Top 10 Market Research Examples And Methods

Discover the top 10 market research examples and methods if you’re looking to conduct market research. 

Market research is a process of interaction with a general audience which is considered to be a target audience where there are several different aspects of a product or a service are discussed or interrogated from the target audience. 

What is Market Research?

The main reason for carrying market research is to know how will the public relate to your product or service and what will be the reaction to that product or service when launched.

It significantly helps businesses and organizations in order to create an image of their product response which in return helps them iterate the product like adding or removing some services or features. 

Any company or business can generate a great amount of revenue when market research is done right.

There are different types of market research, each of them is known by the method which is adopted in order to conduct the research and the results are measured in qualitative or quantitative forms. 

The different types are surveys, phone surveys, focus groups social media market research, and online interviews. These are categorized in terms of primary market research and secondary market research. Here we will discuss both of them.

What Is Primary Research?

Primary research is one that is conducted by the company or business itself. It does not include any kind of data taken from previous researches or studies. 

Each and everything related to the research is collected on the run time. It takes more time than the secondary research but the insights generated are usually more significant than the secondary research as this research is purposed to gather answers to some specific questions, it fills the gap which is left by the secondary research.

There are different types of primary research which are all discussed here:

Online polls and surveys

This is the most commonly known yet the most widely used method of conducting primary research. 

There are different types of online polls and surveys out there as there are many different questions that can be thoroughly asked in them for gathering quantitative data.

This research is used when you need to have more specific questions you’d want to answer so a survey can help a lot. 

Even if you want to gather data from a huge group of people, you can get assistance from a survey method of conducting research.

But this method can completely fail if there is a lack of information that you want to know, or you do not have enough time to conduct a survey even sometimes the money or audience required to do these surveys becomes the hurdles because of their unavailability.

Social Media Research

This type of market research is getting popular day by day as the process is very easy to do and there is less percentage that it will not work. 

Social media platforms are getting more traffic day by day and researchers use this research method to gather quantitative data that is true for a large portion of the population. They mostly use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn.

The good thing is that you can easily get the response of your target audience with almost no effort. And there are good chances that you will get the most results from your target audience about the product and its features.

Focus groups

This research method includes gathering data from a specific group of people. They are gathered in a place where they can think independently, and they can express their thoughts in a better way. 

The main idea is to ask a focused group of people some questions and give them time to answer the way they view it. 

This time will help them to think about their answers and then their answers will be recorded in order to measure the group’s perspective and views.

This is a rather expensive way of conducting research and most of the time the data can not be taken to be precise as the data could be different from the other people in the market.

The major problem with this research method is that it costs more than the other methods of conducting research.

One-To-One Interviews

This is the oldest and most popular research method of its time. This process is similar to that of a focus group, but its highlight is that the target person is interviewed alone rather than a group of people. 

This could be a very helpful method of conducting research because here, you can not only get the answers from the target audience, but you can also observe their body language, expressions, and confidence levels.

If meeting in person is not possible, this interview can also be conducted over a video call. The downside of this method is that the selected audience might not be right one selected and it is also a big investment of time to interview a large number of people.

Phone surveys

The phone survey method is just like the other methods in which you ask questions from a person, but this method is not executed in that way. 

It is only utilized when there is a need for verification of some data or the number of opinions about certain things needs to be increased. 

Then this method for conducting surveys is used. Here each of the people who are being contacted is talked separately and being asked some questions related to the research topic one after the other.

Observation

This method of conducting research simply involves the observation of the behavior of the consumers with your products. 

You can simply do this by using some tools, and this is not necessary to make the target audience feel that you are keeping an eye on them. 

This method works for different things like online websites or some other products in the market.

This method only involves observing the behavior of the consumers that what difficulties they face in using your product and how they react to your products and their features. 

For web-based projects, this can be done with the help of some software and for the market products way can secretly observe the customer while dealing with him or her. 

This method can be very expensive and time-consuming sometimes because there can not be enough target audience, so you need to spend more time carrying on the research.

Sometimes the environment is not friendly enough for you to conduct the research in an effective manner.

 And you always need the permission of the audience that you are going to record your observation for research processes in case of web-based projects but in the market products, you can secretly observe their reaction without them knowing so that you will get their true reactions because when they are not knowing, they will not try to be their ideal versions. 

Product A/B testing

In this research method, different things about a product are observed in order to check if that product is fit for the market or not and the results of this research are mostly utilized in the development cycle of the product. 

The research is usually conducted in the natural environment or it can also be conducted in an artificially created environment.

The target audience is given the product and they can observe it and after thorough observation, they will give their true opinions about different aspects of the product. 

Their answers are recorded and then they are further studied in order to make the product better in the future.

Sometimes this method proves to be very effective because it undergoes real-world testing and people give their honest opinion but in other cases, it can be very costly and time-consuming at the same time which means it is not suitable for smaller organizations sometimes.

Section 2: Secondary research

Secondary research is totally different from the primary research because in primary research, you need to gather data by yourself but in secondary research, the data is gathered by some other person in the past and they also have made reports on them in the past. 

All you need to do id that you need to find the data and analyze it according to your needs. The best example for secondary research is gathering stats there are available online. 

Just like primary research, secondary research also has some types which could be both qualitative and quantitative which are discussed here.

Public sources

The easiest way of conducting secondary research is to collect data from an organization that has already worked on gathering a lot of data. 

The most commonplace for any person can be a government organization because government organizations have almost of data that they have collected over time. 

The government organization that one can select can be of different types because of the nature of people that visit that place. 

For example, if you want data about something related to kids or students, then you can get that data from educational institutes. 

Similarly, you can get data from public libraries because they keep almost every research conducted so there is a large collection of business directories and newsletters. 

You can also get data from government agencies that are related so some specific business type or some organizations` work.

Commercial sources

There are some agencies that work on collecting data from the markets which is consisted of industrial analysis over different things. 

After collection of data, they properly analyze the data, and then the specific reports are generated which could help many organizations or entrepreneurs in their work, so this data is available for everyone, but they charge you for providing you with this data and the reports.

But if that data is not that critical then you can get it from different things like a newspaper or a magazine or even TV stations. 

Because these organizations have to provide proper reports in their news about each and everything, they need to do a proper analysis and research over the data collected so these reports can also be considered to be very authentic and beneficial at the same time as you can get them for free.

Internal sources

The internal sources have the data in generally better form, and they can provide you with their market research. 

They already have their data in-house which means that all they have to do is analyze and make reports. 

They have all the data of their organization that what were the rates of customer retention, what were the histories of all the new and old accounts. 

This data can help you in concluding what was need by the audience at that time and what are their demands now.

In Conclusion

To conclude things, we can say that market research is a very critical thing which can help you boost your profits by selling the right features of your product or ignoring it can also make your product marked as a failure. 

You may think that you know your audience very well but there are certain possibilities that what you are thinking about your products` features is probably outdated or it may be offered by someone else at the same time with better features.

You must know that the general public which will be your target audience always wants to get all the unique and latest features. 

That is why you must undergo the process of market research about your product which will tell you how the people are reacting to your product.

In the first place, it will make you aware of the response that you will get if you lunch it as it is. So, observing the opinions and reactions, you can make some little upgrades in the features of your product and this can give you a significant profit for the sales of your product.