Beginner's Guide to Marketing: How to Do Market Research

Alright, so you're a new marketer in your company and you want to start generating jaw-dropping results. Or, maybe you're the owner of a relatively new business. Regardless, the same question remains -- where do you start? Do you just assemble a quick sales email and send it out to random prospects while hoping for the best? No.

You start with doing your market research. You collect information about your business and your target audience so you can make the best business email, the best call scripts, and the most effective marketing materials that you possibly can.

Market research is what separates forgettable (and thus, ignorable) marketing from marketing that resonates with audiences and creates engagement that drives conversions.

Let's dig into the market research process so you can conduct it the right way to fuel your marketing efforts.

Understanding Market Research Fundamentals

Market research is how you learn about and begin to understand the basic characteristics of your target audience. It is a process where you gather, organize, analyze, and interpret information about your target market. It's how you learn about your audience. 

Let's break down the basics of market research:

• Primary Research. This is research you conduct directly to collect information from your target audience. This often leverages surveys or customer relationship management (CRM) tools like HubSpot.
• Secondary Research. Data you collect from external sources like industry publications, government reports, and statistics websites. Often useful for establishing the condition of your industry and verifying (or correcting) your assumptions about it.
• Competitor Analysis. A benchmarking process where you take a look at other organizations in your industry to study what they're doing and why. This is useful for getting a feel for your competition and learning what to do (or to avoid) in your marketing.
• Market Research Goals. What do you hope to accomplish with your marketing? Are you looking to boost sales? Improve customer service to increase retention and customer lifetime value (CLV)? Your goal will help you shape your market research.

Identifying Your Research Objectives and Questions

Embarking on a market research journey without a map? Prepare to spend what feels like 40 years wandering a barren desert of irrelevant data. Identifying your research objectives creates a map that helps you find the information you need more quickly and easily. It's all about asking the right questions:

What golden nuggets of information are you seeking? Are you exploring new markets or trying to understand customer perceptions amongst your existing audience?

It helps to start by outlining your business objectives. Some objectives that could be the basis of your market research include:

• Revenue growth
• Expansion into a new market or vertical within a market
• Optimizing customer service processes to match market niches
• Preparing for a new product 

Use these objectives to help frame your questions and guide your market research efforts.

Choosing the Right Tools and Methods for Data Collection

The tools you choose for your market research can make or break your quest for knowledge. It's like choosing the right gear before a hike—choose wisely, and you'll easily climb the mountain. Choose poorly, and it will go about as well as picking the wrong Grail did for Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

To help you choose wisely, here are some trusty tools to use to gather market data:

• Surveys: The Swiss Army Knife of tools, versatile for collecting a wide range of data straight from the horse's mouth (i.e., your customers).
• Focus Groups: Collect a group of people who match your target audience and gather feedback from them about products, services, ads, and more to help you identify the best messaging and avoid critical marketing missteps.
• Online/Web Analytics: Gather data about your current audience—who they are, where they're from, and what elements of your website are the most interesting to them. Website analytics tools like HubSpot's custom reporting tools help you identify your audience and how they're reaching your website. This, in turn, helps you optimize your marketing strategy.
• Social Listening Tools: What are people saying about your brand on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X? Social listening tools like hashtag tracking help you gauge sentiment towards your brand so you can adjust your marketing strategy on social media.

Analyzing Data to Uncover Actionable Insights

In addition to researching the wider market, it's important to take a look at data more specific to your business. These metrics help you determine the efficacy of your current efforts and where you have an opportunity to improve:

• Engagement Rates: How is your audience interacting with your content? Are they engaged (visiting lots of different pages, spending a lot of time on each page, and clicking your CTAs) or are they bouncing off your pages harder and faster than flubber? Measure engagement metrics to determine what is or isn't working with your audience.
• Sales Data: At the end of the day, revenue is what keeps your doors open. If you aren't closing deals and making sales, you won't be able to stay in operation for long. Collect data about your sales process—how many deals you have in your pipelines, where prospects most frequently exit your sales pipeline, and how long they tend to stay in each stage—and use that information to enhance your sales process.
• Customer Feedback: Using surveys, online forms, and other tools, collect feedback directly from your customer base. This can help you learn what it is about your organization that attracted them, what they would like to see improved, and what their actual interests or needs are (so you can better fill them).
• Market Trends: Catch early warning signs of market shifts and adjust your processes accordingly. Stay ahead of the curve so you don't fall behind the times. 

Implementing Findings to Drive Business Success

Congratulations, intrepid explorer, you've navigated the research maze and emerged with the treasure—actionable insights. Now, it's time chart your course to success:

• Enhance Customer Experience: Use your newfound knowledge to charm your customers and make each interaction into an opportunity to solidify customer loyalty and sell more products or services to them.
• Product Development: Innovate your product/services offerings to speak directly to the desires of your market. Make your offerings irresistable to your target audience so they keep coming back for more.
• Strategic Marketing: With the map of your market in hand, plan campaigns that hit the mark, every time. 

Ready to embark on your market research quest? Remember, be innovative, helpful, and trustworthy, and you'll both reach your goals and inspire those who follow your lead.

Need Help Crafting Great Marketing?

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