Types of Market Research

1. How many types of market research are there, really?
2. The most common types
3. Listing some of the many types
4. Unpacking the most common techniques
5. The downfalls of doing market research on your own
6. How to get market research right - help & guidance
   

You want to grow your business, right? In turn, you’ll need to really, truly, and deeply understand your customers and potential customers with various types of market research.

So, how many types of market research are there, really?

There are many, many, (wait for it) many types of market research that exist in the world - which can all be used for different purposes. However, there are some industry favourites.

The most common market research types/techniques include:

1. Surveys
2. Interviews
3. Focus groups
4. Customer observation
   

But there are also many other types of market research, including:

• Market Segmentation - Asking various survey questions which identify needs, values, attitudes, behaviours & demographics.
• Brand Awareness and Reach - If you conduct regular brand awareness surveys you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
• Pricing Research - Asking your customers to choose between different products with unique features & price points, helps you identify what features are most valuable to your audience and what they’d be willing to pay for them.
• Product Testing - Testing if your product meets (or does not meet) your customer’s needs.
• Advertising Testing - Taking potential campaigns directly to your audience & testing their responses - this helps create your ideal advertising techniques.
• Satisfaction and Loyalty Analysis - Identifying key drivers of satisfaction & measuring the likelihood of customers to continue using your products and services.
  

Unpacking the most common types of market research

Surveys

A type of qualitative research, surveys ask respondents a series of open- or closed-ended questions, which can be delivered as an online questionnaire or via email. Surveys are super easy and inexpensive to run and quickly deliver lots of insightful data.

Interviews

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with people in your target market. An in-person interview is ideal for really digging deep (while also being able to read body language). An in-depth interview will always produce big benefits in deeply understanding your target customers.

When you speak directly to an ideal customer, you gain greater empathy for their pain points and you can spend more time understanding their specific needs or wants.

Focus research groups

Focus groups bring a selected group of people (from your target audience) and a trained moderator helps guide the group of people through a conversation. This conversation unpacks the product, user experience, as well as your marketing message to gain deeper insights.

If you’re new to market research, it isn’t ideal to start with focus groups. Firstly, it is expensive and your research could fall victim to all kinds of misunderstandings. Dominance bias, moderator style bias and group think bias are just a few of the many ways your focus group data could quickly get skewed.

Customer observation

A customer observation session allows for a company employee to take notes while they watch an ideal user engage with their product/service (or a similar product/service).

This type of observation is a great alternative to focus groups as it is less costly. You’ll also get to see how people interact with your product in a normal, day-to-day setting without influencing each other. However, you cannot get inside those customers’ heads, so observation is never a replacement for customer surveys or interviews.

The downfalls of doing market research alone

At the end of the day, if using these types of market research - you’re looking for market trends, with the aim to develop a seriously well-thought-out business and marketing strategy. So, what would be the downfalls of doing market research in-house?

Market research requires a fair amount of time and effort - that’s not a new concept. Yet, it is never just the time and effort to run the actual, market research experiments - it is also all the time needed to brainstorm who your potential customers are, find out where they are, and then still work out how to convince them to effortlessly share their insights.

Overall, conducting market research can be particularly tough if you are doing it alone. Data collection can be subject to various POPIA concerns and security - you may also be doubting how much you actually know about this. So, how do you get market research right?

How to get market research right -  help & guidance

Getting your market research right is important. It needs to be quick and accurate.

This means that in-house research may not be your best bet (you can still get brownie points for doing your homework by reading this article).

Let us make it easy - reach out to Yazi.