How to do market research: the definitive method for businesses
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Designing market research requires expertise in complex subjects such as psychology, statistics, strategic marketing, and software programming.
In this article you will find a safe and tested method to design your analysis and understand how to do market research for your company, without necessarily having in-depth knowledge in market research .
Choosing the wrong type of market research therefore means not obtaining useful information for business purposes, and above all wasting time and resources.
If you don't want to take this risk, keep reading!
1) What is a market analysis?
Let's start with the basics: a market analysis is an active process through which the company collects structured information, through different codified methodologies, to answer a strategic question.
Here are some typical "questions" that people seek answers to when planning their business marketing strategy :
How large is the market segment I am addressing or want to address?
What are customers' expectations of my brand?
What features of my product/service do customers like or dislike?
How satisfied are my customers?
How is my company perceived compared to competitors?
Which logo/image/packaging is best to use?
Want to get an idea or get some numbers? The two macro categories to choose from
Once you have defined the question to answer, you must make a choice of field for your market research: plan to carry out qualitative research or plan to carry out quantitative research .
Qualitative Research
The first category (qualitative research) includes market research that does not have a statistical value, but which serves "to get an initial idea" by proposing stimuli to customers, interviewing them, or studying their purchasing experience.
Examples of these types of research are focus groups, in-depth interviews or ethnographic research.
Quantitative Research
The second category (quantitative research) includes research that has a statistical value, and therefore serves to confirm marketing hypotheses with objective numbers. We are talking about telephone research, online research, customer satisfaction questionnaires, and so on.
Typically, the complete research process includes a qualitative exploration phase, followed by a quantitative confirmation phase.
A category in itself is information research for defining the size of a market: this type of study is technically defined as " desk research ", or research done at a desk, because it always starts from a check of online statistical sources (free and paid) via computer.
2) examples of market analysis
Now that you know what the main lines of marketing research are, here are some examples of the most commonly used research in the business sector:
In-depth research : Qualitative research aimed at understanding the perspective, purchasing motivations and purchasing process of corporate customers or to build buyer personas in the retail market.
Focus Group : qualitative research aimed at making a small group of people representative of the market think and discuss about a general concept, a product, or the evolution of a product. They can be used both for business decision makers and to understand the purchasing and choice behaviors of "ordinary people".
Telephone interviews : these are interviews carried out on pre-recruited or cold samples of people in order to collect a large number of responses in a short time.
Online interviews : the purpose is similar to that of telephone interviews, but in addition to obviously being conducted online, they usually involve pre-recruitment of the sample who therefore does not receive the "cold" survey. They can be used to statistically confirm information received from qualitative research, or to carry out a customer satisfaction survey.
With the four types of research above you can get information in 95% of business cases.
3) How many people do you need to involve?
The second step to define in designing your marketing analysis is the definition of the research sample , that is, the portion of people you will have to interview, in relation to the total population.
In general, know that qualitative research, not having a statistical value, does not require a large sample.
For example, for a focus group, 8 participants per type of target to be investigated may be sufficient.
The situation is different if you want to do quantitative research and therefore obtain reliable numbers on which to make business decisions.
In this case you need to calculate the size of the research sample: to do so I refer you to this brief study where you will also find a table with the most common cases.
I would also like to point you to a free online tool where you can accurately calculate the size of your research sample (always use a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 5 with this tool).
4) Write the questionnaire
Once the type of survey has been chosen and the sample defined, it is natural to write the research questionnaire.
The questionnaire in market research is equivalent to the plot of a movie: you have to start slowly by introducing the respondent to the research context, telling the "problem" and getting his feedback on it, as a closing.
These phases translate into the following macro areas of the questionnaire:
Screening : the initial section of questions that filter out respondents, excluding those who do not fall into the segment we are interested in (e.g. because they do not use a specific product and therefore cannot give an opinion)
Body : the body of the questionnaire is the coded sequence of key questions you want answered. There are several standard questionnaire templates to start with, such as: new product launch survey, customer satisfaction survey, in-depth interview discussion guide, abandonment reasons survey, etc. Here you can find some of the main templates (they are related to online quantitative surveys, but you can take them as a useful starting point for other types of surveys too): be careful to customize them according to your needs.
Closing : once the sequence of questions that make up the body of the questionnaire has been completed, the survey usually ends, leaving the participant the opportunity to express themselves freely to add any arguments they deem useful for the purposes of the survey.
5) Launch the investigation and write the report
Once you have defined the type of research, the sample size and written the questionnaire, you are ready to launch the survey.
To carry out qualitative research, it is advisable to hire specialized companies (like ours) that provide locations and professional moderators, and an interviewee sourcing service.
As for telephone and online surveys, you can approach a "do-it-yourself" approach in the execution (for example using an online survey software such as Survey Monkey), but it is always better to have support in drafting the questionnaire and analyzing the results.
This is because a poorly designed questionnaire can influence the participants' responses, undermining the entire research.
Similarly, the analysis of the results often includes the creation of research tables, coding of the results and bubble charts that require the support of a professional for their creation.
6) The PDF scheme of this method for doing market research
If you need an operating diagram you can find it below (by clicking on the image you can download it):
If you need an example guide, you can find it here .