Morgan Molnar
Everything you need to know before getting started
Market research is essential to every organization.
According to the latest global market research report by ESOMAR, a global community of market researchers, roughly $45 billion is spent on market research annually around the globe. The majority of these resources are spent contracting full-service vendors and agencies that do your market research for you. But what if you could cut out the middleman and do it yourself? Doing your own market research is much cheaper, faster, and not nearly as difficult as you might think, as long as you know what you’re doing.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to run your own market research programs and get insights to help everyone at your company make business decisions—without costly middlemen.
Market research is the process of collecting information on consumers’ behaviors and preferences, category trends, and/or competitive intelligence. Market research is typically conducted by organizations to inform product development and go-to-market strategy to ultimately drive business growth.
Market research can help companies answer questions like:
Sure, business decisions can be made based on gut instincts alone, but doing so comes with high risk. After all, not all of us can be brilliant visionaries like Steve Jobs, who famously said, “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.” We beg to differ. Market research provides the necessary data-backed evidence to help you make those decisions with confidence. Here’s why market research is so important:
Market research is a broad term that encompasses several different types of information gathering. It can mean different things to different people and be viewed through a number of different lenses. In order to give you a comprehensive understanding of it, we’ll walk through each of common types of market research, their pros and cons, and how they’re most commonly used. We’ll talk about the differences between:
Fundamentally, market research can be broken down into two major categories: primary research and secondary research.
For the purpose of this guide, we will be focusing on primary research. Once you’re done reading, you’ll be a pro at conducting your own primary market research.
Quantitative and qualitative research can be done individually or in combination to get broader and deeper insights.
The main differences between quantitative and qualitative research are summarized below:
Quantitative research | Qualitative research |
Research design: -Descriptive/confirmatory -Large sample size | Research design: -Exploratory -Smaller sample sizes |
Data/analysis: -Structured data -Aggregates and averages -Presented in numbers | Data/analysis: -Unstructured data -In-depth details -Presented in themes |
Pros: -Faster and easier to analyze results with spreadsheets and statistical software -Larger sample sizes mean the results are more likely to be statistically significant | Pros: -Deep dive into the “how” and “why” -Exploratory research design provides the opportunity to capture concepts or ideas you hadn’t thought of before |
Cons: -Less detail around “how” and “why” -Structured research design means it’s possible the research isn’t capturing all possible concepts or ideas | Cons: -Time consuming and difficult to analyze the findings -Smaller sample sizes mean the results are less likely to be statistically significant |
When your organization needs to conduct market research, there are a couple ways to go about it. The two main approaches are do-it-yourself (DIY) market research or to use a full-service market research firm.
Here is a summary of the pros and cons of DIY market research and full-service market research for you to consider when deciding how you’ll conduct your research:
DIY market research | Full-service market research |
Pros: -Instant results -Cost-effective -Complete control over research design and timeline | Pros: -All of the work is done for you by the vendor -No expertise needed |
Cons: -Requires work internally to set up the research and analyze results | Cons: -Takes a long time -Expensive -Requires vendor on-boarding to ensure relevant recommendations |
Now that you’re well versed in the different types of market research, it’s time to get you off and running! In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to conduct your own market research from start to finish—from creating a project plan to designing your survey to collecting representative responses to turning results into action.
The best practices in this guide span any market research use case, but we’ll focus on the three example surveys you see below: consumer behavior, ad testing, and brand tracking. By the time you’ve finished reading this guide, you’ll be a pro at DIY market research!
How to create a market research plan
Before you get knee-deep in survey design and data collection, it’s important to have a clear plan in place for your market research. Knowing when you need market research, understanding what type of market research is important to your business, aligning with your stakeholders, and scoping out your project ahead of time will ensure you stay on track and deliver actionable results.
So, when’s the best time to do market research? Trick question! Continuously. No matter where you work, you can always tap into the market’s opinions and preferences to be better at your job.
Let’s look at this in the context of a product’s lifecycle:
If the answer to “when should I do market research” is “all the time,” how do companies manage and plan for that? One way is budgeting for large annual studies—like brand tracking and competitive research every year or more frequently. In addition to that, more and more companies have taken a page from the world’s most innovative companies to make their market research more agile.
Agile market research is an approach to conducting market research in which projects are structured in small, frequent “sprints” so you can adapt to challenges on the fly.
Rooted in the Agile Methodology first introduced in the software development space, agile market research takes on a lot of the same characteristics you’d find in startup culture. Agile market research goes beyond just being faster. As SurveyMonkey president Tom Hale described in his piece in Quirk’s, “The era of doing a couple of large, set-in-stone projects a year is gone. Today your research goals adapt to the ever-changing needs of the business, which translates into frequent projects that validate your strategy along the way.”
“The era of doing a couple of large, set-in-stone projects a year is gone. Today your research goals adapt to the ever-changing needs of the business, which translates into frequent projects that validate your strategy along the way.”
Agile market research isn’t a brand new concept, but it has spread like wildfire. Even a couple years ago, 78% of researchers were planning to adopt agile market research methodologies, according to a study by GutCheck. With DIY research tools like SurveyMonkey and SurveyMonkey Audience, more people and teams within an organization are able to do their own market research without having to rely on centralized insights teams or full-service agencies, and this allows them to always have the data they need to make decisions faster.
Below is SurveyMonkey’s agile market research framework. It visualizes a cyclical approach to exploring, testing, validating, and optimizing strategies—whether they’re ideas, concepts, campaigns, you name it—all the while continuously tracking progress. It takes what otherwise might be a long, drawn out research timeline and breaks it into sprints of smaller, more manageable projects. The beauty of this framework is its versatility. It shows you how agile market research can help you for nearly any challenge or project you might encounter at your job.
Each research phase fundamentally asks the following questions:
The key takeaway here is that with the right tools and processes, research can be an ongoing activity that any team in your organization can own. Now, that doesn’t mean that you should just start conducting research willy-nilly. Having a clear direction and plan will make frequent research that much more strategic and actionable. The first step is defining the business question your research aims to answer.
Starting a market research project from scratch can feel intimidating. If you break it into chunks and have a clear vision of what you’re looking for, things become easier. In order to focus your research, you should lay out the business question and research goals you’re looking to achieve.
The business question is a short summary of the problem you’re solving for and the context of how it fits in to your business. We’re not talking about survey questions here—business questions are high-level goals or challenges that tie directly to your business objectives that can help you make better decisions. A business question might involve:
The research goal is an outline of the specific facts or metrics you hope to learn with your research. In other words, your research goals are what helps you answer your business question, you can map research goals to that question. Writing strong, relevant research goals is important because they will later translate to specific survey questions later on.
A good rule of thumb is to have no more than 3 research goals so you ensure your survey is focused and not overwhelming for respondents.
To bring this to life, here are some hypothetical business questions and research goals:
Business question | Research goals |
Consumer behavior: We’re considering investing in a couple video streaming services companies, and we need to understand the existing landscape and perceptions so we invest wisely. | 1. Learn what tech brands and apps are most popular among millenials 2. Gather proof points around quantity/satisfaction of apps used 3. Understand millennials’ usage and attitudes towards streaming services |
Ad testing: We’re very close to going to market with our new dog food, and our designers have come up with several great designs for print ads. How do we choose which design to go with? | 1. Compare consumer appeal and preference for each ad design 2. Identify which design consumers would be willing to pay more for 3. Assess any differences by consumer demographics |
Brand tracking: We’re an established brand in the sparkling water category, but a lot of new brands have launched in the last year. What does that mean for us? | 1. Measure brand awareness for all major brands in the category 2. Assess each brand’s perception and associations 3. Understand brand adoption for our brand and the new entrants |
As you go about connecting your business question to your research goals, you should begin thinking about summarizing how your results will be used, what format they’ll be delivered in (a summary in a spreadsheet? a formal presentation to executives?), and who the key stakeholders are for the research (typically those responsible for business decisions). All of this information will be helpful later when you create a brief to help you summarize (or defend) your market research project.
When your objectives are clear, the next step is to outline your project scope. This includes your project budget, who you’ll be surveying and how, and the estimated project timeline.
Okay, so this is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Should the project scope determine the budget or vice versa? The reality is that most teams are given a set budget for the year and need to figure out how to work within it. Earlier in the year (or planning cycle), you might have more unallocated funds to work with, but as the year goes on, things might get tighter. Where you stand with budget will likely determine how you move forward.
Things to consider when figuring out your budget:
Knowing who you need to target with your survey and how you plan to do it will have implications for how you resource your project (both dollars and team members working on it). Try to answer the following questions before getting started:
Not to worry, we’ll go into much more depth on how to answer these questions in the fielding section of this guide.
Understanding how long each step in a market research project takes will ensure you start the work early enough to have actionable insights before you need to make your decisions. Here’s the timeline you can expect for a large scale DIY market research project.
Timing considerations for each step:
Now, these are timeline estimates for a larger-scale research project with several stakeholders. The beauty of agile market research is that it’s frequent and built into your business process. You might follow the above timeline for the first run, but future projects could be done on the fly in a much more accelerated timeline (perhaps even just days from start to finish).
Once you’ve worked through everything above, you should document everything in a research brief. Research briefs are a great way to keep everything in one place. A well-written research brief will be able to tell anyone who’s interested exactly what you will be studying (and what you won’t be) to make sure everyone is on the same page. And if anyone wants to suggest something that’s not part of your experiment, your research brief will help you show why you need to stick to the plan.
And with your plan all set, you’re ready to start drafting your survey!
How to design a successful market research survey
In this section, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about writing an effective market research survey. We’ll start with how to structure your survey, discuss question writing tips, tell you ways to optimize your survey for data quality, provide market research survey templates to get you started, and even share a pre-launch checklist. Let’s get to it!
To start, take a look at the below diagram. It breaks down the anatomy of a good market research survey. We’ll dive into all of these recommendations in more detail in this chapter.
Before you begin writing survey questions, it’s important to know how to structure a good market research survey. While there isn’t a perfect formula, there are several fundamental things to take note of before you get writing:
Now that we’ve reviewed how to structure your survey, let’s look at strategies for writing your survey questions in a way that ensures you don’t bias your respondents.
A lot of things can inadvertently bias your survey respondents—the wording of your question, the sentence structure, how you choose your answer options, and more. Luckily it’s pretty easy to avoid if you adhere to these tips.
No matter the question, the golden rules for writing a good survey question are:
Ordinal scale questions like Likert scale questions are extremely common in market research. They typically come in the form of a 5-, or 7-point scale, which means they include 5 or 7 answer options. The key with these types of questions is balancing the number of positive, neutral, and negative answer options—there should be equal parts positive and negative.
Also, avoid agree/disagree questions. Survey scientists have found again and again that they cause desirability bias, the tendency for respondents to agree more often than they normally would. We recommend using Likert Scale questions instead.
If you’re having trouble coming up with the right answer options, SurveyMonkey’s Answer Genius can help by using artificial intelligence to predict the answer options you should use for a given question.
Make sure every respondent who enters your survey is able to answer the questions in your survey—even if the survey question isn’t relevant to them. Including an “other” or “none of the above” or “never” answer option can help you achieve this.
Jargon, industry-specific terms, acronyms, and slang have no place in a survey. If your respondents don’t understand what you’re asking you may end up with bad data, so don’t assume they know specific terms. Make your question wording as clear and simple as possible, and if you must, explain what technical terms are with examples (either within the question itself or in a survey introduction).
Be careful of words like “and” and “or” in your survey question. It may mean you’re asking two questions in one (double-barreled questions), which could make the results unusable. Make sure you’re sticking to one topic in your question, or split your question into two parts.
You don’t want the way you worded a question or the order of your answer options to influence respondents’ answers. Order bias can be reduced by randomizing your answer options. Note: Don’t randomize Likert scale questions—just make sure the answer options show up in a consistent order (positive to negative or negative to positive). Also, don’t bother randomizing if it makes more sense to arrange answer options alphabetically (e.g. US states and territories).
Screening questions ensure your respondents actually meet your survey criteria. But savvy online panelists have caught on to the fact that failing a screening question means they get kicked out of the survey (and therefore, miss out on the incentive). You’re more likely to get higher data quality when respondents are unaware you’re using a screening question at the beginning of your survey. Avoid obvious screening questions like yes/no questions because acquiescence bias (tendency to answer “yes” to appear more agreeable) may influence respondents to answer dishonestly.
Data quality can be attributed to many things, but optimizing your survey design is one of the most important (and controllable!) ways to ensure reliable results. Here’s what you should and shouldn’t do:
If you’ve read this far and you still don’t know where to begin, we’ve got 20+ market research survey templates waiting for you!
We have several market research survey templates to help you get started. All you have to do is customize the survey template for your product/service category and you’re good to go!
Quantify the demand for your product, and pinpoint which market to enter next.
See templateMeasure awareness, usage, and NPS® for the key players in your category.
See templateGauge the levels of awareness and adoption for emerging product categories.
See templateLearn who, where, and how people shop for your product/service category.
See templateDeep dive into the purchase decision making process of your target buyers.
See templateGet feedback on your product concepts to learn which one will win in-market.
See templateTest to see which packaging designs and messaging will stand out most with buyers.
See templateKnow what consumers are willing to pay for your product and what’s too expensive.
See templateTest your advertising campaigns to know which will drive higher purchase intent.
See templateGet feedback on your logo ideas to find out which is most appealing to buyers.
See templateSee which marketing messages or claims resonate most with your target buyer.
See templateLearn how many people are aware of your brand plus how and when they heard about it.
See templateCapture the entire brand funnel from awareness to consideration to loyalty.
See templateSee what’s most important when making a purchase and how your brand performs.
See template
Can’t find what you’re looking for? See all market research survey templates, or check out our question bank when you create your next survey.
And if you’re planning to do a lot of research, you can create your own shared library of internal survey templates and a custom question bank so the research across your organization is consistent over time.
Once you’re satisfied with your survey design, the next step is to collect survey responses!
How to collect survey responses from the right people
Now that your survey is ready to launch (or as we say, get into “the field”), it’s time to figure out who you’ll target, how you’ll reach them, how many responses you’ll need, and when to send your survey.
When you’re sending out a market research survey, your ultimate goal is to understand the behaviors and perceptions of the target population you’re interested in. In order to do that, you need to know who your target audience is to begin with.
Here are some example characteristics that you could use to define your target audience:
Now, if you’re a well-established company, you probably already have a good sense of who your target market is and the attributes that define it. But if you don’t that’s okay too. With market research there are times when you want to target a broad audience and times when you want to target a narrower group of people.
How you’re going to reach the people you need to survey depends on who you’re surveying. Rest assured there are a variety of options for getting your survey in front of the right people.
Existing contacts could be your friends, family, coworkers, customers, website visitors, social followers - anyone you already have access to. In most cases, you have some way of contacting them to invite them to take your survey.
Common ways of surveying existing contacts:
With most market research surveys, what you need to do is obtain a representative sample of your target market, meaning a group of people that accurately mirrors the population you’re interested in.
Market research panels, like SurveyMonkey Audience, offer a way to access people you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach.
Survey panels will also do a lot of the work for you, like recruiting a diverse population to join the panel, inviting the right people to take your survey, incentivizing respondents, and monitoring your completion rate.
Existing contacts (customers, followers, etc.) | Representative sample of your target market |
Pros: -It’s low cost since all you have to pay for is the survey incentive, if applicable. -Respondents are easy to reach since you’ve already got their info or a way to contact them. | Pros: -It’s easy to get a balanced, representative sample that reduces bias in results. -You can get more granular and specific with your survey targeting. -Panels make inaccessible people accessible. -It’s fast. You can collect 1,000 responses in a couple days versus the weeks it might take to get responses on your own. |
Cons: -Existing contacts make an inherently biased sample because they usually already know and like you, so it’s less likely they’ll answer your survey objectively. -You need to have a lot of contacts to survey in order receive enough survey responses. -It can take a long time to reach a high sample size. A couple reminders are usually necessary. -It takes more work on your part to monitor the survey progress, manage reminders, and send incentives. | Cons: -Buying responses costs money. DIY options like SurveyMonkey Audience are usually cheaper. -Finding a niche sample can be challenging for some targets. For example, cardiologists may be hard to reach with an online panel. |
If you’re surveying the general population using a survey panel, you’ll still want to make sure that your sample is representative of the population in the location you’re surveying. For example, if you want to survey adults in the U.S., the breakdown of certain demographics like age and gender in your survey sample should match the breakdown of the U.S. population. The U.S. Census is a great source of this information—see the table below.
Once you know what the breakdown of your sample should be, you can specify the balancing criteria for your sample. Balancing refers to the distribution of demographic buckets (e.g.: age, gender) in your survey sample and is specified when you target your audience. SurveyMonkey Audience allows Census balancing as the default, but you can also use our custom balancing capabilities to set your own demographic distribution. This way, your sample won’t skew to one age or gender and throw off your results.
Now, let’s say you don’t want to target the general population, but you have a more specific target in mind. In our dog food example, let’s say the product is specifically for small dogs. If you think about the U.S., pet owners are a subset of the adult population, dog owners are a subset of pet owners, and small dog owners are a subset of all dog owners. If you want to understand the packaging appeal of your product, it makes sense to target this relatively small population.
There are two ways of targeting a narrow population like small dog owners.
1. Choose from pre-profiled targeting options. With SurveyMonkey Audience, we have already asked our panelists questions typically used for targeting a survey sample:
Check out the targeting options we have available for your next market research project.
Note: Don’t forget to double check the balancing options. Even when you’re targeting a narrower group of people, you want to ensure the proper demographic balancing. That way, you won’t end up with only female small dog owners instead of a balance of male and female small dog owners.
2. Using custom screening questions. When the available targeting options don’t get you the exact target audience you’re looking for, you can write your own screening questions to disqualify people you don’t need. For example, if we only had a targeting option for dog owners, but you wanted to survey small dog owners, you could use a screening question to disqualify dog owners whose dog is over a certain weight.
When you use screening questions in your survey, you’ll need to estimate the associated qualification rate (also sometimes called incidence rate), which is the percentage of respondents who make it past your screening questions and go on to take the rest of your survey. This will help us calculate the total number of survey invites to send so you get the total number of completed responses you ordered.
It’s important to understand how targeting options and screening questions work together. For example, you could use targeting options to specify dog owners, and then use a screening question to weed out large dog owners. That way, only small dog owners take your survey. When estimating your qualification rate in this case, it would be the percentage of dog owners (who you targeted with the targeting options) that you think own small dogs (who will qualify past your screening question).
When surveying your customers or followers isn't right for your survey topic, use SurveyMonkey Audience to find the people you need.
Once you know who to send your survey to, the next question is how many people should you be surveying? The sample size of your survey will have an effect on your ability to analyze and draw conclusions from your results, so getting enough responses is key to doing effective market research.
When choosing a sample size for your market research survey, here’s what you need to consider:
Are you doing a quick gut-check, making a strategic business decision, or trying to get your results published? How you’ll be using your results can help determine your sample size. Here are some sample size recommendations:
Margin of Error is an indicator of how closely the survey results from your sample represent the entire population you’re targeting. Essentially, it tells you how confident you can be in your survey results. Here’s how to interpret margin of error: Let’s say you surveyed 400 people, and 50% are aware of your brand. With a margin of error of +/- 5%, you can be confident that between 45% and 55% of the target population is aware of your brand.
If you want a tighter margin of error, you’ll want to survey a larger sample size.
Factors that Influence Margin of Error:
If you’re looking for an extremely specific type of respondent, the panel you’re working with might only have so many in their inventory. The feasibility of your sample can determine the max number of people you can survey at a given time. To get around this, you could loosen your targeting criteria and ask extra questions that can help you identify the respondents you’re looking for. Then, once you’ve collected your responses, you can use filters in your data analysis to see how those respondents answered.. That way, you’ll be working with more data at the total level, but still have a way to see how that specific group answered your questions.
Let’s be realistic: We all have to work within a budget. The good news about DIY market research and online panels is that they are much less expensive than traditional full-service vendors. Even still, your budget will play a role in the number of responses you’re able to collect. But remember, even if you can’t reach the sample size you were hoping for, some data is always better than no data at all.
Sometimes your survey logic will influence the number of people you need to survey. Let’s say you’re testing 2 different ad campaigns and you used our A/B test functionality (or a monadic survey design) so that 50% of your respondents see one campaign and 50% of respondents see the other. If you want 200 responses for each ad campaign, you’ll need 400 total responses.
Is there an ideal time to launch your market research project? Not really. Neither time of day, day of the week, seasons, nor holidays really make a difference for data quality. It’s best to time your project based mainly on your project goals and research plan. However, there are some implications for response volume and data consistency (if you’re running multiple projects or a tracking study) that you should keep in mind.
What does this mean for you? One thing you might want to consider sending dense or image-heavy surveys on a Friday night because it’s more likely people will be taking the survey on their mobile devices.
You did it! You launched your survey! Now, what? If you’re using our Audience panel, all you have to do is sit back and watch the results roll in automatically. If you are surveying your own contacts, there’s a little more to do to make sure you get all of the responses you need.
You’ll want to monitor your survey as it’s gathering responses so you can (a) make sure you get results on time and (b) detect any potential issues with your survey. There are three metrics you should be aware of:
A low completion rate indicates something may be wrong with your survey because few people who begin the survey actually finish it.
Note: when you use SurveyMonkey Audience to collect targeted responses, our system will monitor your completion rate. If it gets too low, we may pause your project and have one of our survey experts help you get it back on track.
Our team of Audience experts are here to help you get your project off the ground.
When surveying your own contacts, it’s rare to get all of the responses you need with just one invite, but that first invitation is extremely important. Our research shows that about ¾ of your responses will come in the first 24 hours of sending your survey via email. Reminders are a good way to boost your response rates. Our recommendation:
Offering a survey incentive is another way to improve your response rates. Whether you offer an incentive depends on your budget, but when you use a survey panel, the respondent incentives are included in the price of the responses. Check out SurveyMonkey’s integrations with digital gift companies—an easy way to offer incentives for your survey.
When you’ve collected all of the responses you need, it’s a good idea to close your survey. That way, once you start your analysis, you’ll have a static dataset without responses trickling in here and there. If you’ve got an always-on survey, like a survey embedded in your website, then you don’t ever want to close your survey.
Note: If you’re using our Audience panel, we’ll close your survey after you’ve received all of the results you ordered.
How to make sense of your market research results
Hooray! The results are in! Now it’s time to figure out what the results mean so you can turn your in-depth data into actionable insights.
Before you start diving into your results, you’ll want to make sure that you’re working with a complete, clean dataset. If you do these things first, you’ll have even more confidence in the findings you deliver to your stakeholders.
Trust us, we know it’s tempting! When results start flowing into your survey, your first instinct is to start combing through the early data, but be careful! Even if you’ve ordered a balanced sample from a panel like SurveyMonkey Audience, the results aren’t necessarily arriving in a balanced order.
For example, if you launched the survey early in the morning on the east coast, you’ll likely get a lot of responses from the east coast before the west coast. We also know that older female demographic buckets tend to fill up before younger male demographic buckets. So, the conclusion here is to wait until you’ve received all of the responses you ordered and your survey is closed to begin your analysis.
We get this question a lot: “But aren’t I skewing my data by removing responses?” The answer is that if the responses are low quality (i.e. if you’re certain the respondent didn’t take the time to answer your questions carefully), then removing them will improve your data’s reliability. Even full-service research firms do this before delivering results to clients, so if you’re doing your own market research, you should expect to do a little data cleaning.
A few of the top things to look for:
Note: If you made your open-ended questions required, it’s possible that the respondent didn’t have an answer for the question. Write-ins like “none”, “n/a” or misspellings aren’t a sign of poor data quality.
Now, if you specified census or custom balancing when purchasing responses, representation probably isn’t an issue since major demographic buckets like age and gender will have the distribution you ordered.
If you sent your survey to your own contacts via email or social media, it’s possible your data isn’t balanced. Check your sample’s demographic breakdown compared to the population you’re interested in. If they’re similar, you’re good to go.
If your sample’s demographics do not match the population’s you might consider weighting your results. Weighting is an adjustment technique used after data has been collected to make sure the demographic profile of your respondents matches your population. Weighting involves custom calculations with a statistical software to fix any lopsidedness in your sample by giving more weight to underrepresented groups and less weight to overrepresented groups.
If you’re a data nerd like us, it’s easy to get sucked into the data abyss and lose all sense of time and space. Having an analysis plan helps you avoid this. Now is the time to revisit your business questions and research goals. At this point, you should know exactly how you’re going to answer your main questions, so your analysis can be focused and efficient.
And now, with your analysis plan at the ready, data spick-and-span, you’re ready to dive into your results!
How you summarize and visualize your results is important for understanding and communicating your findings to stakeholders. Below are some guidelines for how to make it easy to spot those valuable insights.
We did a study on research-backed content consumption and saw that 42% of people found data visualized with charts, graphs or infographics more enjoyable to read than data written out in a sentence or presented in a table. Here are the most common chart types—from bar graphs to word clouds—and when to use them:
Knowing what chart type to use is the first step. Next, surround your chart with the right details and context so people can understand what they’re looking at. Here’s what to include in any chart you’re presenting:
This is an example of a chart that’s presentation-ready from a brand awareness survey:
If you have any Likert scale questions in your market research survey, Top 2 Box Scores combine the highest 2 responses of the scale into one easy-to-interpret metric. Consolidating your results in this way makes it easier to:
How to use a Top 2 Box Score in your survey analysis.
When you first get your survey results, you’ll likely looking at aggregated answers for the entire sample you collected. Looking at how individual segments of your population answer your survey is one way to uncover insights that could be critical to your analysis.
Here are a few segments of your sample you could look into:
Once you know what segments could be interesting to dive into, there are two ways to approach segmenting your results for deeper insights:
Important note: When segmenting your data, be aware of the base sizes you end up with. If you only surveyed 300 people total, segmenting your data by US state would leave you with a handful of responses from each state (at best). This would make it much harder to draw significant conclusions from those responses.
Collecting data over time can be immensely useful to a business. Tracking things like market trends, consumer perceptions, brand awareness, and competitive intelligence can provide valuable indicators that companies need to adapt to.
A baseline is your first set of results. Whether that’s your first wave of a tracking survey, or the first month of an always-on survey, the baseline is what you’ll be benchmarking against as you collect more data. Once you have a baseline, the next time you run your survey, you’ll be able to understand if things have changed or stayed the same.
The key to understanding market trends is to consistently collect data over time. But the types of projects you’re running can make a big difference in how you collect that data:
In our sparkling water brand tracking study, we decided on quarterly waves. Here’s what the awareness results look like from the first two waves.
Statistical significance shows whether one group's answers are substantially different from another group's answers by using statistical testing. When a difference between sample groups is statistically significant, it means you can be confident your results represent a real characteristic of the population instead of random variation in your sample. Statistical significance is useful in market research when applied to differences between respondent groups (e.g.: male vs female) or differences between waves of a tracking study.
A practical rule of thumb is to check if the change between one group and the other is outside the margin of error based on the sample size. If the change is greater than the margin of error, it’s likely a statistically significant change.
You can check your margin of error using SurveyMonkey’s margin of error calculator, or use the table below as a guide. As a general rule, the margin of error gets smaller as the sample gets bigger.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you surveyed 400 people, and find that your brand awareness is 50% in Wave 1 and 53% in Wave 2. This change of +3% is within the margin of error of +/- 5%, which means we cannot conclude that the brand awareness has grown between the two waves.
One thing to remember—while Statistical Significance can tell you what is statistically different, it does not necessarily mean that the difference is meaningful for your business. It’s up to you as the interpreter of the results to determine if that statistical significance is important.
Beyond using the sample size and margin of error to estimate whether results are significantly different, you can use statistical testing (a.k.a.: stat testing) to know for sure. Statistical testing is commonly built right into survey software. In SurveyMonkey, you can use stat testing with comparisons and cross-tab reports.
Alternatively, you can use calculators to do your own stat testing on groups of results.
Once you complete your analysis and are ready to publish your research, it’s a good idea to write a methodology summary—whether it’s in a presentation or a research report. A methodology summary explains where the results came from so anyone reading your analysis has the right context.
A survey methodology summary should contain:
Here’s an example:
This study was fielded using SurveyMonkey Audience from June 20-June 22, 2019 with a U.S. sample of 1,013 adults age 18+. The sample was balanced on age and gender according to the 2010 US Census.
Transform insights into strategic business recommendations
The results are in, you have your findings, and now you need to figure out what to do next. Or, maybe it’s clear what you should do, but you need to convince the right people. We’ve got a few suggestions for how you can go beyond the insights to craft a story, develop clear recommendations, and get buy-in from leadership.
Think about some of the best presentations you’ve seen. What makes them stand out? Usually the answer is a memorable story. If you can package up your findings with a clear, logical story, you’re more likely to make an impression and get buy-in for your recommendations. Here are six things to keep in mind as you craft your data story:
By now you’ve become very intimate with your research, but, of course, not everyone you’ll present it to will be. It’s important to set up the story to ensure everyone is caught up before you present your findings and recommendations. Storytelling frameworks can help you come up with an outline for your presentation.
One framework you can follow is SCQA, first introduced by Barbara Minto in her book, The Pyramid Principle: Logic and Writing in Thinking. The SCQA acronym stands for: Situation, Complication, Question & Answer, and it’s commonly used by consulting firms.
If you follow the SCQA framework, this will come naturally. When presenting your research to stakeholders, business context helps you answer the “so what?” question—why your research matters, why stakeholders should care, and how the findings/recommendations can help the business.
No one’s going to be overly impressed if you’re throwing up percentages in the single digits. The powerful stats are the ones that support your claim with large numbers. This is because once you exceed the 50%-mark, you’re talking about the majority.
If the data that supports your story isn’t a big statistic, try reframing it. Instead of “10% of Americans would feel safe as a passenger in a self-driving car”, try “90% of Americans would not feel safe…” Note that in cases where you’re conducting a structured analysis (e.g.: building a scorecard), reframing stats won’t work.
In many cases, your existing business data will describe the “what” but when you collect consumers voices and opinions using market research, you can uncover the “why”. When your story is falling flat, step back and see if your presentation is not just answering the “what” and “how”, but also the “why”.
You’ve done a lot of digging into your data, and while a lot of the findings may be interesting, they might not all be relevant to your story. Only include the results that contribute to or add color to your story and recommendations. It’s OK to leave a lot of your data out of your presentation if it distracts your audience from taking away what matters.
At the end of the day, the goal of market research is to explain human perceptions and behaviors. The more you can bring real examples into your story, the more tangible the results will be to your audience.
One way to do this is by peppering in quotes from your open-ended responses. You can also mix qualitative information (e.g.: interviews, customer support cases, etc.) with your quantitative results. This will bring your data to life and make your points that much more compelling.
Strategic business recommendations take your findings from “Oh, that’s really interesting” to “Now what?” But, in order to get people on board, you have to make sure your recommendations are realistic and aligned to the overall business strategy.
Strategic recommendations should be:
This is the moment you’ve waited for! Your time to shine! How you’re going to leave your mark and impact your organization for the better!
Now, getting buy-in for your recommendations and motivating others to act can be a challenge. Two strategies that we’ve seen work well for our clients are 1) Going on a research roadshow and 2) Creating a follow-up plan.
The research roadshow is pretty much what it sounds like: a series of meetings to present your findings and recommendations to the right stakeholders to motivate them to take action. The order in which you do things here can make a big difference in how your roadshow turns out:
One of the best ways to ensure your recommendations are implemented is to hold your team and stakeholders accountable with follow-up. Make a plan to regroup with the team as needed to check in on action items. Ask yourself and your stakeholders these questions:
Finally, pull your stakeholders into your follow-up research plan. As you continue to do more market research, keeping stakeholders involved will improve the effectiveness and actionability of your research.
And now! Go forth! Use what you learned in this guide to get the market feedback that will catapult your business to the next level. And remember: if you get stuck, our team is only an email away!
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