Whether you're starting a new venture, already in a phase of rapid growth or struggling to build the momentum you need - market research is a crucial tool for every stage of your business.
Real talk: What's the one thing all successful businesses have in common?
They understand who their target customers are, the problems their target customers are facing, what their expectations of a solution might be, and where, when and how they'd go searching for it.
It's understandable if you can't answer these questions for your business yet. This is why market research exists - to help you definitively answer them. By the end of this guide, you'll be well equipped with all the knowledge you need to understand your customers better and answer these crucial questions. Let's dive in.
How to conduct market research in 5 steps
In order to conduct market research, you'll first need to identify the specific characteristics of the audience group you're trying to gain insights from. This should be the primary target audience for your product or service. If you're not sure of your target audience yet, here's how to identify it:
For example, if you're a clothing retailer, it's not good enough to identify that you cater to women. Women comprise of half the world's population; the target group is simply too large. The consumption behaviour within your identified target group can vary significantly when you add factors like their age, income, spending habits, marital status, occupation, education level or geographical location to the mix.
If your clothing items average a $400 retail price, you can safely remove women below the age of 23 from your primary target audience, since they are less likely to be high income earners at this stage. You can also eliminate women based on their income level, as numerous studies have found that women with income levels above $150,000 spend significantly more money on clothes.
This might help you focus your research even further. If a significant percentage of your audience has something in common: whether it's their occupation, ethnicity, likeliness to shop online or geographical location, you may be on to something. If you've seen a higher level of adoption within a significant demographic, it would be wise to lean into this and dig deeper into your customer base.
By doing this, you can adopt a funnel approach to find your target market. First start with a certain demographic (in this case gender), then narrow this further with a second filter (let's say age) and then create a final sieve that makes your audience really specific (for example, income level).
And there you have it. A target audience for our hypothetical clothing business: Women aged 25+ with a yearly income of over $150,000. If your existing customer research has helped, you can target this even further if you identify that your audience primarily shops in store, comes from a certain city, has a particular occupation etc.
Now that you know who you're targeting, you should identify exactly what you need to learn from your audience.
The kind of insights that will help your business are largely defined by the stage of your business. Here are a two important stages to consider:
"I have an idea that I want to turn into a business"
Great! So you really need to get to know your target audience. For example, if you're thinking of opening your own gym, you should focus on learning whether your target audience currently exercises, where they exercise, what times they exercise, how often they exercise and how they chose their current method of exercise.
Another important insight you can get from customers at this stage is what their pain points are - what about their workout experience would they really want to change? You can get some incredibly valuable insights from this that could directly impact the effectiveness of your product itself. For example, if you find that a significant portion of your target audience hates the lack of parking area around their current gym, you'll be able to solve this problem for them by ensuring you have sufficient parking facilities around your own.
"I run a business but am struggling to grow my customer base"
Your research primarily needs to confirm that you are targeting your efforts towards the right audience, in the right way. For example, if you're currently marketing to a target group of males aged 25 - 50 who live in New York, your research needs to determine whether this audience has problems that can be solved with your product or service. You'll also need to learn whether this target group is open to the kind of of solution you're providing and the medium you're providing it through.
If you're in a competitive space, it would also be worthwhile to consider whether your target audience is currently being serviced elsewhere. In this case, it would also be beneficial to learn whether they're experiencing any pain points with their current provider and if there are any opportunities for you to solve them.
Based on the results of this research, you'll ideally learn if you're either:
a) Not targeting the right audience, in which case you should to move back to step 1 and apply your newfound insights to find the correct audience for your product.
b) Targeting the right audience, but not doing it the right way. For example, if you're currently targeting your audience via emails, though your research finds that your target group prefers being contacted via phone calls, this might be cause to pivot your marketing strategy to align with your audience.
Take some time to really think about the current stage of your company and outline in a few sentences exactly what you're hoping to learn from your research.
Next, you need to translate what you want to learn into how you’ll learn it.
It may seem obvious to ask the survey questions that you defined above. But chances are that you actually don’t want to ask these questions outright. Instead, you want to ask questions that will give you insight from the people you’re polling. For example, you may want to learn how you can improve your service.
In order to learn ways to improve your service, what you really need to know—the data you need to collect—is where your service currently falls flat.
Rather than asking, “how can we improve our service?,” you might want to try asking customers about their specific experience:
While this may not be a 1:1 fit with the learnings you etched out originally, the findings that come from asking these questions will give you the data that you need to actually answer the question.
This step can be the most tricky, because you need to balance two main objectives:
Chances are, most survey respondents will be thinking about what you’re trying to learn from while they take your survey. And if the questions that you ask are too on the nose, it my end up skewing what results you get.
Take some time to research here. Botched questions could make this whole exercise pointless.
As you’re writing your survey, also consider what other text elements will need to be written. Do you need an intro? Section headings and introductions? It could also be helpful to write tips or help text that go along with your questions, to provide added context or clarification for respondents.
Designing your survey optimally is incredibly crucial to its success.
Even the best-laid plans--or the world’s smartest poll--means nothing if it looks bad, is not usable, or the interface isn’t intuitive.
In general, you’ll want to create a survey that’s easy to read and navigate, isn't too time-consuming for the respondent and has an engaging user experience.
A well-designed survey can ensure that you'll have a high overall completion rate for your research, collecting valuable data. You’ll need to carefully consider the order, flow, and structure of your questions to make sure the survey doesn't feel too long to the respondent. Using section breaks to create a multi-step survey can help the user feel a sense of achievement after completing a section and make the survey feel shorter.
In our research, we've found that shorter forms, fewer pages, and lower complexity can significantly improve the completion rate across the board.
Create your own survey: Below are a few survey templates that have been inspired by real user forms with fantastic submission rates.
Depending on the nature of your business and who you’re trying to reach, there are a few different strategies that you can deploy to find respondents for your survey:
Lastly, consider an incentive. It’s awfully difficult to get someone to take time out of their day to give you some feedback. It’s even more difficult if there’s really nothing in it for them. Try offering a small gift ($5 gift card) for participants, or enter them to win one larger prize like a $100 gift card or a free service.
Quick tip: Keeping your questions simple and designing your survey in a way that will allow for simple analysis will go a long way.
It’s easier to draw basic correlations between 2 numbers than it is to recognize patterns in text usage or perform advanced analysis of multiple confounding variables.
Look for patterns in responses:
Keep step 2 in mind and always turn back to the learnings you're trying to extract from your research. If a question does not directly allow you to draw quantitative or qualitative insights to answer these questions, reconsider including it in your survey.
Once you launch your first campaign, it’ll get easier, faster, and better as you go on. Next thing you know, you’ll be conducting research like a pro and your whole company will be wiser for it.
Now’s the perfect time to plan your market research efforts for 2020.
Start conducting your own market research with Paperform. It’s free to try for 14 days.
In this guide, Allison from Demio outlines the ten steps you'll need to plan and record a fantastic webinar.
Looking for an alternative to traditional websites? In this post we'll show you how to create a one-page website with Paperform - no coding necessary....
Looking for a good alternative to Canva? In this guide, Sandra Goh reviews the best graphic design platforms for designers and amateurs alike.
Marketing wiz Chandelle Hay shares her exclusive tips on how to open a (successful) yoga studio.