After Working on Numerous Market Research Projects, I've Learned These 5 Powerful Steps!!

By Atul Ekad on June 27, 2020

The market research helps us to find insights about our customers, how the market performs, competitors & their products, business growth, etc. These insights help us to make well-informed business decisions and develop effective strategies.

So, how to conduct effective market research?

Step 1: Define research objectives

As a marketing professional, you will have different challenges to better understand your market for example identifying & targeting markets & consumer segments for business development. You will need to convert it into a research objective to find a solution, for example, “research study for target market size and target customer potential”. Also, try to speculate the outcome for the research project.

It is important to clearly define what objectives you are trying to achieve out of the research project.

Step 2: Formulate research design

As you are ready with your research objectives, you will work on the framework for the way research needs to be conducted. You should answer the following questions to formulate a research design.

  1. Which research methodology you will use (qualitative or quantitative)?
  2. What data points you need to collect (based on your objective & outcome)?
  3. Which research tools will you use to collect data for primary data collection (interviews, questionnaires, focus group discussions)?
  4. How will you process/analyze the data (based on your objective & outcome)?

Based on the final speculated outcome, you should test your data points & tools to rectify any issues, if there are any. Sometimes, you need to collect & utilize the data from secondary data sources like internal sources (within the organization) and external sources (government statistics, commercial data, media reports, etc). Please make sure to finalize the data sources where you can find relevant data before entering into data collection phase

Step 3: Data collection

Once you are ready with research design, you will start collecting relevant data using research tools and/or data sources. It can be primary data collection based on research technique or secondary data collection based on internal or external sources.
Data quality is one of the most important parts of market research, as all the outcomes, insights & recommendations coming out of the project are entirely based on the collected data.

Step 4: Data processing & analysis

In this step, the collected raw data needs to be extracted, cleaned & processed, so it will be ready for the analysis. For example, filled questionnaires by companies about their basic & financial information which will be collected into data analysis software (example spreadsheet) for further quantitative analysis. As defined in the research design, you will use a data analysis tool to further extract the relevant actionable information to find a solution to your research objective.

Step 5: Insights visualization and deliver findings

Once you are ready with your data analysis, you will also need to consolidate the most important findings in a report or a presentation. For that, you need to showcase relevant findings & insights in suitable visualization formats like graphical, tabular, etc. based on your research objectives.
Please note that your findings should solve the original research objectives of the project and it should be easy to understand for the decision-makers.

Final words!!

Market research is one of the most important inputs for a business decision. As a marketing professional, I truly believe that market research, if done properly, provide unique value towards solving business challenges efficiently.

Questions? Anything you would like to add? Need to brainstorm on this topic? Share below in the comments — I’d love to hear them! Feel free to connect with me via LinkedIn!!

This article was originally published by the author as a post on LinkedIn

This article is published with the permission of the author(s). The author(s) hold the copyrights and reproduction of this article without their permission is prohibited.

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