most-used channels for customer engagement and purchasing to decide where to prioritize marketing and sales budget in Q1 2022. Determine what’s causing customer churn at the later stages of the buyer journey and implement a new retention and sales strategy to address it.

Your objectives should be smart, that is: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

3) Deliverables (or outcomes)

This section should focus on what you expect to have at the end of the project. How many responses are you looking for? How will the data be presented? Who will the data be shared with? (Stakeholders, executives) What are your next steps? Make sure you state how you will collect and analyze the data once it’s available.

Products such as Qualtrics CoreXM make this process fast and incredibly easy to do, drastically reducing the time to insights so you can make more meaningful changes, faster.

4) Target audience

Not to be confused with your market research sample, your target audience represents who you want to research. Of course, your sample may include ideal buyers from your target audience. Here you want to define the main variables or factors of your audience: demographic , age, location , product interaction, experience, and so on. It’s worth building out your buyer personas (if you haven’t already) and including a quick breakdown of them here.

5) Sample plan

How many participants do you want to research and what kind of groups do you want to reach? Depending on these two variables, you may have to use qualitative, quantitative , or multi-method approaches.

6) Research methods

What methods will you use in your market research project? The insights (and the granularity of those insights) will depend on the methods and tools you choose. For example, and as mentioned earlier, surveys are often the go-to for many organizations as they’re affordable and straightforward, but if you want to get more personal views from your respondents, one-to-one interviews might be more applicable. You might even want to take a hands-off approach and simply observe participants as they use your products, or try a combination of research methods. Make sure to outline what methods you will use as part of your research plan.

7) Timeline

How long will your research project run? It’s worth putting together a Gantt chart to highlight key milestones in the project, along with dependencies, and to break down tasks as much as possible. Schedule in contingency time in case some tasks or research runs over – or you need more responses.

Set a budget for the overall program and list it in your plan. Though this might be the most difficult aspect of any research plan, it helps you to be more strategic about tasks and hold people accountable at each stage of the process. If costs go over, that’s good to know for future market research. If costs are lower than anticipated, you then have the opportunity to do further research or prop up other areas of the study.

9) Ethical concerns or conflicts of interest

One of the most important parts of your market research plan, you should highlight any ethical concerns. To begin with, it’s your duty to state whether or not responses will be kept confidential and anonymous as part of the study. It’s also important to allow participants to remain anonymous and ensure you protect their privacy at all times.

Another issue to consider is stereotyping. Any analysis of real populations needs to make approximations and place individuals into groups, but if conducted irresponsibly, stereotyping can lead to undesirable results.

Lastly, conflicts of interest – it may be that researchers have interests in the outcome of the project that lead to a personal advantage that might compromise the integrity of your market research project. You should clearly state in your market research report that any potential conflicts of interest are highlighted and addressed before continuing.

But I want a faster solution!

Well, there’s a quicker and far easier way to do all of the above and get the data you need – just use a market research survey template. In our next section, we’re going to share a whole list of templates that you can use.

Free market research survey templates

No matter what kind of research you want to conduct, we have templates that will remove the complexity of the task and empower you to get more from your data. Below we’ve compiled a list of templates for four key experience areas: Brand , Customer , Employee , and Product .

All of our research templates are free. All you need to do is sign up for a free Qualtrics account to access them.

Brand experience market research templates:

• Logo testing : Collect feedback to help you evaluate and iterate on your logo designs and concepts
• Brand awareness : Track the level of brand awareness in your target market, including current and potential future customers
• Ad testing : Evaluate your consumers’ reaction to an advertisement so you know which campaigns to deploy before you invest
• A/B testing : Quickly and easily compare to versions or options in a study, whether it’s a design, headline, color palette or a mock-up of your latest ad campaign

Customer experience market research templates

• Student satisfaction : Gather feedback on how your institution is delivering on the student experience
• Net promoter score (NPS) : Measure customer loyalty and understand how they feel about your product or service using one of the world’s best-recognized metrics
• Customer satisfaction : Evaluate how satisfied your customers are with your company, including the products and services you provide, and how they are treated when they buy from you
• Customer service : Gain insights into the contact center experience, so you can achieve and maintain optimum levels of customer experience (CX) performance
• Event feedback : Measure the effectiveness of your events and how well they meet attendee expectations so that you can continuously improve your offering
• IT help desk : Understand how satisfied your employees and customers are with your IT help desk experience
• Website suggestion box : Collect visitor feedback on how your website can be improved
• Website satisfaction : Find out how satisfied visitors are with your website’s design, usability, and performance
• Store purchase feedback : Capture customer experience data at the point of purchase to help you improve the in-store experience
• Online purchase feedback : Find out how well your online shopping experience performs against customer needs and expectations

Employee experience market research templates

• Employee satisfaction : Get an overview of your current employee experience
• Manager feedback : Improve your skills as a leader with valuable feedback from your team
• Employee engagement : Find out how employees find the current experience at your workplace with this entry-level engagement survey
• Employee exit interview : Understand why your employees are leaving and how they’ll speak about your company once they’re gone with this survey template
• Employee onboarding : Improve your onboarding program by understanding what’s working and what’s not
• Team event planning : Collect inputs from employees to plan a team event that works for everyone
• Meeting feedback : Check-in with team members after a meeting to see how well your company is running and what improvements can be made
• Interview feedback : Improve your candidate experience by gathering actionable insights about the interview process
• Employee suggestion box : Gather anonymous data to help address concerns and improve the employee experience in your organization
• Candidate experience : Improve your candidate experience to increase brand perception, offer acceptance rates, and hiring process efficiency with this single-touchpoint survey template
• Employee suggestion action : Take employee feedback a step further by working with your staff to quantify solutions based on their experience data

Product experience market research templates

• Product research : Evaluate your consumers’ reaction to a new product or product feature across every stage of the product development journey
• Pricing : Understand how to set the exact price point for your product or service, according to your target consumers
• Feature prioritization : Compare and contrast product features using conjoint analysis to find the optimal mix for your customers
• Product package testing : Collect feedback on your product packaging to see how well it meets the needs and expectations of your customers

Armed with the right market research templates, getting the information you need across brand, product, customer and employee disciplines — as well as beyond — is significantly easier.

But if you want help putting together complex market research and scaling your in-house research team to get agile insights, check out our guide to building an agile research function.

Insights are more important than ever, especially during times of change, but building a great team takes a lot of time and money.

In our eBook, we’ll explain how you can:

• Scale your research team
• Build a smart partner strategy
• Ensure you have the right technology for market research and data analysis

Tackle your market research with our agile market research eBook

Related resources

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, primary vs secondary research 14 min read, request demo.

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Discover, Analyze, Succeed: 10 Best Market Research Templates

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

February 13, 2024

When promoting your products or launching new ones, it’s essential to understand the market, size up your competition, and have a crystal-clear picture of what your customers want. Once you’ve got that insight, you’re ready to set the stage with a marketing plan .

Market research might sound intimidating, considering the laborious process of collecting and analyzing data. But don’t fret—market research templates swoop in to save the day. They provide a structured roadmap that covers all the vital market research steps, from pinpointing your objectives to gathering and interpreting the data. 🗺️

Come along as we delve into the top 10 free market research templates . We’ll walk you through their unique features, making it a breeze to pick the perfect template that suits your needs.

What Is a Market Research Template? 

What are the key components of a market research template, 1. clickup market research template, 2. clickup market analysis template, 3. clickup business plan template, 4. clickup business development plan template, 5. clickup new product development template, 6. clickup product positioning template, 7. clickup competitive analysis template, 8. clickup customer journey map template, 9. word market research plan template by flexmr, 10. word general market survey template by businessinabox.

Market research is a vast, often time-consuming process that involves gathering essential information about a target market through surveys, interviews, and focus groups. It’s crucial for anticipating trends and maintaining a competitive edge over your rivals. 

A market research template is a pre-designed framework to bring structure to your research processes. It comes with questions and fields for collecting data relevant to specific markets or objectives.

It simplifies the whole exercise by providing a standard format that you can customize to align with your research goals.

Market research templates help you:

• Save time designing and planning your research project
• Save money by removing the need for external research firms
• Ensure consistency in data collection, analysis, and reporting

A market research template is like a recipe for conducting research. It tells you what you need and how to use it. Here are the key components you can find in this template:

• Research objectives : Clearly defined goals of the research project
• Data collection methods : Specific methods and tools for gathering information, such as surveys, interviews, or observations
• Research questions : A set of well-crafted questions to address the research objectives
• Sample selection : Guidelines for choosing the right target audience or sample group
• Data analysis : Instructions on how the gathered data will be analyzed and interpreted
• Reporting : A format for summarizing and presenting the research findings 
• Timeline : A schedule that outlines when you will conduct each research activity
• Budget : Estimated costs associated with the research project
• Contact information : Details of the individuals or teams responsible for the research

10 Best Market Research Templates

We’ve handpicked the most innovative market research templates from Word and ClickUp to help you discover, gather, and analyze data effortlessly. Now, let’s see what makes them stand out! 💖

Market research is your first ally when you want to enhance your brand management and gain insights into your competitors’ strategies. With the ClickUp Market Research Template , you get a user-friendly tool that simplifies the task of gathering and presenting crucial information about your target audience, the state of your product or service, and the broader industry landscape. 🌄

This Task template takes you through the ins and outs of research, covering your approach, data collection techniques, and the valuable insights you’ve gathered from your current or potential customers through Custom Fields.

Adapt the fields to document any information you see fit—add data links and attachments, or choose a research stage like Design , Preparation , and Execution .

Each task comes with a to-do subtask list to keep a record of research steps, like defining a research scope and setting up a research team. The assignees can use it to monitor each subtask’s progress through Custom Statuses like Open, Under Review, or Closed. 

If you’re curious about where your product stands among its competitors, look no further than the ClickUp Market Analysis Template . This tool assists you in identifying and assessing key market trends, gaining insights into customer needs, and examining competitor strategies and performances. ♟️

This extensive market research template sorts competitors into five main types: direct , indirect , potential , future , and replacement (for competitors offering a substitute product).

Use the Growth Share Whiteboard view to evaluate competitor products and decide where to invest your resources. Simply pick the competitor type from the legend, create a sticky note of the corresponding color, and place it on the desired spot. Use the horizontal Quality axis to measure the competitor’s Relative Market Share and the Y-axis to measure their Growth Rate.

The Price vs. Quality Whiteboard view functions similarly, but this time, you’re using a matrix to measure the relation between product quality and price. It gives you a visual grasp of your competitors’ pricing strategy, helping you tactically position your product in the market.

The Competitors List view is your central hub for competitor information, neatly categorized by analysis status like Direct , Indirect , or Potential . Additionally, leverage the Advertisements Board view to see your competitors’ promotional strategies.

Replace traditional, lengthy business plan documents with the ClickUp Business Plan Template and speed up the process. It’s a comprehensive toolkit for documenting every aspect of your business plan and streamlining the drafting process to ensure it’s polished on time. ⏰

This one-page Doc template is neatly divided into several key sections:

• Company description : Provides a company overview, your mission, and vision
• Market analysis : Explains the problem you’re solving, its solution, and the target market
• Sales and marketing strategy : Outlines products and marketing plans
• Operational plan : Covers aspects like your location, equipment, and financial forecasts
• Milestones and metrics : Displays targets and KPIs

Customize the template with your brand logo and contact information. Each section comes with helpful prompts suggesting how to present your data—through bullet lists, pictures, charts, or tables.

Open the Topics List view to see all the sections and subsections included in the comprehensive market research Doc, allowing you to assign them to team members, set due dates, and attach relevant documents.

To track task statuses, switch to the Status Board view and categorize them as To Do, In Progress, Needs Revision, or Complete. Open the Timeline view to monitor potential plan deviations.

Expanding or starting a business is like embarking on an adventure of challenges and surprises. However, a carefully laid-out plan can make this journey much more manageable.

No need to start from scratch, though! Introducing the ClickUp Business Development Plan Template —your business roadmap, equipped with pre-designed sections that will lead you through the entire process, making your path to success smoother. 🛤️

Whether you’re a startup or a growing business, this template offers handy Doc pages to help you document the following:

• Executive summary : For providing an overview of the business you’re growing, outlining the issues you’re addressing, and suggesting solutions
• Key people : For explaining who’s on the executive team and what each person does
• Operations : Lists your business locations and employee count. You can outline the cost of equipment and facilities and map out manufacturing processes on a Whiteboard
• Marketing : Enables sharing the market’s history and growth to foresee potential opportunities, decide on the target audience, and analyze the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
• Financial plan : Gives an estimate of your cash flow and balance sheet, identifying the revenue point where you break even

Of the market research templates in this list, the one comes with ready-made tables and sheets with guidelines on how to fill them in. Feel free to customize any template section to match your business requirements.

Or you can include images to illustrate your plan, add or remove rows, choose your preferred color pallet, and rename the pages to make them your own—all within the target market research template.

Unlocking the path to a successful product launch boils down to one word: preparation. And guess what? The ClickUp New Product Development Template has got your back! 🙌

This comprehensive market research template streamlines the product development process , ensures alignment between your team and milestones, and keeps all tasks organized for seamless collaboration. All this is possible through Custom Fields, allowing you to explore your project from various viewpoints.

The Project Summary List view neatly organizes your tasks by their project phase , from Idea Generation to Product Launch , making it a breeze to track your progress. The list also clearly displays details like Task Complexity and Impact Level through Custom Fields that you can tailor to your needs.

To observe your tasks like a hawk, open the Process Kanban Board view , which turns tasks into cards and groups them by their phases. It’s your go-to spot to quickly identify which tasks are in the pipeline from conceptualization to launch. 

Use the Timeline view for a linear display of your tasks, grouped by the teams working on them and color-coded by phase. This view allows you to efficiently monitor your task schedules and durations by giving you control over your workflow!

You can drag a task to reschedule or tweak its duration by dragging its edges.

Your product’s value directly reflects what your customers think, right? That’s why it’s crucial to figure out where your product slots into the marketplace and how you want your customers to perceive it.

Discover the perfect shortcut to those answers—the ClickUp Product Positioning Template —to implement into your business strategy. This tool helps you better understand your product and find that ideal niche in your target market.

Start by evaluating the product you want to launch in the Product Positioning Assessment view , with pre-made fields like: 

• Product name and description
• Market segment
• Target launch date
• Unique selling points
• Pain points 

Customize the form by renaming the available fields or adding custom ones.

Distribute the form to your team members, and once completed, all the valuable information automatically appears in the Product List view . This view is where you can review the details covered in the form, assign tasks to team members, set priorities , and group tasks by status.

This template also offers a Product Positioning Map Whiteboard view . It features a graph as a visual aid for showcasing how your upcoming product stacks up in terms of value for money compared to the competition. 

Competitive analysis isn’t just a fancy term—it’s your secret weapon if you’re gearing up to introduce a fresh product or service. The ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template is your trusty sidekick for this mission. It assists in revealing competitor strengths and weaknesses, providing a comprehensive industry overview , and cooking up strategies to outshine the competition and nail down your target audience. 🌟

To start your competitive analysis , brainstorm a list of potential competitors. Think about where your customers might go if they didn’t choose your company. Keep it realistic—aim for a list of up to 10 names, leaving time for thorough market research.

After you’ve completed the research, use the provided Matrix to place the competitor’s product concerning the Market Presence and Satisfaction axes. Use the Legend to help you understand the product type , including:

• High market presence and high satisfaction
• High market presence and low satisfaction
• High satisfaction and low market presence
• Low satisfaction and low market presence

Duplicate a color-coded sticky note that matches your product type and drag it over to the quadrant where it fits the best. The Matrix is split into four sections to help you decide whether a product is a Contender , a Leader , a Niche , or a High Performer.

This business strategy template gives you the ultimate freedom to play around with its elements. Add, tweak, and place them wherever you like in the interactive Whiteboard view. 

Have you ever found yourself scratching your head, wondering what your customers want? The ClickUp Customer Journey Map Template is a handy tool that can help you out! 🛠️

Think of it as a guide to better understanding your ideal customer’s user persona . By mapping their journey, you can uncover their needs and expectations and come up with sensible strategies to improve your products and services for your target audience.

This Whiteboard template brims with handy question prompts about customer actions, experiences, touchpoints, and solutions. The template leads you through three key stages:

• Awareness : You introduce customers to your business and what it offers
• Consideration : They start considering your business as a solution to their needs, leading them to research your products or services and compare them to other options 
• Conversion : They go from pondering to action and become paying customers

Each of these stages comes with pre-made sticky notes to get you started, but you’ve got the creative license to add more. Give the Whiteboard a personal touch with freehand drawing, create shapes, insert images, use connectors, and add text from focus groups, customer research, or any market research examples you own. 

If you’re looking for a structured framework to streamline market research, the Word Market Research Plan Template by FlexMR is a handy solution. It’s divided into well-structured sections for every step and features tips and instructions on how to use them.

This Word template is fully customizable, allowing you to modify colors, change font and letter size, add rows and columns to pre-made tables or include graphs and charts. ✍🏻

Use its first section to provide a brief business background. Then, define the project’s scope and specify what you expect to achieve at the project’s conclusion, including target response numbers, data presentation guidelines, and the influence of data on future decision-making .

Additional details the template covers are:

• Target Audience : Describe the customers you aim to research, considering age, demographics, and interactions with the company or product
• Sample Plan : Detail the number of participants you intend to research
• Research Methods : Include qualitative and quantitative methods
• Timeline : Present a project timeline, breaking down tasks and accounting for variations in response rates
• Budget : Outline the budget, providing a cost breakdown and highlighting areas requiring investment
• Ethical Considerations : Address ethical and other considerations that may arise during the project, like conflict of interest with suppliers

To finish up, add Further Considerations to include anything the previous sections don’t cover.

One way to conduct effective market research is through a survey. If you’re unsure about the questions to include for optimal results or need a structured framework to streamline the process, try the Word General Market Survey Template by BusinessInABox. 

This two-page Word document contains open-ended and multiple-choice questions for an effective customer case study . They provide all the essential information to understand the market you’re involved in or planning to enter.

The questions in the template cover customer information like:

• Age and gender
• Education level
• Marital status
• Total annual income 

As this is a Word template, customize it however you like ! Add or tweak questions to dig into the specifics you’re curious about, and make the survey longer or shorter. Feeling fancy? Give it a personal touch by using a different font or changing the background color!

Crack the Code to Market Domination with These Essential Market Research Templates

Market research can be a wild ride, but these top-notch market research templates make it smooth sailing. From gaming insights into customer preferences to uncovering your competitor’s strategies, they provide a structured solution for every research step.

If you’re hungry for more research assets, dive into the ClickUp template library , where you’ll find over 1,000 user-friendly templates waiting to guide you on areas like mapping out customer journeys , performing competitor analysis , and nailing down product positioning with minimal effort. ✌

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Market analysis templates

Turn market research into insights

Save time, highlight crucial insights, and drive strategic decision-making

Last updated

22 July 2023

Reviewed by

To outlast competitors, your business needs to stay ahead of the curve. To do this, you need to have your finger on the pulse of the market.

Conducting a market analysis can provide you with detailed information about all areas of your industry and help guide decisions for the greatest growth potential.

Benefits of conducting a market analysis

A market analysis is one of the things a business can do that benefits nearly every facet of the business. From your marketing team to your product development manager, all the way up to the CEO, the insights provided by a market analysis will help to drive important decisions and push the business forward. 

Some of the ways in which it can do that are:

Identifying customer needs and preferences

Your reputation is made or broken by how well you meet the needs and preferences of your target customers. Market analysis gives you deep insights into those needs and preferences, allowing you to tailor your products, services, and marketing strategies to better meet them. You'll build better customer satisfaction and increase brand loyalty in the process.

Identifying competitors and market share

You don't just have to meet your customers' needs; you have to do a better job of it than your competitors. This will not be possible if you don't understand the strengths and weaknesses of those competitors. A market analysis can provide that information, giving you the data you need to set yourself apart from them.

Identifying market opportunities and threats

Markets aren't static. Your business can't be static, either. Through ongoing market analysis, you'll identify opportunities and threats as they occur, allowing you to pivot gracefully to best handle those situations. You'll be able to better predict opportunities for growth and better prepare for potential threats such as new competitors or changing market conditions.

Enhancing product development and innovation

With more information about customer needs and preferences and deeper insight into emerging market trends, you'll be positioned nicely for a more efficient product development process. You'll be able to make product decisions quickly based on the knowledge you've gained and develop products the market will love.

Supporting business planning and strategy

Data plays an important role in planning and decision-making from the very first days of a startup to a large corporation planning its next few years. A market analysis helps you identify target markets, build your value proposition, and set realistic goals and objectives. They can help guide the feasibility of new business ventures or business expansions.

Component of a market analysis

A market analysis consists primarily of three components. Although they overlap, each focuses the bulk of its intent on one specific area of analysis. 

Industry examination

This part of the analysis is focused on the specific industry you operate in or are hoping to expand into. It examines the trends, characteristics, and dynamics of the industry. 

To do so, it looks at the key players in the industry and its market size and growth rate. It also examines factors impacting entry into the market, such as technological barriers, regulatory requirements, supply chain logistics, and more.

The industry analysis can be broken down into the following steps:

Industry size and growth — Determine the market size and growth rate. For a complete picture, consider historical data and future projections.

Industry structure — Identify the key players, market segments, and distribution channels within the industry. When prudent, focus on the region you'll be working within.

Market trends — Analyze the current and emerging trends, innovations, and technologies influencing the industry. Look for opportunities to capitalize on those trends.

Competitive forces — Assess the competitive landscape. Look at the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers and competitive rivalry within the industry.

Regulatory and legal factors — Examine any policies, regulations, or laws that must be accounted for when entering the industry. When needed, consult with a lawyer familiar with the industry.

Market examination

The market examination focuses on understanding a specific target market within the industry.

When conducting a market analysis, you'll gather data about customers within the industry—their demographics, buying behavior, needs and preferences, and demand for products or services. This part of your analysis helps you identify your target audience and help you begin to form your value propositions.

Conducting the market examination portion of the market analysis consists of the following steps:

Target market segmentation — Segment customer segments based on characteristics such as demographics, psychographics, behavior, location, and other factors. This helps you decide which market segments are a good fit for you.

Customer analysis — For each segment, research the needs, preferences, motivations, and purchasing behavior of those customers. For this, you can limit yourself to only those market segments you're interested in appealing to.

Market size and growth — Gather detailed data on the market size. Examine the historical size of the market to identify any trends that might impact your perception of the market. Look at future predictions to see where the market will be in years after you've entered it.

Market trends — Examine customer behavior to determine what their needs and preferences are now, how they've changed in the future, and where they might be heading. Look also for customers' behavior in the market and the strength of their demand for products and services.

Market gaps and opportunities — Armed with your data on customers and market trends, look for any gaps in the market that currently aren't being met by the existing players in the space. Explore each gap further to examine its market viability.

Competitor examination

The final area of the market analysis is the competitor examination.

During this part of the analysis, the focus is squarely on the competitors operating in the industry. A close look will be taken at their strengths and weaknesses and the strategies they use within the market. This helps you further refine your value proposition and set yourself apart from other market players.

For the competitor examination, follow these steps:

Competitive analysis — Identify key competitors in the industry and research them thoroughly. Analyze their market share, product offerings, pricing strategies, and marketing tactics. Look at their distribution and supply channels to better understand how they function in the industry.

SWOT analysis — A SWOT analysis assesses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats posed by competitors. It tells you what you need to be wary of when dealing with your competitors and potential avenues for gaining a competitive advantage.

Differentiation — With the help of your SWOT analysis and the other data you've gathered, look for areas where gaps in the market mesh with weaknesses in the competitive landscape. These are areas you can focus on to differentiate yourself from your competition.

Competitive advantage — Understand the value proposition of your competitors, both as they state it and as customers perceive it. These factors will identify their competitive advantages. Develop a plan to work around these advantages or turn them in your favor.

8 market analysis templates

As you can see, there are many steps within the three areas of market analysis. Getting a template to guide you through the ones you're working on can save a lot of time.

Below, we've gathered eight quality templates for some of the most important aspects of market analysis. All of the companies linked provide a host of other templates to fit other aspects of the analysis as well.

1. Market research kit

2. market analysis.

This market analysis template streamlines business market research by utilizing secondary sources and analyzing market reports and industry data. It saves time, emphasizes key insights, and informs strategic decision-making.

3. SWOT analysis

This SWOT analysis template helps assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in a concise and organized manner. It will help facilitate strategic planning and decision-making.

4. Risk assessment 

This risk assessment template , integrated with market analysis, enables businesses to identify and evaluate potential risks associated with market dynamics and other potential barriers.

5. Competitive analysis 

This template helps to systematically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of competitors. It provides a structured approach to research, and it analyzes its products, services, target market, marketing strategies, and financial performance.

6. Marketing SWOT analysis

This marketing SWOT analysis template allows for evaluating a company's marketing strategies. It helps identify strengths and weaknesses internally while analyzing opportunities and threats in the market. 

7. Market segmentation

This template aids in analyzing geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral segments to better understand the target audience's preferences and needs. It enables effective targeting and messaging.

8. Market potential analysis

This market potential analysis template offers a comprehensive and customizable solution for analyzing market size, trends, segmentation, SWOT analysis, and new product launch strategy.

Here are 8 templates to analyze market reports, industry data, and other relevant documents.

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The Ultimate Guide to Market Research [+Free Templates]

A comprehensive guide on Market Research with tools, examples of brands winning with research, and templates for surveys, focus groups + presentation template.

Rakefet is the CMO at Mayple. She manages all things marketing and leads our community of experts through live events, workshops, and expert interviews. MBA, 1 dog + 2 cats, and has an extensive collection of Chinese teas.

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Natalie is a content writer and manager who is passionate about using her craft to empower others. She thrives on team dynamic, great coffee, and excellent content. One of these days, she might even get to her own content ideas.

Updated February 26, 2024.

Before you do anything in business you have to have a good grasp of the market. What’s the market like? Who are your competitors? And what are the pain points and challenges of your ideal customer? And how can you solve them? Once you have the answers to those questions then you are ready to move forward with a marketing plan and/or hire a digital marketing agency to execute it.

In this guide we break down what market research is, the different types of market research, and provide you with some of the best templates, tools, and examples, to help you execute it on your own.

Excited to learn?

Let’s dive in.

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to determine the success of your product or service, make changes to your existing product, or understand the perception of your brand in the market.

“Research is formalized curiosity, it is poking and prying with a purpose.” - Zora Neale Hurston

We hear the phrase "product-market fit" all the time and that just means that a product solves a customer's need in the market. And it's very hard to get there without proper market research. Now, I know what you're going to say. Why not get actionable insights from your existing customers? Why not do some customer research?

The problem with customer research is two-fold:

• You have a very limited amount of data as your current customers don't represent the entire market.
• Customer research can introduce a lot of bias into the process.

So the real way to solve these issues is by going broader and conducting some market research.

Why do market research?

There are many benefits of doing market research for your company. Here are a few of them:

• Understand how much demand exists in the market, the market size
• Discover who your competitors are and where they are falling short.
• Better understand the needs of your target customers and the problems and pain points your product solves.
• Learn what your potential customers feel about your brand.
• Identify potential partners and new markets and opportunities.
• Determine which product features you should develop next.
• Find out what your ideal customer is thinking and feeling.
• Use these findings to improve your brand strategy and marketing campaigns.

“The goal is to transform data into information, and information into insight.” - Carly Fiorina

Market research allows you to make better business decisions at every stage of your business and helps you launch better products and services for your customers.

Primary vs secondary research

There are two main types of market research - primary and secondary research.

Primary research

Primary market research is when researchers collect information directly, instead of relying on outside sources of information. It could be done through interviews, online surveys, or focus groups and the advantage here is that the company owns that information. The disadvantage of using primary sources of information is that it's usually more expensive and time-consuming than secondary market research.

Secondary research

Secondary market research involves using existing data that is summarized and collected by third parties. Secondary sources could be commercial sources or public sources like libraries, other websites, blogs , government agencies, and existing surveys. It's data that's more readily available and it's usually much cheaper than conducting primary research.

Qualitative vs quantitative research

Qualitative research is about gathering qualitative data like the market sentiment about the products currently available on the market (read: words and meanings). Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics. It's data that is numbers-based, countable, and measurable.

Types of market research

1. competitive analysis.

Every business needs to know its own strengths and weaknesses and how they compare with its largest competitors in the market. It helps brands identify gaps in the market, develop new products and services, uncover market trends, improve brand positioning , and increase their market share. A SWOT analysis is a good framework to use for this type of research.

2. Consumer insights

It's also equally important to know what consumers are thinking, what the most common problems are and what products they are purchasing. Consumer research can be done through social listening which involves tracking consumer conversations on social media. It could also include analyzing audiences of brands , online communities, and influencers, and analyzing trends in the market.

3. Brand awareness research

Brand awareness is a super important metric for understanding how well your target audience knows your brand. It's used to assess brand performance and the marketing effectiveness of a brand. It tells you about the associations consumers make when they think of your brand and what they believe you're all about.

4. Customer satisfaction research

 Customer satisfaction and loyalty are two really important levers for any business and you don't have to conduct in-depth interviews to get that information. There is a wide range of automated methods to get that kind of data including customer surveys such as NPS surveys, customer effort score (CES) surveys, and regularly asking your customers about their experience with your brand.

5. Customer segmentation research

 Customer segmentation research involves figuring out what buckets consumers fall into based on common characteristics such as - demographics, interests, purchasing behavior, and more. Market segmentation is super helpful for advertising campaigns, product launches, and customer journey mapping.

6. Interviews

Customer interviews are one of the most effective market research methods out there. It's a great way for business owners to get first-party data from their customers and get insights into how they are doing in real time.

7. Focus groups

Focus groups are a great way to get data on a specific demographic. It's one of the most well-known data collection methods and it involves taking a sample size of people and asking them some open-ended questions. It's a great way to get actionable insights from your target market.

8. Pricing research

 Pricing strategy has a huge influence on business growth and it's critical for any business to know how they compare with the leading brands in their niche. It can help you understand what your target customer is willing to pay for your product and at what price you should be selling it.

To start, get automated software to track your competitors' pricing . Then, summarize your research into a report and group the results based on product attributes and other factors. You can use quadrants to make it easier to read visually.

9. Campaign research

It's also important for a brand to research its past marketing campaigns to determine the results and analyze their success. It takes a lot of experimentation to nail the various aspects of a campaign and it's crucial for business leaders to continuously analyze and iterate.

10. Product/service use research

Product or user research gives you an idea of why and how an audience uses a product and gives you data about specific features. Studies show that usability testing is ranked among the most useful ways to discover user insights (8.7 out of 10), above digital analytics and user surveys. So it's a very effective way to measure the usability of a product.

Now that you know the different types of market research let's go through a step-by-step process of setting up your study.

How to conduct a market research study

Looking for your next business idea? Want to check which niche markets are going to be best for it? if it's going to Here's a pretty simple process for conducting

1. Define your buyer persona

The first step in market research is to understand who your buyers are. For that, you need a buyer persona (sometimes called a marketing persona) which is a fictional generalized description of your target customer. You could (and should) have several buyer personas to work with.

Key characteristics to include in your buyer personas are:

• Job title(s)
• Family size
• Major challenges

Now that you've got your customer personas it's time to decide who to work with for your research.

2. Identify the right people to engage with

It's critical that you pick the right group of people to research. This could make or break your market research study. It's important to pick a representative sample that most closely resembles your target customer. That way you'll be able to identify their actual characteristics, challenges, pain points, and buying behavior.

Here are a few strategies that will help you pick the right people:

• Select people who have recently interacted with you
• Pull a list of participants who made a recent purchase
• Call for participants on social media
• Leverage your own network
• Gather a mix of participants
• Offer an incentive (gift card, product access, content upgrades)

3. Pick your data collection method(s)

Here's a quick breakdown of all the different ways you could collect data for your market research study.

Surveys are by far the fastest method of gathering data. You could launch them on your site or send them in an email and automate the whole process. Regular surveys can also help brands improve their customer service so they help kill two birds with one stone.

Interviews take a little longer and require a detailed set of interview questions. Never go into an interview without a clear idea of what you're going to be asking. It's also a little more difficult to schedule time and to get your potential or current customers on the phone or on Zoom.

Focus group

Focus groups are controlled interviews with groups of people led by facilitators. Participants in focus groups are selected based on a set of predetermined criteria such as location, age, social status, income, and more.

Online tracking

Online tracking is done through digital analytics tools like HotJar or Google Analytics. Tracking user behavior on your site gets you an accurate analysis of who your demographic is and what are the types of products or content that they engage with.

The problem here is that you never get to find out the 'why' - the reason behind their behavior - and that's why you need to combine digital analytics with other data collection methods like surveys and usability/product testing.

Marketing analysis

Another great way to collect data is to analyze your marketing campaigns which gives you a great idea of who clicked on your ads, how often, and which device they used. It's a more focused way of using tracking to zero in on a specific marketing campaign.

Social media monitoring

We've talked about this one before. Social monitoring or listening is when you track online conversations on social media platforms. You can use a simple social listening tool to get all the data you need by searching for specific keywords, hashtags, or topics.

Subscription and registration data

Another great way to collect data is to look at your existing audience. That might include your email list, rewards program, or existing customers. Depending on the size of your list, it could give you some broad insights into the type of customers/users you have and what they are most interested in.

Monitoring in-store traffic

Conduct a customer observation session to monitor your actual customers and how they behave in your store (physically or online). Observation is a market research technique where highly-trained market researchers observe how people or consumers interact with products/services in a natural setting.

4. Prepare your research questions

Write down your research questions before you conduct the research. Make sure you cover all the topics that you are trying to gain clarity on and include open-ended questions. The type of questions you use will vary depending on your data collection approach from the last step.

If you're doing a survey or an in-person interview then here are some of the best questions to ask.

The awareness stage

• How did you know that something in this product category could help you?
• Think back to the time you first realized you needed [product category]. What was your challenge?
• How familiar were you with different options on the market?

The consideration stage

• Where did you go to find out the information?
• What was the first thing you did to research potential solutions?
• Did you search on Google? What specifically did you search for? Which keywords did you use?
• Which vendor sites did you visit?
• What did you find helpful? What turned you off?

The decision stage

• Which criteria did you use to compare different vendors?
• What vendors made it to the shortlist and what were the pros/cons of each?
• Who else was involved in the final decision?
• Allow time for further questions on their end.
• Don't forget to thank them for their time and confirm their email/address to receive the incentive you offered

If you noticed, the progression of these questions follows the stages of the buyer's journey which helps you to gain actionable insights into the entire customer experience.

5. List your primary competitors

There are two kinds of competitors - industry competitors and content competitors. Industry competitors compete with you on the actual product or service they sell. Content competitors compete with you in terms of the content they publish - whether that's on specific keywords or they rank higher on topics that you want to be ranked for.

It's important to write a list of all of your competitors and compare their strengths, weaknesses, competitive advantages, and the type of content they publish.

There are different ways to find your competitors. You can look on sites like G2 Crowd and check their industry quadrants.

You could also download a market report from Forrester or Gartner . And you could also search on social media or market research tools like SimilarWeb .

6. Summarize your findings

Now that you've done your research it's time to summarize your findings. Look for common themes in your research and try to present them in the simplest way possible. Use your favorite presentation software to document it and add it to your company database.

Here's a quick research outline you could use:

Background - your goals and why you conducted this study

Participants - who you've talked to. Break down the type of personas and/or customers you've spoken with.

Executive summary - what was the most interesting stuff you've learned? What do you plan to do about it?

Customer journey map - map out the specific motivations and behavioral insights you've gained from each stage of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, and decision).

Action plan - describe what action steps you're going to take to address the issues you've uncovered in your research and how you are going to promote your product/service to your target audience more effectively.

Market research template

Not sure where to begin? Need some templates to help you get started? We got them for you.

1. Market survey template

First and foremost, you need a template to run your market survey. In this template, you will find all the types of questions you should be asking - demographic, product, pricing, and brand questions. They can be used for market surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups.

We also present a variety of question formats for you to use:

• true/false questions
• multiple choice questions
• open response questions

2. SWOT analysis template

A strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis is one of the best ways to do competitor research. It's a really simple analysis. There are four squares and you write down all four of these attributes for each of your competitors.

3. Focus group template

Not sure how to conduct focus groups? Here is a comprehensive template that will help you to take better notes and record your findings during the focus group meeting.

4. Marketing strategy template

The plan of action from your market research should become a vital part of your marketing strategy. We've actually created a marketing strategy template that you could download and use to update your marketing personas, your SWOT analysis, and your marketing channel strategies.

Market research examples

Here are some examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly in market research. Some brands thrive on research and some ignore it completely. Take a look.

McDonald's

McDonald’s sells its food in 97 countries around the world. Their secret? They do a lot of market research before they launch anything. The company uses four key questions in their research process:

• Which products are performing well?
• What prices are most affordable to customers?
• What are consumers reading and watching?
• What content do they consume?
• Which restaurants are most attended, and why?

They also extensively use customer feedback to improve their products. They even put some products up for a vote to see which ones are most loved by their customers.

The iconic coffee brand is valued at almost $30 billion and has over 30,000 coffee shops around the world and part of that success comes from their obsession with customer service. They launched a brilliant idea called “My Starbucks Idea” to try and make the customer feel a part of the journey.

It was an open innovation platform where customers could post their idea for a new coffee drink or food item and if it was good a company representative would actually reach out to them. It had a leaderboard and every year the company would develop some of these ideas.

In 2012, Starbucks launched 73 coffee products from ideas they received from customers. Cake pops and pumpkin spice lattes were born out of this platform, all thanks to market research. Can you imagine a world without pumpkin spice lattes?

For all its innovation Facebook had an epic market research failure. In 2013, Facebook partnered with HTC to launch a smartphone called First. It had Facebook’s interface on its home screen and that was a really jarring change for most people. Instead of taking you to a home screen with your favorite apps, Facebook really took center stage.

To be fair, you could turn it off and get a regular Android home window but that would be missing the entire reason you bought the phone in the first place. So it was a complete mismatch to consumers’ wants and the phone flopped.

Turns out, that nobody wanted to see Facebook when they first opened their phone 😅.

Bloom & Wild

Bloom & Wild is a UK flower delivery brand that was looking for their next campaign. They did some research and found out that people think red roses are cliche and prefer to buy something else as a gift on Valentine’s Day. So the brand chose not to sell roses for Valentine’s Day 2021 and made it into a “No Roses Campaign”.

The results - they saw a 51% increase in press coverage year after year.

Top tools used for market research

Here are some of the top market research and digital analytics tools you should try out for your next research project.

Answer the Public

Answer the public is a free market research tool that helps marketers figure out what questions people ask online. It's really easy to use. You put in a keyword or topic and it spits out a whole variety of questions and subtopics.

Spyfu is a search engine analytics platform that gives you data on where your competitors get their traffic from. It provides info on the kind of both organic traffic and PPC channels down to the specific keywords people used to find each site. It's a great tool to use to map the competitive landscape.

Think with Google

This is an online publication from Google's team where they publish consumer insights from real-time data and their own insights. It uses Google Analytics but presents it to you as a library of information. You can find industry data on a whole array of businesses from educational institutions to counseling services.

Want to do the most extensive market research possible? Use SimilarWeb. It's a competitive analysis and data tool that provides you with literally everything you need.

It has data on:

• Digital marketing data - SEO, traffic, advertising
• Economic trends - economic indicators like annual growth rate, audience, benchmarking
• eCommerce, investing, and even sales data

BuzzSumo is a great tool to use to get actionable insights from social media and content marketing. It aggregates data from various social media channels and shows you the type of content that users engage with and share on their pages.

Typeform is a survey tool that can help you make surveys and fun interactive forms. It's a great tool to use to make your forms more engaging for your audience. The tool has a bunch of easy templates and a ton of integrations to help you visualize that data and share it with your team.

Latana is a brand research tool that helps you understand consumer perception of your brand over time. It helps you answer some key questions about the type of values your customers have, and the type of audiences your competitors are targeting and helps you to focus your campaigns on the right audience for your business.

Statista is one of the most popular consumer data platforms around. It has a wealth of information about consumer markets, business conditions, and industry trends around the world. It's easier to use than most business publications because it aggregates all the data you need in one place. The downside is that it's a little pricy but perfect for teams that have the budget for it.

Dimensions.ai

Dimensions is a search engine for academic publications. It is a great resource if you're looking for deeper insights into things like psychology, micro and macroeconomics, and business trends. A lot of the articles are free to view just make sure you select the " All OA " option which stands for Open Access research.

Otter is an AI-powered transcription software for interviews and meetings. It sits in the background and transcribes your meeting for you and then provides you with a digitized conversation that can be stored, search for specific keywords, and analyzed. It's a great tool to use for doing interviews.

Yelp is a search engine for reviews of local businesses. It's one of the best sources of opinions about a whole variety of products and services. It's a great place to get ideas about the kind of interview questions you want to ask, to find out the pain points of your ideal customer, and to find deeper insights into your target audience.

You have to conduct your market research regularly if you want to see significant results. Try the different methods that we’ve outlined, see what works for you, and remember to keep your team’s focus on the customer. The more knowledgeable they are of your target customer’s needs and wants the better your targeting and marketing strategy will be.

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6 Free Market Research Templates to Help Win Your Market

Market research templates save time and give clarity about what should and shouldn’t be included in any type of market research .

These days, doing regular market research is key. Particularly given how quickly consumer behaviors shift and companies change tactics to keep up with the ever-growing number of competitors in their industry.

In this post, I’m sharing six market research report templates to give you a head start and help steer your analysis in the right direction from the onset.

What is a market research template?

Market research templates provide questions and specific fields to fill out – relevant to specified market research objectives. You can add or remove fields according to what’s relevant to your market and research goal. It provides a framework to develop your own research methodology if you don’t want to go full-scale with a research firm.

What are the advantages of using market research templates?

There are many ways market research templates benefit organizations of any size.

• It costs less than hiring an external market research firm.
• Completion is often quicker because pre-set fields guide your research.
• Little to no professional training is required to complete a template.
• Templates can be easily shared with other business units.
• Files can be easily updated internally in the future.
• Research Intelligence tools like Similarweb make it much easier to access market research data than ever before.
• Using a template enables you to stay focused and organized.

Doing market research with a template can help you generate results faster than any agency can deliver. You set your priorities and start collecting information without untimely back-and-forth correspondence. This is particularly valuable for online companies in markets that develop and change quickly. You need real-time data to improve your results, so time is always of the essence.

In addition to time, you also save costs. Comprehensive market research usually demands additional financial resources. By using shareable templates, you can involve relevant internal business units at minimal extra cost.

This presents another advantage: You own your information. You can come back to the files, reuse, update, and compare whenever it’s relevant. This is particularly useful in the dynamic world of online business because you’ll want to research the market repeatedly to detect and adapt to changes.

What are market research templates used for?

Most types of market research templates provide a robust framework that steers market research efforts in the right direction. When we consider the “journeys” a market research report template can help with – most use cases aren’t merely one-time research projects but should include periodic monitoring and analysis.

• Assess your brand’s strength and influential power. Evaluate your market share , and measure which percentage of the market you reach and sell to.
• Launch a new product or enter a new market . Get to know the territory and the key players to avoid unnecessary risks and recognize new opportunities.
• Identify and keep tabs on your top competitors. Be aware of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses to align your strategic planning.
• Understand your target audience. If you truly want people to resonate with your product or service, you need to take the time to get to know them, their interests, pain points, likes, and dislikes.
• Innovate your business model. Before applying changes to products or business strategies, understand user demand and need shifts.
• Drive more sales. Optimize product placement by identifying your product’s uniqueness and the specific value to boost your marketing campaigns.
• Fine-tune your digital advertising and analytics. Find and optimize the marketing channels and keywords with the highest potential and lowest competition .
• Find and follow emerging trends. Detect changes in the market development early and use them to your advantage.

Five things to do before using a market research analysis template

As you’ll soon discover, there are lots of tools and resources at your disposal – and you won’t need all of them to reach your goal. Your choices should depend on the goal of your research, something you’ll need to clarify before you start to use any type of market research report template.

Take a little time to do the following pre-planning steps 1-3 before you use any template in your research.

• Define the reason for your research and its goals.
• Identify the most suitable research types and methods.
• Prepare the materials you need to conduct the research, i.e., templates, tools, and market research questions ; then delegate responsibilities if applicable.
• Identify your market’s characteristics.
• Define your target audience and segments.
• Consider both qualitative and quantitative data points.
• Decide whether to use primary research, secondary research , or a mixture of both.
• Google Analytics vs. Similarweb
• Free online sources and tools
• Advanced competitor analysis
• Summarize your findings in a template and start to analyze.

Get a step-by-step roadmap for easy and comprehensive market research in our guide – Market Research: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How To Get It Right .

Types of market research templates

In this next section, I’m sharing the most important types of market research templates you need to fulfil your research goals. I’ll cover what each is and how a template can help with the research. In the final section of this post, I’ll share the quickest way to find the data you need to complete your template.

SWOT analysis template

Many of you will have heard of or used a SWOT analysis framework before. It’s a tried and trusted tool that helps organizations and individuals uncover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of their business and the competition. A template gives you pre-set fields to consider and complete, helping you know the essential metrics. Once complete, it shows a range of factors relevant to your business and market that can help you adapt for growth.

Use this type of market research analysis template to review your business, along with each of your competitors – analysis of the top four rivals is enough, but you might want to extend this up to eight. This market analysis template provides key questions to answer in each section to help guide your responses.

Market sizing template

Using a market analysis template shows you exactly how to do market sizing correctly. What’s more, it can ensure others within your organization are clear about how the figures have been calculated and provide a consistent and transparent framework for repeating the process in the future.

Use this simple market research template to get the formulas for the total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM), and serviceable obtainable market (SOM).

Competitive analysis framework template

Pick between 2-4 direct and indirect competitors , then compile the same data and information about each. Start with company research, then customer research, and add information about products and marketing strategies to build the ultimate competitive framework. Collecting the same data points gives you a straightforward comparison and clear picture of the competitive landscape .

This market analysis template covers both B2C and B2B markets. It gives you a detailed framework that helps you map company, customer, product, go-to-market, and marketing channels for your business, and that of your rivals.

Further reading: this post covers seven different types of Competitive Analysis Frameworks that can be used for this form of market research.

Use this market research template for a business plan or as a base document to do regular checks on the state of the competitive landscape.

Trend analysis template

Completing regular market trend analysis is vital – particularly given how fast consumer behavior and markets change. Sure, you can set up news alerts and keep an ear close to the ground, but this is not necessarily the most effective way to future-proof a business and stay ahead of the curve. Rather, it’s a slow and unreliable way to access the intel you need, not just to survive but to flourish.

Early detection of fluctuations, shifts, and changes is key; and a trend analysis template, when done periodically, can help you quickly identify and prepare your business to react.

This market trend analysis template is designed specifically for those operating in the B2B space. It clearly guides you through industry research, historical competitive data, desktop vs. mobile trends , and seasonal keyword research ; each of which can help you discover market-specific trends effectively.

Further reading: Trendspotting: Why All the Market Leaders Are Doing It

Buyer persona template

Define the customer who would benefit most from your product or service. Based on what you’ve learned about consumers and your target market , characterize your ideal customer. Who are they, what are their pain points, and how can you help them?

This template shows you exactly what kind of data to include when you build a new buyer person. We’ve completed an example for you as a guide; but also given you empty slides you can fill-in yourself for your own business and market.

Further reading: How to Create Buyer Personas That Boost Conversions

Audience analysis template

An Audience analysis looks at a group of people in much the same way you examine your current customers. It can help you discover how to turn more of your audience into paying customers by segmenting visitor and behavioral characteristics.

This market analysis template will guide you through the different types of data you should collect from both your own and your rival’s channels. It takes into account various characteristics of company, product, purchase, consumers, interests, and more to help you form a clear and comprehensive view of your target audience.

It’s split into three tabs, each covering B2B, transactional, and informative businesses separately.

Further reading: If this is your first time doing audience analysis, read this guide to understand what a target audience is and how to analyze it .

Get started with all the free market research templates you need to succeed!

How to use Similarweb to help with market research templates

Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence can help you complete almost any market research project quickly and effectively. One of the most-cited reasons people choose tools like Similarweb is due to the accuracy and timeliness of data. Unlike other forms of market research, like secondary research; Similarweb’s information is always the most up-to-date there is.

• Benchmarking tool : Accelerate your new digital strategy and learn how you stack up against the competition and market leaders.
• Market research tool : Analyze market trends in near-real time so that you can take action when it matters most, not a quarter later.
• Company research : Take a closer look at any company’s digital performance and expose your competitor’s digital strategies.
• Audience analysis tool : Engage more deeply with your audience, explore new audience segments and expand your reach.
• Customer journey analytics : Understand your customers and explore bottom-of-the-funnel metrics to discover what makes them convert.
• Mobile app intelligence : See the impact of mobile apps in your market: spot trends and emerging players.

Wrapping up…..

Good market research shouldn’t have to take an age; but as a task that requires careful planning, meticulous attention, and focus – even with the best tools, you’ve got to know the right questions to ask, and the best places to uncover the best intel.

Using market research templates will save significant time in the market research process while providing a clear and comprehensive set of guidelines that can be easily replicated or revisited in the future.

Market analysis templates allow for consistency and provide a clear framework that allows the inexperienced market researcher to do the task with ease.

Use these templates to jumpstart your research efforts and make strategic decisions more effectively, and in a more informed way.

Boost Your Market Research with Similarweb

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What is the importance of market research?

Market research is important because you can’t succeed if you’re not aware of market conditions, potential obstacles, purported budget, and how to market your products effectively.

How do you write a market research document?

The simplest way to write a market research document is to obtain a free market research template to guide your content. It can prompt you with the right questions to ask, and shape research efforts and outcomes effectively.

Which type of market research should I use?

To employ a highly effective market research strategy, you should combine the two methods. We advise you to use secondary research as a preparation for your primary research.

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The Ultimate Guide to Conducting Market Research [+Templates]

Table of Contents

What is market research.

• How to Do Market Research: 10 Best Tips

4 Useful Market Research Report Templates

Key takeaways.

Before you start a business venture, it is important to understand the market you are entering. And the only way to do that is by conducting thorough market research. Detailed research about your intended market and understanding the demographics of your potential clients can help you build a successful and sustainable business. This market research guide will cover every aspect of conducting market research for your business.

Market research is the process of collecting information about your target market and potential customers to validate the demand for a new product. Additionally, a business may conduct this research to understand its brand’s perception among the customers or even help its team iterate on an existing product.

It is crucial to note that formulating a market research strategy is not an instant task. Sometimes it may take weeks or even months for a business to gather deep insights into its target market and audience. However, conducting this research can make you more intuitive about who your buyers are and how to deliver value that none of your competitors are offering at the moment.

Succinctly, market research helps you find out answers to the following questions. 

• Where do your target customers search for products or services?
• What is trending in your industry?
• What are your target customer’s preferences? Which of your competitors are they turning to?
• Is there a demand for your new product?
• Who makes up your market, and what challenges do they face?
• What is the consumer attitude towards a specific topic, product, or brand?
• Are there any underserved customer needs that can become a huge selling opportunity?

Market research allows you to get factual data about your target audience without any bias and assumptions. Consequently, it helps make better and more informed business decisions.

How to Do Market Research: 10 Best Tips 

This market research guide will help you understand how marketers gather and assess their industry and target audience. Essentially, the process involves the following steps. 

1. Define your buyer persona 

The first step in formulating an effective market research strategy involves understanding who your customers are. And this is where buyer personas come in handy.

For those wondering, buyer personas are fictional or generalized representations of your ideal customers. There are several online tools that help you develop your buyer persona.

Some key aspects included in a buyer persona are age, gender, location, job type and title, income, family size, major life challenges, etc. The main idea behind defining buyer personas is to learn about the real audience in your industry, and understand ways to effectively reach them.

2. Identify a group to engage 

The next step in how to do market research involves identifying a group to engage to conduct your research with. Remember, the group you choose must possess the same characteristics and purchasing habits as that of your target customers. It is a good idea to conduct your research on people who recently purchased your product or service, or those who decided not to.

Sometimes, companies feel the need to develop multiple buyer personas. Try to aim for ten individuals per buyer persona. Moving on, there are two effective ways to identify a persona group. 

• Choose individuals who recently interacted with you

You can select a group of individuals who interacted with you in the past six months, or up to a year. A period that goes beyond this is not recommended, as you will be asking detailed questions, and the user experience must be fresh.

• Gather a mix of participants

By gathering a mix, we mean a group of people who purchased your product, bought a competitor’s product or refrained from purchasing at all. Gathering people out of your network will help you gain a balanced view of the market.

3. Send out surveys to understand customer sentiment

Online surveys are among the most common and effective tools for audience analysis. Many survey platforms are available for free or meager rates, which allow you to easily export data for interpretation. So, whether you are just asking a couple of quick questions or directing your customers to an extensive market survey questionnaire with open-ended questions, you can have a treasure trove of valuable first-person data in a few days.

4. Analyze what visitors are doing on your website

Several online tools enable businesses to tap into online market research without disrupting the customers. And one such tool is Google Analytics. You can use the tool to monitor customer behavior and engagement rates. You can further use the information to make smart business decisions based on proof of customer interests.

5. Track your website demographics

Website demographics are another crucial aspect of audience analysis. They help you understand who is actually purchasing your product and why they are visiting your website. When done right, they can form the basis of your entire market research strategy. Google Analytics offers exhaustive and customized demographics reports. Apart from that, you can check out the Insights tab on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram.

6. Understand your audience’s interests

There are many online tools that enable you to see which other websites your audience frequently uses. For instance, tools like SEMrush and Audience Overlap Tool provide reports that display a visual map of other websites that share a similar audience. This is a great way to identify trends on the websites they frequently use.

7. Research top competitor search terms

To develop a robust market research strategy, you need to look at your audience as well as competitors. And thankfully, there are plenty of ways to do that. Tools such as the Competitive Keyword Matrix can help you compare up to ten sites at the same time, and identify keywords that are driving your audience to your competitor’s sites. This way, you can understand the problem your competitors are addressing, and derive valuable insights.

8. Evaluate the digital footprint of your competition

There are online tools that further improve your market research by letting you gain insights into your competitor’s footprint. For instance, the Competitor Backlink Checker enables you to see how your competitors are using backlinks . In this manner, you can know more about their marketing and link-building strategies.

9. Perform market analysis

By now, you have gathered lots of unstructured data. But before you can use it, you need to analyze it carefully. And this involves putting all the gathered data into structured formats that can ease the process of decision-making. There are different market research templates that you can use to analyze your data. We will study four important templates in the next section of this market research guide.

10. Take action

You don’t conduct comprehensive market research to simply let it sit on your work desk, gathering dust. So the next step certainly involves taking action based on what you have learned. If done correctly, your analysis will uncover a few campaigns that you can run to get your brand in front of the buyers. It is a good idea to create a list of priorities and give them a proper timeline to make the tracking process easier.

A market research report template is an editable document that offers an outline for conducting market research. Typically, the template includes details about the research framework, focus group size, questions to be asked, and how the data should be analyzed. Here, we will look at some of the most common market research report templates you can use while conducting your research.

1. Porter’s Five Forces template

Porter’s Five Forces model is an excellent strategy to understand an industry by examining five different criteria. It enables businesses to make key decisions when it comes to entering a specific market. These five criteria elements are as follows:

• Competitive rivalry
• Supplier power
• The threat of new entry
• Buyer power
• Threat of substitution

2. SWOT analysis template

This is another powerful market research template. SWOT refers to strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis helps identify a company’s potential threats and opportunities, as well as all internal strengths and weaknesses. It also helps determine if the company is aligned with target growth trajectories and success milestones.

3. Market survey template

Market surveys help find out significant details about your buyer personas, current and potential customers, competitors, and the market on the whole. These surveys contain a vast range of questions that are multiple-choice, rankings, or open-ended queries. It is advisable to ask short-answer questions, as they motivate more and more users to take the survey. Here are some categories of questions you can ask in your survey. 

• Business questions
• Competitor questions
• Industry-based questions
• Demographic questions
• Brand questions
• Product/service questions

4. Focus group template

Focus groups present the best way to gather qualitative data. These forms can help researchers understand consumer behavior through open-ended questions. It is one of the most effective templates to create more meaningful and in-depth conversations. Moving on, some ground rules for conducting a focus group are as follows:

• Choose the right participants.
• Prepare effective open-ended questions.
• Motivate participants to have long and meaningful conversations.
• Ask participants how they feel about price and competition. 
• A methodical market research process allows you to learn about your customers, understand their requirements, and position your products or services to serve them better.
• With market research insights, you can boost your marketing tactics and rise above your competitors who do not fully understand their target customers and market. 
• Conducting market research is a complete process that begins with identifying your buyer persona. Based on that, you choose a focus group to engage with.
• There are many ways to gather qualitative data, such as sending out surveys to customers, analyzing website demographics, learning about your audience’s interests, researching competitors, etc.
• Once you have gathered all the necessary data, it is time to summarize your findings and derive valuable insights from the data.
• No matter the type of research you wish to conduct, there are templates to ease the complexity of the task and empower businesses to gather more from their data.

Conducting market research is an incredible and eye-opening experience. Even if you think your buyers are pretty satisfied with your business, performing this research can help you uncover new findings and channels for growth. Make sure you gather qualitative data and summarize your findings to identify trends, and shape your advertising strategies and brand positioning accordingly.

Market research is the process of understanding your audience. It involves determining the viability of a new product or service through research conducted directly via potential customers.

The five most commonly used types of market research techniques include interviews, surveys, customer observation, field trials, and focus groups.

Market research is a great tool that can be leveraged by all businesses. The process helps you gather valuable information that offers insights into customer thinking, their purchase patterns, and location. Additionally, market research can help you decipher important market trends, as well as keep an eye on what your primary competitors are doing.

A typical market research process includes the following steps.  1. Developing buyer personas 2. Identifying a focus group to engage  3. Sending out surveys to understand customer sentiment 4. Tracking website demographics   5. Conducting market analysis 6. Taking action

A market research template is a document that outlines the main objective of the research, key questions, target audience and size, budget, timeline, and other crucial variables.

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How to Write a Market Research Plan (+ Free Template)

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A market research plan, similar to a brief, is a vital document that details important information about your market research project. Though it is often an overlooked step of the market research process , an effective plan is often a critical factor in determining whether or not your market research efforts are successful.

Why? Because a well-thought through plan, more so than objectives alone, can be a vital instrument in focusing your investment. It ensures you know, ahead of the commencement date, the timeline, budget and desired outcomes from the project. It can even be used as a tool for receiving quicker sign-off from management when embarking on a new venture.

But it’s also important to remember that the research plan is not just for your team. To make full use of this document, it should be written in a way that can be distributed to agency partners as well – ensuring that your insight team and specialist partners are all working towards the same goal.

Tips for Crafting a Successful Plan

The first rule of writing a successful market research plan is to keep it short. The perfect length is between 1-2 pages, but as an absolute maximum try to ensure that it never exceeds 3. This will give you enough space to explain the background, scope and practicalities of the project while ensuring it is concise enough to be read in full. Throughout these few short pages, the tone of your plan should be informative. Remember that you are outlining information that you already know.

Write in a way that holistically encompasses all aspects of the project. Throughout the duration of your scripting, data collection, analysis and reporting stages of your project you should always be referring back to this document in order to remain focused. As any researcher knows, one of the biggest challenges in any research project is staying true to your original objectives.

With both exploratory and confirmatory research alike, new information is likely to arise which may spark other ideas or bring light to previously unknown issues. Remember these, but set them aside for further investigation at a later date. Travelling too far down the rabbit hole is the quickest way to overspend and under deliver on your original goal.

The 10 Elements of the Best Research Plans

First, let me preface this with a reminder: every project is different. A long term co-creation community will have different needs and requirements to a customer feedback survey or ad testing project. However, despite this – it is important to give equal consideration to all projects, and plan each with the same high degree of meticulous care. With this in mind, these are the 10 key aspects we recommend that all research plans should include:

1. Overview

Use this first section to outline the background to the problem that you are attempting to solve. Include background information on the business to provide context, as well as the circumstances that have led to the need for research. Overviews should be limited to 200 words at most, with most of the word count dedicated to the business circumstances & challenges surrounding the research.

2. Objectives

Arguably the most important aspect of the entire document, objectives should be in bullet point format. List 3-5 of the decisions or initiatives that the research will inform – this will become the remit of the project. Below are a few examples of both well and poorly written objectives:

Well written research objectives:

• Understand the channels in which our customers are most comfortable shopping, in order to decide which should be prioritised in the 2017 Q1 budget
• Develop an active co-creation community that contributes 2 user-generated product improvements for testing to the R & D team per month
• Learn what is leading to an increase in customer churn so that a new retention strategy can be put in place within 12 weeks

Poorly written research objectives:

• Survey 1,000 potential customers to find out how our products can be improved
• Develop a panel of employees that are able to provide answers to research questions on an ad-hoc basis
• Learn how our company is perceived in comparison to competitors and how we can stand out in the marketplace

3. Deliverable outcomes

This section acts as a list what you expect to be produced at the end of the project. This can include, but is not limited to: a target number of responses you expect to receive, descriptions of how the data should be presented and the extent to which the data will be used to inform future decisions. In long term projects such as panels or communities, this may include a target for the amount of decisions that research is expected to inform and/or a pipeline for new ideas in exploratory studies.

4. Target audience

Different to sample, your target audience describes the population that you wish to research. This can be defined by a number of factors depending on the nature of your project. Some of the most common include: demographics, psychographics, life stages and company/ product interaction.

5. Sample plan

The sample plan should be used to indicate the amount of participants you wish to research, as well as a breakdown of each group. This will be affected by the choice to use qualitative, quantitative or multi-method approaches, as well as the estimated size of the target population.

6. Research Methods

List the different research methods that you plan to use in your project. This will be used by your team and agency partners to ensure that the insight you need comes from the most appropriate tools. Be sure to include any non-traditional methods you plan to use as well – it’s important that your team are aware of how data will be captured, even if it is being gathered by an experimental technique.

7. Timeline

These usually take the form of a Gantt chart, but can vary depending on the scope and length of your project. Try to break down tasks as much as possible but be wary of dependencies within your chart. Be sure to schedule enough time in case some research tasks over-run or response rates are lower than expected.

Perhaps the most dreaded aspect of any research plan, budgeting is never easy. But by providing a breakdown of costs and outlining which elements of the project require most investment, a well-planned budget can be a benefit rather than a hurdle.

9 & 10. Ethical and Further considerations

Finally, you should outline any ethical/ other considerations or issues that may arise throughout the course of your project. Whether these are as simple as a conflict of interest or a concern about supplier relationships – this is your chance to address any problems that may arise before they do.

Free Market Research Plan Template

Use this link to download our   free market research plan template . The template comes complete with each of the sections outlined above, with instructions on usage and tips on how to make the most out of it. Currently available in .docx format, please email   [email protected]  if you have any problems with the download.

What do you believe should be included in a successful market research plan? Share your advice with us in the comments below and join the conversation.

About FlexMR

We are The Insights Empowerment Company. We help research, product and marketing teams drive informed decisions with efficient, scalable & impactful insight.

About Chris Martin

Chris is an experienced executive and marketing strategist in the insight and technology sectors. He also hosts our MRX Lab podcast.

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A Complete Guide to Market Research: Methods, Templates, How to do it and a lot more

Johnny Tong

Jan 19, 2021

Table of Contents

What is Market Research?

Why is market research so important, market research methods, focus groups, observation, types of market research, market segmentation, brand awareness and reach, pricing research, how to do market research, market research report & analysis templates, swot analysis template, market survey template, 15 common and effective market survey questions, demographic questions, psychographic questions, questions about your product/service., 10 best market research software.

• 1. Surveybot
• 2. Google analytics
• 3. Question Pro
• 4. Make My Persona
• 5. SurveyMonkey

Dos and Don’ts of Market Research

Do focus on your purpose, do use multiple tools, do make necessary changes according to the reports, do use user-friendly survey, do define a budget, don’t stop doing it again, don’t rely on internet information alone, don’t go for professional respondents, market research faqs.

• What is market research?
• Why is market research so important?
• Types of market research
• How to do market research?
• 5 best market research software
• Dos and don’ts of market research
• Market research FAQs

• Keep a definite purpose
• Identify the target audience
• Relationship status
• Education level
• Study your industry
• Prepare survey questions
• Record and analyze your findings

• How old are you?
• What is your gender?
• What is your employment status?
• What do you do?
• What are your hobbies, interests, attitudes?
• What are your challenges, goals?
• How satisfied are you with our product?
• Would you recommend our product to a friend?
• How appealing is our website/store?
• Do you think our prices are high?
• How satisfied are you with our customer service?
• Was it easy to find the right product from our store/website?
• How did you know about our product?
• What attracted you to our brand?
• How often do you come across our advertisements online?

1.  Surveybot

2.  google analytics, 3.  question pro, 4.  make my persona, 5.  surveymonkey.

• How long will it take to carry out market research?
• How to choose the best market research software for my business?
• How many questions should be there in my survey?
• Can I trust the research results to make business decisions?

Chief Human @ Surveybot

Market research template: DIY guide, tips and examples

What is market research , why do you need to do market research , type of market research , market research methods , how to conduct market research, market research template .

We’ve covered specific areas of market research, for instance aimed at successful product development and for startups . But there are many more reasons to conduct market research, so today we’re taking a step back and looking at the complete picture.

What does solid market research project entail in 2021, when we’re using metrics and tools that are relevant nowadays?

In this article, you’ll find the basic concepts of market research linked to handy tools and a free market research template and survey templates that’ll help you put the knowledge into practice.

Market research comes in many different shapes and sizes. You’ll look at all or some aspects of the market: market share, competitors, trends, target audience and more.

You’ll combine these based on the goal of your research, to inform your marketing strategies. You can also focus on one aspect of market research. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but market research templates give you an awesome starting point.

You can identify gaps and opportunities by analysing consumers’ needs and preferences and comparing that to what is currently on the market. Or you evaluate trends to come up with a new business idea.

To guide your market research, or the parts of it, it can be helpful to divide it into different topics to make the scope of your research clear.

Here are some topics that are often used in market research:

• Analysing distribution : to find cheaper or faster alternatives, or enter new markets
• Consumer behaviour : how has this been developing over the years? What can you expect going forward, and how do you prepare your business for this?
• Competitor analysis : who is leading your market, and how are they perceived? How can you position your brand to win territory?
• Market Segmentation and Targeting : are there any target groups that are being overlooked? How can you reach your ideal customers more effectively?
• Internet Marketing : learn to work with the search engines — what keywords are important in your market? What social media channels and types of content are working well?

As you can see, market research doesn’t just involve marketing. It can be used for your logistics as well, your product development department and even your sales people will need it, if they want to be effective sellers. All in all, successful market research is your gateway to product, sales and marketing strategies that really work.

New to market research? Here’s our whistle-stop intro!

Even the biggest, most successful and established companies are still conducting market research. Coca-Cola doesn’t just assume their position, Apple stays on top of consumer behaviour and Mercedes needs to know how they can get millennials to drive the cars their parents used to own.

Market research can be done in different stages. Below we’ll look at two scenarios in which market research is relevant, and how you can use it.

Before starting a business or developing a product

In this case, market research is used to find out how likely you are to succeed and what needs you should address to put a successful product or service on the market. You gather data, using market research templates or your own research drafts, to minimise risks and potentially to convince investors that this idea of yours is worth pursuing.

Some things market research in this stage can help you with:

Minimising risks

Think your idea for a new product is great because you’ve never heard of it before? Going in blindly is a risk – even if you want to move fast. With market research, you can determine what competition really looks like and if there’s enough demand for you to benefit from.

Plus, it will help you calculate the real costs you are going to make upon entering the market to find out if the idea is really viable in the long run.

Attest gives us reliable and direct access to all of our audiences across 11 markets, reducing our risk by reliably delivering against all of our needs. Beatrice Ramelle-Rigollet, Research Manager, WorldRemit

Attracting investors

Try convincing investors of your idea without giving them some numbers. Even though market research doesn’t exactly predict the future, past trends and thorough research into consumers and competitors will give investors a clear picture of how likely you are to make some profits from your idea.

What is the sweet spot when it comes to pricing? By looking at your competitors and surveying your ideal customers, you can pinpoint the right price for your product or service.

Positioning

What areas of the market are crowded and what spots are still available – and are they interesting to look into? Market research can help you choose a strong positioning.

Product features

Don’t develop a product without ever talking to your target customers. They know what they really want, and market research surveys will help you find out how to create that.

Shaping your marketing mix

Your communication and messaging should come from your values, but it should also match the needs of the market.

Defining strategy

Combining everything above will help you create an unbeatable strategy for every aspect of your business.

Keep up to speed with your market

Attest’s intuitive platform helps showcase where and how you can win market share and unlock new sources of growth.

Ongoing market research

It might seem like an unnecessary extra workload, to have someone keep an eye on the market on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. But the alternative is more dangerous and, potentially, more costly.

If you don’t keep up to speed with the market, you will only notice changes when your sales are dropping. It’s important to be proactive, especially when you’re in a competitive market. Stay on top of what your rivals are doing, so you can make decisions and react accordingly faster.

Some things market research templates in this stage can help you with:

Keep an eye on how your own campaigns and ads are performing, but also check on your competitors. How does your target respond to their campaign? What can you learn from their successes and failures?

SEO and social listening

Search engines have become such an important part of ‘the market’ that they are a real part of market research. Keywords and search queries will teach you a lot about your market’s questions and needs.

Identify new opportunities

What’s the most dangerous phrase for any business? ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ With market research, you can proactively find gaps and opportunities in your market.

Keep the focus on current customers

Think you know your customers? Keep in mind that they are also growing older, and are being influenced by other things in your market and society. To stay relevant to them, check in regularly and perform ongoing buyer persona research and survey customer satisfaction.

We track shifting key metrics, like awareness and consideration very carefully and also how our brand is perceived… it helps us to identify areas of opportunity Charlotte Langley, Brand & Communications Director, Bloom & Wild

De-risk market expansion

Spot opportunities to maximise the effectiveness of your marketing strategies in new territories, by understanding the differences between consumers in each market.

Product improvement

In product reviews, and it doesn’t even have to be your own product, you can figure out pain points that customers have. With that information, you can build an unbeatable product.

Did your marketing research team or product designer pitch a crazy idea and you, kind of, like it? Dive into your target market to find background information that can help you find out if it’s worth further investigation.

Market research templates can be used in many ways — and there’s usually not one that is best. The trick is to combine the different types of market research, depending on the availability of data and what you already know about your industry.

We’ll break down some of the types of market research before we dive into the methods and a step-by-step plan. We’ll be comparing primary and secondary research and explain how quantitative and qualitative market research complement each other.

Quantitative market research

Quantitative market research is perfect for the data analysis part of your research. If focused on anything that can be measured, like market statistics, price developments and search volume.

Qualitative market research

You give your quantitative research more meaning and context with qualitative research, This supplements the dry data with motives and emotions, often from your customers.

Primary market research

Any data that you gather first-hand, whether directly from customers or by conducting completely new research, is considered primary data. This can come from surveys, focus groups or fresh research.

Secondary market research

Secondary research is done by data collection and analysing existing reports. You can look at historic data, surveys performed by other brands or trend reports from trusted sources.

Luckily, there are all kinds of tools and different types of methods you can combine to gather all the data on your target market using your market analysis template . We’ll dive into the methods that are commonly used in market research and give some suggestions on tools that make this a little easier.

Interviews 

You can interview either industry experts or customers, or even both – depending on what your research focuses on. This is a type of primary research that gives you in-depth information on things like buying reasons and preferences.

Experts on the other hand can help you give more context to dry market statistics and give you more information on the meaning of some of the market trends you spotted.

Focus groups 

With focus groups, you sit down with your potential customers and listen to what they have to say. You can either observe or actively engage with them. How do they use certain products? How do they react to different marketing campaigns? This method can help you optimise what you’re offering, either in your product or in your communication.

Trend reports and public domain data

What trends in the world can affect your market? If you use the right sources, market trend reports will give you invaluable insight on things like demand, and factors that influence your target group.

Social listening

When doing market research and brand tracking in 2021, you can’t skip social media. This is where customers are actively talking about brands and products, their needs and wishes and also what bothers them. Twitter and the comments under Instagram posts are incredibly valuable for some brands.

But it can seem impossible to keep track of all of that. Luckily, there are some handy tools that will help you stay updated on relevant keywords and topics within your market. In this blog, we list some of our favourite social listening tools.

Market research without surveys is a lot like guesswork. If you want to know what your target audience is really thinking, hoping, wishing and seeing, all you have to do is ask.

You can use a survey template for all types of market research. Find out what your target audience thinks of other brands, what product features they would love to see, and how much they’d be willing to pay for a certain product.

Don’t let the market get ahead of you

Understand your target market with our ready-to-use survey templates, global audience of 125 million and results in days, not weeks.

Observation

Whether staged or unstaged, observation can be a great tool to see how your product would perform in the real world. How do they react to marketing visuals? How do they behave in a store? These details can help you fine tune your product and tactics to a t.

Experiment and testing

If you never try, you never know. Experiments can be incredibly useful, especially with product development. Create a minimal viable product (MVP) and see how your target audience likes it. A/B tests can be used for a wide variety of things, from social media campaigns to discounts – so use them! Read more about concept testing.

Competitive analysis

One of the most important parts of market research is undoubtedly an analysis of your competitors . You can’t really analyse your target market without looking at who else is in it. If you think you’re alone, look at how markets similar to yours are developing to become aware of market trends to look out for.

If only you could tell an AI-powered robot your objectives and sit back and relax while he surveys and analyses your market.

While we’re not there yet, we’re certainly equipped with a wide variety of tools that will make conducting market research a whole lot easier.

While it’s important to note that there are several approaches to market research templates, depending on your specific situation, we’ll give you a generic framework to work within. If you follow these steps and add the methods you need for your research goals to it, you surely won’t miss a thing.

• Define the problem
• Define how you’re going to approach the problem
• Design your research
• Identify information types, gaps and sources
• Perform field work and collect data
• Prepare data
• Analyse insights
• Create a report on your market research 
• Communicate the results
• Turn your insight into action points

Step 1. Define the problem

Before you start, find out what you really need to know and why. The latter is very important. Sometimes you think you want to know more about what your competitors are doing to be successful, while in fact your customers are the one who could close the knowledge gap by telling you what features they are missing in a product.

Step 2. Design your research

Think about what path you should follow to find the knowledge you need. What types and methods of research templates should you combine to find the right data and give context to it?

Step 3. Identify information types, gaps and sources

For what parts of your research will you need to talk to customers, and what can be found in reports for market trends? Make this part of your research design. Identifying this beforehand will save you a lot of time in the process.

Step 4. Fieldwork and collecting data

Get to work! This is the part where you’ll be launching surveys and analysing data from tools and trend reports.

Step 5. Prepare and organise data

It can get a bit messy, so take your time to structure the insights you’ve collected – especially if you used a mixture of tools and methods. Don’t draw any conclusions just yet – you want to have the full picture.

Step 6. Analyse data

If you combine what your customers said during the focus group sessions with the market trends you’ve spotted in reports, what can you say about the market? What keywords have become increasingly important? How have the actions of your competitors influenced and changed the market?

Make decisions based on high-quality consumer insights

With Attest you can run multiple surveys across different markets and see results in days, not weeks.

Step 7. Create a report

Include all the relevant data in a report and also determine what needs further research.

Step 8. Communicate the results

Present the results of your research to whomever it’s relevant to. Investors, marketers, designers – make sure the information is readily available so they can make well-informed decisions.

Step 9. Turn your insights into action points

Nobody conducts a full market research to just let it sit on your desk gathering dust. If you go into the whole process with the intention of changing or improving, base your next steps on this report.

We’ll make market research a little easier for you with our market research templates. Our market analysis template is free and can be used in basically any market research plan, and is a key ingredient in a comprehensive market research program.

With this free market analysis template, you can ask your target customers up to 5 hyper-relevant research questions. You can reach people in the US or UK, or upgrade your plan to talk to the customers in the other 50+ countries we work in. And don’t worry about creating reports – we’ll help you analyse it within our platform.

Here’s what that’ll look like for your target audience:

Get started with your DIY market research templates – our free template could be the key to unlocking your next successful product or service.

The Experts’ Guide to Brand Tracking

How to look at the impact of things like audience reach, panel diversity, and survey design to help you decide whether your current brand tracker is up to scratch.

Nikos Nikolaidis

Senior Customer Research Manager 

Nikos joined Attest in 2019, with a strong background in psychology and market research. As part of Customer Research Team, Nikos focuses on helping brands uncover insights to achieve their objectives and open new opportunities for growth.

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The Ultimate Market Research Template

Understanding your market is essential for making strategic and informed decisions that help you innovate quickly. However, the process of getting started with market research can be overwhelming. This comprehensive market research template is meant to break the market research planning process down into simple, straightforward, step-by-step activities to yield valuable insights. We’ll guide you through the importance of a market research template below and demonstrate how to effectively use and customize the template to fit your unique needs.

The power of an effective Market Research Template

A market research template is a structured framework designed to guide you through the intricacies of your research project. It serves as a roadmap, ensuring you cover all the essential aspects of your market analysis. By using a template, you can save time, maintain consistency, and produce well-organized research that leads to actionable insights. It’s also great for collaborating with your team and cross-functional partners to keep key stakeholders aligned.

Introducing Sprint Valley’s Ultimate Market Research Template

Our market research template is thoughtfully crafted to cater to businesses of all sizes and industries. Whether you're a startup aiming to understand your target audience or an established company seeking to explore new opportunities, our template can be tailored to your requirements.

How to use and adapt our Market Research Template

Step 1: download the template.

To copy this template for use within your own teams, click “Use template” in the upper right corner of this page. This will create a new board for you to adopt, customize, and personalize for your needs and requirements.

Step 2: Create your research plan

Use the templates provided to start planning your market research project. The template is divided into three main sections that cover core aspects of market research. These sections include:

Vision: Clearly define the research objectives and goals of your research project.

Vision Setting: Define what success looks like.

Problem/Research Statement: Create a framework based on your vision.

Assumption Mapping: Identify questions most critical for your team to validate.

Focus Finding: Sort your assumptions and questions into categories.

Impact Board: Discuss key questions and prioritise the types of answers you seek.

Structure: Create a well-structured plan to gather valuable insights.

Audience: Identify who you need to reach with your research to get reliable insights.

Methods: Choose the appropriate methods, such as interviews, diary studies, and more.

Outputs: Create a plan for how you will report out on key research findings to make research insights actionable.

Data: Identify which data you will collect and how to keep it safe.

Plan: Set your plan in motion by determining the project partners and timeline.

Resourcing: Identify the support you need to be successful.

Timeline: Clarify the timeline you’ll follow to stay on track.

Action Plan: Agree on first steps to get started.

Our template is designed to be flexible. Tailor each section to match your specific research project. Add or remove sections as needed, ensuring the template aligns with your objectives.

Step 3: Design your research instruments

Craft appropriate research instruments, such as survey or interview questionnaires or specific stimulus like prototypes. Carefully align the questions with your objectives to gather relevant and insightful data.

Step 4: Conduct research and collect data

Execute the research plan by recruiting and engaging with the chosen participants.

Remember that as the researcher, you have an ethical responsibility to all research participants to ensure inclusive research that minimises bias and protects participants’ identity.

Step 5: Analyze and draw conclusions

Thoroughly analyze the collected data using appropriate qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, identifying patterns, trends, and correlations that enable you to draw meaningful and accurate conclusions.

Step 6: Generate actionable insights

Based on the conclusions, derive actionable insights that offer valuable recommendations or strategies for decision-making, addressing the research objectives and providing direction for potential improvements.

Step 7: Create your research report

Compile the research findings, insights, and conclusions into a well-structured and coherent deliverable according to the outputs you laid out in your research plan. This may be a traditional report or take a more immersive approach like a workshop, podcast or mini documentary. Incorporating visual graphs or charts, quotes, video clips and more can enhance the clarity and impact of your presentation.

Our customizable market research template is your key to unlocking valuable insights that drive business growth. By providing a structured framework for your next market research project, this template will help you get started on the right foot to streamline the entire process, from data collection to actionable recommendations. Download our template today, adapt it to your unique project, and harness the power of organized and effective market research.

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How To Do Market Research: Definition, Types, Methods

Jan 2, 2024

11 min. read

Market research isn’t just collecting data. It’s a strategic tool that allows businesses to gain a competitive advantage while making the best use of their resources. Research reveals valuable insights into your target audience about their preferences, buying habits, and emerging demands — all of which help you unlock new opportunities to grow your business.

When done correctly, market research can minimize risks and losses, spur growth, and position you as a leader in your industry. 

Let’s explore the basic building blocks of market research and how to collect and use data to move your company forward:

Table of Contents

What Is Market Research?

Why is market research important, market analysis example, 5 types of market research, what are common market research questions, what are the limitations of market research, how to do market research, improving your market research with radarly.

Market Research Definition: The process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market or audience.

Market research studies consumer behavior to better understand how they perceive products or services. These insights help businesses identify ways to grow their current offering, create new products or services, and improve brand trust and brand recognition .

You might also hear market research referred to as market analysis or consumer research .

Traditionally, market research has taken the form of focus groups, surveys, interviews, and even competitor analysis . But with modern analytics and research tools, businesses can now capture deeper insights from a wider variety of sources, including social media, online reviews, and customer interactions. These extra layers of intel can help companies gain a more comprehensive understanding of their audience.

With consumer preferences and markets evolving at breakneck speeds, businesses need a way to stay in touch with what people need and want. That’s why the importance of market research cannot be overstated.

Market research offers a proactive way to identify these trends and make adjustments to product development, marketing strategies , and overall operations. This proactive approach can help businesses stay ahead of the curve and remain agile as markets shift.

Market research examples abound — given the number of ways companies can get inside the minds of their customers, simply skimming through your business’s social media comments can be a form of market research.

A restaurant chain might use market research methods to learn more about consumers’ evolving dining habits. These insights might be used to offer new menu items, re-examine their pricing strategies, or even open new locations in different markets, for example.

A consumer electronics company might use market research for similar purposes. For instance, market research may reveal how consumers are using their smart devices so they can develop innovative features.

Market research can be applied to a wide range of use cases, including:

• Testing new product ideas
• Improve existing products
• Entering new markets
• Right-sizing their physical footprints
• Improving brand image and awareness
• Gaining insights into competitors via competitive intelligence

Ultimately, companies can lean on market research techniques to stay ahead of trends and competitors while improving the lives of their customers.

Market research methods take different forms, and you don’t have to limit yourself to just one. Let’s review the most common market research techniques and the insights they deliver.

1. Interviews

3. Focus Groups

4. Observations

5. AI-Driven Market Research

One-on-one interviews are one of the most common market research techniques. Beyond asking direct questions, skilled interviewers can uncover deeper motivations and emotions that drive purchasing decisions. Researchers can elicit more detailed and nuanced responses they might not receive via other methods, such as self-guided surveys.

Interviews also create the opportunity to build rapport with customers and prospects. Establishing a connection with interviewees can encourage them to open up and share their candid thoughts, which can enrich your findings. Researchers also have the opportunity to ask clarifying questions and dig deeper based on individual responses.

Market research surveys provide an easy entry into the consumer psyche. They’re cost-effective to produce and allow researchers to reach lots of people in a short time. They’re also user-friendly for consumers, which allows companies to capture more responses from more people.

Big data and data analytics are making traditional surveys more valuable. Researchers can apply these tools to elicit a deeper understanding from responses and uncover hidden patterns and correlations within survey data that were previously undetectable.

The ways in which surveys are conducted are also changing. With the rise of social media and other online channels, brands and consumers alike have more ways to engage with each other, lending to a continuous approach to market research surveys.

3. Focus groups

Focus groups are “group interviews” designed to gain collective insights. This interactive setting allows participants to express their thoughts and feelings openly, giving researchers richer insights beyond yes-or-no responses.

One of the key benefits of using focus groups is the opportunity for participants to interact with one another. They spark discussions while sharing diverse viewpoints. These sessions can uncover underlying motivations and attitudes that may not be easily expressed through other research methods.

Observing your customers “in the wild” might feel informal, but it can be one of the most revealing market research techniques of all. That’s because you might not always know the right questions to ask. By simply observing, you can surface insights you might not have known to look for otherwise.

This method also delivers raw, authentic, unfiltered data. There’s no room for bias and no potential for participants to accidentally skew the data. Researchers can also pick up on non-verbal cues and gestures that other research methods may fail to capture.

5. AI-driven market research

One of the newer methods of market research is the use of AI-driven market research tools to collect and analyze insights on your behalf. AI customer intelligence tools and consumer insights software like Meltwater Radarly take an always-on approach by going wherever your audience is and continuously predicting behaviors based on current behaviors.

By leveraging advanced algorithms, machine learning, and big data analysis , AI enables companies to uncover deep-seated patterns and correlations within large datasets that would be near impossible for human researchers to identify. This not only leads to more accurate and reliable findings but also allows businesses to make informed decisions with greater confidence.

Tip: Learn how to use Meltwater as a research tool , how Meltwater uses AI , and learn more about consumer insights and about consumer insights in the fashion industry .

No matter the market research methods you use, market research’s effectiveness lies in the questions you ask. These questions should be designed to elicit honest responses that will help you reach your goals.

Examples of common market research questions include:

Demographic market research questions

• What is your age range?
• What is your occupation?
• What is your household income level?
• What is your educational background?
• What is your gender?

Product or service usage market research questions

• How long have you been using [product/service]?
• How frequently do you use [product/service]?
• What do you like most about [product/service]?
• Have you experienced any problems using [product/service]?
• How could we improve [product/service]?
• Why did you choose [product/service] over a competitor’s [product/service]?

Brand perception market research questions

• How familiar are you with our brand?
• What words do you associate with our brand?
• How do you feel about our brand?
• What makes you trust our brand?
• What sets our brand apart from competitors?
• What would make you recommend our brand to others?

Buying behavior market research questions

• What do you look for in a [product/service]?
• What features in a [product/service] are important to you?
• How much time do you need to choose a [product/service]?
• How do you discover new products like [product/service]?
• Do you prefer to purchase [product/service] online or in-store?
• How do you research [product/service] before making a purchase?
• How often do you buy [product/service]?
• How important is pricing when buying [product/service]?
• What would make you switch to another brand of [product/service]?

Customer satisfaction market research questions

• How happy have you been with [product/service]?
• What would make you more satisfied with [product/service]?
• How likely are you to continue using [product/service]?

Bonus Tip: Compiling these questions into a market research template can streamline your efforts.

Market research can offer powerful insights, but it also has some limitations. One key limitation is the potential for bias. Researchers may unconsciously skew results based on their own preconceptions or desires, which can make your findings inaccurate.

• Depending on your market research methods, your findings may be outdated by the time you sit down to analyze and act on them. Some methods struggle to account for rapidly changing consumer preferences and behaviors.
• There’s also the risk of self-reported data (common in online surveys). Consumers might not always accurately convey their true feelings or intentions. They might provide answers they think researchers are looking for or misunderstand the question altogether.
• There’s also the potential to miss emerging or untapped markets . Researchers are digging deeper into what (or who) they already know. This means you might be leaving out a key part of the story without realizing it.

Still, the benefits of market research cannot be understated, especially when you supplement traditional market research methods with modern tools and technology.

Let’s put it all together and explore how to do market research step-by-step to help you leverage all its benefits.

Step 1: Define your objectives

You’ll get more from your market research when you hone in on a specific goal : What do you want to know, and how will this knowledge help your business?

This step will also help you define your target audience. You’ll need to ask the right people the right questions to collect the information you want. Understand the characteristics of the audience and what gives them authority to answer your questions.

Step 2: Select your market research methods

Choose one or more of the market research methods (interviews, surveys, focus groups, observations, and/or AI-driven tools) to fuel your research strategy.

Certain methods might work better than others for specific goals . For example, if you want basic feedback from customers about a product, a simple survey might suffice. If you want to hone in on serious pain points to develop a new product, a focus group or interview might work best.

You can also source secondary research ( complementary research ) via secondary research companies , such as industry reports or analyses from large market research firms. These can help you gather preliminary information and inform your approach.

Step 3: Develop your research tools

Prior to working with participants, you’ll need to craft your survey or interview questions, interview guides, and other tools. These tools will help you capture the right information , weed out non-qualifying participants, and keep your information organized.

You should also have a system for recording responses to ensure data accuracy and privacy. Test your processes before speaking with participants so you can spot and fix inefficiencies or errors.

Step 4: Conduct the market research

With a system in place, you can start looking for candidates to contribute to your market research. This might include distributing surveys to current customers or recruiting participants who fit a specific profile, for example.

Set a time frame for conducting your research. You might collect responses over the course of a few days, weeks, or even months. If you’re using AI tools to gather data, choose a data range for your data to focus on the most relevant information.

Step 5: Analyze and apply your findings

Review your findings while looking for trends and patterns. AI tools can come in handy in this phase by analyzing large amounts of data on your behalf.

Compile your findings into an easy-to-read report and highlight key takeaways and next steps. Reports aren’t useful unless the reader can understand and act on them.

Tip: Learn more about trend forecasting , trend detection , and trendspotting .

Meltwater’s Radarly consumer intelligence suite helps you reap the benefits of market research on an ongoing basis. Using a combination of AI, data science, and market research expertise, Radarly scans multiple global data sources to learn what people are talking about, the actions they’re taking, and how they’re feeling about specific brands.

Our tools are created by market research experts and designed to help researchers uncover what they want to know (and what they don’t know they want to know). Get data-driven insights at scale with information that’s always relevant, always accurate, and always tailored to your organization’s needs.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below:

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How to conduct your own market research survey (with example)

After watching a few of those sketches, you can imagine why real-life focus groups tend to be pretty small. Even without any over-the-top personalities involved, it's easy for these groups to go off the rails.

So what happens when you want to collect market research at a larger scale? That's where the market research survey comes in. Market surveys allow you to get just as much valuable information as an in-person interview, without the burden of herding hundreds of rowdy Eagles fans through a product test.

Table of contents:

What is a market research survey?

Market surveys are what's known as "primary research"—that is, information that the researching company gathers firsthand. Secondary research consists of data that another organization gathered and published, which other researchers can then use for their own reports. Primary research is more expensive and time-intensive than secondary research, which is why you should only use market research surveys to obtain information that you can't get anywhere else. 

A market research survey can collect information on your target customers':

Experiences

Preferences, desires, and needs

Values and motivations

The types of information that can usually be found in a secondary source, and therefore aren't good candidates for a market survey, include your target customers':

Demographic data

Consumer spending data

Household size

Why conduct market research?

Here are some examples of how market research surveys can be used to fill a wide range of knowledge gaps for companies:

A B2B software company asks real users in its industry about Kanban board usage to help prioritize their project view change rollout.

A B2C software company asks its target demographic about their mobile browsing habits to help them find features to incorporate into their forthcoming mobile app.

A printing company asks its target demographic about fabric preferences to gauge interest in a premium material option for their apparel lines.

A wholesale food vendor surveys regional restaurant owners to find ideas for seasonal products to offer.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market surveys are what's known as "primary research"—that is, information that the researching company gathers firsthand. Secondary research consists of data that another organization gathered and published, which other researchers can then use for their own reports. 

Primary research is more expensive and time-intensive than secondary research, which is why you should only use market research surveys to obtain information that you can't get anywhere else. 

If you've exhausted your secondary research options and still have unanswered questions, it's time to start thinking about conducting a market research survey.

6 types of market research survey

Depending on your goal, you'll need different types of market research. Here are six types of market research surveys.

1. Buyer persona research

A buyer persona research survey will help you learn more about things like demographics, household makeup, income and education levels, and lifestyle markers. The more you learn about your existing customers, the more specific you can get in targeting potential customers. You may find that there are more buyer personas within your user base than the ones that you've been targeting.

2. Sales funnel research

With a sales funnel research survey, you can learn about potential customers' main drivers at different stages of the sales funnel. You can also get feedback on how effective different sales strategies are. Use this survey to find out:

How close potential buyers are to making a purchase

What tools and experiences have been most effective in moving prospective customers closer to conversion

3. Customer loyalty research

The demographics of your most loyal customers

What tools are most effective in turning customers into advocates

What you can do to encourage more brand loyalty

4. Branding and marketing research

The Charmin focus group featured in that SNL sketch is an example of branding and marketing research, in which a company looks for feedback on a particular advertising angle to get a sense of whether it will be effective before the company spends money on running the ad at scale. Use this type of survey to find out:

Whether a new advertising angle will do well with existing customers

Whether a campaign will do well with a new customer segment you haven't targeted yet

What types of campaign angles do well with a particular demographic

5. New products or features research

What features they wish your product currently had

What they think of a particular product or feature idea

6. Competitor research

Whether your competitors have found success with a buyer persona you're not targeting

Information about buyers for a product that's similar to one you're thinking about launching

Feedback on what features your competitors' customers wish their version of a product had

How to write and conduct a market research survey

Once you've narrowed down your survey's objectives, you can move forward with designing and running your survey.

Step 1: Write your survey questions

A poorly worded survey, or a survey that uses the wrong question format, can render all of your data moot. If you write a question that results in most respondents answering "none of the above," you haven't learned much. 

Categorical questions

Also known as a nominal question, this question type provides numbers and percentages for easy visualization, like "35% said ABC." It works great for bar graphs and pie charts, but you can't take averages or test correlations with nominal-level data.

Multiple choice: Use this type of question if you need more nuance than a Yes/No answer gives. You can add as many answers as you want, and your respondents can pick only one answer to the question. 

Checkbox: Checkbox questions add the flexibility to select all the answers that apply. Add as many answers as you want, and respondents aren't limited to just one. 

Ordinal questions

This type of question requires survey-takers to pick from options presented in a specific order, like "income of $0-$25K, $26K-$40K, $41K+." Like nominal questions, ordinal questions elicit responses that allow you to analyze counts and percentages, though you can't calculate averages or assess correlations with ordinal-level data.

Dropdown: Responses to ordinal questions can be presented as a dropdown, from which survey-takers can only make one selection. You could use this question type to gather demographic data, like the respondent's country or state of residence. 

Ranking: This is a unique question type that allows respondents to arrange a list of answers in their preferred order, providing feedback on each option in the process. 

Interval/ratio questions

For precise data and advanced analysis, use interval or ratio questions. These can help you calculate more advanced analytics, like averages, test correlations, and run regression models. Interval questions commonly use scales of 1-5 or 1-7, like "Strongly disagree" to "Strongly agree." Ratio questions have a true zero and often ask for numerical inputs (like "How many cups of coffee do you drink per day? ____").

Ranking scale: A ranking scale presents answer choices along an ordered value-based sequence, either using numbers, a like/love scale, a never/always scale, or some other ratio interval. It gives more insight into people's thoughts than a Yes/No question. 

Matrix: Have a lot of interval questions to ask? You can put a number of questions in a list and use the same scale for all of them. It simplifies gathering data about a lot of similar items at once. 

Example : How much do you like the following: oranges, apples, grapes? Hate/Dislike/Ok/Like/Love

Textbox: A textbox question is needed for collecting direct feedback or personal data like names. There will be a blank space where the respondent can enter their answer to your question on their own. 

Step 2: Choose a survey platform

Most survey apps today look great on mobile, but be sure to preview your survey on your phone and computer, at least, to make sure it'll look good for all of your users.

If you have the budget, you can also purchase survey services from a larger research agency. 

Step 3: Run a test survey

Before you run your full survey, conduct a smaller test on 5%-10% of your target respondent pool size. This will allow you to work out any confusing wording or questions that result in unhelpful responses without spending the full cost of the survey. Look out for:

Survey rejection from the platform for prohibited topics

Joke or nonsense textbox answers that indicate the respondent didn't answer the survey in earnest

Multiple choice questions with an outsized percentage of "none of the above" or "N/A" responses

Step 4: Launch your survey

If your test survey comes back looking good, you're ready to launch the full thing! Make sure that you leave ample time for the survey to run—you'd be surprised at how long it takes to get a few thousand respondents. 

Even if you've run similar surveys in the past, leave more time than you need. Some surveys take longer than others for no clear reason, and you also want to build in time to conduct a comprehensive data analysis.

Step 5: Organize and interpret the data

Tips for running a market research survey.

You know the basics of how to conduct a market research survey, but here are some tips to enhance the quality of your data and the reliability of your findings.

Find the right audience: You could have meticulously crafted survey questions, but if you don't target the appropriate demographic or customer segment, it doesn't really matter. You need to collect responses from the people you're trying to understand. Targeted audiences you can send surveys to include your existing customers, current social media followers, newsletter subscribers, attendees at relevant industry events, and community members from online forums, discussion boards, or other online communities that cater to your target audience. 

Focus questions on a desired data type: As you conceptualize your survey, consider whether a qualitative or quantitative approach will better suit your research goals. Qualitative methods are best for exploring in-depth insights and underlying motivations, while quantitative methods are better for obtaining statistical data and measurable trends. For an outcome like "optimize our ice cream shop's menu offerings," you may want to find out which flavors of ice cream are most popular with teens. This would require a quantitative approach, for which you would use categorical questions that can help you rank potential flavors numerically.

Establish a timeline: Set a realistic timeline for your survey, from creation to distribution to data collection and analysis. You'll want to balance having your survey out long enough to generate a significant amount of responses but not so long that it loses relevance. That length can vary widely based on factors like type of survey, number of questions, audience size, time sensitivity, question format, and question length.

Market research survey campaign example

Let's say you own a market research company, and you want to use a survey to gain critical insights into your market. You prompt users to fill out your survey before they can access gated premium content.

Survey questions: 

1. What size is your business? 

<10 employees

11-50 employees

51-100 employees

101-200 employees

>200 employees

2. What industry type best describes your role?

3. On a scale of 1-4, how important would you say access to market data is?

1 - Not important

2 - Somewhat important

3 - Very important

4 - Critically important

4. On a scale of 1 (least important) to 5 (most important), rank how important these market data access factors are.

Accuracy of data

Attractive presentation of data

Cost of data access

Range of data presentation formats

Timeliness of data

5. True or false: your job relies on access to accurate, up-to-date market data.

Survey findings: 

63% of respondents represent businesses with over 100 employees, while only 8% represent businesses with under 10.

71% of respondents work in sales, marketing, or operations.

80% of respondents consider access to market data to be either very important or critically important.

"Timeliness of data" (38%) and "Accuracy of data" (32%) were most commonly ranked as the most important market data access factor.

86% of respondents claimed that their jobs rely on accessing accurate, up-to-date market data.

Insights and recommendations: Independent analysis of the survey indicates that a large percentage of users work in the sales, marketing, or operations fields of large companies, and these customers value timeliness and accuracy most. These findings can help you position future report offerings more effectively by highlighting key benefits that are important to customers that fit into related customer profiles. 

Market research survey example questions

Your individual questions will vary by your industry, market, and research goals, so don't expect a cut-and-paste survey to suit your needs. To help you get started, here are market research survey example questions to give you a sense of the format.

Yes/No: Have you purchased our product before?

Multiple choice: How many employees work at your company?

<10 / 10-20 / 21-50 / 51-100 / 101-250 / 250+

Checkbox: Which of the following features do you use in our app?

Push notifications / Dashboard / Profile customization / In-app chat

Dropdown: What's your household income? 

$0-$10K / $11-$35K / $36-$60K / $61K+

Ranking: Which social media platforms do you use the most? Rank in order, from most to least.

Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / LinkedIn / Reddit

Ranking scale: On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate our customer service? 

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

Textbox: How many apps are installed on your phone? Enter a number: 

Market research survey question types

Good survey apps typically offer pre-designed templates as a starting point. But to give you a more visual sense of what these questions might look like, we've put together a document showcasing common market research survey question types.

Use automation to put survey results into action

Related reading:

This article was originally published in June 2015 by Stephanie Briggs. The most recent update, with contributions from Cecilia Gillen, was in September 2023.

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Amanda Pell

Amanda is a writer and content strategist who built her career writing on campaigns for brands like Nature Valley, Disney, and the NFL. When she's not knee-deep in research, you'll likely find her hiking with her dog or with her nose in a good book.

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