Four steps to designing a market research study

When setting up a market research project, there are four key steps to take to ensure your study is robust and yields relevant insights. These are; identifying your business objectives, defining your research objectives, planning your approach, and defining your sample. Once you’ve followed these steps, you’re ready to conduct your study and collect your survey data.

Step One: Identify the Target

Clearly defining your business objective, the reason you need to do market research, is the most important step in the research process. Business objectives clearly define what questions you want answered or what business or marketing decision you want to make based on the outcome of the research.

An example of the types of business decisions you may need to make based on the results of market research are:

• How can we improve the satisfaction of our customers?
• Is there a demand for my product idea?
• Is my advertising working?
• What should we do to make the ad more attractive or appealing to our target market?

Once you’ve defined your business goals, you can refer back to them throughout the market research process to ensure you stay focused.

Next, find out what information already exists that may answer some or all of the questions. For example, in the case of a satisfaction study, talk to your sales staff to see if they’ve received any feedback from customers that suggests they’re not happy.

Step Two: Defining the Research Objectives

Once you have defined your business objectives, you can clearly define the objectives of your research. For example, if you want to understand how satisfied your customers are, your research goals may be to understand:

• What drives customer satisfaction?
• What do your customers think are the most important service factors?
• How well are you doing on these factors?

Step 3 – Plan Your Approach

When planning your approach, you need to think about what information you have and what information is missing. Do you need to take a qualitative or quantitative approach or both? Sometimes this will depend on budget and available expertise. If, for example, you want to understand how satisfied your customers are with the service they’ve received, you might want to start with a qualitative study among some of your customers to understand the factors that drive satisfaction, and then conduct a more quantitative study. broad to find out how well you perform on each of these factors.

Once you’ve decided on your approach, you’re ready to develop your quantitative questionnaire or qualitative discussion guide, which I’ll show you how to do in future posts.

Step 4 – Define your target sample

When defining your sample, you need to think about who your customers or potential customers are. In a satisfaction study, you may want to talk to your customers and the customers of your competition. If you are just starting a new business or launching a new product, you need to think about who you are targeting with your product or service. Specifically, think about:

• How old are they?
• Where they live?
• Through what channels do they buy?

Once you have completed these four steps, you are ready to collect your information or conduct your market research study.