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What is Market Research Analysis? Definition, Steps, Benefits, and Best Practices

By Nick Jain

Published on: September 8, 2023

Market Research Analysis

Table of Contents

What is Market Research Analysis?

Market research analysis steps, market research analysis benefits, 15 market research analysis best practices.

Market research analysis is defined as the systematic process of collecting, processing, interpreting, and evaluating data related to a specific market, industry, or business environment. Its primary purpose is to gain insights into various aspects of the market, including consumer behavior, market trends, competitive landscape, and other relevant factors. Market research analysis aims to provide businesses with actionable information that can inform their decision-making processes and strategies.

Here are the key components and objectives of market research analysis:

  • Data Collection: The process begins with gathering data from a variety of sources. This data can be classified into two main categories:

Primary Data: Data collected directly from original sources, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups , observations, and experiments.

Secondary Data: Existing data collected by third parties, such as market reports, government publications, industry publications, and academic studies.

  • Data Processing: Once collected, the data is processed to ensure its accuracy and reliability. This step involves cleaning the data to remove errors or inconsistencies and structuring it in a way that is suitable for analysis. Data processing may also involve data coding, categorization, and transformation.
  • Data Analysis: The heart of market research analysis involves examining and interpreting the data to extract meaningful insights. Various analytical techniques and statistical tools are used to identify patterns, relationships, trends, and correlations within the data. This analysis supports businesses in making knowledgeable decisions.
  • Competitive Analysis: Assessing the competitive landscape is an essential aspect of market research analysis. This includes studying competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, strategies, market share, and customer perceptions. Understanding the competitive environment is crucial for shaping a company’s strategy and positioning in the market.
  • Consumer Behavior Analysis: Understanding how consumers think, feel, and act is a central objective of market research analysis. It involves identifying consumer preferences, purchasing habits, motivations, and pain points. This information helps businesses tailor their products, services, and marketing efforts to meet customer needs effectively.
  • Market Trends Identification: Market research analysis helps businesses stay updated on the latest market trends, industry developments, and emerging technologies. Recognizing these trends allows companies to adapt, innovate, and remain competitive in their respective markets.
  • Strategic Decision-Making: Ultimately, the goal of market research analysis is to provide actionable insights that inform strategic decision-making. These decisions can relate to product development, pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, market entry or expansion, and more.
  • Risk Mitigation: By understanding market dynamics and potential challenges, businesses can proactively identify and mitigate risks. This reduces the likelihood of unexpected setbacks and allows for more effective crisis management.

Market research analysis is a vital tool that helps businesses gather and interpret data to make informed decisions, mitigate risks, identify opportunities for growth, and stay competitive in their respective markets. It plays a pivotal role in shaping business strategies and ensuring that resources are allocated effectively to achieve business objectives.

Market Research Analysis Steps

Market research analysis involves a series of systematic steps to gather, process, and interpret data to gain insights into a specific market or industry. These steps are crucial for making informed business decisions and developing effective strategies. Here are the key steps in the market research analysis process:

Step 1: Define Research Objectives

Precisely outline the goals and objectives of your market research . What specific insights or data are you aiming to acquire? What are your research questions? Understanding your objectives is essential for guiding the entire process.

Step 2: Data Collection

Collect relevant data from various sources. This can include primary data (directly collected from surveys, interviews, focus groups , observations, etc.) and secondary data (existing data from reports, publications, databases, etc.). Make certain that your data-gathering approaches are in harmony with your research objectives.

Step 3: Data Processing and Cleaning

Clean and preprocess the collected data to ensure its accuracy and reliability. This step may involve removing duplicate records, correcting errors, and organizing the data for analysis.

Step 4: Data Analysis

Perform data analysis using appropriate techniques and tools. Common analytical methods include statistical analysis, regression analysis, trend analysis, customer segmentation, and sentiment analysis. The objective is to derive significant insights from the data.

Step 5: Competitive Analysis

Assess the competitive landscape by studying your competitors. Analyze their strengths, weaknesses, market share, strategies, and customer perceptions. Recognize potential opportunities and vulnerabilities within the competitive landscape.

Step 6: Consumer Behavior Analysis

Examine consumer behavior by analyzing data related to preferences, purchasing habits, motivations, and demographics. Gain insights into what drives consumer decisions and how they interact with your products or services.

Step 7: Market Trends Identification

Identify and analyze current market trends, industry developments, and emerging technologies. Stay up-to-date with changes in the market that could impact your business.

Step 8: Data Interpretation

Interpret the outcomes of your data analysis within the framework of your research goals. What do the findings mean for your business? Are there actionable insights that can inform your decisions?

Step 9: Report and Presentation

Create a comprehensive report or presentation that summarizes your research findings. Use clear visuals, charts, and graphs to convey the information effectively. Include recommendations and insights that can guide decision-making.

Step 10: Strategic Decision-Making

Use the insights gained from your market research analysis to make informed strategic decisions. These decisions can relate to product development, pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, market entry or expansion, and more.

Step 11: Implementation

Put your strategic decisions into action. Implement the changes and strategies based on your market research analysis. Continuously track progress and adapt your approach as necessary.

Step 12: Continuous Monitoring

Market research analysis is an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, consumer behavior, and competitive developments to stay adaptable and responsive to changes in the market.

By following these steps, businesses can harness the power of market research analysis to make informed decisions, gain a competitive edge, and drive growth and innovation in their respective industries.

Learn more: What is Research Design?

Market research analysis offers numerous benefits to businesses and organizations across various industries. These benefits are instrumental in making informed decisions, shaping strategies, and ultimately achieving business objectives. Here are some of the key advantages of conducting market research analysis:

  • Informed Decision-Making: Market research analysis provides valuable insights and data-driven information that support informed decision-making. By understanding market dynamics, consumer behavior, and trends, businesses can make strategic choices that are more likely to lead to success.
  • Risk Mitigation: Through market research , organizations can identify potential risks and challenges in advance. This proactive approach allows them to develop strategies for risk mitigation and crisis management, reducing the impact of unforeseen events.
  • Market Understanding: Market research analysis helps companies gain a deeper understanding of their target audience, including demographics, preferences, and purchasing behavior. This knowledge is critical for tailoring products, services, and marketing efforts to meet customer needs effectively.
  • Competitive Advantage: By analyzing the competitive landscape, businesses can identify their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This information enables them to develop strategies that capitalize on their strengths and exploit competitors’ weaknesses, leading to a competitive advantage.
  • Product Development: Market research analysis guides product development by uncovering consumer preferences, pain points, and unmet needs. This ensures that companies create products that resonate with their target market, increasing the likelihood of success in the market.
  • Effective Marketing Strategies: Understanding consumer behavior and preferences helps in crafting more effective marketing campaigns. Market research analysis can identify the most suitable marketing channels, messaging, and timing to reach and engage the target audience.
  • Optimized Pricing Strategies: Businesses can determine the optimal pricing strategies for their products or services through market research analysis. This includes assessing price sensitivity, competitive pricing, and value perception among customers.
  • Market Expansion and Diversification: Market research analysis can reveal new market opportunities and potential areas for diversification. Companies can use this information to expand their reach into new markets or introduce new product lines.
  • Improved Customer Satisfaction: By aligning products and services with customer preferences, companies can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Contented customers are increasingly inclined to become returning purchasers and enthusiastic brand supporters.
  • Cost Efficiency: Market research analysis can help companies allocate resources more efficiently by focusing on strategies and initiatives that are most likely to yield positive results. This reduces wasteful spending on ineffective activities.
  • Measurable Results: Market research provides a basis for measuring the success of strategies and initiatives. It allows companies to set benchmarks, track progress, and assess the return on investment (ROI) of various marketing and business efforts.
  • Innovation and Adaptation: Market research analysis keeps businesses up-to-date with market trends and emerging technologies. This knowledge encourages innovation and the ability to adapt to changing market conditions.
  • Enhanced Reputation: Companies that demonstrate a commitment to understanding their market and meeting customer needs often enjoy an enhanced reputation in the eyes of consumers, partners, and investors.

Market research analysis is a valuable tool that empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, minimize risks, gain a competitive edge, and achieve sustainable growth. It is an investment that can yield substantial returns by helping organizations align their strategies and resources with market realities and customer expectations.

Learn more: What is Primary Market Research?

Market Research Analysis Best Practices

Effective market research analysis is crucial for businesses to make informed decisions and stay competitive in their respective industries. To ensure that your market research analysis yields valuable insights, consider these best practices:

1. Clearly Define Objectives

Begin by clearly defining the objectives of your market research analysis. What particular inquiries do you aim to address? What are your goals and desired outcomes? Having a well-defined purpose will guide your research efforts.

2. Use a Mix of Data Sources

Combine both primary and secondary data sources. Primary data is collected directly from your target audience, while secondary data comes from existing sources. Using a mix of data sources enhances the comprehensiveness of your analysis.

3. Ensure Data Quality

Data quality is paramount. Take steps to ensure the data you collect is accurate, relevant, and reliable. Verify the credibility of your sources and implement data-cleaning processes to remove errors and inconsistencies.

4. Segment Your Audience

Segment your target audience into distinct groups based on demographics, behaviors, or other relevant criteria. This allows for more tailored insights and strategies.

5. Use a Variety of Analysis Techniques

Employ a range of analysis techniques such as quantitative and qualitative methods . Quantitative analysis involves numerical data, while qualitative analysis explores insights from open-ended questions and interviews. This all-encompassing strategy offers a more complete perspective.

6. Stay Objective and Unbiased

Avoid bias in your research by maintaining objectivity. Be aware of any preconceived notions or assumptions that might influence your analysis. Use unbiased language and interpretation of results.

7. Thoroughly Understand Your Market

Before conducting research , gain a deep understanding of the market and industry you’re investigating. This background knowledge will help you ask the right questions and interpret findings effectively.

8. Invest in Technology and Tools

Utilize advanced tools and software for data analysis. These tools can streamline the process, handle large datasets, and provide more robust insights. Consider investing in data visualization tools to present findings effectively.

9. Continuous Learning and Adaptation

Keep yourself informed about the most current research methodologies and industry developments. Market conditions evolve, so it’s essential to adapt your research methods accordingly.

10. Ethical Considerations

Adhere to ethical standards in data collection and analysis. Respect privacy and confidentiality, obtain informed consent when necessary, and ensure compliance with data protection regulations.

11. Regularly Communicate Findings

Share research findings with relevant stakeholders within your organization. Effective communication ensures that insights are used to inform decision-making and strategy development.

12. Iterative Process

Market research analysis should be an iterative process. As you implement strategies based on your findings, continue to monitor and analyze the market to stay responsive to changes.

13. Benchmark and Measure Progress

Set benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your strategies. Regularly assess whether you are meeting your objectives and adjust your approach as needed.

14. Seek External Expertise

Consider consulting with external experts or hiring market research professionals when needed. Their expertise can enhance the quality and reliability of your analysis.

15. Document Your Process

Maintain thorough documentation of your research process , including data sources, methodologies, and assumptions. This documentation is valuable for transparency and future reference.

By following these best practices, businesses can conduct market research analysis that provides actionable insights, informs decision-making, and contributes to long-term success in a competitive market.

Learn more: What is Qualitative Market Research?

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How to Do Market Research: The Complete Guide

Learn how to do market research with this step-by-step guide, complete with templates, tools and real-world examples.

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What are your customers’ needs? How does your product compare to the competition? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in your industry? If these questions keep you up at night, it’s time to conduct market research.

Market research plays a pivotal role in your ability to stay competitive and relevant, helping you anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and industry dynamics. It involves gathering these insights using a wide range of techniques, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and observational studies.

In this guide, we’ll explore why market research is crucial, the various types of market research, the methods used in data collection, and how to effectively conduct market research to drive informed decision-making and success.

What is market research?

Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry. The purpose of market research is to offer valuable insight into the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, and anticipate shifts in market trends and the competitive landscape. This information helps you make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies for your business, and maximize your chances of long-term growth.

Business intelligence insight graphic with hand showing a lightbulb with $ sign in it

Why is market research important? 

By understanding the significance of market research, you can make sure you’re asking the right questions and using the process to your advantage. Some of the benefits of market research include:

  • Informed decision-making: Market research provides you with the data and insights you need to make smart decisions for your business. It helps you identify opportunities, assess risks and tailor your strategies to meet the demands of the market. Without market research, decisions are often based on assumptions or guesswork, leading to costly mistakes.
  • Customer-centric approach: A cornerstone of market research involves developing a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This gives you valuable insights into your target audience, helping you develop products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers.
  • Competitive advantage: By conducting market research, you’ll gain a competitive edge. You’ll be able to identify gaps in the market, analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses, and position your business strategically. This enables you to create unique value propositions, differentiate yourself from competitors, and seize opportunities that others may overlook.
  • Risk mitigation: Market research helps you anticipate market shifts and potential challenges. By identifying threats early, you can proactively adjust their strategies to mitigate risks and respond effectively to changing circumstances. This proactive approach is particularly valuable in volatile industries.
  • Resource optimization: Conducting market research allows organizations to allocate their time, money and resources more efficiently. It ensures that investments are made in areas with the highest potential return on investment, reducing wasted resources and improving overall business performance.
  • Adaptation to market trends: Markets evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements, cultural shifts and changing consumer attitudes. Market research ensures that you stay ahead of these trends and adapt your offerings accordingly so you can avoid becoming obsolete. 

As you can see, market research empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, cater to customer needs, outperform competitors, mitigate risks, optimize resources and stay agile in a dynamic marketplace. These benefits make it a huge industry; the global market research services market is expected to grow from $76.37 billion in 2021 to $108.57 billion in 2026 . Now, let’s dig into the different types of market research that can help you achieve these benefits.

Types of market research 

  • Qualitative research
  • Quantitative research
  • Exploratory research
  • Descriptive research
  • Causal research
  • Cross-sectional research
  • Longitudinal research

Despite its advantages, 23% of organizations don’t have a clear market research strategy. Part of developing a strategy involves choosing the right type of market research for your business goals. The most commonly used approaches include:

1. Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the underlying motivations, attitudes and perceptions of individuals or groups. It is typically conducted through techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups and content analysis — methods we’ll discuss further in the sections below. Qualitative research provides rich, nuanced insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies and brand positioning.

2. Quantitative research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, involves the collection and analysis of numerical data, often through surveys, experiments and structured questionnaires. This approach allows for statistical analysis and the measurement of trends, making it suitable for large-scale market studies and hypothesis testing. While it’s worthwhile using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, most businesses prioritize the latter because it is scientific, measurable and easily replicated across different experiments.

3. Exploratory research

Whether you’re conducting qualitative or quantitative research or a mix of both, exploratory research is often the first step. Its primary goal is to help you understand a market or problem so you can gain insights and identify potential issues or opportunities. This type of market research is less structured and is typically conducted through open-ended interviews, focus groups or secondary data analysis. Exploratory research is valuable when entering new markets or exploring new product ideas.

4. Descriptive research

As its name implies, descriptive research seeks to describe a market, population or phenomenon in detail. It involves collecting and summarizing data to answer questions about audience demographics and behaviors, market size, and current trends. Surveys, observational studies and content analysis are common methods used in descriptive research. 

5. Causal research

Causal research aims to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. It investigates whether changes in one variable result in changes in another. Experimental designs, A/B testing and regression analysis are common causal research methods. This sheds light on how specific marketing strategies or product changes impact consumer behavior.

6. Cross-sectional research

Cross-sectional market research involves collecting data from a sample of the population at a single point in time. It is used to analyze differences, relationships or trends among various groups within a population. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for market segmentation, identifying target audiences and assessing market trends at a specific moment.

7. Longitudinal research

Longitudinal research, in contrast to cross-sectional research, collects data from the same subjects over an extended period. This allows for the analysis of trends, changes and developments over time. Longitudinal studies are useful for tracking long-term developments in consumer preferences, brand loyalty and market dynamics.

Each type of market research has its strengths and weaknesses, and the method you choose depends on your specific research goals and the depth of understanding you’re aiming to achieve. In the following sections, we’ll delve into primary and secondary research approaches and specific research methods.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market research of all types can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: primary research and secondary research. By understanding the differences between these approaches, you can better determine the most appropriate research method for your specific goals.

Primary market research 

Primary research involves the collection of original data straight from the source. Typically, this involves communicating directly with your target audience — through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more — to gather information. Here are some key attributes of primary market research:

  • Customized data: Primary research provides data that is tailored to your research needs. You design a custom research study and gather information specific to your goals.
  • Up-to-date insights: Because primary research involves communicating with customers, the data you collect reflects the most current market conditions and consumer behaviors.
  • Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Despite its advantages, primary research can be labor-intensive and costly, especially when dealing with large sample sizes or complex study designs. Whether you hire a market research consultant, agency or use an in-house team, primary research studies consume a large amount of resources and time.

Secondary market research 

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing data that has already been compiled by third-party sources, such as online research tools, databases, news sites, industry reports and academic studies.

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Here are the main characteristics of secondary market research:

  • Cost-effective: Secondary research is generally more cost-effective than primary research since it doesn’t require building a research plan from scratch. You and your team can look at databases, websites and publications on an ongoing basis, without needing to design a custom experiment or hire a consultant. 
  • Leverages multiple sources: Data tools and software extract data from multiple places across the web, and then consolidate that information within a single platform. This means you’ll get a greater amount of data and a wider scope from secondary research.
  • Quick to access: You can access a wide range of information rapidly — often in seconds — if you’re using online research tools and databases. Because of this, you can act on insights sooner, rather than taking the time to develop an experiment. 

So, when should you use primary vs. secondary research? In practice, many market research projects incorporate both primary and secondary research to take advantage of the strengths of each approach.

One rule of thumb is to focus on secondary research to obtain background information, market trends or industry benchmarks. It is especially valuable for conducting preliminary research, competitor analysis, or when time and budget constraints are tight. Then, if you still have knowledge gaps or need to answer specific questions unique to your business model, use primary research to create a custom experiment. 

Market research methods

  • Surveys and questionnaires
  • Focus groups
  • Observational research
  • Online research tools
  • Experiments
  • Content analysis
  • Ethnographic research

How do primary and secondary research approaches translate into specific research methods? Let’s take a look at the different ways you can gather data: 

1. Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods for collecting structured data from a large number of respondents. They involve a set of predetermined questions that participants answer. Surveys can be conducted through various channels, including online tools, telephone interviews and in-person or online questionnaires. They are useful for gathering quantitative data and assessing customer demographics, opinions, preferences and needs. On average, customer surveys have a 33% response rate , so keep that in mind as you consider your sample size.

2. Interviews

Interviews are in-depth conversations with individuals or groups to gather qualitative insights. They can be structured (with predefined questions) or unstructured (with open-ended discussions). Interviews are valuable for exploring complex topics, uncovering motivations and obtaining detailed feedback. 

3. Focus groups

The most common primary research methods are in-depth webcam interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are a small gathering of participants who discuss a specific topic or product under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions are valuable for primary market research because they reveal insights into consumer attitudes, perceptions and emotions. Focus groups are especially useful for idea generation, concept testing and understanding group dynamics within your target audience.

4. Observational research

Observational research involves observing and recording participant behavior in a natural setting. This method is particularly valuable when studying consumer behavior in physical spaces, such as retail stores or public places. In some types of observational research, participants are aware you’re watching them; in other cases, you discreetly watch consumers without their knowledge, as they use your product. Either way, observational research provides firsthand insights into how people interact with products or environments.

5. Online research tools

You and your team can do your own secondary market research using online tools. These tools include data prospecting platforms and databases, as well as online surveys, social media listening, web analytics and sentiment analysis platforms. They help you gather data from online sources, monitor industry trends, track competitors, understand consumer preferences and keep tabs on online behavior. We’ll talk more about choosing the right market research tools in the sections that follow.

6. Experiments

Market research experiments are controlled tests of variables to determine causal relationships. While experiments are often associated with scientific research, they are also used in market research to assess the impact of specific marketing strategies, product features, or pricing and packaging changes.

7. Content analysis

Content analysis involves the systematic examination of textual, visual or audio content to identify patterns, themes and trends. It’s commonly applied to customer reviews, social media posts and other forms of online content to analyze consumer opinions and sentiments.

8. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research immerses researchers into the daily lives of consumers to understand their behavior and culture. This method is particularly valuable when studying niche markets or exploring the cultural context of consumer choices.

How to do market research

  • Set clear objectives
  • Identify your target audience
  • Choose your research methods
  • Use the right market research tools
  • Collect data
  • Analyze data 
  • Interpret your findings
  • Identify opportunities and challenges
  • Make informed business decisions
  • Monitor and adapt

Now that you have gained insights into the various market research methods at your disposal, let’s delve into the practical aspects of how to conduct market research effectively. Here’s a quick step-by-step overview, from defining objectives to monitoring market shifts.

1. Set clear objectives

When you set clear and specific goals, you’re essentially creating a compass to guide your research questions and methodology. Start by precisely defining what you want to achieve. Are you launching a new product and want to understand its viability in the market? Are you evaluating customer satisfaction with a product redesign? 

Start by creating SMART goals — objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this clarify your research focus from the outset, but it will also help you track progress and benchmark your success throughout the process. 

You should also consult with key stakeholders and team members to ensure alignment on your research objectives before diving into data collecting. This will help you gain diverse perspectives and insights that will shape your research approach.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, you’ll need to pinpoint your target audience to determine who should be included in your research. Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or stakeholder profiles. Consider demographic factors like age, gender, income and location, but also delve into psychographics, such as interests, values and pain points.

The more specific your target audience, the more accurate and actionable your research will be. Additionally, segment your audience if your research objectives involve studying different groups, such as current customers and potential leads.

If you already have existing customers, you can also hold conversations with them to better understand your target market. From there, you can refine your buyer personas and tailor your research methods accordingly.

3. Choose your research methods

Selecting the right research methods is crucial for gathering high-quality data. Start by considering the nature of your research objectives. If you’re exploring consumer preferences, surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights. For in-depth understanding, focus groups or observational research might be suitable. Consider using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a well-rounded perspective. 

You’ll also need to consider your budget. Think about what you can realistically achieve using the time and resources available to you. If you have a fairly generous budget, you may want to try a mix of primary and secondary research approaches. If you’re doing market research for a startup , on the other hand, chances are your budget is somewhat limited. If that’s the case, try addressing your goals with secondary research tools before investing time and effort in a primary research study. 

4. Use the right market research tools

Whether you’re conducting primary or secondary research, you’ll need to choose the right tools. These can help you do anything from sending surveys to customers to monitoring trends and analyzing data. Here are some examples of popular market research tools:

  • Market research software: Crunchbase is a platform that provides best-in-class company data, making it valuable for market research on growing companies and industries. You can use Crunchbase to access trusted, first-party funding data, revenue data, news and firmographics, enabling you to monitor industry trends and understand customer needs.

Market Research Graphic Crunchbase

  • Survey and questionnaire tools: SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Google Forms is a free tool that lets you create surveys and collect responses through Google Drive.
  • Data analysis software: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are useful for conducting statistical analyses. SPSS is a powerful statistical analysis software used for data processing, analysis and reporting.
  • Social listening tools: Brandwatch is a social listening and analytics platform that helps you monitor social media conversations, track sentiment and analyze trends. Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords across various online sources.
  • Data visualization platforms: Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps you create interactive and shareable dashboards and reports. Power BI by Microsoft is a business analytics tool for creating interactive visualizations and reports.

5. Collect data

There’s an infinite amount of data you could be collecting using these tools, so you’ll need to be intentional about going after the data that aligns with your research goals. Implement your chosen research methods, whether it’s distributing surveys, conducting interviews or pulling from secondary research platforms. Pay close attention to data quality and accuracy, and stick to a standardized process to streamline data capture and reduce errors. 

6. Analyze data

Once data is collected, you’ll need to analyze it systematically. Use statistical software or analysis tools to identify patterns, trends and correlations. For qualitative data, employ thematic analysis to extract common themes and insights. Visualize your findings with charts, graphs and tables to make complex data more understandable.

If you’re not proficient in data analysis, consider outsourcing or collaborating with a data analyst who can assist in processing and interpreting your data accurately.

Enrich your database graphic

7. Interpret your findings

Interpreting your market research findings involves understanding what the data means in the context of your objectives. Are there significant trends that uncover the answers to your initial research questions? Consider the implications of your findings on your business strategy. It’s essential to move beyond raw data and extract actionable insights that inform decision-making.

Hold a cross-functional meeting or workshop with relevant team members to collectively interpret the findings. Different perspectives can lead to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions.

8. Identify opportunities and challenges

Use your research findings to identify potential growth opportunities and challenges within your market. What segments of your audience are underserved or overlooked? Are there emerging trends you can capitalize on? Conversely, what obstacles or competitors could hinder your progress?

Lay out this information in a clear and organized way by conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Jot down notes for each of these areas to provide a structured overview of gaps and hurdles in the market.

9. Make informed business decisions

Market research is only valuable if it leads to informed decisions for your company. Based on your insights, devise actionable strategies and initiatives that align with your research objectives. Whether it’s refining your product, targeting new customer segments or adjusting pricing, ensure your decisions are rooted in the data.

At this point, it’s also crucial to keep your team aligned and accountable. Create an action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities and timelines for implementing the recommendations derived from your research. 

10. Monitor and adapt

Market research isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, customer behaviors and industry trends. Set up mechanisms to collect real-time data and feedback. As you gather new information, be prepared to adapt your strategies and tactics accordingly. Regularly revisiting your research ensures your business remains agile and reflects changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Online market research sources

As you go through the steps above, you’ll want to turn to trusted, reputable sources to gather your data. Here’s a list to get you started:

  • Crunchbase: As mentioned above, Crunchbase is an online platform with an extensive dataset, allowing you to access in-depth insights on market trends, consumer behavior and competitive analysis. You can also customize your search options to tailor your research to specific industries, geographic regions or customer personas.

Product Image Advanced Search CRMConnected

  • Academic databases: Academic databases, such as ProQuest and JSTOR , are treasure troves of scholarly research papers, studies and academic journals. They offer in-depth analyses of various subjects, including market trends, consumer preferences and industry-specific insights. Researchers can access a wealth of peer-reviewed publications to gain a deeper understanding of their research topics.
  • Government and NGO databases: Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other institutions frequently maintain databases containing valuable economic, demographic and industry-related data. These sources offer credible statistics and reports on a wide range of topics, making them essential for market researchers. Examples include the U.S. Census Bureau , the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center .
  • Industry reports: Industry reports and market studies are comprehensive documents prepared by research firms, industry associations and consulting companies. They provide in-depth insights into specific markets, including market size, trends, competitive analysis and consumer behavior. You can find this information by looking at relevant industry association databases; examples include the American Marketing Association and the National Retail Federation .
  • Social media and online communities: Social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (X) , forums such as Reddit and Quora , and review platforms such as G2 can provide real-time insights into consumer sentiment, opinions and trends. 

Market research examples

At this point, you have market research tools and data sources — but how do you act on the data you gather? Let’s go over some real-world examples that illustrate the practical application of market research across various industries. These examples showcase how market research can lead to smart decision-making and successful business decisions.

Example 1: Apple’s iPhone launch

Apple ’s iconic iPhone launch in 2007 serves as a prime example of market research driving product innovation in tech. Before the iPhone’s release, Apple conducted extensive market research to understand consumer preferences, pain points and unmet needs in the mobile phone industry. This research led to the development of a touchscreen smartphone with a user-friendly interface, addressing consumer demands for a more intuitive and versatile device. The result was a revolutionary product that disrupted the market and redefined the smartphone industry.

Example 2: McDonald’s global expansion

McDonald’s successful global expansion strategy demonstrates the importance of market research when expanding into new territories. Before entering a new market, McDonald’s conducts thorough research to understand local tastes, preferences and cultural nuances. This research informs menu customization, marketing strategies and store design. For instance, in India, McDonald’s offers a menu tailored to local preferences, including vegetarian options. This market-specific approach has enabled McDonald’s to adapt and thrive in diverse global markets.

Example 3: Organic and sustainable farming

The shift toward organic and sustainable farming practices in the food industry is driven by market research that indicates increased consumer demand for healthier and environmentally friendly food options. As a result, food producers and retailers invest in sustainable sourcing and organic product lines — such as with these sustainable seafood startups — to align with this shift in consumer values. 

The bottom line? Market research has multiple use cases and is a critical practice for any industry. Whether it’s launching groundbreaking products, entering new markets or responding to changing consumer preferences, you can use market research to shape successful strategies and outcomes.

Market research templates

You finally have a strong understanding of how to do market research and apply it in the real world. Before we wrap up, here are some market research templates that you can use as a starting point for your projects:

  • Smartsheet competitive analysis templates : These spreadsheets can serve as a framework for gathering information about the competitive landscape and obtaining valuable lessons to apply to your business strategy.
  • SurveyMonkey product survey template : Customize the questions on this survey based on what you want to learn from your target customers.
  • HubSpot templates : HubSpot offers a wide range of free templates you can use for market research, business planning and more.
  • SCORE templates : SCORE is a nonprofit organization that provides templates for business plans, market analysis and financial projections.
  • SBA.gov : The U.S. Small Business Administration offers templates for every aspect of your business, including market research, and is particularly valuable for new startups. 

Strengthen your business with market research

When conducted effectively, market research is like a guiding star. Equipped with the right tools and techniques, you can uncover valuable insights, stay competitive, foster innovation and navigate the complexities of your industry.

Throughout this guide, we’ve discussed the definition of market research, different research methods, and how to conduct it effectively. We’ve also explored various types of market research and shared practical insights and templates for getting started. 

Now, it’s time to start the research process. Trust in data, listen to the market and make informed decisions that guide your company toward lasting success.

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What Is Market Research?

  • How It Works
  • Primary vs. Secondary
  • How to Conduct Research

The Bottom Line

  • Marketing Essentials

How to Do Market Research, Types, and Example

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Natalya Yashina is a CPA, DASM with over 12 years of experience in accounting including public accounting, financial reporting, and accounting policies.

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Market research examines consumer behavior and trends in the economy to help a business develop and fine-tune its business idea and strategy. It helps a business understand its target market by gathering and analyzing data.

Market research is the process of evaluating the viability of a new service or product through research conducted directly with potential customers. It allows a company to define its target market and get opinions and other feedback from consumers about their interest in a product or service.

Research may be conducted in-house or by a third party that specializes in market research. It can be done through surveys and focus groups, among other ways. Test subjects are usually compensated with product samples or a small stipend for their time.

Key Takeaways

  • Companies conduct market research before introducing new products to determine their appeal to potential customers.
  • Tools include focus groups, telephone interviews, and questionnaires.
  • The results of market research inform the final design of the product and determine how it will be positioned in the marketplace.
  • Market research usually combines primary information, gathered directly from consumers, and secondary information, which is data available from external sources.

Market Research

How market research works.

Market research is used to determine the viability of a new product or service. The results may be used to revise the product design and fine-tune the strategy for introducing it to the public. This can include information gathered for the purpose of determining market segmentation . It also informs product differentiation , which is used to tailor advertising.

A business engages in various tasks to complete the market research process. It gathers information based on the market sector being targeted by the product. This information is then analyzed and relevant data points are interpreted to draw conclusions about how the product may be optimally designed and marketed to the market segment for which it is intended.

It is a critical component in the research and development (R&D) phase of a new product or service introduction. Market research can be conducted in many different ways, including surveys, product testing, interviews, and focus groups.

Market research is a critical tool that companies use to understand what consumers want, develop products that those consumers will use, and maintain a competitive advantage over other companies in their industry.

Primary Market Research vs. Secondary Market Research

Market research usually consists of a combination of:

  • Primary research, gathered by the company or by an outside company that it hires
  • Secondary research, which draws on external sources of data

Primary Market Research

Primary research generally falls into two categories: exploratory and specific research.

  • Exploratory research is less structured and functions via open-ended questions. The questions may be posed in a focus group setting, telephone interviews, or questionnaires. It results in questions or issues that the company needs to address about a product that it has under development.
  • Specific research delves more deeply into the problems or issues identified in exploratory research.

Secondary Market Research

All market research is informed by the findings of other researchers about the needs and wants of consumers. Today, much of this research can be found online.

Secondary research can include population information from government census data , trade association research reports , polling results, and research from other businesses operating in the same market sector.

History of Market Research

Formal market research began in Germany during the 1920s. In the United States, it soon took off with the advent of the Golden Age of Radio.

Companies that created advertisements for this new entertainment medium began to look at the demographics of the audiences who listened to each of the radio plays, music programs, and comedy skits that were presented.

They had once tried to reach the widest possible audience by placing their messages on billboards or in the most popular magazines. With radio programming, they had the chance to target rural or urban consumers, teenagers or families, and judge the results by the sales numbers that followed.

Types of Market Research

Face-to-face interviews.

From their earliest days, market research companies would interview people on the street about the newspapers and magazines that they read regularly and ask whether they recalled any of the ads or brands that were published in them. Data collected from these interviews were compared to the circulation of the publication to determine the effectiveness of those ads.

Market research and surveys were adapted from these early techniques.

To get a strong understanding of your market, it’s essential to understand demand, market size, economic indicators, location, market saturation, and pricing.

Focus Groups

A focus group is a small number of representative consumers chosen to try a product or watch an advertisement.

Afterward, the group is asked for feedback on their perceptions of the product, the company’s brand, or competing products. The company then takes that information and makes decisions about what to do with the product or service, whether that's releasing it, making changes, or abandoning it altogether.

Phone Research

The man-on-the-street interview technique soon gave way to the telephone interview. A telephone interviewer could collect information in a more efficient and cost-effective fashion.

Telephone research was a preferred tactic of market researchers for many years. It has become much more difficult in recent years as landline phone service dwindles and is replaced by less accessible mobile phones.

Survey Research

As an alternative to focus groups, surveys represent a cost-effective way to determine consumer attitudes without having to interview anyone in person. Consumers are sent surveys in the mail, usually with a coupon or voucher to incentivize participation. These surveys help determine how consumers feel about the product, brand, and price point.

Online Market Research

With people spending more time online, market research activities have shifted online as well. Data collection still uses a survey-style form. But instead of companies actively seeking participants by finding them on the street or cold calling them on the phone, people can choose to sign up, take surveys, and offer opinions when they have time.

This makes the process far less intrusive and less rushed, since people can participate on their own time and of their own volition.

How to Conduct Market Research

The first step to effective market research is to determine the goals of the study. Each study should seek to answer a clear, well-defined problem. For example, a company might seek to identify consumer preferences, brand recognition, or the comparative effectiveness of different types of ad campaigns.

After that, the next step is to determine who will be included in the research. Market research is an expensive process, and a company cannot waste resources collecting unnecessary data. The firm should decide in advance which types of consumers will be included in the research, and how the data will be collected. They should also account for the probability of statistical errors or sampling bias .

The next step is to collect the data and analyze the results. If the two previous steps have been completed accurately, this should be straightforward. The researchers will collect the results of their study, keeping track of the ages, gender, and other relevant data of each respondent. This is then analyzed in a marketing report that explains the results of their research.

The last step is for company executives to use their market research to make business decisions. Depending on the results of their research, they may choose to target a different group of consumers, or they may change their price point or some product features.

The results of these changes may eventually be measured in further market research, and the process will begin all over again.

Benefits of Market Research

Market research is essential for developing brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Since it is unlikely for a product to appeal equally to every consumer, a strong market research program can help identify the key demographics and market segments that are most likely to use a given product.

Market research is also important for developing a company’s advertising efforts. For example, if a company’s market research determines that its consumers are more likely to use Facebook than X (formerly Twitter), it can then target its advertisements to one platform instead of another. Or, if they determine that their target market is value-sensitive rather than price-sensitive, they can work on improving the product rather than reducing their prices.

Market research only works when subjects are honest and open to participating.

Example of Market Research

Many companies use market research to test new products or get information from consumers about what kinds of products or services they need and don’t currently have.

For example, a company that’s considering starting a business might conduct market research to test the viability of its product or service. If the market research confirms consumer interest, the business can proceed confidently with its business plan . If not, the company can use the results of the market research to make adjustments to the product to bring it in line with customer desires.

What Are the Main Types of Market Research?

The main types of market research are primary research and secondary research. Primary research includes focus groups, polls, and surveys. Secondary research includes academic articles, infographics, and white papers.

Qualitative research gives insights into how customers feel and think. Quantitative research uses data and statistics such as website views, social media engagement, and subscriber numbers.

What Is Online Market Research?

Online market research uses the same strategies and techniques as traditional primary and secondary market research, but it is conducted on the Internet. Potential customers may be asked to participate in a survey or give feedback on a product. The responses may help the researchers create a profile of the likely customer for a new product.

What Are Paid Market Research Surveys?

Paid market research involves rewarding individuals who agree to participate in a study. They may be offered a small payment for their time or a discount coupon in return for filling out a questionnaire or participating in a focus group.

What Is a Market Study?

A market study is an analysis of consumer demand for a product or service. It looks at all of the factors that influence demand for a product or service. These include the product’s price, location, competition, and substitutes as well as general economic factors that could influence the new product’s adoption, for better or worse.

Market research is a key component of a company’s research and development (R&D) stage. It helps companies understand in advance the viability of a new product that they have in development and to see how it might perform in the real world.

Britannica Money. “ Market Research .”

U.S. Small Business Administration. “ Market Research and Competitive Analysis .”

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Research

How to do Market Analysis in 6 Easy Steps

How to do Market Analysis in 6 Easy Steps

Knowing how to do market analysis is pivotal for many roles, benefiting any organization, regardless of its size, scope, or sector.

Regular market analysis levels up your individual ability to spot potential opportunities, stay on top of current trends, and gives you insights into the competitive landscape .

This article will cover why you need to analyze a market frequently and shows you how to do a basic market analysis in 6 straightforward steps.

What is a market analysis?

Market analysis is the process of gathering data about a target market . It examines the competitive landscape, consumers, and conditions that impact the marketplace.

Market analysis definition

The benefits of market analysis

Here are eight reasons why a regular market analysis is beneficial:

  • Understand the competitive landscape
  • Spot trends in your market
  • Uncover opportunities for growth or diversification
  • Reduce either risk or cost for launching new products or services
  • Develop a deeper understanding of a target audience
  • Enhance marketing efforts or discover ways to change
  • Analyze business performance within a market
  • Identify new segments of a market to target

Why you should conduct a market analysis

Aside from the benefits we’ve already listed, reviewing and redoing your market analysis regularly is important . Here’s why.

  • Markets shift
  • Consumer behaviors change
  • New players enter existing markets
  • Disruptive technologies and enhancements to rival offerings can shift the landscape
  • External events impact market conditions that drive changes

If you already know how to do market analysis, ask yourself how frequently you undertake the task: is it annually or quarterly? And consider the time it takes and the tools you used to obtain your information.

With this in mind, we’ll walk you through the most effective market analysis methods. Showing you the steps to take, with market analysis examples, to bring these steps to life.

How to conduct a market analysis

These six steps break down how to analyze a market into easy-to-follow, digestible stages.

Before you start: Use a framework to record your findings. There are plenty of visualization tools, but a basic excel sheet will be fine if you want to keep it simple. Why? Because when you return to review this analysis and repeat this exercise, you’ll want to have everything recorded in a single place. It will save you time and make any future comparisons easier.

Step 1 – Market segmentation

What: Whether you want to enter a new market , launch a new product, or simply assess opportunities for an existing business, this first step in the market analysis process is crucial yet often overlooked.

Why: Market segmentation helps you identify the core segments of a market to target. By identifying the portion of a market your products will be suitable for, you can accurately define the market size and better understand your potential customers’ specific needs and preferences.

How: There are multiple ways you can segment a market, and the right approach will depend on your product, its customers, and its target profiles.

Here, we can see how a segment is built using Similarweb’s website segment feature. I specifically want to view the credit card sector in the US, a market made up of pure players (think Amex or Visa ) and individual players with credit card lines as one of their segments (think Wells Fargo or USAA ). By splitting up a market like this, I can analyze the areas of business I care about more for my market analysis.

So, instead of viewing data that encompasses the other lines of business the likes of Wells Fargo and the USAA handle, such as loans, I get to hone in on their credit card segments only.

This is just one example of market segmentation. You can also segment a market based on consumer needs, ideal consumer profiles, regions, and other demographic data.

Step 2 – Market sizing

What: Market sizing determines your target market’s potential volume or sales revenue. It’s an essential component of market analysis that uses either secondary or primary research to explore the actual size of the market you are in or wish to enter. 

Total Addressable Market (TAM) – This gives you the complete value of the overall market and the first step in the market sizing process . Let’s say we want to analyze the US credit card market, the TAM would account for the whole of this market. Service Addressable Market (SAM) looks at potential audience volumes for a product or service in a target region. Sticking with the credit card sector example, this could be the total value of the credit card business that specifically targets the ‘poor credit rating’ segment of this market. Share of Market (SOM) – Also known as ‘service addressable market,’ it represents the proportion of your SAM that you are likely to achieve. SOM is always lower than SAM, taking a range of estimates based on the previous year’s performance or current market share + project growth to arrive at this figure.

Market sizing calculations

Why: Market sizing helps businesses understand the size of their opportunity. By understanding the size and scope of a market, companies can better assess the potential profitability of the market. Tracking market share over time can also show who wins or loses at any given time.

Power-up Your Market Analysis with Similarweb Today

Market analysis example: market sizing.

Using a metric known as traffic share , we can estimate the potential market size by showing the total reachable audience you have or could have with a product or service.

Market sizing for market analysis

Using Similarweb Industry Analysis , I can see a real-time snapshot of my market’s performance. With it, I can see the total number of people in a market (unique visitors) and establish how much of that share I have or will target this year.

When sizing a market, it’s easy to fall into the habit of analyzing the market quarterly or annually. But often, the best insights are dynamic in nature. They appear to show shifts, sometimes unexpectedly or can indicate growth and changing behaviors as the year progresses. This is why we place a high emphasis on continuing a market analysis throughout the year.

traffic share changes over time using Similarweb’s market trends

Here, we’re looking at traffic share changes over time using Similarweb’s market trends. You can see the impact of Snychrony’s growth (in green) as they gain traction, along with USAA (purple). At the start of the year, these two players had no impact on the market. By the end of 2022, they’re showing gains and would be two key competitors to track when you reach step 4 of the market analysis process.

Those analyzing a market annually would miss out on key insights that show the rise of these two emerging players. At the end of the year, they’ve already grabbed a chunk of the market and, if they continue on the same trajectory, will continue to do so in 2023.

With the right tools, you get a dynamic view of the market data you need, allowing you to change tactics when markets shift.

Step 3 – Market trends

What: Reviewing current trends is key to any good market analysis. As we all know, trends can rise and fall at a moment’s notice. This is why this activity, in particular, is one you should routinely perform.

Why: Keeping a finger on the pulse can help you adapt and flex, at the right time, in the right way. Market trends give you insights into the current market situation and potential opportunities and challenges. Doing so can help you identify areas for growth, spot potential risks, and plan effective strategies. Market trends can also provide valuable information about customer preferences, competition, and economic and technological developments. By monitoring these trends, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and make informed decisions that will benefit their bottom line.

You may have heard about ChatGPT in the press ; this is an example of a highly-disruptive technology that has the potential to completely shift an entire market; many, in fact. It managed to gain over 1 million users within its first week on the market. And it’s a great example of why regular market trends analysis should occur.

market trends analysis

How: There are lots of ways new market trends can surface. Consumer behavior, economic trends, technological advancements, and the competitive landscape can impact how markets behave. Legal and regulatory changes can also influence trends and changes too.

Staying up to date with industry news and legislation changes is useful. But it takes time, and it’s not always the most effective way to know when consumer sentiment changes.

Market research surveys are one way to understand customer attitudes and needs and how they shift over time. However, it’s not the most effective way to inform your market analysis. Particularly when you want real-time market intel.

Market analysis example: trend detection 

Similarweb analyzes billions of data signals daily to deliver game-changing insights about any market, region, or individual company. So, as we look at how to do market analysis, I wanted to share a practical example of how clients use Similarweb to spot trends in a market.

Wonderbly , a global business, provides personalized books, serving over 6 million customers. To grow its business, it conducts regular market analysis. As part of this process, they analyzed seasonal trending keywords within Similarweb. Let’s look at what it found out and how it impacted the business.

Keyword seasonality

Wonderbly was able to spot an emerging category (anniversaries and weddings) that was not currently catered for within its own product set. In addition to being able to capitalize on seasonal trends in its market, it achieved a 69% revenue in books purchased by a more mature demographic and a completely new audience for its business.

Read more: Wonderbly’s market analysis success story .

Step 4 – Competitive analysis

What: A competitive analysis involves collecting and reviewing data about key industry players, rivals, or emerging stars in your market. It unpacks and tracks their activities and successes, letting you see what’s working, how they go to market and the various marketing strategies they use to attract and retain customers.

Why: Regardless of your size or scope, understanding the competitive landscape is key. Your target audience knows your competitors and will likely size up the pros and cons of buying from thesm before considering whether to do business with you. A robust competitive analysis can help you refine your own offerings, make informed pricing decisions, show where you can beat out your rivals, and identify areas for improvement or diversification.

How: A tried and trusted tool for this process is the well-known SWOT analysis . It lets you map and view what and how each competitor takes its products to market. Considering things like pricing, positioning, marketing, services, and more. A competitive matrix is another tool used to visualize data about rivals in a market.

To do it, download our free competitive analysis framework . Then, pick five competitors in your market to track. Complete each section, and analyze the results to discover your biggest opportunities.

Step 5 – Develop strategies

What: Use the results of your market analysis to make data-driven decisions .

Why: When you read a post about how to do market analysis, the chances are you’ve got a goal in mind. Perhaps you want to explore a new market before deciding if it’s ripe for entry. You may want to introduce a new product or service or acquire an existing company. Whatever your goal is, ensure you put the insights and data you’ve obtained to good use.

How: Create a list of potential opportunities, then build strategies around each. Here, you might evaluate potential ideas based on project costs or timeframes. Once you’ve clearly mapped out each opportunity, and understand the potential impact it will have, along with associated costs and timeframes, you can think strategically about which ideas to move forward with from both a short and long-term perspective.

Pro Tip: Use a framework to record, capture, and review the data you’ve collected about market segmentation, size, trends, and key competitors. You can draw inspiration from our downloadable competitive analysis frameworks. However, what’s key is that you systematically record your findings and review them regularly.

Step 6 – Monitor the market

What: Keep track of your market and its key players; monitor changes over time.

Why: We know markets shift, whether they’re impacted by consumer behaviors, external factors, or something else. So, it’s important to monitor changes over time.

How: We may be a little biased, but Similarweb gives you a real-time bird-eye view of your market. Letting you dive into the details and unpick changes and tactics whenever you need. With it, you can track key growth metrics, marketing channels, emerging players, trending topics , and much more.

Using the Industry Analysis tab in Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence , I can identify the market leaders and rising stars quickly. Here, I immediately see a company to track, Synchrony . As an emerging player showing exponential growth (2700%), I’ll take my market analysis a step further by investigating their successes later.

Similarweb shows me key insights, such as website traffic , the marketing channels it’s getting traffic from, audience demographics , geography , organic search insights, and more. As part of any good market analysis, the ability to spot rising players and unpack their successes can be crucial, particularly when they’re showing such growth.

Analyzing a market: Conclusions

Learning how to do market analysis is the first step. Aside from analyzing the results and making key strategic decisions, the ability to track changes over time is key. Similarweb makes it easy to segment, size, and analyze a market fast. With it, you can spot opportunities, benchmark your performance, and monitor shifts and changes as they happen, not a month or quarter later.

What are the 4 types of market analysis?

The four types of market analysis are market segmentation, market sizing, market trends, and competitive analysis.

What are the five components of market analysis?

The five components of market analysis are: customer segmentation, customer needs and trends, competitors, market size and trend, and pricing.

What makes a good market analysis?

A good market analysis should include accurate, up-to-date data, clear objectives, and a thorough market and customer needs analysis.

Is market analysis the same as a SWOT analysis?

No, market analysis and SWOT analysis are not the same. While a SWOT analysis evaluates an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, a market analysis focuses on the external environment, such as customer needs, market trends, and competitors.

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Market research is a cornerstone of all successful, strategic businesses. It can also be daunting for entrepreneurs looking to launch a startup or start a side hustle . What is market research, anyway? And how do you…do it?

We’ll walk you through absolutely everything you need to know about the market research process so that by the end of this guide, you’ll be an expert in market research too. And what’s more important: you’ll have actionable steps you can take to start collecting your own market research.

What Is Market Research?

Market research is the organized process of gathering information about your target customers and market. Market research can help you better understand customer behavior and competitor strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide insight for the best strategies in launching new businesses and products. There are different ways to approach market research, including primary and secondary research and qualitative and quantitative research. The strongest approaches will include a combination of all four.

“Virtually every business can benefit from conducting some market research,” says Niles Koenigsberg of Real FiG Advertising + Marketing . “Market research can help you piece together your [business’s] strengths and weaknesses, along with your prospective opportunities, so that you can understand where your unique differentiators may lie.” Well-honed market research will help your brand stand out from the competition and help you see what you need to do to lead the market. It can also do so much more.

The Purposes of Market Research

Why do market research? It can help you…

  • Pinpoint your target market, create buyer personas, and develop a more holistic understanding of your customer base and market.
  • Understand current market conditions to evaluate risks and anticipate how your product or service will perform.
  • Validate a concept prior to launch.
  • Identify gaps in the market that your competitors have created or overlooked.
  • Solve problems that have been left unresolved by the existing product/brand offerings.
  • Identify opportunities and solutions for new products or services.
  • Develop killer marketing strategies .

What Are the Benefits of Market Research?

Strong market research can help your business in many ways. It can…

  • Strengthen your market position.
  • Help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.
  • Help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
  • Minimize risk.
  • Center your customers’ experience from the get-go.
  • Help you create a dynamic strategy based on market conditions and customer needs/demands.

What Are the Basic Methods of Market Research?

The basic methods of market research include surveys, personal interviews, customer observation, and the review of secondary research. In addition to these basic methods, a forward-thinking market research approach incorporates data from the digital landscape like social media analysis, SEO research, gathering feedback via forums, and more. Throughout this guide, we will cover each of the methods commonly used in market research to give you a comprehensive overview.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Primary and secondary are the two main types of market research you can do. The latter relies on research conducted by others. Primary research, on the other hand, refers to the fact-finding efforts you conduct on your own.

This approach is limited, however. It’s likely that the research objectives of these secondary data points differ from your own, and it can be difficult to confirm the veracity of their findings.

Primary Market Research

Primary research is more labor intensive, but it generally yields data that is exponentially more actionable. It can be conducted through interviews, surveys, online research, and your own data collection. Every new business should engage in primary market research prior to launch. It will help you validate that your idea has traction, and it will give you the information you need to help minimize financial risk.

You can hire an agency to conduct this research on your behalf. This brings the benefit of expertise, as you’ll likely work with a market research analyst. The downside is that hiring an agency can be expensive—too expensive for many burgeoning entrepreneurs. That brings us to the second approach. You can also do the market research yourself, which substantially reduces the financial burden of starting a new business .

Secondary Market Research

Secondary research includes resources like government databases and industry-specific data and publications. It can be beneficial to start your market research with secondary sources because it’s widely available and often free-to-access. This information will help you gain a broad overview of the market conditions for your new business.

Identify Your Goals and Your Audience

Before you begin conducting interviews or sending out surveys, you need to set your market research goals. At the end of your market research process, you want to have a clear idea of who your target market is—including demographic information like age, gender, and where they live—but you also want to start with a rough idea of who your audience might be and what you’re trying to achieve with market research.

You can pinpoint your objectives by asking yourself a series of guiding questions:

  • What are you hoping to discover through your research?
  • Who are you hoping to serve better because of your findings?
  • What do you think your market is?
  • Who are your competitors?
  • Are you testing the reception of a new product category or do you want to see if your product or service solves the problem left by a current gap in the market?
  • Are you just…testing the waters to get a sense of how people would react to a new brand?

Once you’ve narrowed down the “what” of your market research goals, you’re ready to move onto how you can best achieve them. Think of it like algebra. Many math problems start with “solve for x.” Once you know what you’re looking for, you can get to work trying to find it. It’s a heck of a lot easier to solve a problem when you know you’re looking for “x” than if you were to say “I’m gonna throw some numbers out there and see if I find a variable.”

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How to Do Market Research

This guide outlines every component of a comprehensive market research effort. Take into consideration the goals you have established for your market research, as they will influence which of these elements you’ll want to include in your market research strategy.

Secondary Data

Secondary data allows you to utilize pre-existing data to garner a sense of market conditions and opportunities. You can rely on published market studies, white papers, and public competitive information to start your market research journey.

Secondary data, while useful, is limited and cannot substitute your own primary data. It’s best used for quantitative data that can provide background to your more specific inquiries.

Find Your Customers Online

Once you’ve identified your target market, you can use online gathering spaces and forums to gain insights and give yourself a competitive advantage. Rebecca McCusker of The Creative Content Shop recommends internet recon as a vital tool for gaining a sense of customer needs and sentiment. “Read their posts and comments on forums, YouTube video comments, Facebook group [comments], and even Amazon/Goodreads book comments to get in their heads and see what people are saying.”

If you’re interested in engaging with your target demographic online, there are some general rules you should follow. First, secure the consent of any group moderators to ensure that you are acting within the group guidelines. Failure to do so could result in your eviction from the group.

Not all comments have the same research value. “Focus on the comments and posts with the most comments and highest engagement,” says McCusker. These high-engagement posts can give you a sense of what is already connecting and gaining traction within the group.

Social media can also be a great avenue for finding interview subjects. “LinkedIn is very useful if your [target customer] has a very specific job or works in a very specific industry or sector. It’s amazing the amount of people that will be willing to help,” explains Miguel González, a marketing executive at Dealers League . “My advice here is BE BRAVE, go to LinkedIn, or even to people you know and ask them, do quick interviews and ask real people that belong to that market and segment and get your buyer persona information first hand.”

Market research interviews can provide direct feedback on your brand, product, or service and give you a better understanding of consumer pain points and interests.

When organizing your market research interviews, you want to pay special attention to the sample group you’re selecting, as it will directly impact the information you receive. According to Tanya Zhang, the co-founder of Nimble Made , you want to first determine whether you want to choose a representative sample—for example, interviewing people who match each of the buyer persona/customer profiles you’ve developed—or a random sample.

“A sampling of your usual persona styles, for example, can validate details that you’ve already established about your product, while a random sampling may [help you] discover a new way people may use your product,” Zhang says.

Market Surveys

Market surveys solicit customer inclinations regarding your potential product or service through a series of open-ended questions. This direct outreach to your target audience can provide information on your customers’ preferences, attitudes, buying potential, and more.

Every expert we asked voiced unanimous support for market surveys as a powerful tool for market research. With the advent of various survey tools with accessible pricing—or free use—it’s never been easier to assemble, disseminate, and gather market surveys. While it should also be noted that surveys shouldn’t replace customer interviews , they can be used to supplement customer interviews to give you feedback from a broader audience.

Who to Include in Market Surveys

  • Current customers
  • Past customers
  • Your existing audience (such as social media/newsletter audiences)

Example Questions to Include in Market Surveys

While the exact questions will vary for each business, here are some common, helpful questions that you may want to consider for your market survey. Demographic Questions: the questions that help you understand, demographically, who your target customers are:

  • “What is your age?”
  • “Where do you live?”
  • “What is your gender identity?”
  • “What is your household income?”
  • “What is your household size?”
  • “What do you do for a living?”
  • “What is your highest level of education?”

Product-Based Questions: Whether you’re seeking feedback for an existing brand or an entirely new one, these questions will help you get a sense of how people feel about your business, product, or service:

  • “How well does/would our product/service meet your needs?”
  • “How does our product/service compare to similar products/services that you use?”
  • “How long have you been a customer?” or “What is the likelihood that you would be a customer of our brand?

Personal/Informative Questions: the deeper questions that help you understand how your audience thinks and what they care about.

  • “What are your biggest challenges?”
  • “What’s most important to you?”
  • “What do you do for fun (hobbies, interests, activities)?”
  • “Where do you seek new information when researching a new product?”
  • “How do you like to make purchases?”
  • “What is your preferred method for interacting with a brand?”

Survey Tools

Online survey tools make it easy to distribute surveys and collect responses. The best part is that there are many free tools available. If you’re making your own online survey, you may want to consider SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, or Zoho Survey.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is a breakdown of how your business stacks up against the competition. There are many different ways to conduct this analysis. One of the most popular methods is a SWOT analysis, which stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” This type of analysis is helpful because it gives you a more robust understanding of why a customer might choose a competitor over your business. Seeing how you stack up against the competition can give you the direction you need to carve out your place as a market leader.

Social Media Analysis

Social media has fundamentally changed the market research landscape, making it easier than ever to engage with a wide swath of consumers. Follow your current or potential competitors on social media to see what they’re posting and how their audience is engaging with it. Social media can also give you a lower cost opportunity for testing different messaging and brand positioning.

SEO Analysis and Opportunities

SEO analysis can help you identify the digital competition for getting the word out about your brand, product, or service. You won’t want to overlook this valuable information. Search listening tools offer a novel approach to understanding the market and generating the content strategy that will drive business. Tools like Google Trends and Awario can streamline this process.

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Now that you’ve completed the guide to market research you know you’re ready to put on your researcher hat to give your business the best start. Still not sure how actually… launch the thing? Our free mini-course can run you through the essentials for starting your side hustle .

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About Mary Kate Miller

Mary Kate Miller writes about small business, real estate, and finance. In addition to writing for Foundr, her work has been published by The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Bustle, and more. She lives in Chicago.

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How to do market research in 4 steps: a lean approach to marketing research

From pinpointing your target audience and assessing your competitive advantage, to ongoing product development and customer satisfaction efforts, market research is a practice your business can only benefit from.

Learn how to conduct quick and effective market research using a lean approach in this article full of strategies and practical examples. 

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analysis market research

A comprehensive (and successful) business strategy is not complete without some form of market research—you can’t make informed and profitable business decisions without truly understanding your customer base and the current market trends that drive your business.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct quick, effective market research  using an approach called 'lean market research'. It’s easier than you might think, and it can be done at any stage in a product’s lifecycle.

How to conduct lean market research in 4 steps

What is market research, why is market research so valuable, advantages of lean market research, 4 common market research methods, 5 common market research questions, market research faqs.

We’ll jump right into our 4-step approach to lean market research. To show you how it’s done in the real world, each step includes a practical example from Smallpdf , a Swiss company that used lean market research to reduce their tool’s error rate by 75% and boost their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) by 1%.

Research your market the lean way...

From on-page surveys to user interviews, Hotjar has the tools to help you scope out your market and get to know your customers—without breaking the bank.

The following four steps and practical examples will give you a solid market research plan for understanding who your users are and what they want from a company like yours.

1. Create simple user personas

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on psychographic and demographic data from people who use websites and products similar to your own. Start by defining broad user categories, then elaborate on them later to further segment your customer base and determine your ideal customer profile .

How to get the data: use on-page or emailed surveys and interviews to understand your users and what drives them to your business.

How to do it right: whatever survey or interview questions you ask, they should answer the following questions about the customer:

Who are they?

What is their main goal?

What is their main barrier to achieving this goal?

Pitfalls to avoid:

Don’t ask too many questions! Keep it to five or less, otherwise you’ll inundate them and they’ll stop answering thoughtfully.

Don’t worry too much about typical demographic questions like age or background. Instead, focus on the role these people play (as it relates to your product) and their goals.

How Smallpdf did it: Smallpdf ran an on-page survey for a couple of weeks and received 1,000 replies. They learned that many of their users were administrative assistants, students, and teachers.

#One of the five survey questions Smallpdf asked their users

Next, they used the survey results to create simple user personas like this one for admins:

Who are they? Administrative Assistants.

What is their main goal? Creating Word documents from a scanned, hard-copy document or a PDF where the source file was lost.

What is their main barrier to achieving it? Converting a scanned PDF doc to a Word file.

💡Pro tip: Smallpdf used Hotjar Surveys to run their user persona survey. Our survey tool helped them avoid the pitfalls of guesswork and find out who their users really are, in their own words. 

You can design a survey and start running it in minutes with our easy-to-use drag and drop builder. Customize your survey to fit your needs, from a sleek one-question pop-up survey to a fully branded questionnaire sent via email. 

We've also created 40+ free survey templates that you can start collecting data with, including a user persona survey like the one Smallpdf used.

2. Conduct observational research

Observational research involves taking notes while watching someone use your product (or a similar product).

Overt vs. covert observation

Overt observation involves asking customers if they’ll let you watch them use your product. This method is often used for user testing and it provides a great opportunity for collecting live product or customer feedback .

Covert observation means studying users ‘in the wild’ without them knowing. This method works well if you sell a type of product that people use regularly, and it offers the purest observational data because people often behave differently when they know they’re being watched. 

Tips to do it right:

Record an entry in your field notes, along with a timestamp, each time an action or event occurs.

Make note of the users' workflow, capturing the ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘for whom’ of each action.

#Sample of field notes taken by Smallpdf

Don’t record identifiable video or audio data without consent. If recording people using your product is helpful for achieving your research goal, make sure all participants are informed and agree to the terms.

Don’t forget to explain why you’d like to observe them (for overt observation). People are more likely to cooperate if you tell them you want to improve the product.

💡Pro tip: while conducting field research out in the wild can wield rewarding results, you can also conduct observational research remotely. Hotjar Recordings is a tool that lets you capture anonymized user sessions of real people interacting with your website. 

Observe how customers navigate your pages and products to gain an inside look into their user behavior . This method is great for conducting exploratory research with the purpose of identifying more specific issues to investigate further, like pain points along the customer journey and opportunities for optimizing conversion .

With Hotjar Recordings you can observe real people using your site without capturing their sensitive information

How Smallpdf did it: here’s how Smallpdf observed two different user personas both covertly and overtly.

Observing students (covert): Kristina Wagner, Principle Product Manager at Smallpdf, went to cafes and libraries at two local universities and waited until she saw students doing PDF-related activities. Then she watched and took notes from a distance. One thing that struck her was the difference between how students self-reported their activities vs. how they behaved (i.e, the self-reporting bias). Students, she found, spent hours talking, listening to music, or simply staring at a blank screen rather than working. When she did find students who were working, she recorded the task they were performing and the software they were using (if she recognized it).

Observing administrative assistants (overt): Kristina sent emails to admins explaining that she’d like to observe them at work, and she asked those who agreed to try to batch their PDF work for her observation day. While watching admins work, she learned that they frequently needed to scan documents into PDF-format and then convert those PDFs into Word docs. By observing the challenges admins faced, Smallpdf knew which products to target for improvement.

“Data is really good for discovery and validation, but there is a bit in the middle where you have to go and find the human.”

3. Conduct individual interviews

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. They allow you to dig deep and explore their concerns, which can lead to all sorts of revelations.

Listen more, talk less. Be curious.

Act like a journalist, not a salesperson. Rather than trying to talk your company up, ask people about their lives, their needs, their frustrations, and how a product like yours could help.

Ask "why?" so you can dig deeper. Get into the specifics and learn about their past behavior.

Record the conversation. Focus on the conversation and avoid relying solely on notes by recording the interview. There are plenty of services that will transcribe recorded conversations for a good price (including Hotjar!).

Avoid asking leading questions , which reveal bias on your part and pushes respondents to answer in a certain direction (e.g. “Have you taken advantage of the amazing new features we just released?).

Don't ask loaded questions , which sneak in an assumption which, if untrue, would make it impossible to answer honestly. For example, we can’t ask you, “What did you find most useful about this article?” without asking whether you found the article useful in the first place.

Be cautious when asking opinions about the future (or predictions of future behavior). Studies suggest that people aren’t very good at predicting their future behavior. This is due to several cognitive biases, from the misguided exceptionalism bias (we’re good at guessing what others will do, but we somehow think we’re different), to the optimism bias (which makes us see things with rose-colored glasses), to the ‘illusion of control’ (which makes us forget the role of randomness in future events).

How Smallpdf did it: Kristina explored her teacher user persona by speaking with university professors at a local graduate school. She learned that the school was mostly paperless and rarely used PDFs, so for the sake of time, she moved on to the admins.

A bit of a letdown? Sure. But this story highlights an important lesson: sometimes you follow a lead and come up short, so you have to make adjustments on the fly. Lean market research is about getting solid, actionable insights quickly so you can tweak things and see what works.

💡Pro tip: to save even more time, conduct remote interviews using an online user research service like Hotjar Engage , which automates the entire interview process, from recruitment and scheduling to hosting and recording.

You can interview your own customers or connect with people from our diverse pool of 200,000+ participants from 130+ countries and 25 industries. And no need to fret about taking meticulous notes—Engage will automatically transcribe the interview for you.

4. Analyze the data (without drowning in it)

The following techniques will help you wrap your head around the market data you collect without losing yourself in it. Remember, the point of lean market research is to find quick, actionable insights.

A flow model is a diagram that tracks the flow of information within a system. By creating a simple visual representation of how users interact with your product and each other, you can better assess their needs.

#Example of a flow model designed by Smallpdf

You’ll notice that admins are at the center of Smallpdf’s flow model, which represents the flow of PDF-related documents throughout a school. This flow model shows the challenges that admins face as they work to satisfy their own internal and external customers.

Affinity diagram

An affinity diagram is a way of sorting large amounts of data into groups to better understand the big picture. For example, if you ask your users about their profession, you’ll notice some general themes start to form, even though the individual responses differ. Depending on your needs, you could group them by profession, or more generally by industry.

<

We wrote a guide about how to analyze open-ended questions to help you sort through and categorize large volumes of response data. You can also do this by hand by clipping up survey responses or interview notes and grouping them (which is what Kristina does).

“For an interview, you will have somewhere between 30 and 60 notes, and those notes are usually direct phrases. And when you literally cut them up into separate pieces of paper and group them, they should make sense by themselves.”

Pro tip: if you’re conducting an online survey with Hotjar, keep your team in the loop by sharing survey responses automatically via our Slack and Microsoft Team integrations. Reading answers as they come in lets you digest the data in pieces and can help prepare you for identifying common themes when it comes time for analysis.

Hotjar lets you easily share survey responses with your team

Customer journey map

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the way a typical prospect becomes a paying customer. It outlines their first interaction with your brand and every step in the sales cycle, from awareness to repurchase (and hopefully advocacy).

#A customer journey map example

The above  customer journey map , created by our team at Hotjar, shows many ways a customer might engage with our tool. Your map will be based on your own data and business model.

📚 Read more: if you’re new to customer journey maps, we wrote this step-by-step guide to creating your first customer journey map in 2 and 1/2 days with free templates you can download and start using immediately.

Next steps: from research to results

So, how do you turn market research insights into tangible business results? Let’s look at the actions Smallpdf took after conducting their lean market research: first they implemented changes, then measured the impact.

#Smallpdf used lean market research to dig below the surface, understand their clients, and build a better product and user experience

Implement changes

Based on what Smallpdf learned about the challenges that one key user segment (admins) face when trying to convert PDFs into Word files, they improved their ‘PDF to Word’ conversion tool.

We won’t go into the details here because it involves a lot of technical jargon, but they made the entire process simpler and more straightforward for users. Plus, they made it so that their system recognized when you drop a PDF file into their ‘Word to PDF’ converter instead of the ‘PDF to Word’ converter, so users wouldn’t have to redo the task when they made that mistake. 

In other words: simple market segmentation for admins showed a business need that had to be accounted for, and customers are happier overall after Smallpdf implemented an informed change to their product.

Measure results

According to the Lean UX model, product and UX changes aren’t retained unless they achieve results.

Smallpdf’s changes produced:

A 75% reduction in error rate for the ‘PDF to Word’ converter

A 1% increase in NPS

Greater confidence in the team’s marketing efforts

"With all the changes said and done, we've cut our original error rate in four, which is huge. We increased our NPS by +1%, which isn't huge, but it means that of the users who received a file, they were still slightly happier than before, even if they didn't notice that anything special happened at all.”

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Market research (or marketing research) is any set of techniques used to gather information and better understand a company’s target market. This might include primary research on brand awareness and customer satisfaction or secondary market research on market size and competitive analysis. Businesses use this information to design better products, improve user experience, and craft a marketing strategy that attracts quality leads and improves conversion rates.

David Darmanin, one of Hotjar’s founders, launched two startups before Hotjar took off—but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded.

With Hotjar, they did things differently . Long story short, they conducted market research in the early stages to figure out what consumers really wanted, and the team made (and continues to make) constant improvements based on market and user research.

Without market research, it’s impossible to understand your users. Sure, you might have a general idea of who they are and what they need, but you have to dig deep if you want to win their loyalty.

Here’s why research matters:

Obsessing over your users is the only way to win. If you don’t care deeply about them, you’ll lose potential customers to someone who does.

Analytics gives you the ‘what’, while research gives you the ‘why’. Big data, user analytics , and dashboards can tell you what people do at scale, but only research can tell you what they’re thinking and why they do what they do. For example, analytics can tell you that customers leave when they reach your pricing page, but only research can explain why.

Research beats assumptions, trends, and so-called best practices. Have you ever watched your colleagues rally behind a terrible decision? Bad ideas are often the result of guesswork, emotional reasoning, death by best practices , and defaulting to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO). By listening to your users and focusing on their customer experience , you’re less likely to get pulled in the wrong direction.

Research keeps you from planning in a vacuum. Your team might be amazing, but you and your colleagues simply can’t experience your product the way your customers do. Customers might use your product in a way that surprises you, and product features that seem obvious to you might confuse them. Over-planning and refusing to test your assumptions is a waste of time, money, and effort because you’ll likely need to make changes once your untested business plan gets put into practice.

Lean User Experience (UX) design is a model for continuous improvement that relies on quick, efficient research to understand customer needs and test new product features.

Lean market research can help you become more...

Efficient: it gets you closer to your customers, faster.

Cost-effective: no need to hire an expensive marketing firm to get things started.

Competitive: quick, powerful insights can place your products on the cutting edge.

As a small business or sole proprietor, conducting lean market research is an attractive option when investing in a full-blown research project might seem out of scope or budget.

There are lots of different ways you could conduct market research and collect customer data, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just one research method. Four common types of market research techniques include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer observation.

Which method you use may vary based on your business type: ecommerce business owners have different goals from SaaS businesses, so it’s typically prudent to mix and match these methods based on your particular goals and what you need to know.

1. Surveys: the most commonly used

Surveys are a form of qualitative research that ask respondents a short series of open- or closed-ended questions, which can be delivered as an on-screen questionnaire or via email. When we asked 2,000 Customer Experience (CX) professionals about their company’s approach to research , surveys proved to be the most commonly used market research technique.

What makes online surveys so popular?  

They’re easy and inexpensive to conduct, and you can do a lot of data collection quickly. Plus, the data is pretty straightforward to analyze, even when you have to analyze open-ended questions whose answers might initially appear difficult to categorize.

We've built a number of survey templates ready and waiting for you. Grab a template and share with your customers in just a few clicks.

💡 Pro tip: you can also get started with Hotjar AI for Surveys to create a survey in mere seconds . Just enter your market research goal and watch as the AI generates a survey and populates it with relevant questions. 

Once you’re ready for data analysis, the AI will prepare an automated research report that succinctly summarizes key findings, quotes, and suggested next steps.

analysis market research

An example research report generated by Hotjar AI for Surveys

2. Interviews: the most insightful

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. Nothing beats a face-to-face interview for diving deep (and reading non-verbal cues), but if an in-person meeting isn’t possible, video conferencing is a solid second choice.

Regardless of how you conduct it, any type of in-depth interview will produce big benefits in understanding your target customers.

What makes interviews so insightful?

By speaking directly with an ideal customer, you’ll gain greater empathy for their experience , and you can follow insightful threads that can produce plenty of 'Aha!' moments.

3. Focus groups: the most unreliable

Focus groups bring together a carefully selected group of people who fit a company’s target market. A trained moderator leads a conversation surrounding the product, user experience, or marketing message to gain deeper insights.

What makes focus groups so unreliable?

If you’re new to market research, we wouldn’t recommend starting with focus groups. Doing it right is expensive , and if you cut corners, your research could fall victim to all kinds of errors. Dominance bias (when a forceful participant influences the group) and moderator style bias (when different moderator personalities bring about different results in the same study) are two of the many ways your focus group data could get skewed.

4. Observation: the most powerful

During a customer observation session, someone from the company takes notes while they watch an ideal user engage with their product (or a similar product from a competitor).

What makes observation so clever and powerful?

‘Fly-on-the-wall’ observation is a great alternative to focus groups. It’s not only less expensive, but you’ll see people interact with your product in a natural setting without influencing each other. The only downside is that you can’t get inside their heads, so observation still isn't a recommended replacement for customer surveys and interviews.

The following questions will help you get to know your users on a deeper level when you interview them. They’re general questions, of course, so don’t be afraid to make them your own.

1. Who are you and what do you do?

How you ask this question, and what you want to know, will vary depending on your business model (e.g. business-to-business marketing is usually more focused on someone’s profession than business-to-consumer marketing).

It’s a great question to start with, and it’ll help you understand what’s relevant about your user demographics (age, race, gender, profession, education, etc.), but it’s not the be-all-end-all of market research. The more specific questions come later.

2. What does your day look like?

This question helps you understand your users’ day-to-day life and the challenges they face. It will help you gain empathy for them, and you may stumble across something relevant to their buying habits.

3. Do you ever purchase [product/service type]?

This is a ‘yes or no’ question. A ‘yes’ will lead you to the next question.

4. What problem were you trying to solve or what goal were you trying to achieve?

This question strikes to the core of what someone’s trying to accomplish and why they might be willing to pay for your solution.

5. Take me back to the day when you first decided you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this goal.

This is the golden question, and it comes from Adele Revella, Founder and CEO of Buyer Persona Institute . It helps you get in the heads of your users and figure out what they were thinking the day they decided to spend money to solve a problem.

If you take your time with this question, digging deeper where it makes sense, you should be able to answer all the relevant information you need to understand their perspective.

“The only scripted question I want you to ask them is this one: take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this kind of a goal. Not to buy my product, that’s not the day. We want to go back to the day that when you thought it was urgent and compelling to go spend money to solve a particular problem or achieve a goal. Just tell me what happened.”

— Adele Revella , Founder/CEO at Buyer Persona Institute

Bonus question: is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

This question isn’t just a nice way to wrap it up—it might just give participants the opportunity they need to tell you something you really need to know.

That’s why Sarah Doody, author of UX Notebook , adds it to the end of her written surveys.

“I always have a last question, which is just open-ended: “Is there anything else you would like to tell me?” And sometimes, that’s where you get four paragraphs of amazing content that you would never have gotten if it was just a Net Promoter Score [survey] or something like that.”

What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?

Qualitative research asks questions that can’t be reduced to a number, such as, “What is your job title?” or “What did you like most about your customer service experience?” 

Quantitative research asks questions that can be answered with a numeric value, such as, “What is your annual salary?” or “How was your customer service experience on a scale of 1-5?”

 → Read more about the differences between qualitative and quantitative user research .

How do I do my own market research?

You can do your own quick and effective market research by 

Surveying your customers

Building user personas

Studying your users through interviews and observation

Wrapping your head around your data with tools like flow models, affinity diagrams, and customer journey maps

What is the difference between market research and user research?

Market research takes a broad look at potential customers—what problems they’re trying to solve, their buying experience, and overall demand. User research, on the other hand, is more narrowly focused on the use (and usability ) of specific products.

What are the main criticisms of market research?

Many marketing professionals are critical of market research because it can be expensive and time-consuming. It’s often easier to convince your CEO or CMO to let you do lean market research rather than something more extensive because you can do it yourself. It also gives you quick answers so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Do I need a market research firm to get reliable data?

Absolutely not! In fact, we recommend that you start small and do it yourself in the beginning. By following a lean market research strategy, you can uncover some solid insights about your clients. Then you can make changes, test them out, and see whether the results are positive. This is an excellent strategy for making quick changes and remaining competitive.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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This is where business intelligence (BI) tools come in, transforming raw data into actionable insights that drive informed, customer-centric decisions. 

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How to do market research: The complete guide for your brand

Written by by Jacqueline Zote

Published on  April 13, 2023

Reading time  10 minutes

Blindly putting out content or products and hoping for the best is a thing of the past. Not only is it a waste of time and energy, but you’re wasting valuable marketing dollars in the process. Now you have a wealth of tools and data at your disposal, allowing you to develop data-driven marketing strategies . That’s where market research comes in, allowing you to uncover valuable insights to inform your business decisions.

Conducting market research not only helps you better understand how to sell to customers but also stand out from your competition. In this guide, we break down everything you need to know about market research and how doing your homework can help you grow your business.

Table of contents:

What is market research?

Why is market research important, types of market research, where to conduct market research.

  • Steps for conducting market research
  • Tools to use for market research

Market research is the process of gathering information surrounding your business opportunities. It identifies key information to better understand your audience. This includes insights related to customer personas and even trends shaping your industry.

Taking time out of your schedule to conduct research is crucial for your brand health. Here are some of the key benefits of market research:

Understand your customers’ motivations and pain points

Most marketers are out of touch with what their customers want. Moreover, these marketers are missing key information on what products their audience wants to buy.

Simply put, you can’t run a business if you don’t know what motivates your customers.

And spoiler alert: Your customers’ wants and needs change. Your customers’ behaviors today might be night and day from what they were a few years ago.

Market research holds the key to understanding your customers better. It helps you uncover their key pain points and motivations and understand how they shape their interests and behavior.

Figure out how to position your brand

Positioning is becoming increasingly important as more and more brands enter the marketplace. Market research enables you to spot opportunities to define yourself against your competitors.

Maybe you’re able to emphasize a lower price point. Perhaps your product has a feature that’s one of a kind. Finding those opportunities goes hand in hand with researching your market.

Maintain a strong pulse on your industry at large

Today’s marketing world evolves at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with.

Fresh products. Up-and-coming brands. New marketing tools. Consumers get bombarded with sales messages from all angles. This can be confusing and overwhelming.

By monitoring market trends, you can figure out the best tactics for reaching your target audience.

Not everyone conducts market research for the same reason. While some may want to understand their audience better, others may want to see how their competitors are doing. As such, there are different types of market research you can conduct depending on your goal.

Interview-based market research allows for one-on-one interactions. This helps the conversation to flow naturally, making it easier to add context. Whether this takes place in person or virtually, it enables you to gather more in-depth qualitative data.

Buyer persona research

Buyer persona research lets you take a closer look at the people who make up your target audience. You can discover the needs, challenges and pain points of each buyer persona to understand what they need from your business. This will then allow you to craft products or campaigns to resonate better with each persona.

Pricing research

In this type of research, brands compare similar products or services with a particular focus on pricing. They look at how much those products or services typically sell for so they can get more competitive with their pricing strategy.

Competitive analysis research

Competitor analysis gives you a realistic understanding of where you stand in the market and how your competitors are doing. You can use this analysis to find out what’s working in your industry and which competitors to watch out for. It even gives you an idea of how well those competitors are meeting consumer needs.

Depending on the competitor analysis tool you use, you can get as granular as you need with your research. For instance, Sprout Social lets you analyze your competitors’ social strategies. You can see what types of content they’re posting and even benchmark your growth against theirs.

Dashboard showing Facebook competitors report on Sprout Social

Brand awareness research

Conducting brand awareness research allows you to assess your brand’s standing in the market. It tells you how well-known your brand is among your target audience and what they associate with it. This can help you gauge people’s sentiments toward your brand and whether you need to rebrand or reposition.

If you don’t know where to start with your research, you’re in the right place.

There’s no shortage of market research methods out there. In this section, we’ve highlighted research channels for small and big businesses alike.

Considering that Google sees a staggering 8.5 billion searches each day, there’s perhaps no better place to start.

A quick Google search is a potential goldmine for all sorts of questions to kick off your market research. Who’s ranking for keywords related to your industry? Which products and pieces of content are the hottest right now? Who’s running ads related to your business?

For example, Google Product Listing Ads can help highlight all of the above for B2C brands.

row of product listing ads on Google for the search term "baby carrier"

The same applies to B2B brands looking to keep tabs on who’s running industry-related ads and ranking for keyword terms too.

list of sponsored results for the search term "email marketing tool"

There’s no denying that email represents both an aggressive and effective marketing channel for marketers today. Case in point, 44% of online shoppers consider email as the most influential channel in their buying decisions.

Looking through industry and competitor emails is a brilliant way to learn more about your market. For example, what types of offers and deals are your competitors running? How often are they sending emails?

list of promotional emails from different companies including ASOS and Dropbox

Email is also invaluable for gathering information directly from your customers. This survey message from Asana is a great example of how to pick your customers’ brains to figure out how you can improve your quality of service.

email from asana asking users to take a survey

Industry journals, reports and blogs

Don’t neglect the importance of big-picture market research when it comes to tactics and marketing channels to explore. Look to marketing resources such as reports and blogs as well as industry journals

Keeping your ear to the ground on new trends and technologies is a smart move for any business. Sites such as Statista, Marketing Charts, AdWeek and Emarketer are treasure troves of up-to-date data and news for marketers.

And of course, there’s the  Sprout Insights blog . And invaluable resources like The Sprout Social Index™  can keep you updated on the latest social trends.

Social media

If you want to learn more about your target market, look no further than social media. Social offers a place to discover what your customers want to see in future products or which brands are killin’ it. In fact, social media is become more important for businesses than ever with the level of data available.

It represents a massive repository of real-time data and insights that are instantly accessible. Brand monitoring and social listening are effective ways to conduct social media research . You can even be more direct with your approach. Ask questions directly or even poll your audience to understand their needs and preferences.

twitter poll from canva asking people about their color preferences for the brand logo

The 5 steps for how to do market research

Now that we’ve covered the why and where, it’s time to get into the practical aspects of market research. Here are five essential steps on how to do market research effectively.

Step 1: Identify your research topic

First off, what are you researching about? What do you want to find out? Narrow down on a specific research topic so you can start with a clear idea of what to look for.

For example, you may want to learn more about how well your product features are satisfying the needs of existing users. This might potentially lead to feature updates and improvements. Or it might even result in new feature introductions.

Similarly, your research topic may be related to your product or service launch or customer experience. Or you may want to conduct research for an upcoming marketing campaign.

Step 2: Choose a buyer persona to engage

If you’re planning to focus your research on a specific type of audience, decide which buyer persona you want to engage. This persona group will serve as a representative sample of your target audience.

Engaging a specific group of audience lets you streamline your research efforts. As such, it can be a much more effective and organized approach than researching thousands (if not millions) of individuals.

You may be directing your research toward existing users of your product. To get even more granular, you may want to focus on users who have been familiar with the product for at least a year, for example.

Step 3: Start collecting data

The next step is one of the most critical as it involves collecting the data you need for your research. Before you begin, make sure you’ve chosen the right research methods that will uncover the type of data you need. This largely depends on your research topic and goals.

Remember that you don’t necessarily have to stick to one research method. You may use a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. So for example, you could use interviews to supplement the data from your surveys. Or you may stick to insights from your social listening efforts.

To keep things consistent, let’s look at this in the context of the example from earlier. Perhaps you can send out a survey to your existing users asking them a bunch of questions. This might include questions like which features they use the most and how often they use them. You can get them to choose an answer from one to five and collect quantitative data.

Plus, for qualitative insights, you could even include a few open-ended questions with the option to write their answers. For instance, you might ask them if there’s any improvement they wish to see in your product.

Step 4: Analyze results

Once you have all the data you need, it’s time to analyze it keeping your research topic in mind. This involves trying to interpret the data to look for a wider meaning, particularly in relation to your research goal.

So let’s say a large percentage of responses were four or five in the satisfaction rating. This means your existing users are mostly satisfied with your current product features. On the other hand, if the responses were mostly ones and twos, you may look for opportunities to improve. The responses to your open-ended questions can give you further context as to why people are disappointed.

Step 5: Make decisions for your business

Now it’s time to take your findings and turn them into actionable insights for your business. In this final step, you need to decide how you want to move forward with your new market insight.

What did you find in your research that would require action? How can you put those findings to good use?

The market research tools you should be using

To wrap things up, let’s talk about the various tools available to conduct speedy, in-depth market research. These tools are essential for conducting market research faster and more efficiently.

Social listening and analytics

Social analytics tools like Sprout can help you keep track of engagement across social media. This goes beyond your own engagement data but also includes that of your competitors. Considering how quickly social media moves, using a third-party analytics tool is ideal. It allows you to make sense of your social data at a glance and ensure that you’re never missing out on important trends.

cross channel profile performance on Sprout Social

Email marketing research tools

Keeping track of brand emails is a good idea for any brand looking to stand out in its audience’s inbox.

Tools such as MailCharts ,  Really Good Emails  and  Milled  can show you how different brands run their email campaigns.

Meanwhile, tools like  Owletter  allow you to monitor metrics such as frequency and send-timing. These metrics can help you understand email marketing strategies among competing brands.

Content marketing research

If you’re looking to conduct research on content marketing, tools such as  BuzzSumo  can be of great help. This tool shows you the top-performing industry content based on keywords. Here you can see relevant industry sites and influencers as well as which brands in your industry are scoring the most buzz. It shows you exactly which pieces of content are ranking well in terms of engagements and shares and on which social networks.

content analysis report on buzzsumo

SEO and keyword tracking

Monitoring industry keywords is a great way to uncover competitors. It can also help you discover opportunities to advertise your products via organic search. Tools such as  Ahrefs  provide a comprehensive keyword report to help you see how your search efforts stack up against the competition.

organic traffic and keywords report on ahrefs

Competitor comparison template

For the sake of organizing your market research, consider creating a competitive matrix. The idea is to highlight how you stack up side-by-side against others in your market. Use a  social media competitive analysis template  to track your competitors’ social presence. That way, you can easily compare tactics, messaging and performance. Once you understand your strengths and weaknesses next to your competitors, you’ll find opportunities as well.

Customer persona creator

Finally, customer personas represent a place where all of your market research comes together. You’d need to create a profile of your ideal customer that you can easily refer to. Tools like  Xtensio  can help in outlining your customer motivations and demographics as you zero in on your target market.

user persona example template on xtensio

Build a solid market research strategy

Having a deeper understanding of the market gives you leverage in a sea of competitors. Use the steps and market research tools we shared above to build an effective market research strategy.

But keep in mind that the accuracy of your research findings depends on the quality of data collected. Turn to Sprout’s social media analytics tools to uncover heaps of high-quality data across social networks.

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A Beginner’s Guide to Market Research Analysis

  • Bhumika Dutta
  • Sep 07, 2021

A Beginner’s Guide to Market Research Analysis title banner

Introduction

With the massive amount of data that is being produced every day, it is very essential to analyze the data and include intensive research before extracting any relevant information from them. 

If someone is planning to start a business, they need to do proper market research to understand their consumer requirements, before diving deep into the industry market. 

This article is a beginner’s guide to market research analysis where we cover the following topics:

What is Market Research?

Types of Market Research

Market Research analysis techniques: Statistical analysis and data analysis

Market Research analysis tools

Let us learn more about market research.

What is Market Research ?

Market Research is a process of data analysis that allows the evaluation of data regarding any new product and its viability in the market through direct customer research. This approach enables organizations or enterprises to identify their target market, gather and document feedback given by the potential customers, and make educated decisions.

Market Research can be performed by conducting surveys, interacting with samples (a group of people), and other similar methods by the company itself or by any outsourcing agency specializing in the feat. It is done to understand patterns and how the targeted audience will react to the product or service offered by the company. 

The main objectives of market research, according to Question pro , are:

Market Research helps in the administrative development of any company through several ways like planning and organization. To satisfy all the needs of any market, human and material resource control is also required, which is done by market research.

The social aspects and requirements of the customer are also taken care of by Market research. It informs the business owners about the targeted customers and the specifications that will reach out to a wider variety of customers.

Every new and old company wants to reach out to a stage of economic stability as it determines the degree of success or failure of any business to some extent. 

Market Research is very important for any business as it provides important customer insights that can be used to improve the quality of the product or service or change the marketing strategy according to newly devised marketing plans, ultimately making the business more customer-centric. 

Businesses can anticipate their production and sales by knowing their consumers' demands. The market research also aids in choosing the best inventory goods to keep on hand. Thus, with market research and well-planned strategies, the company can stay ahead of its customers.

There are different types of Market research that are performed while marketing analysis. It depends upon the organization on what works best for them, but here are a few market research types and their methods that are used to draw meaningful conclusions:

Primary Market Research:

Primary market research is an amalgamation of both qualitative and quantitative research, where the consumers of any business are contacted directly, either by the company itself or through any other third party. The data collected can either be statistical data (quantitative) or generic information (qualitative). 

There are generally two types of information collected during such analysis: exploratory and specific. 

Exploratory research is a type of open-ended research in which an issue is investigated by asking open-ended questions in a thorough interview format, generally with a small group of people known as a sample. 

Specific research, on the other hand, is more focused and utilized to tackle problems found by exploratory research.

The methods used in qualitative market research are:

Focus Groups:

It is a commonly used research method in which a small group of people responds to online surveys. This method does not require any personal interaction with the consumers and is used to collect important information.

Personal interview:

Personal interviews consist of unstructured, open-ended questions asked by the researcher to the respondents personally, in the form of an interview. This approach is largely reliant on the interviewer's competence and expertise in asking questions that elicit replies.

Ethnographic research:

This sort of detailed research is undertaken in the respondents' native environment. This approach necessitates the interviewer adapting to the respondents' native surroundings, which might be a metropolis or a distant village.

(Suggested reading: Top 10 B2C Marketing strategies )

Secondary Market Research:

Secondary research makes use of material that has been organized by an outside source such as government agencies, media, chambers of business, and so on. This knowledge is widely disseminated through newspapers, journals, books, corporate websites, free government and non-government organizations, and so on.

These are the methods of secondary market research:

Public Sources:  Information can be collected from public sources like libraries or pre-recorded documents.

Commercial Sources:  Commercial sources like newspapers, magazines, journals, media, etc. are great sources of information.

Educational institutions:  Most colleges and educational institutions are a valuable source of knowledge since they conduct more research than any other corporate sector.

Techniques of Market Research Analysis:

In this article, we are going to discuss the two types of analysis techniques that are used for Market research analysis: Statistical Analysis techniques and Data Analysis techniques .

Statistical analysis:

Statistics is a very important subfield of mathematics that gives numerical values in any analysis. The following statistical analysis techniques are used for market research analysis:

Regression Analysis:

Regression analysis is a statistical technique that is used to find the relationship between two or more variables. There are both dependent and independent variables in this analysis, and any change in the dependent variable depends on the independent variables. 

There are two types of regression techniques: Linear regression and Multiple regression . Regression analysis results in a ‘regression curve’ and analysts can study the degree of the curve to find relevant information.

Analysis of Variance Test:

It is also known as the ANOVA test and is used along with regression analysis to understand the effect of the independent variables over dependent variables. It may compare many groups at the same time to check whether there is a link between them.

Conjoint Analysis:

Conjoint analysis is a technique where market researchers encourage individuals to make trade-offs when making decisions, much like they do in real life, and then analyse the outcomes to determine the most popular option. They conduct surveys and use conjoint analysis softwares to process the survey data to figure out the importance of every option that drove the customers.

The T-Test:

The T-test helps the researchers to compare two datasets on whether they have different mean values and determines if the difference between them has some meaning to it or are purely coincidental. 

(Related blog: T-test vs Z-test )

Crosstab Analysis:

Crosstab analysis is a form of quantitative analysis that carries market research in order to analyse different and mutually exclusive data. 

Data Analysis:

The following are the data analysis techniques for market research analysis:

Descriptive data analysis:

Market researchers analyse historical data sets using descriptive data analysis techniques, basically arranging raw information into groupings so that any current patterns may be easily recognised. 

Some of the descriptive data analysis techniques are simple arithmetic tabulations like number of sales, website visits, etc. and data aggregation and mining systems as well.

(Must read: Multivariate data analysis )

Diagnostic data analysis:

Diagnostic analytics use increasingly complex algorithms to uncover the causes of results. Researchers may frequently identify correlation and/or causal connections by comparing and contrasting data sets. 

Diagnostic data analysis approaches include conjoint and regression analyses , as well as probability measurements.

Predictive data analysis:

Businesses employ predictive data analysis techniques that rely on descriptive and diagnostic numbers to foresee probable outcomes. Market researchers use sophisticated statistical models based on current data to assist them forecast the likelihood of certain future occurrences occurring. 

Analysts must thus be trained in sophisticated machine learning programming and understand how to apply algorithms to existing data sets in ways that allow for the depiction of relationships between numerous variables. 

Regression models, such as linear regression and discrete choice analysis, are two of the most common methods through which academics may assist businesses in optimising their future business operations.

Prescriptive data analysis:

Prescriptive data analysis techniques are thought to be the most sophisticated of all data analysis approaches. Companies utilise them to assist them decide the measures they need to take to prevent future problems or capitalise on future possibilities. 

Prescriptive data analysis techniques, similar to predictive analytics in that they seek to forecast the likelihood of certain events occurring, take the insight a step further, attempting to predict possible outcomes based on specific courses of action, as well as possible actions to take based on one or more targeted outcomes.

Tools of Market Research Analysis:

There are certain tools that are required for market research analysis.We have listed out a few of them:

Google Keywords tool: It shows the behavior of customers when online searching for similar products or services.

Questback: Questback is a premium service that connects a company with its target market. It may conduct extensive research on your behalf and offer useful input in a timely and effective manner.

Klout, Kred and Peerindex: To search for key influencers in a targeted market, tools like klout, kred and peerindex can be used.

KeySurvey: KeySurvey allows the creation of online questionnaires for surveys. It however does not source participants.

Google Analytics: Google analytics is used to provide feedback on customer behavior on the website. It can show which goods are popular but few people buy (or vice versa), and it can show which social media platforms the consumers are using, among other things.

FreeLunch: FreeLunch delivers global data across a variety of demographics and sectors, but it is particularly useful for firms targeting the United States, giving anything from thorough demographic breakdowns to insights into larger spending trends.

Market research is very essential for any starting or growing company. It allows the owners to have a clear vision of their market position and the activities they can perform to make the business better. 

In this article we have learned in detail about what market research is and the types of market research. We also discuss statistical analysis in market research and data analysis. We list out a few popular market research analytics tools as well.

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analysis market research

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How to Conduct a Market Analysis? (+ Examples)

Appinio Research · 04.10.2023 · 28min read

How to Conduct a Market Analysis Examples

Are you ready to transform your business with the unparalleled advantages of market analysis? Discover how harnessing the power of data-driven insights can propel your decision-making and unlock exceptional growth opportunities.

In this guide, we delve deep into the art of market analysis, showing you how to gain a competitive edge, tailor your strategies with precision, and, ultimately, boost your success. Let's embark on this journey of discovery together.

What is Market Analysis?

Market analysis is the process of evaluating market conditions and dynamics to understand its potential and make informed decisions. It helps you answer crucial questions:

  • Who are your customers?
  • What are their needs and preferences?
  • Who are your competitors?
  • What market trends should you be aware of?

Market analysis is crucial because it empowers you to make data-driven choices, minimize risks, and maximize opportunities.

Why is Market Analysis Important?

Before diving into the analysis, you need to define your objectives. Common goals of market analysis include:

  • Market Entry: Evaluating the feasibility of entering a new market.
  • Product Development : Identifying market gaps for new product development.
  • Competitor Analysis: Understanding your competition's strengths and weaknesses.
  • Strategic Planning: Shaping your business strategies based on market insights.

Benefits of Effective Market Analysis

Conducting a thorough market analysis brings several benefits:

  • Risk Mitigation: Minimize the risk of entering an unprofitable market.
  • Resource Allocation: Optimize resource allocation for marketing and product development.
  • Competitive Advantage: Gain a competitive edge by understanding your market better.
  • Innovation: Identify opportunities for innovation and growth.

Now that you understand the importance of market analysis, let's move on to the practical steps involved.

How to Prepare for Market Analysis?

Before diving into market analysis, setting the stage for success is essential. Here are the key steps to prepare for market analysis:

  • Set Clear Objectives: Define your specific goals and objectives for the analysis. Be clear about what you want to achieve. For example, if you're planning to enter a new market, your purpose might be to determine market demand and competition.
  • Identify Target Audience: Knowing your audience is crucial. Identify the demographics, preferences, and behaviors of your target market. This information will guide your data collection methods.
  • Gather Necessary Resources: Market analysis requires data, tools, and expertise. Ensure you have access to the resources you need. This might include budget allocation for research tools, hiring analysts, or outsourcing data collection.
  • Consider Ethical Considerations: Ethical guidelines are paramount in market analysis. Ensure that your data collection methods and analysis processes adhere to ethical standards, respecting privacy and confidentiality.

With your preparations in place, you're ready to collect the data necessary for your market analysis.

Data Collection for Market Analysis

Accurate and relevant data is the lifeblood of market analysis. Here's how you can gather the information you need:

Primary Data Sources

Primary data refers to information collected directly from the source. You can obtain primary data through:

  • Surveys: Conducting surveys to gather insights from your target audience.
  • Interviews: Engaging in one-on-one interviews with industry experts or potential customers .
  • Observations: Collecting data by observing customer behavior or market trends.

Secondary Data Sources

Secondary data is information that already exists and is collected by someone else. Sources of secondary data include:

  • Market Reports: Industry-specific reports and publications.
  • Government Data: Data provided by government agencies.
  • Competitor Reports: Analyzing reports and information about your competitors.

Qualitative Data Collection Methods

Qualitative data provides in-depth insights into customer attitudes and behaviors. Qualitative methods include:

  • Focus Groups: Gathering a small group of participants to discuss specific topics.
  • In-Depth Interviews: Conducting in-depth interviews with individuals to explore their perspectives.

Quantitative Data Collection Methods

Quantitative data is numerical and can be analyzed statistically. Common quantitative methods include:

  • Surveys: Creating structured questionnaires for large-scale data collection.
  • Online Analytics: Analyzing website and social media metrics for user behavior.

With your data collected, it's time to move on to the next crucial step: analyzing and interpreting the data.

Market Research Techniques

Analyzing the data you've collected is where the real insights come to light. Let's explore various market research techniques that help you make sense of your data.

Surveys and Questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are powerful tools for collecting quantitative data. They allow you to gather structured responses from a large sample of participants. When designing surveys, consider:

  • Question Types: Crafting survey questions that are clear and unbiased.
  • Sampling Techniques: Ensuring your sample is representative of your target audience.
  • Data Analysis: Applying statistical methods to analyze survey data.

Interviews provide qualitative data through in-depth conversations with individuals. Key considerations include:

  • Interview Structure: Developing a structured interview guide.
  • Listening Skills: Active listening to uncover valuable insights.
  • Transcribing and Coding: Transcribing interviews and coding responses for analysis.

Focus Groups

Focus groups involve small group discussions, providing rich qualitative data. To conduct effective focus groups:

  • Moderation Skills: Skillfully moderating group discussions.
  • Participant Selection: Recruiting diverse participants for varied perspectives.
  • Thematic Analysis: Identifying themes and patterns in focus group discussions.

Observational Research

Observational research involves watching and recording customer behavior.

  • Research Setting: Choosing the right environment for observations.
  • Data Recording: Accurate and detailed recording of observations.
  • Interpretation: Interpreting observed behaviors in the context of your objectives.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis involves evaluating your rivals to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

  • Identifying Competitors: Determine who your main competitors are.
  • Competitive Metrics: Choose relevant metrics to assess competition.
  • Benchmarking: Comparing your performance against competitors.

By mastering these market research techniques, you'll be well-prepared to extract valuable insights from your data. The next step is to interpret these insights effectively.

Data Analysis and Interpretation

Analyzing and interpreting data is the heart of market analysis. This process involves converting raw data into actionable insights.

Data Cleaning and Preparation

Data can be messy, and cleaning and preparing it for analysis is essential. This involves:

  • Data Cleaning: Removing outliers, errors, and inconsistencies.
  • Data Transformation: Converting data into a consistent format.
  • Data Validation: Ensuring data accuracy and completeness.

Descriptive Analysis

Descriptive analysis involves summarizing and visualizing data to understand its basic characteristics. Techniques include:

  • Summary Statistics: Calculating measures like mean, median, and standard deviation.
  • Data Visualization: Creating charts and graphs to represent data visually.
  • Data Distribution Analysis: Understanding how data is distributed.

Statistical Analysis

Statistical analysis allows you to draw meaningful conclusions from your data. Techniques include:

  • Hypothesis Testing: Testing hypotheses to make data-driven decisions.
  • Regression Analysis: Examining relationships between variables.
  • Segmentation Analysis: Grouping data for more targeted insights.

Identify Trends and Patterns

Identifying trends and patterns in your data helps you make predictions and formulate strategies.

  • Time Series Analysis: Analyzing data over time to identify trends.
  • Pattern Recognition: Spotting recurring patterns in customer behavior.
  • Predictive Modeling: Using data to make future predictions.

Armed with these analytical skills, you can effectively uncover valuable insights that inform your business decisions.

Market Segmentation

Market segmentation is crucial in understanding your audience better and tailoring your strategies accordingly.

What is Market Segmentation?

Market segmentation involves dividing your market into distinct groups based on shared characteristics. This is significant because it allows you to:

  • Target Specific Audiences: Tailor your marketing efforts to specific segments.
  • Personalize Products: Customize products and services to meet segment needs.
  • Optimize Resource Allocation: Allocate resources more efficiently by focusing on high-potential segments.

Types of Market Segmentation

There are various ways to segment a market, including:

  • Demographic Segmentation : Dividing based on age, gender, income, etc.
  • Psychographic Segmentation : Grouping by lifestyles, values, and attitudes.
  • Geographic Segmentation: Segmenting by location or region.
  • Behavioral Segmentation: Dividing based on buying behavior and preferences.

Targeting Specific Market Segments

After segmentation, you must target your chosen segments effectively. This involves:

  • Positioning: Crafting a unique value proposition for each segment.
  • Messaging: Tailoring your marketing messages to resonate with each segment.
  • Product Development: Adapting products to meet segment-specific needs.

By understanding your market segments, you can connect with your audience on a deeper level and increase your chances of success.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a valuable tool for assessing your business's internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats.

Identify and leverage your strengths, such as:

  • Unique Products: What sets your products apart from the competition?
  • Skilled Workforce: Highlight the expertise of your team.
  • Strong Brand: Emphasize your brand reputation and recognition.

Acknowledge and address your weaknesses, including:

  • Limited Resources: Recognize budget constraints or resource shortages.
  • Market Share: Assess areas where competitors outperform you.
  • Operational Challenges: Identify internal issues that need improvement.

Opportunities

Exploit opportunities in your market, such as:

  • Market Growth: Explore emerging markets and trends.
  • Partnerships: Seek collaboration with complementary businesses.
  • New Technologies: Embrace innovations that can improve your operations.

Mitigate potential threats, such as:

  • Competition: Analyze the competitive landscape and potential disruptors.
  • Economic Trends: Consider how economic fluctuations may affect your business.
  • Regulatory Changes: Stay updated on industry regulations and compliance.

Conducting a SWOT analysis helps you develop strategies that capitalize on strengths, mitigate weaknesses, seize opportunities, and guard against threats.

How to Conduct Competitive Market Analysis?

Competitive market analysis is a critical component of your overall market analysis strategy. Understanding who your competitors are, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, and conducting competitive benchmarking are essential steps to gain a strategic advantage in your market.

1. Identify Key Competitors

Identifying your key competitors is the first step in a competitive market analysis. Key competitors are those businesses that directly compete with you for the same target audience or market share. Here's how to identify them:

  • Market Research : Conduct thorough market research to identify businesses offering similar products or services in your industry or niche.
  • Customer Feedback: Listen to your customers. Often, they will mention your competitors when discussing alternatives or choices.
  • Industry Associations: Explore industry associations, directories, or trade publications to find a list of competitors.
  • Online Search: Use search engines and social media platforms to discover businesses that appear in similar search results or target similar keywords.

Once you have identified your key competitors, you can move on to a more in-depth analysis of their strengths and weaknesses.

2. Analyze Competitor Strengths and Weaknesses

Analyzing competitor strengths and weaknesses provides valuable insights into their strategies and helps you identify opportunities and threats. Here's how to conduct this analysis effectively:

Product or Service Offering

  • Strengths: Determine what your competitors excel at regarding product quality, features, and innovation.
  • Weaknesses: Identify areas where their products or services fall short compared to yours.

Pricing Strategies

  • Strengths: Analyze whether competitors offer competitive pricing or unique pricing models.
  • Weaknesses: Look for instances where their pricing may be less competitive or prohibitive.

Market Share and Customer Base

  • Strengths: Assess the size of their customer base and market share in your industry.
  • Weaknesses: Investigate whether they have any vulnerabilities or dependencies on a specific customer segment.

Marketing and Branding

  • Strengths: Analyze their marketing strategies, branding efforts, and customer engagement tactics.
  • Weaknesses: Identify any gaps or areas where their marketing efforts may be less effective.

Customer Reviews and Feedback

  • Strengths: Look for positive customer reviews and feedback to understand what your competitors are doing well.
  • Weaknesses: Pay attention to negative reviews and areas where customers express dissatisfaction.

This analysis will help you identify areas where you can differentiate yourself and gain a competitive edge. It also enables you to anticipate how competitors might respond to your strategies.

3. Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking involves comparing your performance and strategies against those of your key competitors. It allows you to set performance goals, identify best practices, and continuously improve.

  • Select Key Metrics: Choose the key performance metrics that matter most to your business. These could include revenue growth, customer acquisition costs, customer satisfaction scores, or market share.
  • Gather Data: Collect data on these selected metrics for both your business and your competitors. This data can come from public sources, industry reports, or your own internal records.
  • Analyze and Compare: Compare your performance against that of your competitors using the selected metrics. Pay close attention to areas where you outperform them and areas where you lag behind.
  • Identify Best Practices: Identify the strategies and practices that contribute to your competitors' success. Learn from their best practices and consider implementing similar strategies in your business.
  • Set Improvement Goals: Based on your analysis, set specific improvement goals for your business. These goals should be realistic and aligned with your overall business objectives.
  • Monitor Progress: Regularly monitor your progress toward achieving your improvement goals. Adjust your strategies and tactics as needed to stay competitive.

Competitive benchmarking is an ongoing process. By continuously assessing your performance compared to your competitors, you can adapt and refine your strategies to maintain a competitive advantage in the market.

How to Conduct Comparative Market Analysis?

Comparative market analysis involves assessing your market position, understanding competitor strategies and performance, and identifying opportunities for growth. Let's explore each aspect in more detail.

What is Comparative Analysis in Market Research?

Comparative analysis involves examining your business in relation to your competitors and the overall market. It helps you:

  • Gain Perspective: Understand where your business stands in the market landscape.
  • Identify Trends: Recognize industry trends and shifts.
  • Spot Opportunities: Discover areas where your business can excel or innovate.

To conduct an effective comparative analysis:

  • Collect Data: Gather data on your business, competitors, and the market as a whole.
  • Use Key Metrics: Focus on key performance metrics relevant to your industry.
  • Benchmark Against Competitors: Compare your performance against that of your direct competitors.

Analyzing Competitor Strategies and Performance

Analyzing competitor strategies and performance is a critical aspect of comparative analysis. Here's how to go about it:

1. Competitor Strategies

Product and Service Strategies: Examine their product/service offerings and pricing strategies.

  • Marketing and Promotion: Analyze their marketing campaigns, messaging, and customer engagement tactics.
  • Distribution Channels: Understand how they reach and distribute products or services to customers.
  • Innovation: Identify areas where they innovate or introduce new features.

2. Financial Performance

  • Revenue and Growth: Assess their revenue figures and growth rates over time.
  • Profit Margins: Analyze their profit margins and how they compare to industry standards.
  • Investment and Funding: Explore whether they have secured significant investments or funding.

3. Customer Engagement

  • Customer Base: Understand the size and composition of their customer base.
  • Customer Satisfaction: Look for indicators of customer satisfaction, such as reviews or feedback.

4. Market Presence

Market Share: Determine their market share in your industry or niche.

Geographic Reach: Explore the regions or markets they serve.

Identifying Market Position and Opportunities

Identifying your market position and opportunities is the ultimate goal of comparative market analysis. Here's how to accomplish this:

1. Market Position

  • Relative Strengths: Determine where your business excels compared to competitors.
  • Areas of Improvement: Identify areas where you lag and need improvement.
  • Market Niche: Define your unique value proposition and niche within the market.

2. Opportunities

  • Competitive Gaps: Recognize gaps in the market that your business can fill.
  • Unmet Customer Needs: Explore customer needs that competitors are not effectively addressing.
  • Emerging Trends: Stay alert to emerging industry trends and adapt your strategies accordingly.

3. Strategic Planning

  • Strategy Development: Formulate strategies that capitalize on your strengths and address weaknesses.
  • Innovation: Consider innovative approaches to differentiate your business.
  • Risk Mitigation: Develop plans to mitigate risks associated with market dynamics.

By conducting a comprehensive comparative market analysis, you gain a deeper understanding of your competitive landscape, enabling you to make informed decisions, refine your strategies, and seize growth opportunities effectively. This process should be ongoing, as the market is dynamic and ever-changing.

Competitive Market Analysis vs. Comparative Market Analysis

While these approaches share some similarities, they serve distinct purposes and offer unique insights. Let's explore the key differences and applications of each.

Competitive Market Analysis

Objective: Competitive Market Analysis primarily focuses on assessing your direct competitors and understanding their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and overall market position. Its main goal is to help you gain a competitive edge by learning from and responding to your rivals effectively.

Key Aspects:

  • Competitor-Centric: It revolves around thoroughly examining specific competitors that directly impact your business.
  • Strategy-Oriented: The emphasis is on understanding your competitors' strategies, pricing models, product offerings, and marketing tactics.
  • Market Positioning: It helps you define your position in relation to your immediate competitors and identify areas for differentiation.
  • Direct Impact: Competitive Market Analysis is often employed for short-term decision-making, such as refining marketing strategies or adjusting pricing to respond to competitor moves.

Comparative Market Analysis

Objective: Comparative Market Analysis takes a broader perspective by evaluating your business within the context of the entire market. It aims to provide a comprehensive view of your market's dynamics, trends, and opportunities, helping you make informed, long-term strategic decisions.

  • Market-Centric: It considers a broader view of the market, including competitors, potential entrants, and industry dynamics.
  • Trend Analysis: Comparative Market Analysis looks at industry trends, market growth, consumer behavior, and emerging technologies that may impact your business.
  • Strategic Insights: It provides strategic insights that extend beyond immediate competition, helping you identify opportunities for market expansion, diversification, or innovation.
  • Long-Term Planning: This approach is suitable for long-term strategic planning, such as entering new markets, launching new products, or adapting to evolving market conditions.

How to Choose the Right Approach?

The choice between Competitive Market Analysis and Comparative Market Analysis depends on your specific business goals and the depth of insights you seek:

  • Use Competitive Market Analysis when you need to closely monitor and respond to specific competitors' actions, refine short-term strategies, or differentiate your offerings within a crowded market segment.
  • Opt for Comparative Market Analysis when you are making long-term strategic decisions, considering market expansion, or seeking to innovate based on broader industry trends. This approach provides a holistic view that extends beyond immediate competitors.

In practice, many businesses find value in combining elements of both approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of their market environment. The key is to align your analysis with your strategic objectives and adapt your approach as your business evolves.

Market Analysis Template

A well-structured market analysis template is invaluable for streamlining the market research process, ensuring you cover all essential aspects and gather data systematically. Let's explore the components of an effective market analysis template and how to customize it to your specific needs.

How to Create a Structured Market Analysis Framework?

A comprehensive market analysis template typically includes the following sections:

1. Market Overview

  • Market Size: Describe the current size and potential growth of the market.
  • Market Segmentation: Identify key segments within the market.
  • Market Trends: Highlight recent trends and developments.

2. Competitive Landscape

  • Competitor Identification: List your main competitors and potential disruptors.
  • Competitor Analysis: Evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).
  • Competitive Advantage: Explore ways in which your business can gain a competitive edge.

3. Target Market Analysis

  • Customer Personas: Develop detailed customer personas based on demographics, behavior, and preferences.
  • Customer Needs: Understand your target audience's specific needs and pain points.
  • Market Demand: Assess the demand for your products or services within your target market.

4. SWOT Analysis

  • Strengths: Identify your business's internal strengths and advantages.
  • Weaknesses: Acknowledge areas where your business may be vulnerable.
  • Opportunities: Explore external factors that can be leveraged for growth.
  • Threats: Recognize potential challenges and external risks.

5. Trends and Forecast

  • Market Trends: Analyze current trends and their potential impact on your business.
  • Market Forecast: Make data-driven predictions about the future of the market.
  • Emerging Technologies: Assess how emerging technologies may influence your industry.

How to Utilize Template for Efficient Market Analysis?

Templates not only save time but also ensure that you cover all critical aspects of market analysis. To effectively utilize a template:

1. Identify Relevant Sections

Review the template to identify sections that are relevant to your specific market analysis objectives. Not all sections may be necessary for every analysis.

2. Customize Sections

Tailor each section to your business and market. For example:

  • In the "Market Overview" section , provide market data specific to your industry or region.
  • In the "Competitive Landscape" section , focus on competitors directly impacting your business.

3. Collect Data Methodically

Use the template as a guide to collect data methodically. It ensures that you gather the right information in a structured manner.

4. Analyze and Interpret Data

After collecting data, analyze and interpret it within the context of each section of the template.

This step provides actionable insights.

5. Draw Conclusions and Recommendations

Utilize the insights gained from your analysis to draw conclusions and formulate recommendations that address your initial market analysis objectives.

6. Report Compilation

Compile the information from your template into a well-organized market analysis report that can be easily shared with stakeholders, investors, or team members.

How to Customize the Market Analysis Template?

Market analysis templates should not be rigid but rather adaptable to meet your unique requirements.

  • Additional Sections: If your analysis requires sections not covered in the template, feel free to add them. For example, you might include a section on environmental or sustainability factors.
  • Data Sources and Tools: Specify the data sources and analysis tools you'll use for each section. This ensures transparency and accountability in your analysis process.
  • Visual Elements: Incorporate charts, graphs, and visual representations where relevant. Graphic elements can make complex data more digestible.
  • Timelines and Milestones: If your market analysis is part of a larger project or business plan, include timelines and milestones to track progress.
  • Appendices: Consider including appendices with supplementary materials such as raw data, survey questionnaires, or detailed calculations to support your analysis.

Market Analysis Examples

To gain a deeper understanding of how market analysis is applied in real-world scenarios, let's explore a variety of detailed examples that showcase different aspects of this crucial business practice.

Example 1: Entering a New Market

Scenario: Imagine you are the marketing manager of a well-established electronics company considering expansion into a new geographic market. Let's call it Market X.

Market Analysis Objective: Your goal is to assess the feasibility and potential success of entering Market X.

Data Collection and Analysis

  • Market Research: Begin by collecting data on Market X, such as population demographics, economic indicators, and consumer behavior.
  • Competitor Analysis: Identify and analyze competitors already operating in Market X. Assess their market share, product offerings, pricing strategies, and customer reviews.
  • Consumer Surveys: Conduct surveys in Market X to understand consumer preferences, needs, and willingness to adopt your products.
  • Regulatory Environment: Investigate the regulatory framework in Market X, including import/export regulations, industry standards, and compliance requirements.

Findings and Insights

  • Market Potential: Through extensive data analysis, you discover that Market X has a growing population with a high demand for electronics, indicating market potential.
  • Competitive Landscape: You identify several established competitors, but their product offerings are limited in comparison to your company's range.
  • Consumer Preferences: Survey results reveal a preference for high-quality, durable electronics aligning with your product portfolio.
  • Regulatory Insights: Understanding the regulatory environment helps you plan for compliance, ensuring a smooth market entry.

Recommendations

Based on your analysis, you can make informed recommendations:

  • Market Entry Strategy: Develop a comprehensive market entry strategy tailored to Market X, including distribution channels and pricing strategies.
  • Product Localization: Customize certain product features to align with local preferences and regulatory requirements.
  • Competitive Edge: Leverage your wider product range as a competitive advantage.

Example 2: Product Launch Strategy

Scenario: You work for a startup that has developed an innovative health and fitness wearable device. Your goal is to create an effective product launch strategy.

Market Analysis Objective: Understand your target market, competition, and market trends to launch the wearable successfully.

  • Target Audience Profiling: Create detailed customer personas based on demographics, interests, and health and fitness habits.
  • Competitor Analysis: Examine the market for similar wearable devices, assessing their features, pricing, and customer reviews.
  • Market Trends and Consumer Behavior: Analyze market trends related to health and fitness, wearable technology adoption, and consumer preferences.
  • Market Size and Growth: Determine the size of the wearable technology market and its growth rate.
  • Target Audience: Detailed personas reveal that your primary customer segments include health-conscious individuals, athletes, and tech enthusiasts.
  • Competition: While there are competitors in the market, a gap exists for a wearable that combines health monitoring with advanced fitness tracking.
  • Market Trends: Trends show an increasing demand for health-related wearables due to a growing focus on fitness and well-being.
  • Market Size: The market is substantial and expected to grow steadily over the next few years.
  • Product Features: Focus your product's features on health monitoring and advanced fitness tracking to cater to the identified target segments.
  • Pricing Strategy: Set a competitive yet profitable price point for your wearable.
  • Marketing Campaign: Develop a marketing campaign highlighting the unique features of your wearable and its benefits for health-conscious consumers, athletes, and tech enthusiasts.

Example 3: Competitive Analysis for an E-commerce Startup

Scenario: You're part of a startup team launching an e-commerce platform that sells handmade artisanal products. You need to understand the competitive landscape to formulate a successful business strategy.

Market Analysis Objective: Gain insights into the e-commerce market for handmade products and identify opportunities for differentiation.

  • Competitor Identification: Identify existing e-commerce platforms specializing in handmade products.
  • Product Range and Quality: Assess the variety and quality of products offered by competitors.
  • Pricing Strategies: Analyze pricing strategies and discount offers of competitors.
  • Customer Reviews: Study customer reviews and ratings for competing platforms.
  • Competitor Landscape: You discover several established e-commerce platforms in the handmade product niche, but none seem to offer a comprehensive range of unique artisanal items.
  • Product Quality: Competitors mainly offer mass-produced items with limited emphasis on craftsmanship and uniqueness.
  • Pricing: Pricing strategies appear to be competitive, but customer reviews indicate a desire for more affordable options.
  • Product Curation: Focus on curating a selection of high-quality, truly artisanal products to differentiate your platform.
  • Competitive Pricing: Offer competitive pricing while maintaining the unique value proposition of handmade items.
  • Customer Engagement: Implement strategies to engage customers and gather feedback for continuous improvement.

These examples illustrate how market analysis informs critical business decisions. Whether entering a new market, launching a product, or competing in e-commerce, a data-driven approach empowers you to make informed choices and increase your chances of success.

Remember that market analysis is an ongoing process, and staying updated with evolving market dynamics is essential for long-term success.

Market analysis is your secret weapon for success in the ever-evolving business landscape. By understanding your market, customers, and competition, you gain the knowledge to make informed decisions, identify growth opportunities, and stay ahead of the curve.

Remember, market analysis is not a one-time task; it's an ongoing journey. Continuously gather data, adapt your strategies, and embrace the power of real-time insights. With the right tools and knowledge, you have the potential to turn market analysis into a dynamic force that propels your business to new heights.

How to Conduct Market Analysis in Minutes?

Looking to supercharge your market analysis? Look no further than Appinio , the real-time market research platform changing the game. With Appinio, you can harness the power of real-time consumer insights to make data-driven decisions that drive your business forward.

  • Lightning-Fast Insights: Say goodbye to waiting weeks for market research results. Appinio delivers answers to your burning questions in minutes.
  • Instant Decision-Making: With real-time consumer insights at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions on the fly, giving your business a competitive edge.
  • User-Friendly and Intuitive: Market research doesn't have to be a daunting task. Appinio's user-friendly platform makes it easy for anyone to access and interpret valuable data.

Say goodbye to the old stigma of market research being boring, intimidating, and overpriced. It's time to unlock the power of real-time insights and drive your success.

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What Is a Market Analysis?

by Alecia Mouhanna , on April 10, 2019

business plan market analysis

While it’s possible to try to perform your own market analysis, often your best bet is to turn to qualified market research providers like The Freedonia Group, Packaged Facts, and Simba Information, who can provide small- and large-scale industry insights backed by decades of experience and expertise. 

How to Perform a Market Analysis

Experienced research firms understand how to conduct a market analysis so that it is both comprehensive and concise, answering a range of questions, including (but not limited to):

  • What is the market size?
  • Who is the target customer?
  • What is the competitor environment?
  • Is the market growing or contracting?
  • What are potential disruptors?

Taking into account these key queries, a market analysis provides a high-level perspective on the business environment, identifying both opportunities and restraining factors. Credible market research firms can combine primary and secondary research like government statistics, trade publications, and interviews with other industry experts to answer these questions and generate the most accurate possible picture of the industry.

Examples of Market Analysis

Market analysis is not always one-size-fits-all, and the type that will best suit your business’ needs will depend on your budget and strategic goals. Here are a few key examples of the kinds of high-quality market analysis you can find through Marketresearch.com and its publishing brands.

Comprehensive Industry Reports:  These reports are extensive and wide in scope, offering a broad look at an industry. Reports like these offer not only top line growth rates, but forecasts based on market segmentation and market share by top products and competitors. These studies account for disruptions, regulatory shifts, consumer trends, and other factors that are expected to impact an industry over the forecast period and beyond.

Niche/Hot Topic Studies:  Niche reports offer in-depth examination of fast-growing or revolutionary new product segments that are likely to have significant impact on their overall industries over the short- and/or long-term.

Focus Reports: These are short-format market research reports, intended to provide quick insights on a large number of products and services. The reports center on sizing, segmenting and forecasting markets as well as identifying key suppliers, against a backdrop of key quantitative and qualitative trends.

Custom Research: When off-the-shelf research isn’t available to meet a business' specific needs, clients can commission custom research reports that are tailored to the company's exact requirements. These reports provide enhanced insights on decisions and initiatives such as strategic planning, new product development, geographic market expansion, mergers and acquisitions, competitive intelligence, and much more.

How Can Market Analysis Improve Your Business Plan?

Whether you’re a smaller tier player looking to increase market share, or a leading industry participant defending a top market position, using a market analysis can be beneficial to your business planning. A market analysis can identify not only what the industry is presently doing but where it is going, highlighting areas with the most promising growth opportunities.

Thus, companies that utilize market research are better equipped to make informed decisions regarding research and development and manufacturing investments, regional market entries and expansions, and growth and diversification through M&A activity and new product development.

To Learn More About Market and Industry Analysis

Interested in finding out more about how market research can help you seek new opportunities? Check out  MarketResearch.com's free white paper  Finding Business Opportunities: The Importance of Market Research .  Download the white paper to learn how companies use syndicated research to gain a competitive edge and drive business growth.  

Finding Business Opportunities: The Importance of Market Research

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What is a Competitive Analysis — and How Do You Conduct One?

Christine White

Published: November 10, 2022

10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates

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Track and analyze your competitors with these ten free planning templates.

Thank you for downloading the offer.

When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand? And most importantly, do you know how to do one efficiently?

marketing conducting a competitive analysis

If you‘re unsure or if the last "analysis" you ran was a quick perusal of a competitor’s website, you're likely missing out on important intelligence that could help your brand grow.

Download Now: 10 Competitive Analysis Templates [Free Templates]

In this detailed guide, you'll learn how to conduct a competitive analysis to give your business an advantage.

Table of Contents

What is a competitive analysis?

  • Understanding Competitive Market Research

Competitive Analysis in Marketing

How to do a competitive analysis, competitive product analysis, competitive analysis example, competitive analysis templates, competitive analysis: faqs, what is a competitive market analysis.

A competitive analysis is a strategy that involves researching major competitors to gain insight into their products, sales, and marketing tactics. Implementing stronger business strategies, warding off competitors, and capturing market share are just a few benefits of conducting a competitive market analysis.

A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works and identify potential opportunities where you can outperform them. It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your product is consistently meeting — and exceeding — industry standards.

Let's dive into a few more benefits of conducting competitive analyses:

  • Helps you identify your product's unique value proposition and what makes your product different from your competitors, which can inform future marketing efforts.
  • Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring your product and marketing campaigns outperform industry standards.
  • Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace and test out new, unique marketing strategies they haven't taken advantage of.
  • Learn through customer reviews what‘s missing in a competitor’s product, and consider how you might add features to your own product to meet those needs.
  • Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure your growth.

Competitive analysis is a meticulous strategy that dives deep into the operations of your prime competitors.

It's not just about knowing what they offer. You need to understand their sales strategies, marketing tactics, and the ethos driving their brand.

analysis market research

  • SWOT Analysis
  • Battle Cards
  • Feature Comparison
  • Strategic Overview

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

10 Competitive Analysis Templates

Fill out the form to access the templates., why is a competitive analysis important.

The ripple effects of a well-executed competitive analysis are manifold:

  • Strategic business decisions. Anchoring your business strategies on solid, data-driven insights ensures you stay ahead in the game.
  • Fortifying defenses. By knowing what your competitors are up to, you can better defend your market share and even capture new territories.
  • Unearth golden opportunities. Delving into the intricacies of your competition’s operations can spotlight areas where you can shine brighter.

Beyond Just the Basics

While it's essential to understand how your competition operates, the real magic happens when you can:

  • Spot your unique value. What sets you apart? How can you amplify that difference in your marketing efforts?
  • Learn from their triumphs. Your competitors might just be doing something genius. Identifying their strengths ensures you're always at par, if not ahead.
  • Discover their shortcomings. Every brand has its Achilles' heel. Find it. This knowledge can carve out opportunities and new strategies for your business.
  • Tap into customer sentiments. Dive into customer reviews. What’s lacking in their product? Can you incorporate those missing features into your offerings?
  • Benchmark your progress. Your journey is unique. However, setting a benchmark based on your competitors can offer valuable growth metrics.

What is competitive market research?

Competitive market research is a vital exercise that goes beyond merely comparing products or services.

It involves an in-depth analysis of the market metrics that distinguish your offerings from those of your competitors.

A thorough market research doesn't just highlight these differences but leverages them, laying a solid foundation for a sales and marketing strategy that truly differentiates your business in a bustling market.

In the next section, we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of conducting a detailed competitive analysis tailored to your brand.

Every brand can benefit from regular competitor analysis. By performing a competitor analysis, you'll be able to:

  • Identify gaps in the market.
  • Develop new products and services.
  • Uncover market trends.
  • Market and sell more effectively.

As you can see, learning any of these four components will lead your brand down the path of achievement.

Next, let's dive into some steps you can take to conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis.

  • Determine who your competitors are.
  • Determine what products your competitors offer.
  • Research your competitors' sales tactics and results.
  • Take a look at your competitors' pricing, as well as any perks they offer.
  • Ensure you're meeting competitive shipping costs.
  • Analyze how your competitors market their products.
  • Take note of your competition's content strategy.
  • Learn what technology stack your competitors use.
  • Analyze the level of engagement on your competitors' content.
  • Observe how they promote marketing content.
  • Look at their social media presence, strategies, and go-to platforms.
  • Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

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How to Conduct Marketing Research and Analysis

Two professionals analyzing company documents

A key component of running any successful business is regularly conducting market analysis—a process that provides insight into where the company is and where it's heading. This analysis contains qualitative and quantitative marketing research, primary and secondary research, and additional data points regarding positioning, industry and market statistics, insights into consumer attitudes and buying habits, customer satisfaction, and more.

According to the global data and business intelligence platform Statista, the worldwide market research industry surpassed $81 billion in 2022. 1 The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects that employment in the industry is due to grow 13% over the next ten years. 2 In light of that strength and likely rapid expansion, facility with marketing research and analysis is an increasingly valuable skill. Keep reading to explore some of the key elements of this essential process.

Market Research, Marketing Research, and Other Key Terms

It’s important to understand the differences between market research/analysis and marketing research/analysis. The terms are similar but the meanings are distinct: 3

  • Market research: A study done to collect statistics on a given market within a specific industry
  • Market analysis: Interpretation of market information to determine a market’s size, growth potential, audience, and competitive landscape 4
  • Marketing research: The process of collecting data to understand consumer behaviors, preferences, and market dynamics
  • Marketing analysis: Evaluating and interpreting collected data to draw conclusions, derive actionable insights, and make informed, data-driven marketing decisions

In addition, as you get further into marketing research and analysis, you’ll need to be familiar with these terms:

  • Quantitative marketing research involves gathering numerical data to quantify and analyze patterns and relationships in consumer behavior
  • Qualitative marketing research involves gathering information that isn't expressed in numbers to gain insights into consumer behaviors, attitudes, and motivations
  • Ethnographic research is the process of studying a target audience's environment to gain a clearer understanding of potential customers’ behaviors and preferences
  • Market segmentation is the process of dividing a target market into distinct groups of consumers; each group of people shares similar characteristics or needs
  • Data mining is the process of analyzing large datasets to identify patterns, relevant trends, and valuable marketing insights; data mining for marketing insights is used to influence strategizing and decision-making
  • Competitive analysis: By analyzing competitors to understand their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning, businesses become able to identify opportunities and threats
  • Market trend analysis is the examination of historic and current market data to identify patterns and emerging trends

Primary and Secondary Research in Marketing: What’s the Difference?

To conduct thorough, effective marketing research and analysis, you need both primary and secondary data.

Primary research involves original data collected directly from targeted sources. This is typically done through in-person or online surveys, focus group studies, observations, or experiments.

Primary research offers several distinct advantages. It’s highly relevant due to its freshness and the researchers’ ability to customize the surveys or studies they administer. It also allows analysts to hone in on the specific market they're trying to understand, which leads to sharper data precision and accuracy.

Secondary research, on the other hand, uses existing information that others have previously collected in the form of published reports, articles, academic papers, market research reports, government publications, industry databases, or historical data.

Secondary research is more cost-effective and saves time because it doesn’t require data collection. It also provides a broader perspective by offering a comprehensive view of trends and historical information.

How to Conduct Quantitative and Qualitative Marketing Research

Quantitative marketing research is a structured process that involves gathering, processing, and interpreting numerical data.

  • The process begins with defining specific research objectives and selecting an appropriate quantitative research method, such as experiments or customer surveys
  • Researchers then develop a structured instrument, like a questionnaire, to collect numerical data from a representative sample
  • After data collection, meticulous data entry is essential for ensuring accuracy
  • Analysts then employ statistical analysis methods, such as descriptive and inferential statistics, to interpret the data

Qualitative research delves more into the motivations behind consumer behavior by analyzing non-numerical information. By its nature, qualitative data can be ephemeral—hard to quantify. The research process can involve listening to recordings from focus group studies, reading social media comments and reviews, and understanding subtext from customers based on visual and other non-verbal cues.

  • Similar to quantitative marketing research, qualitative research begins by selecting a research method, such as individual interviews or focus groups, and defining research objectives
  • Researchers then carefully recruit a diverse set of participants that represent a target audience
  • During data collection, the use of open-ended discussions and follow-up questions can uncover meaningful insights that might not be readily apparent at the outset
  • Afterward, transcribing the data and looking for recurring themes and patterns can allow researchers to interpret the findings within the context of the research objectives

How To Present Market Research and Analysis

Once you’ve completed marketing research and analysis, you’ll likely be called upon to present your findings. If market research techniques come easily to you but presenting before other people seems daunting, a few simple strategies can streamline the process:

Focus on Key Insights

Highlight the most important findings to avoid overwhelming your audience with too much data. They don’t need or want to know every fact that your research turned up, so stick to the information that addresses their priorities. Be ready to answer questions with contextual, detailed information if people ask for it, but keep the structure of your presentation focused on the big-ticket items.

Use Data Visualization

Data visualization involves using software to display substantial amounts of information in a graphic format: as dashboards, pie charts, graphs, and so on. By presenting your findings visually, you can share them with diverse audiences—company leadership, clients, and other stakeholders—in engaging, relatable ways.

Tell a Story

Frame your presentation as a narrative—that is, tell a story—to engage your audience even more and make your findings memorable. Encourage your audience to ask questions. This turns your presentation into a collaborative dialogue, keeps them involved, and helps you shine as you present direct answers to address their needs.

Add Marketing Research and Analysis to Your Expertise

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1. Retrieved on September 21, 2023, from statista.com/topics/1293/market-research/#topicOverview 2. Retrieved on September 21, 2023, from bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/market-research-analysts.htm 3. Retrieved on September 21, 2023, from keydifferences.com/difference-between-market-research-and-marketing-research.html 4. Retrieved on September 21, 2023, from coursera.org/articles/market-analysis

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Market Research and Analysis - Part 1: Why Technical Analysis?

Greg Morris

Greg Morris

Note to the reader: This is the twelfth in a series of articles I'm publishing here taken from my book, "Investing with the Trend." Hopefully, you will find this content useful. Market myths are generally perpetuated by repetition, misleading symbolic connections, and the complete ignorance of facts. The world of finance is full of such tendencies, and here, you'll see some examples. Please keep in mind that not all of these examples are totally misleading -- they are sometimes valid -- but have too many holes in them to be worthwhile as investment concepts. And not all are directly related to investing and finance. Enjoy! - Greg

Technical analysis offers an unbiased truth about the markets. If one is going to follow and utilize a particular discipline, hopefully they have done a thorough investigation as to the benefits and pitfalls of that discipline.

Today I'll share a short story from the mid-1970s, a period of my life when I was a Navy fighter pilot, and, of course, knew everything. I had a few thousand dollars that I wanted to invest. I honestly can't recall my source for research, but I'm almost positive I didn't pay for any of it; probably a trip to the Public Library and probably the Value Line Investment Survey. This is a giant black ring binder with a single page dedicated to a single stock in the Value Line universe of about 1,700 issues. I know the research was quite thorough, and it probably took me a few months to even work up the nerve to actually speculate (I called it invest back then) in the market. I don't even recall the small brokerage firm I used, but I do remember that discount firms were being talked about, though none were in existence then (I think). There was no FNN (Financial News Network), CNBC, Fox Business, or Bloomberg television in those days.

My research efforts involved the typical fundamental review looking for stocks that met a host of different criteria, using ratios such as price to earnings, price to dividend, price to book, and so on. I do know that the price to sales ratio had not been created yet; I think it was developed by Ken Fisher in the 1970s and became widely used in the 1980s. So I bought two stocks in late 1972; I remember that one of them was UAL (United Airlines). Clearly my bias for aviation was part of the decision—a bias that this book is trying to teach is totally wrong.

For two months, they went straight up. I have to be honest, I thought I was truly brilliant. I was euphoric. Then, in early 1973, my brilliance turned to anxiety when the prices of both stocks started to decline. Fear of losing money was now dominating my thought process. Strangely, nothing entered my mind in regard to selling those stocks, or putting a stop loss order in (I doubt I even knew what that was then), I just knew I was right and was going to prove it. Well, as I recall, I held those two stocks until sometime in 1975. They had declined with the market and, by the end of 1974, were down 75 percent from where I bought them. I had no stops, I had no plan, I had no money management, I had nothing but an ego that kept me totally wrong for two years. The market started up in early 1975 and I was so happy to unload them for a few percentage points above their bottom, I swore I'd never gamble in the market again. However, I remember that it sure made me feel good to buy a stock, because the financial ratios were good. Fortunately, I quickly learned that feeling good has very little to do with making money in the markets.

It was then that I read a book, suggested by a good friend, called The Art of Low Risk Investing , by Michael Zahorchak. I had previously read a few other books on technical analysis, but none of them involved a process; they usually dealt with chart patterns, and so on. Zahorchak offered a complete and rational technical process to investing. The book has long been out of print, but I'm sure you can find it on eBay or somewhere. If you are having doubts about technical analysis, this book will correct that. I have never deviated from technical analysis since that experience in the mid-1970s; I believe it is the best way to help investors control their emotions during the investment process.

Figure 9.1 shows the NYSE Composite Index with my interpretation of the Zahorchak method overlaid. Whenever the Zahorchak method line is above zero (horizontal line), one should be invested in equities; when below zero, one should be invested in cash or cash equivalents. One could further fine-tune it by using various levels for different asset commitments to enhance the process. The Zahorchak method uses only weekly data, with moving averages of 5, 15, and 40 on the NYSE Composite Index and the NYSE Advance Decline Line for its signals. The same process is then applied to stocks for selection. A complete set of rules is given on how to make trades from that data.

analysis market research

Now, within technical analysis, there are many varied approaches. Many of which I have tried, but was not successful. I like to say that I have a master's degree in what not to do, as those lessons came at a significant cost. As I have aged, I have slowly learned not to speak in absolutes about the market, as any approach that one can use to be successful is the right approach for that person. Just because I don't care for some approach does not mean that someone else cannot use it successfully.

There are different types of market analysis. The most widely used is fundamental analysis, which focuses on multiples or fundamental ratios. Almost 90 percent of these ratios use price, usually in the numerator or sometimes in the denominator. Price earnings ratio, price to sales, price to dividends, price to book ratio, and so on, are just a few of them.

Technical analysis, however, is the analysis of price. Price is what we buy. When you buy a stock, you are not buying the earnings, the products, the management, dividends; you are buying the stock at a market-generated price. Those other things might be why you buy it, but they are not what you are buying, you are buying the stock, not the company.

Trend determination is the trend of the price that we are analyzing. Trend analysis is a significant part of what this book is all about. Breadth analysis is a derivative of price movement; it is a critical contribution to technical analysis. Relative strength analysis is the analysis of one group relative to another; one example is the relationship between small-capitalization stocks and large-capitalization stocks. However, most importantly, technical analysis bridges the gap between doing the analysis and taking action—it is just the next step.

What is Technical Analysis?

Martin Pring says the art of technical analysis is to identify trend changes at an early stage and to maintain an investment position until the weight of the evidence indicates that the trend has reversed. Although there are other definitions, Pring's definition is the one I agree with. It is primarily used two ways: predictive and reactive. Most newsletter writers, television experts, and brokerage firm analysts use it to predict the market. The reactive mode means that it is used to measure what the market is doing, then just react to that information. The subject of this book is all about the latter. React, don't predict.

For additional reading on technical analysis, I strongly recommend  Technical Analysis , by Charlie Kirkpatrick and Julie Dahlquist. It is the best single volume on technical analysis there is.

I Use Technical Analysis Because...

It is something we can believe in and rely on. It removes the destructive emotions of fear, hope, and greed.

"Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process." — Benjamin Graham (the great value investor)

It keeps our perceptions clear.

"It ain't what you know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." — Mark Twain

And the absolute most important thing technical analysis does is it gives us discipline.

I want to share a story with you. I have been on a diet my entire adult life. Seriously! Last spring (as of this writing), my wife and I were driving in the north Georgia mountains one Sunday afternoon. I stopped at an old filling station for gas. It had the old-style pumps, so I had to go inside to pay for the gas. I see a candy bar near the register and buy it. As I 'm walking back to the car, I can see my wife giving me "that look." You know that look, don't you? I get in the car and she says, "You just don't have any discipline." I said, "That's not true, because you don't know how many of these I wanted."

I tell that story because discipline is not a knob or a lever that you can subjectively set each day. Discipline is something that must be instilled into your life and your work. I think everyone will agree that when it comes to investing, a disciplined approach is probably going to be a better approach. I'll take that one step further and say that a disciplined life is probably going to be a good life. Discipline is a critical element for success in the stock market and in life.

The Challenge of Technical Analysis

"I know of no way of judging the future but by the past." — Patrick Henry

Warning: I share passionate opinions in this section. As of this writing, I am approaching 40 years of being actively involved in technical analysis; you can assume correctly that I have some strong opinions on things. To be perfectly honest, those opinions have changed from time to time, but I do want to share them here. Does this mean that I think I am correct and anything I question is wrong? Not at all, most of technical and, in particular, market analysis is arguable and controversial. I just focus on what works for me.

What is technical analysis? Books are filled with definitions and interpretations on technical analysis. A significant part of technical analysis is the art of studying the past, attempting to identify a pattern or event that seems to represent or reflect the market being studied, and then believing that it will work with some certainty in the foreseeable future.

My definition for technical analysis and my adherence to using it comes from a belief that everyone needs something to believe in or rely on. I believe in technical analysis because of its close relationship to the supply and demand of the market. Fundamental analysis, which is by far a more popular method of analysis, is generally flawed in that it does not address the issue of "when." When should I buy or when should I sell? Researching the hundreds of different fundamental ratios is the full-time job of thousands of securities analysts. However, think about this simple fact. Almost all fundamental ratios involve price. So why not analyze price? Most forms of technical analysis do just that.

Is technical analysis the same as market timing? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Market timing has received a bad rap, especially by those who believe it is a process by some who blindly follow some over-optimized mechanical system without utilizing money management or an asset commitment plan. In that regard, its bad rap is appropriate. The analysis of risk and reward is not market timing in the sense that many think of when using that often misused term. Determining when the market has too much risk is not market timing, but prudent and discretionary investment decision-making. Next time you hear a brokerage firm analyst mention that no one can time the market, or that technical analysis does not work, ask to see his record during the bear markets of 2000 to 2002 or 2007 to 2009. Heck, he probably wasn't a stockbroker then anyway. I hate it when I call salespeople stockbrokers. They are not stockbrokers, as that is what the company they work for is called; they are salespeople for a stockbroker. I feel better now.

I have a cassette tape that I received from Sedge Coppock, the founder of the San Antonio firm, Trendex. This was in 1983 when I was heading a group of technical analysts in Dallas and wanted him to come up and speak to us. He declined, but sent a tape, which was about 30 minutes in length, in which he said how inept most investors were at controlling their emotions and that even worse than that was when they sought advice from a stockbroker. Sedge did not hold stockbrokers in high regard. I was fortunate to attend the Market Technician's Association annual seminar in Naples, Florida in 1989 when Edwin Sedgwick Chittenden Coppock received their highest award, the MTA Annual Award. He passed away the next year.

Another challenge to technical analysis is that of whether it is an art or a science. I cannot believe anyone would seriously ask this, and suspect the question comes almost totally from the nonscientific or the innumerate among us. I do believe that scientists, engineers, and mathematically inclined investors migrate toward technical analysis over time because of its ability to look back in history and see how supply and demand played out. It is certainly a more analytical approach to market analysis.

Many claim that technical analysis is science. My response is that the person making the claim is neither a scientist nor an engineer, and clearly doesn't know the difference between art and science. Finance and economics are considered social sciences, which is a wide swath into the wrong direction. Neither are science, they are arts. You don't get a bachelor of science degree in them; you get a bachelor of arts degree.

Here's the difference between art and science. Science is when you can reliably repeat something within predefined parameters. For example, I know that at sea level, with the ambient temperature at 59 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 degrees Centigrade (59 - 32 = 27. 27 / 9 = 3. 3 x 5 = 15), and the atmospheric pressure is 29.92 inches or 1,013 millibars, that pure water H2O, in laboratory conditions, will boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Centigrade. I'll bet a large sum of money on it. I can't think of anything in finance, economics, or technical analysis in which I would do that.

Those who get excited and experience a warm feeling about the overused adjectives of quality, strong, healthy, and so on, when Wall Street talks about investing in specific companies, are surely the ones who think technical analysis is witchcraft. Years ago, I used to be entertained by watching Wall Street Week , and was humored by the fundamental analysts who would talk endlessly about how they liked to pick good quality companies and hold onto them. They then quickly point out the Ibbotson study that shows that equities have performed at about a 9-plus percent annual rate for the past 100 years. Hogwash! While the study is true, it is totally irrelevant as one does not have a 100-year investment horizon, and is therefore not applicable to humans. Most investors have a good 20-year period in which to make their serious investments. There were many 20-year periods in the past 100 years that resulted in negative or inadequate returns. The most egregious example is if you had bought in 1929, you did not break even until 1954; 25 years later. And guess what, getting even is not what investing is all about.

A good detective will tell you that some of the least reliable information comes from eyewitnesses. When people observe an event, it seems their background, education, and other influences unrelated to the observed event, color their perception of what occurred. Most will also be influenced by what they hear from others. This is also amplified by a number of individual studies done by behavior psychologists. In a nutshell, they all agree that groups of people will tend to amplify the consensus view rather than challenge it. A group's ability to focus on common knowledge and uncover anything new is commonplace. Plus the fact that if someone in the group is acknowledged as an expert, their opinion can totally dominate the thinking for the group and can lead to what is known as the herd mentality. Talk radio is a perfect example of this.

"The riskiest moment is when you are right. That's when you're in the most trouble, because you tend to overstay the good decisions." — Peter Bernstein

I don't want to turn this into a science book, but I am adamant about correcting the proliferation of bad or incorrect information that exists in the financial markets and by showing you similar misconceptions that you may have believed before is the best way to get your attention. In a previous chapter, there was a discussion about believable misinformation; if you found that you believed one or more of those misconceptions, then how many market-related ones do you also believe?

Technical analysis will let you deal with reality and keep you from falling victim every time the financial news offers their expert opinion on why the markets did today what they did. I remember when the Indonesian earthquake tidal waves killed thousands of people, but you could not begin to know how many during the initial broadcasts. Most news sources were stating guesses anywhere from 15,000 to well over 150,000. Many news sources cannot even keep the number consistent within their own articles. Do you think they can also tell you why the markets did what they did on a daily basis? Stick to technical analysis; it will increase your understanding of the markets, if only by the fact that you are uncovering information about market behavior.

Here are some comments on technical analysis that I read more than 35 years ago in The Commodities Futures Game by Richard Teweles, and believe to be just as valid today. Almost all methods of technical analysis generate useful information, which, if used for nothing more than uncovering and organizing facts about market behavior will increase the investor's understanding of the markets. The investor is made painfully aware that technical competence does not ensure competent investing. Speculators who lose money do so not always because of bad analysis, but because of the inability to transform their analysis into sound practice. Bridging the gap between analysis and action requires overcoming the threat of greed, hope, and fear.

Technical analysis is the art of analysis that will keep your emotions from being a part of your investment decision making. While not infallible, it certainly gives you the tools to assist in overcoming the human traits of ignorance and bliss. Ignorance is an intellectual state and appears to be chronic in many people as regards to the stock market. Bliss is an emotional state and it characterizes many investors as long as the market is going up. Deluded by emotions, one cannot begin to be successful in the investing arena without some means of controlling greed, fear, and hope. This is what I think technical analysis does best.

Thanks for reading this far. I intend to publish one article in this series every week. Can't wait? The book is for sale  here

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New immigration estimates help make sense of the pace of employment

Media inquiries, subscribe to the center for economic security and opportunity newsletter, wendy edelberg and wendy edelberg director - the hamilton project , senior fellow - economic studies @wendyedelberg tara watson tara watson director - center for economic security and opportunity , david m. rubenstein fellow - economic studies @taraelizwatson.

March 7, 2024

Key takeaways:

  • This analysis considers the macroeconomic implications of recent estimates of immigration flows.
  • Recent immigration flows are notably higher than previous projections. New numbers from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that 3.3 million net immigrants arrived in 2023 compared to the 1.0 million projected prior to the pandemic.
  • Higher immigration rates mean that employment growth does not need to slow significantly to get the labor market to a sustainable pace: The authors estimate that the labor market in 2023 could accommodate employment growth of 160,000 to 230,000—versus previous projections of 60,000 to 130,000—without adding pressure to wages and price inflation.
  • The uptick can also help to explain the surprising strength in consumer spending and overall economic growth since 2022.

In this analysis, we consider recent immigration flows and their potential macroeconomic implications. Interpreting the current labor market requires understanding recent immigration: how many people arrived and how they engaged in the economy. Recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggest much higher rates of recent immigration than were previously projected. In 2019, CBO projected that net immigration in 2023 would total 1.0 million people; Now, the agency estimates that net immigration last year was 3.3 million . Moreover, we estimate that CBO’s current immigration estimates suggest faster population and labor force growth in recent years than currently reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) using Census population estimates.  

Prior to the pandemic, the range of population and labor force participation projections from CBO, the BLS, and the Social Security Administration (SSA) suggested that sustainable employment growth (that which did not put unwelcome pressure on inflation) would be between 60,000 and 140,000 per month in 2022 and, as more people retired, fall to between 60,000 and 100,000 per month by 2024 (table 1). According to the Employment Situation Report from BLS, employment growth in 2023 averaged 255,000 per month, two to four times the pace that had been considered sustainable.   

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Many observers took this as evidence that the labor market was much too tight and needed to soften significantly in order to get inflation down. But, using the new CBO estimates of net immigration released in January 2024, we estimate that the labor market in 2023 could have sustainably accommodated employment growth of 160,000 to 230,000. That is still below the actual monthly increases in employment in 2023, but far less so than previously estimated. Similarly, for 2024 we estimate sustainable employment growth will be between 160,000 and 200,000, approximately double the sustainable level that would have occurred in absence of the pickup in immigration according to the pre-pandemic projections from CBO, BLS, and SSA.   

Source: CBO 2019b; CBO 2020; BLS 2017; BLS 2019; SSA 2019; CBO 2022; CBO 2023. Note: Range of pre-pandemic estimates includes potential employment growth from CBO (2019) and CBO (2020) as well as projected employment from BLS (2017), BLS (2019), and SSA (2019), which are far enough from the date those projections were published that the employment growth reported here is interpreted to include only non-cyclical factors. To estimate SSA projections, we use the BLS (2019) baseline number in 2019 and SSA’s stated labor force growth rate of 0.8 annually from 2018 to 2028. To account for higher immigration than projected, the initial ranges are adjusted by the upward revision since 2019 to CBO’s estimates of net immigration in 2022 and 2023 and projected immigration for 2024.

The unexpectedly high level of immigration also explains some of the surprising strength in consumer spending and overall economic growth since 2022. Moreover, we expect immigration flows to further boost economic growth in 2024.  

Although we focus here on the near-term boost to the aggregate economy from greater immigration, the forces we describe are also relevant in the long term. The United States is facing a demographic challenge because of lower fertility rates and population aging. Recent Census projections make it clear that the growth of the U.S. population in coming decades will hinge critically on the level of immigration.  

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Lauren Bauer, Eric Jensen, John Sabelhaus, and Louise Sheiner for their generous feedback. We thank Cameron Greene, Simon Hodson, and Olivia Howard for their excellent research assistance.

The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here . The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.

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2024 Housing Market Forecast and Predictions: Housing Affordability Finally Begins to Turnaround

Danielle Hale

As we look ahead to 2024 , we see a mix of continuity and change in both the housing market and economy. Against a backdrop of modest economic growth, slightly higher unemployment, and easing inflation longer term interest rates including mortgage rates begin a slow retreat. The shift from climbing to falling mortgage rates improves housing affordability, but saps some of the urgency home shoppers had previously sensed. Less frenzied housing demand and plenty of rental home options keep home sales relatively stable at low levels in 2024, helping home prices to adjust slightly lower even as the number of for-sale homes continues to dwindle. 

Realtor.com ® 2024 Forecast for Key Housing Indicators

analysis market research

Home Prices Dip, Improving Affordability

Home prices grew at a double-digit annual clip for the better part of two years spanning the second half of 2020 through 2022, a notable burst following a growing streak that spanned back to 2012. As mortgage rates climbed, home price growth flatlined, actually declining on an annual basis in early 2023 before an early-year dip in mortgage rates spurred enough buyer demand to reignite competition for still-limited inventory. Home prices began to climb again, and while they did not reach a new monthly peak, on average for the year we expect that the 2023 median home price will slightly exceed the 2022 annual median.

Nevertheless, even during the brief period when prices eased, using a mortgage to buy a home remained expensive. Since May 2022, purchasing the typical for-sale home listing at the prevailing rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a 20% down payment meant forking over a quarter or more of the typical household paycheck. In fact, in October 2023, it required 39% of the typical household income and this share is expected to average 36.7% for the full calendar year in 2023. This figure has typically ranged around 21%, so it is well above historical average. We expect that the return to pricing in line with financing costs will begin in 2024, and home prices, mortgage rates, and income growth will each contribute to the improvement. Home prices are expected to ease slightly, dropping less than 2% for the year on average. Combined with lower mortgage rates and income growth this will improve the home purchase mortgage payment share relative to median income to an average 34.9% in 2024, with the share slipping under 30% by the end of the year.

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Home Sales Barely Budge Above 2023’s Likely Record Low

After soaring during the pandemic, existing home sales were weighed down in the latter half of 2022 as mortgage rates took off, climbing from just over 3% at the start of the year to a peak of more than 7% in the fourth quarter. The reprieve in mortgage rates in early 2023, when they dipped to around 6%, brought some life to home sales, but the renewed climb of mortgage rates has again exerted significant pressure on home sales that is exacerbated by the fact that a greater than usual number of households bought homes over the past few years, and despite stories of pandemic purchase regret , for the most part, these homeowners continue to be happy in their homes. 

This is consistent with what visitors to Realtor.com report when asked why they are not planning to sell their homes. The number one reason homeowners aren’t trying to sell is that they just don’t need to; concern about losing an existing low-rate mortgage is the top financial concern cited. Our current projection is for 2023 home sales to tally just over 4 million, a dip of 19% over the 2022 5 million total. 

existing_sales_yearly

With many of the same forces at play heading into 2024, the housing chill will continue, with sales expected to remain essentially unchanged at just over 4 million. Although mortgage rates are expected to ease throughout the course of the year, the continuation of high costs will mean that existing homeowners will have a very high threshold for deciding to move, with many likely choosing to stay in place.  Moves of necessity–for job changes, family situation changes, and downsizing to a more affordable market–are likely to drive home sales in 2024. 

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Shoppers Find Even Fewer Existing Homes For Sale

Even before the pandemic, housing inventory was on a long, slow downward trajectory. Insufficient building meant that the supply of houses did not keep up with household formation and left little slack in the housing market. Both homeowner and rental vacancy remain below historic averages . In contrast with the existing home market, which remains sluggish, builders have been catching up, with construction remaining near pre-pandemic highs for single-family and hitting record levels for multi-family . 

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Despite this, the lack of excess capacity in housing has been painfully obvious in the for-sale home market. The number of existing homes on the market has dwindled. With home sales activity to continue at a relatively low pace, the number of unsold homes on the market is also expected to remain low.  Although mortgage rates are expected to begin to ease, they are expected to exceed 6.5% for the calendar year. This means that the lock-in effect, in which the gap between market mortgage rates and the mortgage rates existing homeowners enjoy on their outstanding mortgage, will remain a factor. Roughly two-thirds of outstanding mortgages have a rate under 4% and more than 90% have a rate less than 6%.

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Rental Supply Outpaces Demand to Drive Mild Further Decline in Rents

After almost a full year of double-digit rent growth between mid-2021 and mid-2022, the rental market has finally cooled down, as evidenced by the year-over-year decline that started in May 2023 . In 2024, we expect the rental market will closely resemble the dynamics witnessed in 2023, as the tug of war between supply and demand results in a mild annual decline of -0.2% in the median asking rent.

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New multi-family supply will continue to be a key element shaping the 2024 rental market.  In the third quarter of 2023, the annual pace of newly completed multi-family homes stood at 385,000 units. Although absorption rates remained elevated in the second quarter, especially at lower price points, the rental vacancy rate ticked up to 6.6% in the third quarter. This uptick in rental vacancy suggests the recent supply has outpaced demand, but context is important. After recent gains, the rental vacancy rate is on par with its level right before the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, still below its 7.2% average from the 2013 to 2019 period.  Looking ahead, the strong construction pipeline– which hit a record high for units under construction this summer –is expected to continue fueling rental supply growth in 2024 pushing rental vacancy back toward its long-run average. 

While the surge in new multi-family supply gives renters options, the sheer number of renters will minimize the potential price impact. The median asking rent in 2024 is expected to drop only slightly below its 2023 level. Renting is expected to continue to be a more budget friendly option than buying in the vast majority of markets, even though home prices and mortgage rates are both expected to dip, helping pull the purchase market down slightly from record unaffordability. 

Young adult renters who lack the benefit of historically high home equity to tap into for a home purchase will continue to find the housing market challenging. Specifically, as many Millennials age past first-time home buying age and more Gen Z approach these years, the current housing landscape is likely to keep these households in the rental market for a longer period as they work to save up more money for the growing down payment needed to buy a first home. This trend is expected to sustain robust demand for rental properties. Consequently, we anticipate that rental markets favored by young adults , a list which includes a mix of affordable areas and tech-heavy job markets in the South, Midwest, and West, will be rental markets to watch in 2024.

Key Wildcards:

  • Wildcard 1: Mortgage Rates With both mortgage rates and home prices expected to turn the corner in 2024, record high unaffordability will become a thing of the past, though as noted above, the return to normal won’t be accomplished within the year. This prediction hinges on the expectation that inflation will continue to subside, enabling the recent declines in longer-term interest rates to continue. If inflation were to instead see a surprise resurgence, this aspect of the forecast would change, and home sales could slip lower instead of steadying.
  • Wildcard 2: Geopolitics In our forecast for 2023 , we cited the risk of geopolitical instability on trade and energy costs as something to watch. In addition to Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, instability in the Middle East has not only had a catastrophic human toll, both conflicts have the potential to impact the economic outlook in ways that cannot be fully anticipated. 
  • Wildcard 3: Domestic Politics: 2024 Elections In 2020, amid the upheaval of pandemic-era adaptations, many Americans were on the move. We noted that Realtor.com traffic patterns indicated that home shoppers in very traditionally ‘blue’ or Democratic areas were tending to look for homes in markets where voters have more typically voted ‘red’ or Republican. While consumers also reported preferring to live in locations where their political views align with the majority , few actually reported wanting to move for this reason alone. 

Housing Perspectives:

What will the market be like for homebuyers, especially first-time homebuyers.

First-time homebuyers will continue to face a challenging housing market in 2024, but there are some green shoots. The record-high share of income required to purchase the median priced home is expected to begin to decline as mortgage rates ease, home prices soften, and incomes grow. In 2023 we expect that for the year as a whole, the monthly cost of financing the typical for-sale home will average more than $2,240, a nearly 20% increase over the mortgage payment in 2022, and roughly double the typical payment for buyers in 2020. This amounted to a whopping nearly 37% of the typical household income. In 2024 as modest price declines take hold and mortgage rates dip, the typical purchase cost is expected to slip just under $2,200 which would amount to nearly 35% of income. While far higher than historically average, this is a significant first step in a buyer-friendly direction.

How can homebuyers prepare? 

Homebuyers can prepare for this year’s housing market by getting financially ready. Buyers can use a home affordability calculator , like this one at Realtor.com to translate their income and savings into a home price range. And shoppers can pressure test the results by using a mortgage calculator to consider different down payment, price, and loan scenarios to see how their monthly costs would be impacted. Working with a lender can help potential buyers explore different loan products such as FHA or VA loans that may offer lower mortgage interest rates or more flexible credit criteria. 

Although prices are anticipated to fall in 2024, housing costs remain high, and a down payment can be a big obstacle for buyers. Recent research shows that the typical down payment on a home reached a record high of $30,000 .  To make it easier to cobble together a down payment, shoppers can access information about down payment assistance options at Realtor.com/fairhousing and in the monthly payment section of home listing pages. Furthermore, home shoppers can explore loan products geared toward helping families access homeownership by enabling down payments as low as 3.5% in the case of FHA loans and 0% in the case of VA loans .

What will the market be like for home sellers?

Home sellers are likely to face more competition from builders than from other sellers in 2024. Because builders are continuing to maintain supply and increasingly adapting to market conditions, they are increasingly focused on lower-priced homes and willing to make price adjustments when needed. As a result, potential sellers will want to consider the landscape for new construction housing in their markets and any implications for pricing and marketing before listing their home for sale.

What will the market be like for renters?

In 2024, renting is expected to continue to be a more cost-effective option than buying in the short term even though we anticipate the advantage for renting to diminish as home prices and mortgage rates decline. 

However, for those considering the pursuit of long-term equity through homeownership, it’s essential to not only stay alert about market trends but also to carefully consider the intended duration of residence in their next home. When home prices rise rapidly, like they did during the pandemic, the higher cost of purchasing a home may break even with the cost of renting in as little as 3 years. Generally, it takes longer to reach the breakeven point, typically within a 5 to 7-year timeframe. Importantly, when home prices are falling and rents are also declining, as is expected to be the case in 2024, it can take longer to recoup some of the higher costs of buying a home. Individuals using Realtor.com’s Rent vs. Buy Calculator can thoroughly evaluate the costs and benefits associated with renting versus buying over time and how many years current market trends suggest it will take before buying is the better financial decision. This comprehensive tool can provide insights tailored to a household’s specific rent versus buying decision and empowers consumers to consider not only the optimal choice for the current month but also how the trade-offs evolve over several years.

Local Market Predictions:

All real estate is local and while the national trends are instructive, what matters most is what’s expected in your local market. 

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