4 steps to follow for your market research project

Market research is an indispensable part of fostering and growing a brand. 

Without knowing how consumers feel about you—and your competitors!—it’s nearly impossible to make decisions that’ll actually have an impact.

As with most complex tasks, it can be helpful to break things down into discrete steps. So without further ado, here’s a four-part checklist to help guide your next market research project.

1. IDENTIFY your specific research interest

Avoid broad strokes and narrow in on the granular thing you’re actually trying to improve. 

For instance, a liquor brand wouldn’t want to embark on a research project to “discover how consumers feel about our products.” 

They’d want to sketch specific and manageable areas to query, like:

•What’s causing shopping cart abandonment on our e-commerce site?
•Would a promotional relationship with a sports-related celebrity or content creator potentially boost our whiskey sales?
•Is the packaging design for our vodka somehow less engaging to female consumers?

2. DEFINE the best research method to collect the data

There’s no single way to do market research.

You’ll want to determine whether a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed approach best suits the market research project you’ve already defined.

A quick refresher on the distinctions:

• Quantitative research: This method means you’re dealing with numerical data that can be quantified and subjected to statistical analysis. Examples would include structured surveys, polls, and CRM datasets. It’s a good fit if your goal is to identify patterns, measure variables, and predict outcomes.
• Qualitative research: With this method you’ll be gathering more subjective, non-numerical data to understand concepts, opinions, or experiences. Methods include focus groups, surveys with open-end questions, in-depth interviews, and observational research. This approach helps serve up insights into the motivations and behaviors behind the data.
• Mixed methods: In many cases, you’ll choose to combine both quantitative and qualitative approaches to leverage the strengths of both (shocking, we know!). This might involve using surveys to gather numerical data and then employing 1:1 follow-up interviews to explore some of the underlying reasoning and contexts.

3. CHOOSE the right tool or technology to gather data

The contemporary market researcher now has a toolbox full-to-bursting with new applications and tactics. 

“We need to think about how we use new technology to do more efficient, insightful, high-quality research,” says Gary Topiol, managing director of QuestDIY.

Here’s a few key methods, and pieces of tech, to consider:

• Surveys: Super effective for collecting large amounts of data from a pre-defined population, and useful for understanding general trends and opinions. Intuitive (and often budget-friendly) tools like QuestDIY can help you draft and deploy effective surveys.
• Focus groups: This involves gathering a group of humans IRL in order to gauge their perceptions around new products or marketing strategies. The insights may prove deeper than simpler surveys, but the logistics and costs involved might be prohibitive.
• Insight communities: In some ways this is like a digital focus group that exists over time, with a vetted group of consumers who agree to share their thoughts in exchange for various incentives. One week they might answer a few quick polls; the next they might be asked to keep a diary about their habits.
• Brand-health measurement: Tools like QuestBrand can help measure your brand equity and brand perception and how it has changed over time, or in reaction to key moments like a product launch or ad campaign. 
• Real-world behaviors and location intelligence: The People Platform uses anonymized mobile data to help brands discover how consumers are moving and behaving in the physical world, not just online. 
• Heat maps and click tracking: Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg track how users interact with a website in very specific ways, revealing areas of interest and potential friction points. If you’re not getting any demo requests, or you’re dealing with e-commerce issues, this could offer actionable insights.

4. ANALYZE your results

‍‍‍Once you’ve spent time and energy gathering all this quantitative or qualitative data, you can’t just let it sit there gathering dust.

This stage was previously the most daunting for any market researcher, since it means taking a deep breath, sifting through the mass of information, and trying to tease out actionable patterns, trends, or insights.

Before you even get to that point, you’d likely have to suffer through a lot of completely boring grunt work—like transcribing endless hours of focus group proceedings and interviews.

Thankfully, this is an area where AI is truly proving its mettle. 

Tools like QuestAI are a game changer when it comes to reporting for focus groups or insight communities, eliminating wasted bandwidth spent on transcriptions, and allowing researchers to query huge data sets in order to extract the insights they need.

It also includes plenty of functions to simplify how you visualize and present data to various stakeholders.

Want to learn more?‍

If you’re curious about how some of the specific applications from Stagwell Marketing Cloud can improve your market research efforts, we’d love to show you.

And here’s an in-depth look at other use cases across the Cloud, applicable to all sorts of marketing and comms professionals.