糖心Vlog

Market research has become harder and more important at the same time. 糖心Vlog and product teams face growing pressure to justify demand, pricing, positioning, and product decisions with real evidence. Research shows that 71% of marketers struggle to keep up with how buyers move across platforms, and only 25% strongly agree they have the data they need to reach their audience effectively.

That challenge is exactly what market research is meant to solve: turning scattered signals into clear insight about customers, competitors, and demand. Because connecting those signals requires heavy analysis.

I’m going to walk you through different types of market research with real-world scenarios, AI tools and prompts, and how to turn your findings into an actionable plan.

Table of Contents

• What is market research?
• Benefits of Market Research
• How does market research work?
• When should you conduct market research?
• Should you outsource market research?
• Primary vs. Secondary Research
• 11 Types of Market Research
• How to Do Market Research
• Free Reports & Trends to Start Market Research
• Market Research Report Template
• How to Integrate Your Market Research into Your Business Plan
• Market Research Examples
• Frequently Asked Questions About Market Research

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about target markets, customers, and competitors. It helps marketing, product, and strategy teams test demand, plan go-to-market, evaluate pricing, understand buying behavior, and assess competitors, before making decisions that affect growth.

According to the , research demand is also rising across organizations.

• 66% of research teams report an increase in requests over the last year.
• 71% of research teams report that their organizations now rely more heavily on their insights than a year ago.
• 67% of cutting-edge research teams saw their budgets increase over the last year.
• 92% of market research professionals feel secure in their role.

Smart companies are investing in research because they know gut feelings aren’t enough anymore. So, what makes market research so valuable that companies are pouring billions into it?

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Key Questions Market Research Answers

Market research is especially valuable when it answers specific business questions.

Is there real demand for this product or service?

Demand research helps business owners determine whether a problem is significant enough for customers to pay for a solution. This is the foundation of product market research because interest alone doesn’t prove willingness to buy.

How large is the market, and is it growing?

Market size and growth analysis help product teams estimate opportunity, prioritize segments, and avoid markets with limited expansion potential.

Which economic indicators affect buying behavior?

Economic conditions such as inflation, consumer confidence, and industry spending patterns influence purchasing decisions and pricing tolerance.

Where should the business compete first?

Location and segment research help identify regions, industries, or audience groups with stronger demand or lower competitive pressure.

How saturated is the competitive landscape?

Competitive analysis reveals how many alternatives customers already have and where gaps exist for differentiation.

What price will customers accept?

Pricing research identifies willingness to pay, price sensitivity, and the benchmarks buyers use when comparing options.

When I look at how market research has evolved, two realities stand out. First, your competitors are talking to their customers, too. And they’ve got smart people and solid data just like you do. Second, your current customers are just one piece of the puzzle. They chose you for a reason, but what about the ones who didn’t? That’s where the real growth opportunities hide.

Benefits of Market Research

Before a company commits resources, market research answers the question that matters most: is there actually a market for this? It validates demand, uncovers what customers need, and reveals where competitors are falling short.

But the biggest benefit of market research is that it directly impacts revenue. It affects all areas of the business, including sales growth, gross margin, repeat purchases, and product adoption.

Reduces Business Risk

Market research allows business owners and growth teams to test assumptions before making major investments. Market research validates whether a problem is important enough to solve. It also confirms whether a specific audience segment is large enough to justify targeting.

CB Insights analyzed and found that 35% of startups fail because there is no market need for the product. Market research tests whether an idea is worth pursuing before development resources are committed.

Improves Product Development

Customer research reveals how people use products, what features they value most, and where current solutions fall short. These insights guide product roadmaps and help product teams prioritize improvements that matter to users.

The analysis of , conducted by NIQ, identified that practices rooted in strong consumer-led ideas double a brand’s chances of sustained sales growth.

Reveals Competitive Opportunities

Competitive research helps businesses understand how rivals position their products, price their offerings, and communicate value. It also shows you what your competitors have overlooked. Those gaps are usually hiding in plain sight.

Supports Data-Driven Growth

Market research informs decisions across marketing, product, and strategy. Teams use it to determine which audience segments to target, which messages resonate most with buyers, and which channels produce the highest return.

According to the report, a shocking 93% of marketers stated that personalization improves leads or purchases.

How does market research work?

Market research shapes even the most tactical decisions, including something as specific as cold outreach. I once ran email campaigns with strong open rates and link clicks, but conversions were almost nonexistent. To resolve it, I didn’t simply read analytics, I dug deeper.

First, I identified the key question: What messaging would drive more conversions? Then, I mapped out my research plan:

• Analyze customer support transcripts to uncover common pain points.
• Conduct customer interviews to explore unexpected priorities.
• Mine competitor reviews for unmet market needs.

Each source revealed different pieces of the puzzle:

• Support transcripts highlighted recurring frustrations.
• Interviews unearthed surprising insights about what customers value most.
• Competitor reviews revealed opportunities we hadn’t considered.

I distinctly remember a breakthrough moment during this process. One customer interview revealed that they loved our service but were held back by binding agency contracts.

We had not addressed this in our messaging for leads who wanted to switch to our service. Addressing it immediately led to a measurable uptick in conversions.

When conducting research, I used a blend of quantitative and qualitative methods. Early on, I relied too much on survey data and missed the emotional drivers behind customer decisions. Now, I know that talking to even five customers can uncover insights that hard numbers might miss.

When should you conduct market research?

Here are some specific scenarios when it makes sense to conduct market research.

• Conversion rates drop: When campaigns perform below expectations
• New product launches: To identify customer needs and market gaps.
• Market expansion: When entering unfamiliar territory.
• Rising customer acquisition costs: To optimize your funnel.
• Competitive landscape shifts: To adapt to new players or trends.

For example, when my client was launching a new feature, we decided to conduct interviews to gauge interest and understand potential concerns.

Customers were excited but confused about how the feature worked. This insight allowed us to refine our messaging before the launch, saving us from what could have been a disappointing rollout.

Should you outsource market research?

This depends on your resources, expertise, and the scope of your research. Here’s a simple framework to decide whether to outsource market research.

Do it in-house when:

• You need ongoing, iterative research.
• You have team members with research experience.
• You’re working with sensitive customer data.
• You have a limited budget.
• You need quick turnaround times.

Outsource when:

• You need specialized expertise (e.g., focus group moderation).
• You require large-scale data collection.
• You want to avoid internal biases.
• You lack internal research capabilities.
• Your budget allows for professional services.

Here’s a concrete example: At one point, my client needed to understand market trends for a new service they wanted to introduce. While we were equipped to handle basic customer surveys, this required expertise in analyzing broader data sets.

Outsourcing to a research firm provided us with insights we couldn’t have gathered on our own, like identifying demand trends that shaped our go-to-market strategy.

At the same time, I’ve found that keeping ongoing research in-house allows for quicker iterations. For our email campaigns, we conducted the research ourselves, and it paid off: adjustments to the messaging were implemented in days, which wouldn’t have been possible with an external firm.

Pro tip: A hybrid approach often works best. Keep competitor analysis in-house, while complex projects that require specialized tools and expertise can be outsourced.

Primary vs. Secondary Research

Most powerful insights come from combining two distinct types of data: the stories your market tells (qualitative) and the patterns in their behavior (quantitative).

To understand the “why” behind customer decisions, dig into qualitative research. Here, marketing professionals are gathering opinions, emotions, and detailed feedback about products in your market.

For instance, in my email campaign work, customer interviews revealed messaging pain points that no amount of data could have shown us.

Quantitative research, on the other hand, gives you the hard numbers to validate these insights. Think purchase patterns, engagement rates, and market trends backed by data. This is where you spot opportunities others miss. Blend both approaches through two main research channels:

• Primary research: First-hand information that businesses gather.
• Secondary research: Existing data growth teams can leverage right now.

Primary Research

Primary research involves collecting first-hand data directly from customers. Companies use research methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, usability tests, and observation to understand customer needs, buying behavior, and product feedback.

Because the data comes directly from participants, primary research provides highly specific insights that reflect real customer experiences and motivations.

But before you spend resources on external research, mine your internal data first. Here’s my tried-and-tested internal research process. Start with what your existing audience is telling you.

• Customer interviews, surveys, and polls: Look for specific phrases they use to describe problems and desired outcomes.
• Social media conversations across platforms: Reddit and LinkedIn are particularly rich sources that surface customer language that no focus group will give you.
• Past marketing campaign data: Dig into what messages actually drove conversions.

Then, analyze your offer through your customers’ eyes:

• Map out every problem your product solves.
• Review your existing customer personas (but don’t let them limit your thinking).
• Examine all your marketing materials for promises made and proof points used.

Look at the gap between what’s working and what isn’t:

• Use heat maps and session recordings that show where people engage.
• A/B test results that reveal which messages resonate.
• Analyze data that exposes disconnects between traffic and conversion.

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Secondary Research

Secondary research analyzes existing information that has already been collected by other organizations or published sources. Secondary research uses existing data from reports, studies, or public sources.

Secondary research helps businesses understand market size, economic trends, and competitive landscapes quickly. This often serves as a starting point before conducting more targeted primary research.

Let me share my process for secondary research. First, I go straight to the source — your market’s unfiltered voice:

• Review mining is golden. I spend hours on G2 Crowd, Capterra, and similar sites, not just reading reviews but noting exact phrases customers use to describe their problems and desired outcomes.
• Social listening across LinkedIn, Reddit, and industry forums reveals how people really talk about their challenges when they think no one’s selling to them.
• Support and chat transcripts from competitors (often publicly available) show real pain points and feature requests.

Then, I layer in competitive intelligence to analyze our competitors:

• Map out competitor promises and positioning. What claims are they making?
• Track how the market responds to these claims in comments and discussions.
• Note gaps between what competitors promise and what customers say they actually deliver.

Finally, I validate patterns with authoritative sources:

• Industry reports from , , or (yes, they’re expensive, but worth it for the trends they reveal).
• Academic studies that dig into the “why” behind market behaviors.
• Public data from government sources that provide market size and growth validation (e.g., from the ).

Building from my experience with both methods, I’m now going to break down where each type of research shines and where it can be misleading.

What I Love About Primary Research

• You get unfiltered, real-time insights from your specific market.
• The data is yours exclusively. Your competitors don’t have access to these insights.
• You can pivot your questions mid-research when you spot interesting patterns.
• The findings are hyper-relevant to your specific offering.

Where I’ve Hit Roadblocks With Primary Research

• It’s resource-intensive since good research takes time and money.
• Small sample sizes can skew your results.
• Getting honest feedback can be tough since people often tell you what they think you want to hear.
• You need solid survey design skills to avoid biased results.

Why I Turn to Secondary Research

• You can start gathering insights immediately.
• The sample sizes are usually much larger.
• The hard work of data collection is already done.
• It’s often more cost-effective.
• You get historical trends that help predict future patterns.

The Challenges I’ve Faced With Secondary Research

• The data isn’t tailored to your specific questions.
• Information can be outdated.
• You’re seeing the same data your competitors are.
• Quality sources can be expensive (looking at you, Gartner reports).

The real magic happens when teams combine both research methods. For example, when I was working on that email campaign overhaul, secondary research helped me understand industry-wide pain points. But primary research revealed how those challenges specifically manifested for our audience. That combination gave us the messaging precision we needed.

11 Types of Market Research

Not all market research is worth the time. These are the methods that actually move the needle for marketing and growth teams.

1. Interviews

One-on-one conversations with customers reveal deep insights into their motivations, pain points, and decision-making processes. This method gives teams the richest qualitative data, but, traditionally, requires a significant amount of time for analysis.

When I first started conducting customer interviews six years ago, I’d spend hours manually transcribing recordings and hunting for patterns across spreadsheets, assigning weights to different points. Today, AI-powered interview tools and AI meeting assistants have made that process easier.

Here are two ways to conduct interview-based market research.

The traditional way: Direct conversations with customers.

Teams control the flow, dive deep into unexpected responses, and build genuine connections. The downside? It’s incredibly time-intensive. Each quality interview takes 30-45 minutes, plus another hour or two for manual analysis in spreadsheets.

The AI-powered way: Use an avatar or AI gen to transcribe interviews.

AI tools now conduct the interviews themselves, saving businesses a significant amount of time.

• It records and transcribes meetings on the fly, extracting key themes and action items.
• AI researchers look and talk like humans.
• It overlaps the data and finds patterns in seconds.

I personally use AI meeting assistants like Fathom or Motion for market research interviews.

Among AI researchers, I recommend and . Conveo runs async video and voice interviews, moderated by AI, while Strella lets you choose between self-moderated interviews or fully AI-conducted sessions.

AI-led interviews don’t just save time. They compress weeks of qualitative research into hours. Conveo can run 100+ interviews in parallel, completing your task in under 24 hours. For B2C brands, hiring AI moderators is now table stakes.

Want to experience what it’s like to be interviewed by AI? Strello lets teams run .

2. Focus Groups

These are moderated discussions with six to eight participants that reveal group dynamics and collective opinions about your product or service. They’re perfect to understand how people influence each others’ opinions and test concepts in a social setting.

Most consumer brands still rely on vendor-run focus groups to understand preference shifts, consumption patterns, and the biases their customers don’t know they have.

For example, sets up dozens of focus groups for research on drink consumption, supplements, and even fashion perceptions.

3. Product/Service Use Research

I used this method to observe how people actually used a product I worked on, Serpstat. It helped our product team to reveal the gap between what users say they do and what they actually do. In short, product use research uncovers:

• Usability issues.
• Workflow problems.
• Unexpected user behaviors.

Product research can be applied to both digital and physical products.

Physical Goods

Usability testing brings users into a controlled environment: a lab, a test kitchen, or an observation room. There, they interact with actual products while researchers document every action, frustration, and workaround.

Unlike digital testing, you’re watching people hold, manipulate, and use tangible objects. This can reveal ergonomic issues, packaging problems, and usage patterns that online surveys could never capture.

Sending product samples directly to consumers and asking them to record videos, from unboxing through to use, is one of the most cost-effective ways to capture authentic product reactions.

Digital Products

Digital product testing validates whether a product works technically, experientially, and commercially. Much of this happens on autopilot. Tools like Userpilot, Hotjar, and UserTesting automatically capture how real users interact with your product: where they click, where they drop off, and where they stop altogether.

• Feature adoption.
• Workflow frustrations.
• Product bugs.
• Rage-clicking.
• In-app and website session replays.
• Heatmaps for identifying click, scroll, and attention patterns.
• Conversion funnels for spotting drop-off points.
• Prototype testing for early-stage validation.

All tools come with analytical dashboards that enable product marketers and product owners to identify any friction points.

For example, Cleeng, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform, used Userpilot to recover from after a UI redesign. They actually increased page visits by 75% in just a few days, thanks to the combination of product analytics and session replays.

4. Buyer Persona Research

Traditional buyer persona research involves extensive customer interviews, surveys, and the sales team’s input to understand the human story behind purchasing decisions. Marketers map out daily challenges, information sources, decision criteria, and emotional triggers.

The question is, does it really work? I know successful small businesses that haven’t lifted a finger to develop their ICP. Yet, they sell online via social media and stores. But don’t get fooled.

According to HubSpot research, 93% of marketers agree that you can’t accelerate your growth without a deep understanding of your customers and personalized experiences. To develop buyer personas, first analyze the CRM data.

• Deal records: Won/lost deal summaries with reasons, deal sizes, sales cycle lengths, company size, and decision-maker titles.
• Sales call notes: Common objections and concerns raised, questions prospects ask most frequently, pain points.
• Lead source data: Which channels and campaigns are generating the highest-quality leads, where prospects first encountered the brand, and which sources correlate with shorter sales cycles or higher deal values.

This task is easy-peasy for existing HubSpot users. Just use to execute all those tasks.

Example

Ask Breeze, “Analyze my contacts and identify three distinct customer segments based on company size, industry, and engagement patterns.” Other Breeze prompts you could use:

• Review won deals from the last 6 months and identify common characteristics of our best customers.
• Compare won vs. lost deals to understand decision factors.
• Analyze which value propositions work best with different prospect types.

Pro tip: Let Breeze analyze 6+ months of sales and marketing data before making assumptions. Run persona analysis monthly as you gather more customer data. Compare Breeze findings with actual customer feedback to validate accuracy.

5. Market Segmentation Research

Market research is helpful to better understand who you’re competing with and understand real customer needs. It also helps with refining a business’ value proposition to resonate with different customer types. Analyze customer data through:

• Surveys.
• Purchase history.
• Demographic research.
• Company size.
• Industry.

Now, I also use Claude to analyze Reddit, X, and LinkedIn threads (Amazon shops and reviews for D2C). I’ve also tested a new platform to validate my value propositions.

Use these prompts with Claude or ChatGPT to accelerate market segmentation research:

• Compare how different customer segments discuss [your product category] across Reddit, LinkedIn, and X — identify unique characteristics of each platform’s user segments.
• Search Reddit for discussions about [your product category] and identify the main customer segments based on their pain points, use cases, and demographics mentioned in posts and comments.
• Analyze Reddit discussions about [topic] and extract the exact words and phrases different customer segments use to describe their challenges — organize by segment type.

For more complex research, I developed the following prompt:

I think our market has these segments: [list your specific hypotheses with brief descriptions of each segment’s characteristics, pain points, and behaviors].

Your task:

Validate each segment: Find evidence on Reddit, LinkedIn, and X that confirms or contradicts each proposed segment based on actual user discussions. Challenge my assumptions if you find evidence that contradicts any of my segments, clearly highlight what I got wrong and why.

Suggest alternative segments and provide proof.

Key questions to answer:

• Are my segment pain points accurate based on real discussions?
• Do the demographics I assumed match who’s actually talking about these topics?
• Are there segments with different conversations that I completely overlooked?
• What language does each segment use vs. what I assumed?

Pro tip: Always specify the time frame (e.g., posts from the last 6 months) and ask for specific quotes to capture authentic customer language for each segment.

6. Pricing Research

Pricing research tells you exactly what your market will pay, and ensures you’re capturing that value rather than guessing at it.

But here’s the catch: people are notoriously bad at predicting what they’ll actually pay. You need to use indirect methods to uncover a true willingness to pay. And markets change quickly, so pricing research has a shorter shelf life than other types of research. Teams should use this research when they’re:

• Launching new products.
• Entering new markets.
• Considering a significant price change.
• Developing tiered pricing strategies.

Here’s how teams can do that:

1. The .
2. A/B price testing.
3. Competitor price analysis through platforms like Competera.ai or PriSync.

Pro tip: Test pricing frameworks (per user vs. per feature vs. flat rate), not just price points. Use behavioral data over stated preferences. Look at what people actually purchase at different price levels rather than relying on what they say they’ll pay in surveys.

7. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis reveals market gaps and opportunities that you might miss. Beyond tracking competitors’ features and pricing, it uncovers their strategic positioning, sales and marketing tactics, and customer perception.

When done thoroughly, teams can realize how they win and where they’re vulnerable.vHere’s how to do that:

1. Interview customers who chose competitors over you to understand their real decision criteria. I’ve found these conversations reveal gaps in value props that teams might be blind to.
2. Run feature audit analysis and focus on outcomes rather than just features.
3. Analyze negative competitor reviews on Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, X, G2, Capterra. For D2C, on Amazon, Allegro, and eBay.
4. Automatically track competitor website changes, pricing updates, job postings, and content strategies with tools like Klenty or Crayon.

Start with a competitor reviews audit, using AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, as this is a infinite pool of truth and customer frustration. Second, I want to hear from customers who chose competitors over our product. I conduct in-person interviews or prompt Breeze AI to analyze sales reps’ notes to do that.

Free Market Research Kit

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template
• And More!

Download Now

Download Free

All fields are required.

Form not available

You're all set!

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8. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research measure:

• How happy/disappointed customers are.
• How likely they are to stay.
• How likely they are to buy more.
• Will they recommend a brand to others, or not?

Both research topics, satisfaction and loyalty, give teams qualitative and quantitative analysis that helps prevent customer churn before it happens. Specifically:

• Which customers are at risk of leaving before they actually do.
• What drives long-term loyalty beyond basic satisfaction.
• My biggest upsell and cross-sell opportunities among happy customers.
• Who my customer champions are.
• The root causes of churn.

The main pitfall is survey fatigue. Over-surveying leads to low response rates and skewed data. Also, satisfaction scores alone don’t tell the whole story; teams need context. To gather this data, try these types of customer research:

• NPS surveys with follow-ups.
• An in-app or contextual microsurveys.
• The .
• The customer health score.
• Churn surveys.

Tools that can help:

• Userpilot: in-app feedback, great for SaaS.
• SurveyMonkey: web app surveys to collect data from your website.

Pro tip: Survey customers right after support interactions or major product usage milestones. Focus on behavioral indicators of loyalty (repeat purchases, feature adoption) over stated satisfaction.

9. Brand Awareness Research

This research shows how well a target market knows, remembers, and perceives a brand compared to competitors and a company’s expectations. It highlights gaps in a brand’s marketing efforts.

The challenge is to measure actual awareness versus claimed awareness. Brand metrics can be fuzzy and hard to tie to revenue. Here’s how teams can gauge brand awareness:

• .
• Google Trends analysis.
• Social media mentions tracking.
• Branded traffic growth.
• Brand search vs. category search ratios.
• “How did you first hear about us?” surveys.
• Share of voice in industry publications.

10. Campaign Research

Campaign research doesn’t directly correlate with market research, but it shows whether marketers understand their target audience or not. It’s all about pre-testing and optimizing marketing campaigns to maximize ROI. It’s performed in four steps:

1. Test messages and creative before committing big budgets.
2. Identify which channels and audiences deliver the best ROI.
3. Optimize campaigns in real-time based on performance data.
4. Build a playbook of proven campaigns you can scale.

The main risk is over-testing. To avoid that, try the following approaches:

• Micro-budget A/B tests. Spend $30 to $200 testing 2 to 3 variations of headlines, audiences, or creative.
• Email subject line testing. Test subject lines with 10% of the list.
• Landing page split testing. Tools like Unbounce and Optimizely let teams test different headlines, layouts, and calls-to-action with live traffic.
• Dynamic creative testing through Meta’s Dynamic Creative and Google Ads’ dynamic creatives, or Smartly.

11. Competitive Intelligence Research

Unlike one-time competitive analysis, this is ongoing research that tracks market dynamics, industry trends, and competitors’ moves. Tools and tactics include social listening, website changes, pricing changes, campaigns launched, rank tracking, etc.

How to Do Market Research

Every business runs on assumptions. Market research exists to test them systematically, before they become expensive mistakes. The six steps below give growth teams a practical way to run business market research without losing the thread between raw input and actual decisions.

1. Define the buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a research-based profile of a target customer segment built from market research and real customer data. Start with a working hypothesis about the customer, then refine it with evidence. This step gives the rest of the research process direction:

• Who to talk to
• What to ask
• Which problems to validate
• Where early assumptions are too vague.

Early-stage product market research usually begins with informed assumptions about the buyer based on the product category, the problem it solves, and the type of professional or consumer most likely to experience that problem.

To ground those assumptions in reality, marketing professionals should document a set of baseline persona characteristics before starting interviews or surveys:

• Age range or life stage helps determine buying context and priorities.
• Gender (if relevant to the product) because some products or services have gender-specific usage patterns.
• Geographic location, since market needs, regulations, and spending behavior often vary by region.
• Job title or role, which is critical for B2B product market research, as purchasing authority and priorities vary by role.
• Household or family context, which is relevant for consumer products where lifestyle and family structure influence purchasing decisions.
• Income or budget range indicates purchasing power and pricing tolerance.
• Primary challenges or goals reveals the real problem your product or service must solve.

Once a product launches, growth teams can enrich buyer personas with real behavioral data from customers, support conversations, and CRM activity. These signals help confirm which assumptions were correct and which need revision.

Free resource: Use HubSpot’s tool or check out these to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

2. Identify a persona group to engage.

Once the buyer persona hypothesis is defined, the next step is to select people who match that profile and can provide useful insight. Market research becomes meaningful only when the participants reflect the audience the business actually wants to reach. Most research projects include a mix of three participant groups:

• Existing customers. These participants explain why they chose the product, the alternatives they considered, and what ultimately influenced their decision. Their responses help validate which assumptions about the buyer persona were correct.

• Prospects who evaluated but didn’t buy. This group reveals friction in the buying process. They often explain pricing concerns, missing features, or competitor advantages that prevented conversion.

• People who have never interacted with the product but match the persona profile. These interviews reveal how potential customers currently solve the problem and whether the product concept resonates at all.

Recruiting participants doesn’t require a large sample. In many qualitative market research projects, interviewing 5 to 10 people per persona segment is enough to identify recurring patterns in buying behavior, priorities, and objections. Growth teams typically recruit participants through several channels:

• CRM contacts and existing customers. Reviewing customer records inside makes it easier to identify contacts who match the persona profile and invite them to participate in interviews or surveys.
• Customer support and success teams. These teams already interact with customers who experience the product’s value and friction points firsthand.
• Community spaces and industry groups. Professional communities, niche forums, and social media groups often contain the exact audience a company wants to study.
• Targeted surveys. Teams can use structured feedback surveys to reach a broader group and identify candidates for deeper interviews. Tools like allow teams to send NPS, CSAT, or customer effort score (CES) surveys at key moments in the customer journey and capture insights at scale.

Note: A balanced research sample should include enthusiastic users, skeptical prospects, and people who have chosen competitors. Don’t recruit only loyal customers or colleagues, as they can produce biased results.

Once the right participants are identified, the next step is to design research questions that uncover how customers actually evaluate problems and solutions.

3. Prepare research questions for market research participants.

Strong market research questions follow the structure of the customer journey. The goal of this stage is not to confirm assumptions but to understand how buyers think in their own words. Instead of jumping directly to opinions about your product, the conversation should begin with the problem the customer experienced, then move toward how they researched solutions and ultimately made a purchase decision.

I highly recommend always creating a discussion guide to ensure you use your time wisely. Your discussion guide should be in outline format, with a time allotment and open-ended questions for each section.

Wait, are they all open-ended questions?

Yes — this is a golden rule of market research. You never want to “lead the witness” by asking yes and no questions, as that puts you at risk of unintentionally swaying their thoughts by leading with your own hypothesis.

Example Outline of a 30/60-minute Survey

Here’s a general outline for a 30-minute survey for one B2B buyer. Want to make it a digital survey? Use .

Background Information

Ask the buyer to give you a little background information (their title, how long they’ve been with the company, and so on). Then, ask a fun/easy question to warm things up (first concert attended, favorite restaurant in town, etc.). Here are some key background questions to ask your target audience:

• Describe how your team is structured.
• Tell me about your personal job responsibilities.
• What are the team’s goals, and how do you measure them?
• What has been your biggest challenge in the past year?

Now, transition to acknowledging the specific purchase or interaction they made that led you to include them in the study. The next three stages of the buyer’s journey will focus specifically on that purchase.

Awareness Stage: Understanding the Problem

This stage helps teams understand the real context behind the purchase. Many product teams assume the problem customers care about most, but interviews often reveal different priorities. These questions help uncover the moment when the customer first recognized a need.

• When did you first realize you had this problem?
• What challenges were you trying to solve at the time?
• What triggered you to start looking for a solution?

Consideration Stage: Evaluating Solutions

Now, you want to get very specific about how and where the buyer researched potential solutions. These questions reveal how buyers evaluate trade-offs between features, pricing, and brand trust. Plan to interject to ask for more details.

• What types of solutions did you consider?
• How did you research potential providers or products?
• What criteria mattered most when comparing alternatives?

If they don’t come up organically, ask about search engines, websites visited, people consulted, and so on. Probe, as appropriate, with some of the following questions:

• How did you find that source?
• How did you use vendor websites?
• What words specifically did you search for on Google?
• How helpful was it? How could it be better?
• Who provided the most (and least) helpful information? What did that look like?
• Tell me about your experiences with the salespeople from each vendor.

Decision Stage: Choosing a Solution

Responses at this stage often reveal the factors that actually drive conversions, which can differ significantly from the messaging companies believe is persuasive. Here are the questions to ask:

• Which of the sources you described above was the most influential in driving your decision?
• What, if any, criteria did you establish to compare the alternatives?
• What vendors made it to the shortlist, and what were the pros/cons of each?
• Who else was involved in the final decision? What role did each of these people play?
• What factors ultimately influenced your final purchasing decision?

Closing

Here, you want to wrap up and understand what could have been better for the buyer.

• Ask them what their ideal buying process would look like. How would it differ from what they experienced?
• Allow time for further questions on their end.
• Don’t forget to thank them for their time and confirm their address to send a thank-you note or incentive.

For teams running research projects ranging from small to large, structured surveys can help capture patterns across a broader audience.

, part of Service Hub, enables teams to create customizable NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys, automate distribution, and collect responses at key stages of the customer journey inside the CRM to support ongoing customer insight.

4. List the primary competitors.

In most markets, customers rarely compare only two products. They typically evaluate several options, including established competitors, newer companies, and alternative ways to solve the same problem. Mapping these options helps research teams understand how their product fits into the broader market.

Start by organizing competitors into three categories.

Direct Competitors: Companies Offering a Similar Product to the Same Audience

These businesses solve the same problem with a comparable solution. Their pricing, positioning, and product features will most closely influence your own strategy. Examples include:

• Companies offering the same product category
• Brands targeting the same customer segment
• Vendors competing for the same budget

Direct competitors often provide the clearest benchmark for pricing, product capabilities, and messaging.

I suggest starting your research high-level, using broad terms like education, construction, media and entertainment, food service, healthcare, retail, financial services, telecommunications, and agriculture. 糖心Vlog professionals can build the list in the following ways:

• Review your industry quadrant on G2 Crowd. aggregates user ratings and social data to create “quadrants,” where you can see companies plotted as contenders, leaders, niche, and high performers in their respective industries.
• Download a market report. Companies like and offer both free and gated market forecasts every year on the vendors who are leading their industry.
• Search using social media. Social networks make great company directories. On LinkedIn, for example, select the search bar and enter the name of the industry you’re pursuing. Then, under “More,” select “Companies” to narrow your results.
• Google it. Don’t underestimate the value of seeing which websites come up when you run a search on Google for the industry terms that describe your company. You might find a mix of product developers, blogs, magazines, and more.
• Ask LLMs. Use Claude or ChatGPT’s Deep research or Agent mode to study the industry and direct and adjacent products and the growth trends for you all.

Indirect Competitors: Companies Solving the Same Problem in a Different Way

Indirect competitors address the same customer need but use a different approach or product type:

• A software platform may compete with manual workflows or spreadsheets
• A premium product may compete with a lower-cost alternative that sacrifices some features

For example, a toothpaste company might compete with magazines like Health.com or Prevention on certain related to health and hygiene, even though the magazines don’t actually sell oral care products.

Understanding indirect competitors helps reveal why some buyers choose different solutions even when they have the same underlying problem.

Future Competitors: Emerging Solutions or Adjacent Markets

Markets evolve quickly, especially when new technologies enter the space. Products that seem unrelated today may become serious competitors within a few years. Researching future competitors helps teams identify:

• Emerging technologies
• Startups entering the category
• Adjacent products expanding into your market

Competitive analysis clarifies where you sit in the market, and where the gaps are that a new product or campaign can move into.

Free Market Research Kit

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template
• And More!

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5. Summarize the findings.

Once interviews, surveys, and competitive research are complete, the next step is converting raw observations into a clear set of insights.

Most research projects produce large volumes of notes, transcripts, and survey responses. Instead of documenting everything in long reports, growth teams should focus on identifying the themes that appear repeatedly across interviews and data sources.

The goal is to answer the original research question: What did we learn that should change our strategy?

A practical way to do this is to create a one-page research summary. This document condenses the most important findings so that product, marketing, and leadership teams can quickly understand the implications. The following outline should help teams craft a clear summary:

• Background. The team’s goals and why they conducted this study.
• Participants. Who the team talked to. A table works well, so groups can be broken down by persona and customer/prospect.
• Customer problems. What challenges or frustrations appeared most frequently during interviews?
• Buying triggers. What events caused customers to start looking for a solution?
• Evaluation criteria. Which factors mattered most when comparing alternatives?
• Competitive insights. Which competitors appeared most often in the research?
• Messaging opportunities. What language did customers use to describe their problem or desired outcome?
• Action plan. Provide a list of priorities, a timeline, and the impact it will have on the business.

The most important outcome of this step is clarity. A good research summary should make it easy for stakeholders to answer three questions:

• What did we learn about the customer?
• What did we learn about the market?
• What decisions should change because of this research?

Once the findings are documented, growth teams can begin applying them to messaging, product development, pricing strategies, and go-to-market plans.

6. Make use of AI market research tools.

AI market research tools expand the team’s ability to process large volumes of qualitative and behavioral data and uncover patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. AI market research tools help marketing and growth professionals with a large list of research tasks:

• Generate survey questions based on research goals.
• Track customer behavior and predict trends.
• Deeply segment audiences and personalize marketing strategies.
• Create detailed reports.
• Spot behavioral patterns for different customer segments.
• Spot anomalies.
• Analyze the CRM data and draw a conclusion in a few prompts.
• Conduct AI-moderated interviews with 100 participants in parallel.
• Gauge customer satisfaction.
• Generate interview transcripts.

According to the :

• 89% of researchers are already using AI-powered tools regularly or experimenting with them.
• 83% of researchers plan to increase investment in AI in 2025.

AI tools have proven to help businesses achieve their research goals faster, increase productivity, improve efficiency, and save money. Here are some AI market research tools I recommend:

• for smarter CRM research and data analysis.
• for tracking and analyzing competitor activity like pricing pages changes, product updates, and marketing campaigns.
• for crowdsourced decision-making.
• for sales research and call insights.
• for social media analysis.
• for pricing research.
• and for AI-moderated in-person interviews.
• for analyzing customer sentiment on Reddit.
• for dynamic ads testing (so-called campaign research).
• , , for qualitative research synthesis and discovery-stage market research

Breeze supports data analysis across HubSpot CRM records. This helps teams spot trends in buying behavior and deal outcomes. Growth teams also use Breeze to review marketing campaigns, sales conversations, support tickets, and contact records to identify recurring customer problems, objections, and product use cases.

Breeze helps researchers understand why customers buy, why deals stall, and which segments show the strongest demand. It can also summarize large volumes of CRM activity and highlight trends that would otherwise require manual analysis.

Crayon monitors competitor websites, pricing pages, product updates, and marketing campaigns. Market research teams use it to track how competitors position their products, what messaging they emphasize, and how frequently they release updates. This helps identify positioning gaps, pricing changes, and emerging competitors entering the category.

Poll the People allows teams to quickly test messaging, product names, landing pages, and design variations with targeted audiences. Researchers can upload creative assets or product descriptions and collect rapid feedback from participants who match specific demographic or professional profiles. This is particularly useful for testing positioning and messaging before a product launch.

Gong analyzes recorded sales calls and extracts patterns in customer conversations. Researchers can identify common objections, feature requests, and competitor mentions that appear across sales interactions. These insights help product and marketing teams understand how prospects evaluate solutions and which issues most often influence buying decisions.

Sprout Social helps researchers monitor brand mentions, industry discussions, and customer sentiment across social platforms. Teams use it to identify emerging trends, track competitor campaigns, and analyze how audiences react to specific product announcements or marketing messages.

Competera uses AI to analyze market prices, competitor pricing strategies, and demand signals. Companies use it to test pricing strategies, understand price sensitivity, and identify optimal pricing ranges for products within a competitive category.

and

These platforms conduct AI-moderated interviews that allow researchers to run large numbers of customer conversations simultaneously. They generate transcripts, summarize responses, and extract recurring insights. This approach allows companies to scale qualitative research without scheduling dozens of manual interviews.

Mention.click scans Reddit discussions to identify how users talk about products, competitors, and industry topics. Researchers can analyze authentic customer conversations to uncover product frustrations, feature requests, and emerging trends that may not appear in surveys or structured feedback channels.

Smartly helps marketing teams run structured experiments on ad creatives, messages, and targeting strategies. Researchers can test multiple campaign variations and quickly identify which creative elements generate higher engagement or conversion rates.

, ,

Large language models like ChatGPT help researchers process interview transcripts, survey responses, and research notes. Teams often use them to summarize conversations, cluster feedback themes, and extract insights from large qualitative datasets. LLMs are particularly helpful during the analysis stage when researchers need to turn dozens of interview transcripts into a concise summary of patterns and findings.

LLMs help researchers quickly explore emerging topics, identify industry trends, and locate primary sources during early market research. Teams often use it to gather initial context about a market, find reports, or identify companies operating in a specific category.

Free Reports & Trends to Start Market Research

Market Research Report Template

A market research kit contains several critical pieces of information for your business’s success. Let’s examine these elements.

After downloading , you’ll receive editable templates for each of the kit’s parts, instructions on how to use the kit, and a mock presentation that you can edit and customize.

1. Five Forces Analysis Template

Use Porter’s Five Forces Model to understand an industry by analyzing five different criteria and how high the power, threat, or rivalry in each area is. Here are the five criteria:

• Competitive rivalry.
• Threat of new entrants.
• Threat of substitution.
• Buyer power.
• Supplier power.

Free resource:

2. SWOT Analysis Template

A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis looks at a brand’s internal strengths and weaknesses, and the brand’s external opportunities and threats within the market. A SWOT analysis highlights direct areas of opportunity a company can continue, build, focus on, and work to overcome.

Free resource:

3. Market Survey Template

Market surveys help brands uncover important information about their buyer personas, target audience, current customers, market, and competition. Surveys should contain a variety of question types, like multiple choice, rankings, and open-ended responses. Here are some categories of questions brands should ask via survey:

• Demographic questions.
• Business questions.
• Competitor questions.
• Industry questions.
• Brand questions.
• Product questions.

Free resource:

4. Focus Group Template

Focus groups are an opportunity to collect in-depth, qualitative data from your real customers or members of your target audience. Ask focus group participants open-ended questions. While doing so, keep these tips top of mind:

• Set a limit for the number of questions you’re asking (after all, they’re open-ended).
• Provide participants with a prototype or demonstration.
• Ask participants how they feel about your price.
• Ask participants about your competition.
• Offer participants time at the end of the session for final comments, questions, or concerns.

Free resource:

Free Market Research Kit

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template
• And More!

Download Now

Download Free

All fields are required.

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How to Integrate Your Market Research into Your Business Plan

Step 1: Analyze your market research data.

Once market research is done, teams will have lots of data to analyze. Start by cleaning the data to remove duplicate entries, errors, irrelevant data, and so on, that can negatively affect your data quality.

AI tools can help you a ton with that. Start with simple ChatGPT or Perplexity (paid plans). If you have big budgets, you can use Voxco or Quantilope to automate survey data cleaning.

ChatGPT prompt I use:

“Review my raw market research dataset for duplicate entries, missing values, and inconsistencies. Provide a cleaned version along with a summary report of cleaned items and any assumptions made.”

Then, consider the business’s research goals and organize data into relevant lists, tables, charts, and graphs. Teams can also use spreadsheets and data visualization tools like Tableau to sort data into necessary categories or segments. A SWOT analysis or a Porter’s Five Forces analysis can be done too, if relevant.

This list of prompts can be useful:

• Perform sentiment analysis on this set of open-ended survey responses related to product satisfaction. Identify and quantify positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. Highlight common themes or concerns mentioned.
• Identify key themes and sentiment trends in customer feedback on product satisfaction.
• Based on historical sales and current [industry] trends, predict emerging market trends in the next 6–12 months.
• Compare buying behavior between millennial and Gen Z customers and highlight differences.
• Summarize key insights from [dataset], focusing on brand perception and customer loyalty.

Step 2: Interpret data and extract insights.

After data analysis, it’s time to make sense of the findings, interpret the data, and extract key insights you need for different sections of your business plan. Depending on your research goals and type of business plan, these insights may include:

• A clearer picture of your target market, target audience, and customers.
• Your customer needs, pain points, buying behavior, preferences, dislikes, and so on.
• Answers to questions you’ve always had about your competitors, their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and so on.
• Market and industry gaps you can take advantage of.
• Consumer trends and patterns you didn’t know.

I chatted with our team and put together a list of prompts for LLMs to extract insights:

• Analyze this dataset together with competitor reviews and market reports, and provide an integrated insight into customer needs, competitor gaps, and emerging trends.
• From this data, extract customer pain points and rank them by frequency and potential impact on sales.
• Divide the customer data into segments based on demographics and behavior, and provide insights for each segment, including opportunities, threats, and messaging strategies.
• Based on the market data, identify unmet needs or underserved segments.
• From this social media or review data, identify what customers praise or complain about regarding competitors. List strategic gaps in competitors’ offerings that our business can exploit.

Step 3: Develop actionable strategies.

Go ahead and create actionable strategies for relevant sections of your business plan. Of course, these strategies can vary from one type of business plan to another and may include:

• Brand awareness strategy.
• Product development strategy.
• 糖心Vlog strategy.
• Sales strategy.
• Risk mitigation strategies.
• Resource allocation strategies.
• Pricing strategy.
• Competitor monitoring strategy.
• Funding and financial strategy.
• Implementation timeline.

Step 4: Update the business plan.

Once the strategies are ready, add them to the relevant sections of the business plan. Here’s how to do it:

Map insights to plan sections.

Link each key insight directly to the relevant section of your business plan. For example:

• Customer pain points → Product development and marketing strategies.
• Competitor gaps → Positioning and differentiation strategy.
• Market trends → Growth projections and innovation roadmap.

Prioritize insights by impact and feasibility.

Rank them based on:

• Revenue or cost impact.
• Ease of execution.
• Strategic alignment with your goals.

Focus first on high-impact, actionable items to ensure your plan drives real results.

Translate insights into action.

This is about setting SMART goals, like “Launch a Gen Z-focused social media campaign highlighting eco-friendly features by Q1 2026, targeting a 10% increase in engagement.”

Align insights with financial and resource planning.

Ensure every strategic action has clear budget, staffing, or technology implications. Use the insights to refine financial forecasts, pricing strategies, and resource allocation.

Create a monitoring and feedback loop.

Lastly, define KPIs to track whether strategies informed by market research are working. Plan regular check-ins (quarterly or semi-annually) to compare actual outcomes to predictions and adjust the plan accordingly.

I also recommend that teams include comprehensive details and supporting documents about market research data, sources, methodologies, and so on. This way, you can provide additional information, if needed, to boost the credibility of your market research and business plan. This can be in the appendix of your business plan.

Market Research Examples

1. How Ritual Opted for AI-Moderated Interviews to Optimize Pricing and Drove 24% Revenue Growth

Ritual, a D2C supplement brand, wanted to change how they priced their products (like offering new à la carte options), but they weren’t sure if customers would understand the new pricing. Traditional customer research, like live interviews, would have taken weeks they didn’t have. So they had to make a bet on AI tools.

to conduct interviews and quickly gather actionable insights. The AI tool ran all interviews, analyzed responses, and synthesized findings in real-time. Ritual received immediate insights on where customers were confused about pricing, what they liked, and what worried them.

Results

Armed with Strella’s insights, Ritual adjusted their pricing rollout.

Results:

• Net revenue per customer went up by 24%.
• The initial order value grew by 19%.
• Same-day cancellations dropped by 21%.

2. How Beable Boosted Student Engagement and Teacher Support With Userpilot’s No-Code Analytics and Surveys

Beable Education, an e-learning platform for K-12, needed a better way to showcase its product’s benefits, engage directly with students, train teachers, and gather meaningful feedback.

Existing tools, like Google Analytics and forms, were limiting Beable from making data-driven improvements. So, Beable for its no-code analytics and survey tools. They used in-app surveys to collect feedback and student input, achieving a staggering 77% survey completion rate (2,274 responses from 2,969 invites).

They also used other Userpilot tools like page tagging and funnel analysis to see how students progressed from video content to completing surveys.

Results

• Survey participation soared to 77%, demonstrating student engagement.
• Educator Academy usage went from a trickle (105 users) to a strong volume (1,681 unique visits).
• Self-service support became more efficient.

3. How Land O’Lakes Innovates Market Research With Social Data

Land O’Lakes partnered with Brandwatch to revolutionize how they conduct market and consumer research. With social listening tools, they tapped into vast volumes of online conversations. This enabled them to:

• Reach smaller, very specific niches and emerging audiences quickly.
• Spot rising trends and themes as they happened.
• Gain a deeper, more authentic view of consumers than traditional methods typically allow.

In plain words, they quickly found out and understood new or hidden customer groups that matter for their business. Land O’Lakes even with their step-by-step market research process.

Frequently Asked Questions About Market Research

What are the four methods of market research?

The four most common market research methods are surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observation.

• Surveys collect structured feedback from a large group of respondents and are useful for measuring trends, preferences, and customer satisfaction at scale.
• Interviews provide deeper qualitative insights by allowing researchers to explore customer motivations, decision criteria, and experiences in detail.
• Focus groups bring multiple participants together to discuss a product or concept, helping researchers observe reactions and group dynamics.
• Observation involves studying how customers interact with products or services in real situations, which often reveals behaviors customers may not articulate during interviews.

Modern research departments combine several of these methods to validate insights from different sources.

What is the definition of market research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about target markets, customers, and competitors to guide business decisions.

Companies use market research to evaluate demand, understand customer behavior, test product ideas, analyze competitors, and identify opportunities for growth. By turning scattered signals into structured insights, market research helps organizations reduce uncertainty and make decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions.

How do I do my own market research?

Running your own market research usually involves six steps:

1. Defining your buyer persona
2. Identifying participants who match that persona
3. Preparing research questions
4. Analyzing competitors
5. Summarizing insights
6. Applying AI tools to process research data

Small businesses start by interviewing existing customers, reviewing CRM data with the help of AI assistant like , and analyzing feedback from support conversations. Structured surveys can also help collect insights from larger audiences.

Tools like HubSpot’s make it easier to collect, organize, and analyze customer data during this process.

Can ChatGPT do market research?

Large language models such as ChatGPT can support market research, but they should be used as an analysis tool rather than a replacement for real research.

Researchers often use LLMs to summarize interview transcripts, cluster themes in survey responses, generate research frameworks, or synthesize large datasets. However, reliable insights still come from primary research methods such as interviews, surveys, and customer feedback. AI helps analyze that data faster but does not replace direct interaction with customers.

What are the seven basic questions in market research?

Market research projects aim to answer seven fundamental questions about the market:

1. Who are the target customers?
2. What problem are they trying to solve?
3. How do they currently solve it?
4. Which competitors do they consider?
5. What factors influence their decision?
6. What price are they willing to pay?
7. How large is the potential market?

Answering these questions helps companies understand demand, identify competitive gaps, and design products that align with real customer needs.

Conduct market research to grow better.

Market research helps businesses of any scale replace assumptions with evidence and turn it into revenue.The good news is that you don’t need all the data from all the sources at once and inflated budgets. You need to hear your market, and for that, even buyer persona and market segmentation research are a great starting point.

Growth and research teams using HubSpot Smart CRM with the built-in Breeze AI assistant analyze vast amounts of deal and customer data, from patterns in closed-won and closed-lost deals to signals that predict purchasing behavior. These insights help teams refine positioning, identify opportunities, and design experiments to A/B test messaging, pricing, or product features.

So, start small but strategically. Identify a significant question about your market that keeps you awake at night. It could be about low conversion rates or a competitor’s unexpected success. Use this question as your guiding principle.

In most cases, your customers are already telling you what they want through feedback, behavior, and buying decisions. Market research simply gives you the structure to listen.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Free Market Research Kit

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template
• And More!

Download Now

Download Free

All fields are required.

Form not available

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.