How to do market research and better understand your target customers [+ AI prompts & template]

I like to think about market research as the starting point for your new business, growth stage, and expansion. Once you’re ready to scale up, you have to redefine or reinforce your market knowledge to unlock growth opportunities.

→ Download Now: Market Research Templates [Free Kit]

The beautiful side of market research is in its variety of tactics:

• Interviews (even entirely AI-moderated).
• Product use research.
• Market segmentation.
• Pricing research.
• Brand recognition and loyalty.

Just to name a few.

All types beat our assumptions every time, remove the guesswork, and connect us marketers directly with what customers actually want. However, this is a large chunk of work that requires patience and knowledge. And with that, I can help you.

I’m going to walk you through different types of market research with real-world scenarios, AI tools and prompts, and how to decode your findings to turn them into an actionable plan. Let’s dive into this thoroughly crafted guide.

Table of Contents

• What is market research?
• Primary vs. Secondary Research
• 11 Types of Market Research
• How to Do Market Research
• Free Reports & Trends to Start Market Research
• Market Research Report Template
• How to Integrate Your Market Research Into Your Business Plan
• Market Research Examples

When I look at how market research has evolved, two realities stand out.

First, your competitors are talking to their customers, too. And they’ve got smart people and solid data just like you do.

I’ve seen companies match each other move for move because they’re all drawing from the same small pool of insights. The real advantage comes from looking beyond the obvious — diving deeper than your competition is willing to go.

Second, your current customers are just one piece of the puzzle. They chose you for a reason, but what about the ones who didn’t? That’s where the real growth opportunities hide.

Based on insights from over 3,000 researchers across the globe, the 2025 Qualtrics Market Research Trends Report reveals that there is a growing demand for extensive research. In fact:

• 66% of research teams report increased requests in the last year.
• 71% of research teams report that their organizations now rely more heavily on their insights than a year ago.
• 67% of cutting-edge research teams saw their team’s budget increase in the last year.
• 92% of market research professionals feel secure in their role.

And guess what? The market research industry grew from almost $130 billion in 2022 to $142 billion in 2023, according to ESOMAR’s Global Market Research 2024 report.

I’ve realized that smart companies aren’t just throwing money at research — they’re investing because they know gut feelings aren’t enough anymore. So, what makes market research so valuable that companies are pouring billions into it?

Why do market research?

I learned the hard way that best practice email copy doesn’t guarantee results. But when I switched to messaging built on real customer research, our conversion rates doubled. That’s the power of knowing what moves your buyers to action, instead of guessing.

Here’s what proper market research uncovers:

• The hidden corners of the internet where your buyers are already searching for solutions (often not where you’d expect).
• Which competitors are dominating the conversation — and more importantly, why your target audience trusts them.
• Real-time shifts in your industry that your buyers care about (not just what industry publications claim is trending).
• The true DNA of your market — who they are, what keeps them up at night, and what they’re really willing to pay for.
• Purchase triggers that actually drive decisions.
• Unfiltered attitudes about products like yours, including objections your sales team never hears.
• Validation (or warning signs) for your next big business initiative before you invest heavily.
• Gaps in the market your competitors have missed that are often hiding in plain sight.
• Price sensitivity insights that help you position your offering for maximum value.

I’ve seen how good research strips away internal biases and assumptions, replacing them with ground truth about what your buyers actually think, feel, and do.

The result? You stop guessing and start making decisions based on real market intelligence. That’s the difference between marketing that falls flat and marketing that drives real business growth.

How does market research work?

Think of market research like being a detective, but the stakes are your business growth. For me, the mystery was why our email campaigns had high open rates but low conversions.

Here’s how I cracked the case.

First, I identified the key question: What messaging would drive more conversions? Then, I mapped out my research plan:

• Analyze customer support transcripts to uncover common pain points.
• Conduct customer interviews to explore unexpected priorities.
• Mine competitor reviews for unmet market needs.

Each source revealed different pieces of the puzzle:

• Support transcripts highlighted recurring frustrations.
• Interviews unearthed surprising insights about what customers value most.
• Competitor reviews revealed opportunities we hadn’t considered.

I distinctly remember a breakthrough moment during this process. One customer interview revealed that they loved our service but were held back by binding agency contracts.

We had not addressed this in our messaging for leads who wanted to switch to our service. Addressing it immediately led to a measurable uptick in conversions.

When conducting research, I’ve learned to blend quantitative and qualitative methods. Early on, I relied too much on survey data and missed the emotional drivers behind customer decisions. Now, I know that talking to even five customers can uncover insights that hard numbers might miss.

When should you conduct market research?

Knowing when to conduct market research is just as important as how you do it. The short answer? Do it before any major business decision.

Here are some specific scenarios.

• Conversion rates drop: When campaigns perform below expectations (like my email campaign).
• New product launches: To identify customer needs and market gaps.
• Market expansion: When entering unfamiliar territory.
• Rising customer acquisition costs: To optimize your funnel.
• Competitive landscape shifts: To adapt to new players or trends.

For example, when my client was launching a new feature, we decided to conduct interviews to gauge interest and understand potential concerns.

Customers were excited but confused about how the feature worked. This insight allowed us to refine our messaging before the launch, saving us from what could have been a disappointing rollout.

Even a two-week research sprint can prevent months of costly mistakes. I’ve personally seen this in action — those two weeks of focused effort often pay dividends for months or even years.

Should you outsource market research?

This depends on your resources, expertise, and the scope of your research. Here’s a simple framework I’d recommend.

Do it in-house when:

• You need ongoing, iterative research.
• You have team members with research experience.
• You’re working with sensitive customer data.
• You have a limited budget.
• You need quick turnaround times.

Outsource when:

• You need specialized expertise (e.g., focus group moderation).
• You require large-scale data collection.
• You want to avoid internal biases.
• You lack internal research capabilities.
• Your budget allows for professional services.

Here’s a concrete example: At one point, my client needed to understand market trends for a new service they wanted to introduce. While we were equipped to handle basic customer surveys, this required expertise in analyzing broader data sets.

Outsourcing to a research firm provided us with insights we couldn’t have gathered on our own, like identifying demand trends that shaped our go-to-market strategy.

At the same time, I’ve found that keeping ongoing research in-house allows for quicker iterations.

For our email campaigns, we conducted the research ourselves, and it paid off — adjustments to the messaging were implemented in days, not weeks, which wouldn’t have been possible with an external firm.

Pro tip: A hybrid approach often works best. My client now keeps customer feedback and competitor analysis in-house but outsources complex projects that require specialized tools and expertise.

Primary vs. Secondary Research

In my experience, I’ve found the most powerful insights come from combining two distinct types of data: the stories your market tells (qualitative) and the patterns in their behavior (quantitative).

When I need to understand the “why” behind customer decisions, I dig into qualitative research. Again, it’s like being a detective — you’re gathering opinions, emotions, and detailed feedback about products in your market.

For instance, in my email campaign work, customer interviews revealed messaging pain points that no amount of data could have shown us.

Quantitative research, on the other hand, gives you the hard numbers to validate these insights. Think purchase patterns, engagement rates, and market trends backed by data. This is where you spot opportunities others miss.

I’ve learned to blend both approaches through two main research channels:

• Primary research — first-hand information you gather yourself.
• Secondary research — existing data you can leverage right now.

Let me show you how to use each one effectively.

Primary Research

Primary research is where the real magic happens. It’s your chance to gather first-hand information directly from your market, learn how to segment your audience, and establish your buyer personas.

But here’s what I’ve learned: The goldmine of insights often starts right in your own backyard. Before you spend resources on external research, mine your internal data first.

Here’s my tried-and-tested internal research process.

Start with your existing audience’s voice. I dig through:

• Customer interviews, surveys, and polls — not just for general feedback, but specifically hunting for their exact language about problems and desired outcomes.
• Social media conversations across platforms. Reddit and LinkedIn have been particularly rich sources for uncovering raw, unfiltered customer language for me.
• Past marketing campaign data — what messages actually drove conversions?

Then, analyze your offer through your customers’ eyes:

• Map out every problem your product solves.
• Review your existing customer personas (but don’t let them limit your thinking).
• Examine all your marketing materials for promises made and proof points used.

The game-changer for me? Looking at the gaps between what’s working and what isn’t:

• Heat maps and session recordings that show where people actually engage.
• A/B test results that reveal which messages resonate.
• Marketing analytics data that exposes disconnects between traffic and conversion.

This foundation of internal research is what helped me transform that struggling email campaign I mentioned earlier. By understanding where our existing message was missing the mark, we could craft a copy that actually spoke to our audience’s true concerns.

Secondary Research

Once you’ve done your primary research, it’s time to zoom out and look at the bigger picture through secondary research.

Here’s where I learned something crucial: your market’s truth often lies in the spaces between different data sources.

Let me share my process for secondary research, built from that email campaign turnaround I mentioned.

First, I go straight to the source — your market’s unfiltered voice:

• Review mining is golden. I spend hours on G2 Crowd, Capterra, and similar sites, not just reading reviews but noting exact phrases customers use to describe their problems and desired outcomes.
• Social listening across LinkedIn, Reddit, and industry forums reveals how people really talk about their challenges when they think no one’s selling to them.
• Support and chat transcripts from competitors (often publicly available) show real pain points and feature requests.

Then, I layer in competitive intelligence to analyze our competitors:

• Map out competitor promises and positioning — what claims are they making?
• Track how the market responds to these claims in comments and discussions.
• Note gaps between what competitors promise and what customers say they actually deliver.

Finally, I validate patterns with authoritative sources:

• Industry reports from Pew, Gartner, or Forrester (yes, they’re expensive, but worth it for the trends they reveal).
• Academic studies that dig into the “why” behind market behaviors.
• Public data from government sources that provide market size and growth validation (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau).

Here’s the key insight I’ve gained: Secondary research is about connecting the dots, not just aimlessly collecting data.

When I revamped that struggling email campaign, it was the combination of customer language from review mining and unaddressed pain points from competitor analysis that led to our breakthrough messaging.

Building from my experience with both methods, I’m now going to break down where each type of research shines and where it can trip you up.

What I Love About Primary Research

• You’re getting unfiltered, real-time insights about your specific market questions.
• The data is yours exclusively. Your competitors don’t have access to these insights.
• You can pivot your questions mid-research when you spot interesting patterns.
• The findings are hyper-relevant to your specific offering.

Where I’ve Hit Roadblocks With Primary Research

• It’s resource-intensive since good research takes time and money.
• Small sample sizes can skew your results.
• Getting honest feedback can be tough since people often tell you what they think you want to hear.
• You need solid research design skills to avoid biased results.

Why I Turn to Secondary Research

• You can start gathering insights immediately.
• The sample sizes are usually much larger.
• The hard work of data collection is already done.
• It’s often more cost-effective.
• You get historical trends that help predict future patterns.

The Challenges I’ve Faced With Secondary Research

• The data isn’t tailored to your specific questions.
• Information can be outdated.
• You’re seeing the same data your competitors are.
• Quality sources can be expensive (looking at you, Gartner reports).

Here’s what I’ve learned: The magic happens when you combine both.

For example, when I was working on that email campaign overhaul, secondary research helped me understand industry-wide pain points — but primary research revealed how those challenges specifically manifested for our audience.

That combination gave us the messaging precision we needed.

11 Types of Market Research

Here are the most effective market research types that you can perform in the old-fashioned way or turn to AI-powered instruments. Let’s review the examples and explore how you can accelerate the process by adopting AI gen.

1. Interviews

One-on-one conversations with customers reveal deep insights into their motivations, pain points, and decision-making processes. This method gives you the richest qualitative data, but, traditionally, requires significant time investment for analysis.

When I first started conducting customer interviews six years ago, I’d spend hours manually transcribing recordings and hunting for patterns across spreadsheets, assigning weights to different points.

Luckily, those days are over, thanks to AI-powered interview tools and AI meeting assistants.

So, here are two steps for you to conduct interview-based market research.

The traditional way: Direct conversations with your customers.

You control the flow, dive deep into unexpected responses, and build genuine connections. The downside? It’s incredibly time-intensive. Each quality interview takes 30-45 minutes, plus another hour or two for manual analysis in spreadsheets.

The AI-powered way: Use your avatar or AI gen to transcribe interviews.

I’m fascinated with how AI has advanced in qualitative research applications:

• It records and transcribes meetings on the fly, extracting key themes and action items.
• It offers AI researchers who look and talk like humans.
• It overlaps the data and finds patterns in a matter of seconds.

AI tools now conduct the interviews themselves, saving businesses days and weeks.

I personally use AI meeting assistants for market research interviews, like Fathom or Motion.

Among AI researchers, I recommend Conveo.ai and Strella. Conveo runs async video and voice interviews, moderated by AI, while Strella lets you choose between self-moderated interviews or fully AI-conducted sessions.

The unfair advantage of AI-led interviews is speed. Conveo can run 100+ interviews in parallel, completing your task in under 24 hours. I was also surprised by Conveo’s research, where 83% of respondents reported feeling more open when sharing with an AI than with a human interviewer.

For B2C brands, hiring AI moderators is, in my opinion, a must-have.

Want to feel what it’s like to be interviewed by AI? Strello will run a 5-minute interview for free so you have this experience. I did it — it was weird and amazing all at once.

2. Focus Groups

These are moderated discussions with 6-8 participants that reveal group dynamics and collective opinions about your product or service. They’re perfect for understanding how people influence one another’s opinions and testing concepts in a social setting.

I see a lot of consumer brands gather focus groups via vendors to gain an understanding of preferences for goods, consumption shifts, or to unearth unexpected biases.

For example, FieldworkHub sets up dozens of focus groups for research on drink consumption, supplements, and even fashion perceptions.

3. Product/Service Use Research

I used this method to observe how people actually used our product, Serpstat. It helped our product team to reveal the gap between what users say they do and what they actually do. In short, product use research uncovers:

• Usability issues.
• Workflow problems.
• Unexpected user behaviors.

Product research can be applied to both digital and physical products. The difference is in your tool stack.

Physical Goods

Usability testing involves bringing users into a controlled environment — labs, test kitchens, or observation rooms — where they interact with actual products while researchers document every action, frustration, and workaround.

Unlike digital testing, you’re watching people hold, manipulate, and use tangible objects, revealing ergonomic issues, packaging problems, and usage patterns that online surveys could never capture.

A less expensive way to unearth product frustrations is when a company sends product samples directly to consumers and asks them to record videos from unboxing to use.

Digital Products

Here, everything is simpler. I can catch any product and website interactions on autopilot with tools like Userpilot, Hotjar, or UserTesting — namely:

• Feature adoption.
• Workflow frustrations.
• Product bugs.
• Rage-clicking.
• In-app and website session replays.
• Heatmaps for identifying click, scroll, and attention patterns.
• Conversion funnels for spotting drop-off points.
• Prototype testing for early-stage validation.

All tools come with neat analytical dashboards that enable product marketers and product owners to identify any friction points.

For example, Cleeng, a direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform, used Userpilot to recover from a 92% drop in new feature usage after a UI redesign. They actually increased page visits by 75% in just a few days, thanks to the combination of product analytics and session replays.

4. Buyer Persona Research

Traditional buyer persona research involves extensive customer interviews, surveys, and the sales team’s input to understand the human story behind purchasing decisions. You map out daily challenges, information sources, decision criteria, and emotional triggers.

The question is, does it really work?

I know successful small businesses that haven’t lifted a finger to develop their ICP. Yet, they sell online via social media and stores.

But don’t get fooled.

You can’t accelerate your growth without a deep understanding of your customers, with 96% of marketers agreeing on that.

To develop buyer personas, I first analyze the CRM data:

• Deal records (won/lost deal summaries with reasons, deal sizes, sales cycle lengths, company size, and decision-maker titles).
• Sales call notes (common objections and concerns raised, questions prospects ask most frequently, pain points).
• Lead source data.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, this task is easy-peasy. Just use Breeze AI to execute all those tasks.

Example

Ask Breeze: “Analyze my contacts and identify three distinct customer segments based on company size, industry, and engagement patterns.”

Other Breeze prompts that will make your life easier:

• Review won deals from the last 6 months and identify common characteristics of our best customers.
• Compare won vs. lost deals to understand decision factors.
• Analyze which value propositions work best with different prospect types.

 

Pro tip: Let Breeze analyze 6+ months of sales and marketing data before making assumptions. Run persona analysis monthly as you gather more customer data. Compare Breeze findings with actual customer feedback to validate accuracy.

5. Market Segmentation Research

Before I launch my products even for a small business, I conduct market research to better understand with whom I’ll be competing and to unearth my customers’ needs. It also helps me refine my value prop to resonate with different customer types.

Traditionally, I’d analyze customer data through:

• Surveys.
• Purchase history.
• Demographic research.
• Company size.
• Industry.

Now, I also use Claude to analyze Reddit, X, and LinkedIn threads (Amazon shops and reviews for D2C) — social listening, so to speak. And I tested a new platform mention.click to validate my value props. Works wonderfully, so I definitely recommend you try.

Grab my suggested prompts for Claude/ChatGPT to facilitate your market segmentation research:

• Compare how different customer segments discuss [your product category] across Reddit, LinkedIn, and X — identify unique characteristics of each platform’s user segments.
• Search Reddit for discussions about [your product category] and identify the main customer segments based on their pain points, use cases, and demographics mentioned in posts and comments.
• Analyze Reddit discussions about [topic] and extract the exact words and phrases different customer segments use to describe their challenges — organize by segment type.

For more complex research, I developed the following prompt:

I think our market has these segments: [list your specific hypotheses with brief descriptions of each segment’s characteristics, pain points, and behaviors].

Your task:

Validate each segment: Find evidence on Reddit, LinkedIn, and X that confirms or contradicts each proposed segment based on actual user discussions. Challenge my assumptions if you find evidence that contradicts any of my segments, clearly highlight what I got wrong and why.

Suggest alternative segments and provide proof.

Key questions to answer:

• Are my segment pain points accurate based on real discussions?
• Do the demographics I assumed match who’s actually talking about these topics?
• Are there segments having different conversations that I completely overlooked?
• What language does each segment actually use vs. what I assumed?

Pro tip: Always specify the time frame (e.g., posts from the last 6 months) and ask for specific quotes to capture authentic customer language for each segment.

6. Pricing Research

This research helps you find the sweet spot between customer value and business profitability and avoid the costly mistake of leaving money on the table or pricing yourself out of the market.

But here’s the catch — people are notoriously bad at predicting what they’ll actually pay. You need to use indirect methods to uncover a true willingness to pay. And markets change quickly — pricing research has a shorter shelf life than other types of research.

I recommend using this research when you’re:

• Launching new products.
• Entering new markets.
• Considering a significant price change.
• Developing tiered pricing strategies.

Here’s how you can do that:

1. The Van Westendorp method.
2. A/B price testing.
3. Competitor price analysis through platforms like Competera.ai or PriSync.

Pro tip: Test pricing frameworks (per user vs. per feature vs. flat rate), not just price points. Use behavioral data over stated preferences — look at what people actually purchase at different price levels rather than relying on what they say they’ll pay in surveys.

7. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis reveals market gaps and opportunities that you might miss. Beyond tracking competitors’ features and pricing, it uncovers their strategic positioning, sales and marketing tactics, and customer perception.

When done thoroughly, you realize how they win and where they’re vulnerable.

Here's how you can do that:

1. Interview customers who chose competitors over you to understand their real decision criteria. I’ve found these conversations reveal gaps in your value props that your team might be blind to.
2. Run feature audit analysis and focus on outcomes rather than just features.
3. Analyze negative competitor reviews on Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, X, G2, Capterra. For D2C, on Amazon, Allegro, and eBay.
4. Automatically track competitor website changes, pricing updates, job postings, and content strategies with tools like Klenty or Crayon.

I always start with a competitor reviews audit, as this is an infinite pool of truth and customer frustrations. To do that, I use the help of AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT. Secondly, I want to hear from customers who chose competitors over our product — via in-person interviews or by prompting Breeze AI to analyze sales reps’ notes.

8. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

This is one of my favorite research areas as it helps me measure:

• How happy/disappointed my customers are.
• How likely they are to stay.
• How likely they are to buy more.
• Will they recommend us to others, or not?

Both research topics — satisfaction and loyalty — give me qualitative and quantitative analysis that helps prevent customer churn before it happens. Specifically,

• Which customers are at risk of leaving before they actually do.
• What drives long-term loyalty beyond basic satisfaction.
• My biggest upsell and cross-sell opportunities among happy customers.
• Who my customer champions are.
• The root causes of churn.

The main pitfall is survey fatigue. Over-surveying leads to low response rates and skewed data. Also, satisfaction scores alone don’t tell the whole story — you need context.

To gather this data, I suggest these types of customer research:

• NPS surveys with follow-ups.
• An in-app CSAT survey or contextual microsurveys.
• The customer effort score.
• The customer health score.
• Churn surveys.

Tools that can help you:

• Userpilot — in-app feedback, great for SaaS.
• SurveyMonkey — web app surveys to collect data from your website.

Pro tip: Survey customers right after support interactions or major product usage milestones. Focus on behavioral indicators of loyalty (repeat purchases, feature adoption) over stated satisfaction.

9. Brand Awareness Research

This research tells you how well your target market knows, remembers, and perceives your brand compared to competitors and your expectations. Hence, it highlights gaps in your marketing efforts.

The challenge is measuring actual awareness versus claimed awareness. Brand metrics can be fuzzy and hard to tie to revenue.

Here’s how you can gauge your brand awareness:

• Unaided recall surveys.
• Google Trends analysis.
• Social media mention tracking.
• Branded traffic growth.
• Brand search vs. category search ratios.
• “How did you first hear about us?” surveys.
• Share of voice in industry publications.

10. Campaign Research

This research doesn’t directly correlate with market research, but it says whether you understand your target audience or not. It’s all about pre-testing and optimizing marketing campaigns to maximize ROI.

Usually, it’s performed in four steps:

1. Test messages and creative before committing big budgets.
2. Identify which channels and audiences deliver the best ROI.
3. Optimize campaigns in real-time based on performance data.
4. Build a playbook of proven campaigns you can scale.

The main risk is over-testing. To avoid that, I suggest the following approaches:

• Micro-budget A/B tests. Spend $30–$200 testing 2–3 variations of headlines, audiences, or creative.
• Email subject line testing. Test subject lines with 10% of your list.
• Landing page split testing. Tools like Unbounce and Optimizely let you test different headlines, layouts, and calls-to-action with live traffic.
• Dynamic creative testing through Meta’s Dynamic Creative and Google Ads’ dynamic creatives, or Smartly.

11. Competitive Intelligence Research

Unlike one-time competitive analysis, this is ongoing research that tracks market dynamics, industry trends, and competitors’ moves. You use the same tools and tactics, like social listening, website changes, pricing changes, campaigns launched, rank tracking, etc.

The goal is to never let your guard down and act on the smallest changes that positively influence competitors’ brand recognition, tool adoption, and so on.

1. Define your buyer persona.

Maybe just because I’m a marketer, I never neglect this step. My market research always starts with understanding my buyer persona. For my new businesses — both offline and online — I make assumptions based on my products/services. And then, I dig deeper.

Some key characteristics I try to understand in my buyer persona are:

• Age.
• Gender.
• Geography.
• Job title(s).
• Family size.
• Income.
• Major challenges.

Once a product is launched, you will gather more customer data to reinforce buyer personas. If you need a refresher on how to do that, scroll back to the section on buyer persona research, where I shared useful tools and AI prompts.

Free resource: Use HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool or check out these free templates to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

Try the Make My Persona Tool for Free

2. Identify a persona group to engage.

Now that you know who your buyer personas are, use that information to help you identify a pilot group to engage. This should be a representative sample of your target customers so you can better understand their actual characteristics, challenges, and buying habits.

How to Identify the Right People to Engage for Market Research

When choosing who to engage for your market research, you should:

• Aim for 10 participants per buyer persona. I recommend focusing on one persona at a time.
• Select people who have recently interacted with you. Focus on behaviors within the past six months (or up to a year).
• Gather a mix of participants. Recruit people who have purchased your product, purchased a competitor’s product, and decided not to purchase anything at all.
• Provide an incentive. Motivate someone to spend 30–45 minutes on you and your study. On a tight budget? You can reward participants for free by giving them exclusive access to content.

3. Prepare research questions for your market research participants.

The best way to make sure you get the most out of your conversations is to be prepared.

I highly recommend always creating a discussion guide to ensure you use your time wisely. Your discussion guide should be in outline format, with a time allotment and open-ended questions for each section.

Wait, are they all open-ended questions?

Yes — this is a golden rule of market research. You never want to “lead the witness” by asking yes and no questions, as that puts you at risk of unintentionally swaying their thoughts by leading with your own hypothesis.

Asking open-ended questions also helps you avoid one-word answers (which aren’t very helpful).

Example Outline of a 30-Minute Survey

Here’s a general outline for a 30-minute survey for one B2B buyer. Want to make it a digital survey? Use HubSpot’s free online form builder.

Background Information (5 minutes)

Ask the buyer to give you a little background information (their title, how long they’ve been with the company, and so on). Then, ask a fun/easy question to warm things up (first concert attended, favorite restaurant in town, etc.).

Here are some key background questions to ask your target audience:

• Describe how your team is structured.
• Tell me about your personal job responsibilities.
• What are the team's goals, and how do you measure them?
• What has been your biggest challenge in the past year?

Now, transition to acknowledging the specific purchase or interaction they made that led you to include them in the study. The next three stages of the buyer’s journey will focus specifically on that purchase.

Awareness (5 minutes)

Here, you want to understand how they first realized they had a problem that needed to be solved, without getting into whether or not they knew about your brand yet.

• Think back to when you first realized you needed a [name the product/service category, but not yours specifically]. What challenges were you facing at the time?
• How did you know that something in this category could help you?
• How familiar were you with the different options on the market?

Consideration (10 minutes)

Now, you want to get very specific about how and where the buyer researched potential solutions. Plan to interject to ask for more details.

• What was the first thing you did to research potential solutions? How helpful was this source?
• Where did you go to find more information?

If they don’t come up organically, ask about search engines, websites visited, people consulted, and so on. Probe, as appropriate, with some of the following questions:

• How did you find that source?
• How did you use vendor websites?
• What words specifically did you search for on Google?
• How helpful was it? How could it be better?
• Who provided the most (and least) helpful information? What did that look like?
• Tell me about your experiences with the salespeople from each vendor.

Decision (10 minutes)

• Which of the sources you described above was the most influential in driving your decision?
• What, if any, criteria did you establish to compare the alternatives?
• What vendors made it to the shortlist, and what were the pros/cons of each?
• Who else was involved in the final decision? What role did each of these people play?
• What factors ultimately influenced your final purchasing decision?

Closing

Here, you want to wrap up and understand what could have been better for the buyer.

• Ask them what their ideal buying process would look like. How would it differ from what they experienced?
• Allow time for further questions on their end.
• Don’t forget to thank them for their time and confirm their address to send a thank-you note or incentive.

4. List your primary competitors.

List your primary competitors. Keep in mind that listing the competition isn’t always as simple as Company X versus Company Y.

Sometimes, a company’s division might compete with your main product or service, even though that company’s brand might exert more effort in another area.

For example, Apple is known for its laptops and mobile devices, but Apple Music competes with Spotify over its music streaming service. From a content standpoint, you might compete with a blog, YouTube channel, or similar publication for inbound website visitors — even though their products don’t overlap with yours at all.

For example, a toothpaste company might compete with magazines like Health.com or Prevention on certain blog topics related to health and hygiene, even though the magazines don’t actually sell oral care products.

Identifying Industry Competitors

To identify competitors whose products or services overlap with yours, determine which industry or industries you’re pursuing.

I suggest starting high-level, using terms like education, construction, media and entertainment, food service, healthcare, retail, financial services, telecommunications, and agriculture. You can build your list in the following ways:

• Review your industry quadrant on G2 Crowd. G2 Crowd aggregates user ratings and social data to create “quadrants,” where you can see companies plotted as contenders, leaders, niche, and high performers in their respective industries.
• Download a market report. Companies like Forrester and Gartner offer both free and gated market forecasts every year on the vendors who are leading their industry.
• Search using social media. Social networks make great company directories. On LinkedIn, for example, select the search bar and enter the name of the industry you’re pursuing. Then, under “More,” select “Companies” to narrow your results.

Identifying Content Competitors

Search engines are your best friends in this area of secondary market research.

To find the online publications with which you compete, take the overarching industry term you identified in the section above and come up with a handful of more specific industry terms your company identifies with.

If I owned a catering business, for example, I might generally be a “food service” company but also consider myself a vendor in “event catering,” “cake catering,” or “baked goods.” Once you have your list, do the following:

• Google it. Don’t underestimate the value of seeing which websites come up when you run a search on Google for the industry terms that describe your company. You might find a mix of product developers, blogs, magazines, and more.
• Compare your search results against your buyer persona. If the content the website publishes seems like what your buyer persona would want to see, it’s a potential competitor and should be added to your list of competitors.

5. Summarize your findings.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the notes you took? I suggest looking for common themes that will help you tell a story and creating a list of action items.

To make the process easier, try making a report using your favorite presentation software. This will make it easy to add quotes, diagrams, or call clips.

Feel free to add your own flair, but the following outline should help you craft a clear summary:

• Background. Your goals and why you conducted this study.
• Participants. Who you talked to. A table works well, so you can break groups down by persona and customer/prospect.
• Executive Summary. What were the most interesting things you learned? What do you plan to do about it?
• Awareness. Describe the common triggers that lead someone to enter into an evaluation. (Quotes can be very powerful.)
• Consideration. Provide the main themes you uncovered, as well as the detailed sources buyers use when conducting their evaluation.
• Decision. Paint the picture of how a decision is really made by including the people at the center of influence and any product features or information that can make or break a deal.
• Action Plan. Your analysis probably uncovered a few campaigns you could run to get your brand in front of buyers earlier and/or more effectively. Provide your list of priorities, a timeline, and the impact it will have on your business.

6. Make use of AI market research tools.

Worried that doing market research can take a lot of time, effort, and resources? Well, you can use AI market research tools to achieve your goals a lot faster.

They will help you to:

• Generate survey questions based on research goals.
• Track customer behavior and predict trends.
• Segment audiences and personalize marketing strategies.
• Create detailed reports.
• Spot behavioral patterns for different customer segments.
• Analyze your CRM data in a few prompts.
• Conduct AI-moderated interviews with 100 participants in parallel.
• Gauge customer satisfaction.

According to the 2025 Qualtrics Market Research Trends Report:

• 89% of researchers are already using AI-powered tools regularly or experimenting with them.
• 83% of researchers plan to increase investment in AI in 2025.

AI tools have proven to be handy and help you achieve your research goals faster, increase productivity, improve efficiency, and save money. Here are some AI market research tools I recommend:

• Breeze for smarter CRM research and data analysis.
• Crayon for tracking and analyzing competitor activity.
• Poll The People for crowdsourced decision-making.
• Gong for sales research and call insights.
• Sprout Social for social media analysis.
• Competera for pricing research.
• Conveo.ai and Strella for AI-moderated in-person interviews.
• Mention.click for analyzing customer sentiment on Reddit.
• Smartly for dynamic ads testing (so-called campaign research).

Free Reports & Trends to Start Market Research

Goal	Focus	Link
Plan a Market Research Strategy	Learn the fundamentals of market research and create a research plan	HubSpot Market Research Kit
Understand Buyer Behavior	Develop detailed buyer personas to align marketing and sales efforts	How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas
Identify Customer Pain Points	Conduct customer interviews, focus groups, and surveys	How to Run a Focus Group
Conduct Competitive Analysis	Research competitors and uncover market gaps	What Is a Competitive Analysis — and How Do You Conduct One?
Leverage Technology for Research	Explore AI tools to automate and enhance market research	7 Top AI Market Research Tools
Refine Messaging and Content	Align messaging with customer needs and feedback	30 Tools & Resources for Conducting Market Research
Explore New Market Opportunities	Assess and analyze market potential for expansion or new products	How to Conduct a Market Opportunity Analysis
Understand Consumer Trends	Stay updated on evolving consumer behavior and preferences	HubSpot Consumer Trends Report
Stay Updated on Marketing Trends	Understand the latest marketing research trends and methods	The 2025 State of Marketing & Trends Report
Analyze Nonprofit Industry Trends	Discover key trends and strategies for success in the nonprofit sector	Nonprofit Marketing + Fundraising Trends for 2025 [Download Now]
Stay Updated on Sales Trends	Learn about emerging trends in sales strategies and tools	HubSpot’s 2025 Sales Trends Report

Market Research Report Template

A market research kit contains several critical pieces of information for your business’s success. Let’s examine these elements.

After downloading HubSpot’s free market research kit , you’ll receive editable templates for each of the kit’s parts, instructions on how to use the kit, and a mock presentation that you can edit and customize.

Download HubSpot’s free, editable market research report template here

1. Five Forces Analysis Template

Use Porter’s Five Forces Model to understand an industry by analyzing five different criteria and how high the power, threat, or rivalry in each area is. Here are the five criteria:

• Competitive rivalry.
• Threat of new entrants.
• Threat of substitution.
• Buyer power.
• Supplier power.

Free resource: Download an editable Five Forces Analysis template here.

2. SWOT Analysis Template

A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis looks at your internal strengths and weaknesses, and your external opportunities and threats within the market. A SWOT analysis highlights direct areas of opportunity your company can continue, build, focus on, and work to overcome.

Free resource: Download an editable SWOT Analysis template here.

3. Market Survey Template

Market surveys help you uncover important information about your buyer personas, target audience, current customers, market, and competition. Surveys should contain a variety of question types, like multiple choice, rankings, and open-ended responses.

Here are some categories of questions you should ask via survey:

• Demographic questions.
• Business questions.
• Competitor questions.
• Industry questions.
• Brand questions.
• Product questions.

Free resource: Download an editable Market Survey template here.

4. Focus Group Template

Focus groups are an opportunity to collect in-depth, qualitative data from your real customers or members of your target audience.

You should ask your focus group participants open-ended questions. While doing so, keep these tips top of mind:

• Set a limit for the number of questions you’re asking (after all, they’re open-ended).
• Provide participants with a prototype or demonstration.
• Ask participants how they feel about your price.
• Ask participants about your competition.
• Offer participants time at the end of the session for final comments, questions, or concerns.

Free resource: Download an editable Focus Group template here.

How to Integrate Your Market Research into Your Business Plan

Wondering how to integrate your market research into your business plan? Here are the steps I’d recommend.

Step 1: Analyze your market research data.

Once your market research is done, you’ll have lots of data to analyze. Start by cleaning the data to remove duplicate entries, errors, irrelevant data, and so on, that can negatively affect your data quality.

AI tools can help you a ton with that. Start with simple ChatGPT or Perplexity (paid plans). If you have big budgets, you can use Voxco or Quantilope to automate survey data cleaning.

ChatGPT prompt I use:

“Review my raw market research dataset for duplicate entries, missing values, and inconsistencies. Provide a cleaned version along with a summary report of cleaned items and any assumptions made.”

Then, consider your research goals and organize your data into relevant lists, tables, charts, and graphs. Or use spreadsheets and data visualization tools like Tableau to sort your data into necessary categories or segments.

You can also do a SWOT analysis or a Porter’s Five Forces analysis, if relevant.

Take my list of prompts that can be useful:

• Perform sentiment analysis on this set of open-ended survey responses related to product satisfaction. Identify and quantify positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. Highlight common themes or concerns mentioned.
• Identify key themes and sentiment trends in customer feedback on product satisfaction.
• Based on historical sales and current [industry] trends, predict emerging market trends in the next 6–12 months.
• Compare buying behavior between millennial and Gen Z customers and highlight differences.
• Summarize key insights from [dataset], focusing on brand perception and customer loyalty.

Step 2: Interpret your data and extract insights.

After data analysis, it’s time to make sense of your findings, interpret the data, and extract key insights you need for different sections of your business plan. Depending on your research goals and type of business plan, these insights may include:

• A clearer picture of your target market, target audience, and customers.
• Your customer needs, pain points, buying behavior, preferences, dislikes, and so on.
• Answers to questions you’ve always had about your competitors, their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and so on.
• Market and industry gaps you can take advantage of.
• Consumer trends and patterns you didn’t know.

Surely, you want to know how to execute it quickly but thoroughly. Having a few chats with our team, I noted down invaluable prompts for LLMs to extract insights:

• Analyze this dataset together with competitor reviews and market reports, and provide an integrated insight into customer needs, competitor gaps, and emerging trends.
• From this data, extract customer pain points and rank them by frequency and potential impact on sales.
• Divide the customer data into segments based on demographics and behavior, and provide insights for each segment, including opportunities, threats, and messaging strategies.
• Based on the market data, identify unmet needs or underserved segments.
• From this social media or review data, identify what customers praise or complain about regarding competitors. List strategic gaps in competitors’ offerings that our business can exploit.

Step 3: Develop actionable strategies.

Armed with insights from your research, go ahead and create actionable strategies for relevant sections of your business plan. Of course, these strategies can vary from one type of business plan to another and may include:

• Brand awareness strategy.
• Product development strategy.
• Marketing strategy.
• Sales strategy.
• Risk mitigation strategies.
• Resource allocation strategies.
• Pricing strategy.
• Competitor monitoring strategy.
• Funding and financial strategy.
• Implementation timeline.

Step 4: Update your business plan.

Once your strategies are ready, add them to the relevant sections of your business plan. Here’s how to do it:

Map insights to plan sections.

Link each key insight directly to the relevant section of your business plan. For example:

• Customer pain points → Product development and marketing strategies.
• Competitor gaps → Positioning and differentiation strategy.
• Market trends → Growth projections and innovation roadmap.

Prioritize insights by impact and feasibility.

Rank them based on:

• Revenue or cost impact.
• Ease of execution.
• Strategic alignment with your goals.

Focus first on high-impact, actionable items to ensure your plan drives real results.

Translate insights into actions.

This is about setting SMART goals, like “Launch a Gen Z-focused social media campaign highlighting eco-friendly features by Q1 2026, targeting a 10% increase in engagement.”

Align insights with financial and resource planning.

Ensure every strategic action has clear budget, staffing, or technology implications. Use the insights to refine financial forecasts, pricing strategies, and resource allocation.

Create a monitoring and feedback loop.

Lastly, define KPIs to track whether strategies informed by market research are working. Plan regular check-ins (quarterly or semi-annually) to compare actual outcomes to predictions and adjust the plan accordingly.

I also recommend that you include comprehensive details and supporting documents about your market research data, sources, methodologies, and so on. This way, you can provide additional information, if needed, to boost the credibility of your market research and business plan.

This can be in the appendix of your business plan.

And that’s it! Now, you know how to integrate your market research into your business plan successfully.

Market Research Examples

1. How Ritual opted for AI-moderated interviews to optimize pricing and drove 24% revenue growth.

Ritual, a D2C supplement brand, wanted to change how they priced their products (like offering new à la carte options), but they weren’t sure if customers would understand the new pricing. Traditional customer research, like live interviews, would have taken weeks they didn’t have.

So they had to make a bet on AI tools.

Next, Ritual is hiring Strella’s AI moderator to conduct interviews and quickly gather actionable insights.

The AI tool ran all interviews, analyzed responses, and synthesized findings in real-time. Ritual received immediate insights on where customers were confused about pricing, what they liked, and what worried them.

Results

Armed with Strella’s insights, Ritual adjusted their pricing rollout. The impact left me in awe:

• Net revenue per customer went up by 24%.
• The initial order value grew by 19%.
• Same-day cancellations dropped by 21%.

2. How Beable boosted student engagement and teacher support with Userpilot’s no-code analytics and surveys.

Beable Education, an e-learning platform for K-12, needed a better way to showcase its product’s benefits, engage directly with students, train teachers, and gather meaningful feedback.

Existing tools, like Google Analytics and forms, were limiting Beable from making data-driven improvements.

So, Beable turned to Userpilot for its no-code analytics and survey tools. They used in-app surveys to collect feedback and student input, achieving a staggering 77% survey completion rate (2,274 responses from 2,969 invites).

They also used other Userpilot tools like page tagging and funnel analysis to see how students progressed from video content to completing surveys.

Results

• Survey participation soared to 77%, demonstrating student engagement.
• Educator Academy usage went from a trickle (105 users) to a strong volume (1,681 unique visits).
• Self-service support became more efficient.

3. Land O’Lakes innovates market research with social data.

Land O’Lakes partnered with Brandwatch to revolutionize how they conduct market and consumer research.

With social listening tools, they tapped into vast volumes of online conversations. This enabled them to:

• Reach smaller, very specific niches and emerging audiences quickly.
• Spot rising trends and themes as they happened.
• Gain a deeper, more authentic view of consumers than traditional methods typically allow.

In plain words, they quickly found out and understood new or hidden customer groups that matter for their business.

Land O’Lakes even recorded a webinar with their step-by-step market research process.

Conduct market research to grow better.

When I first sat down to conduct market research for product expansion (Serpstat) into the Spanish market, I froze. I was overwhelmed.

Every step, every type of research felt important. And if I were to skip one, I’d miss a piece of a jigsaw I couldn’t afford to lose.

So, I practiced what I’m preaching here: starting small but strategically.

Identify a significant question about your market that keeps you awake at night. It could be about low conversion rates or a competitor’s unexpected success. Use this question as your guiding principle.

You don’t need all the data from all the sources at once. You need to hear your market, and for that, even buyer persona and market segmentation research will suffice.

I’m sure your customers are already telling you what they want. You just need to listen.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.