An Uncomplicated Approach to Conducting Solid Market Research

Conducting market research is often the starting point for key components of businesses' marketing and sales strategies. It's what helps you draft personas, clarify your marketing messaging, set product marketing direction, and build your sales playbook.

But when you're tasked to sit down and actually ... do it ... many marketers draw a blank. Do we round up Don Draper and set up an expensive, time-intensive focus group behind two way mirrors? Isn't that what the big guns do when they conduct market research?

The big guns -- and even smaller companies -- certainly use the two-way mirror approach, but consider that we also have this amazing thing called the internet. That means we can all conduct market research for less money, across a larger sample size, and with less time investment. This post will explain both the methodology you should implement when conducting any market research, and highlight some of the tools and tactics available to you to easily glean more insight into your target audience.

First, How to Conduct Market Research

Before we get into the tools and tactics you can use to conduct your market research, let's talk about a solid methodology with which you should approach your research.

1) What do you want to know? The first key to conducting market research effectively is identifying something specific you're trying to figure out. Trying to answer everything in one round of market research usually means you won't get meaningful answers to anything. Here are some of the things many businesses are trying to figure out when conducting market research -- be sure to drill down into these categories to make it specific to your business.

Whether you're solving a problem people actually haveWhat competitors your target audience is using for their current solutionWhat people don't like about their current solutionHow much someone is willing to pay for a solutionWhether a new product or add-on is enticingDemographic and psychographic informationHow your target audience likes to communicate and consume information

2) Draft your questions and hypotheses for how people will answer. This will help you think through logical flows and the potential follow-up questions you should ask to get a comprehensive set of data. There's nothing worse than conducting your market research, and upon analyzing the results, realizing there was an entire branch of logic you hadn't anticipated that requires you to conduct your research again. For example, if you're doing market research to determine whether an add-on service would be interesting to your current customers, you'd probably want to ask different follow-up questions to those who responded positive, negatively, and indifferently. Walk through hypothetical conversations with each of those groups, and document all of the questions you'd like to ask before beginning your research.

3) Find the right group of people for your market research. Is your research targeted toward customers (as opposed to leads or the general public)? If so, what qualities should those customers possess? For example, if HubSpot was gauging interest in an add-on service, we might only need feedback from customers that use the Professional package of our software, and eliminate those using the Basic or Enterprise levels of the software. Or if we wanted to gauge whether the inclusion of that add-on service would help convert more leads, we might consult leads in our database only within a certain business size that we know are interested in the Professional version of the software.

4) Determine the best method to ask your questions. We're going to get into tools and tactics in the next sections of this post, but selecting the right method for administering market research is key for getting the best results. For example, if you're like our very own Laura "

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