Patrick Biddiscombe walks through four market research steps: build detailed buyer personas, set clear research objectives, design and test your questions carefully, and turn findings into an actionable report. The video covers survey design, usability testing, and HubSpot tools to get you started.
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Today I'm going to teach you how to do market research, AKA how to find out exactly what your customer wants. If you do this correctly, it'll minimize investment risk, help in spotting emerging trends, and identify potential pain points for customers. Let's get into it when it comes to conducting successful market research, according to HubSpot's own market researchers, there are five steps you need to follow. 1. Define your Persona Personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers before you jump into solving their problems, this is what helps you understand who they are. According to HubSpot's head of market research, Amy Merritt, the best tip when creating a buy Persona is to put yourself in the shoes of that person as much as possible.
You want to understand who they are on a deep level, not just their demographics, though that can certainly be helpful to know, but more importantly how they think, what they care about, what they struggle with, and what energizes them. Then you can more effectively craft experiences, products, messaging, etc. That actually solve their problems and resonate with your target customer.
With a tool like our Persona generator, diving deep beyond just demographics is made easy. Within seven steps, you'll cover demographic traits, what industry they work in, what job they do, the goals, challenges of that job, what tools they need to reach those goals, and their consumption habits. Where are they gaining the information to perform their job? With that info, you can start to figure out what makes them successful and what they might need to be worried about. Use these details to provide solutions that are catered specifically to them. Number two Define your research objective. Always start with your why. Ask yourself what the main objective of your research is. What do you want to know about your customer and let that guide your process. For example, if you if your goal is consumer insights, then you may want to go with more interviews and customer satisfaction survey research if you're looking for something geared more towards collecting customer reviews after using your physical product, website or app, then you want to explore usability testing. In other words, your why will dictate your how. But even with a clear goal, sometimes misalignment can still take place. When I asked Amy what her biggest challenge was when it came to market research, she said it was often misalignment between the research design and the objectives and needs of her stakeholders.
I solved this problem by embedding key touchpoints into project plans where I get all the stakeholders together to brainstorm objectives and information needs and then I follow it up with a clear what's in and out of scope for the project that we can all align on and point back to anytime questions come up.
Along the way Research Questions how did you hear about us? What features do you like most about our product or service? Is our product convenient to use? Whether it's for a focus group, online survey or an interview, questions like these serve your purpose of finding out who your customer is and what you can immediately solve for them. According to our own market research analyst Mat, when it comes to preparing those research questions, there are three points you should keep in mind. The order you ask questions in is very important.
Ask the most important questions first, and remember that previous questions will always influence answers to later ones. For example, if you ask how long a respondent spends on social media every day and then follow it up with a question about how social media affects their mental health, having just thought about how they spent four hours scrolling through TikTok the night before might bias their answer.
Test your survey before taking it live. Try to get into the mind frame of the different Personas your survey targets. Make sure that they're equipped with the knowledge to answer the questions that you're asking them. You wouldn't want to ask someone who just started in Marketing in 2022 about how marketing changed since COVID began.
Read books about sociology, psychology. Read ethnographies. These will teach you lessons about human behavior that you can apply to your survey writing process. And they'll often reference other research studies that help you come up with creative questions.
Lastly, summarize your findings. After you've run your research, you need to compile all of that information into an easily digestible form. We happen to offer a super easy market research kit that does exactly that. It comes with focus group and survey templates. This is where you'll include info on why you're doing this research, how you gathered your information, key findings, and your recommendations. There you have it. Tips and strategies on market research from our own market researchers. Remember, market research can help with understanding your target market, pricing strategies and overall strengthens your business. As always, if you like what you heard and you want to hear more like comment and subscribe, subscribe down below to hear more. Till next time, I can find this.
Client info have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.
