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8 Templates to Plan & Organize Your Market Research

Market research (or marketing research) helps you deeply understand your customers and target market. It's a group of activities that will uncover insights you can use to create better products and improve your marketing. These templates will help you organize every part of your market research project in one collaborative place.

Market Research Brief Template

The goal of any marketing research brief is to define the objectives in a way that a researcher can confidently build an appropriate study. This clarity will then lead to the 'right' research method used and consequent insights uncovered.

Brand Positioning Map Template

The Brand Positioning Map template (or Competitive Landscape) is perfect for identifying your opportunity in the market. It's a simple way to ensure your brand will stand out against your competitors.

Customer Persona Template

It's crucial to have a crystal clear picture of your ideal customer. Building a customer persona helps your team understand the people they're designing for. Use this template to map out your customer's goals, background and pain-points so you can design a brand or product that naturally appeals to them.

Market Research Template

How well do you understand the market you're designing for? The Market Research template is the perfect way build a complete picture of your industry and audience. Use it to collect insights about the competitors, links, customer research, trends, stats and more in one visual place.

SWOT Analysis Template

The SWOT framework helps you uncover your internal Strengths and Weaknesses plus external Opportunities and Threats. You can use it to assess your entire company, brand, marketing or an individual product. It is traditionally used by management teams but is also a great tool for brand strategy and marketing projects.

Moodboard Template

Before you begin designing your new brand or campaign, it's important that everyone involved agrees on the visual style. A moodboard lets you explore different directions in minutes. This template contains placeholders for images, video, color swatches and notes.

Diary Study Template

Understand a user's experiences, behaviour, and activities over time using the Diary Study research method.

Day in the Life of Template

The Day in the Life research technique lets you create a visually engaging timeline of a customer's day. The template allows you to create notes for research, lists of questions, and add images and videos to bring someone's habits and behaviours to life.

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Market research templates: what they are and how to use them.

18 min read Interested in market research but need some templates to start with? In this guide, we unpack market research, survey planning best practice and share some of our best templates for brand, customer, product and employee research.

What is a market research template?

While you’re no doubt familiar with the concept of market research and how it can help you to reach your target audiences and improve your product or service , the real challenge is designing a market research plan that is conducive to excellent results.

All of this starts with the right market research template(s) to help you analyze specific target audiences, collect the right data and uncover insights that can drive actionable change.

In this article, we’re going to:

• talk about market research and its use cases,
• provide you with a standard template that allows you to plan your research,
• and share several other templates to help you with specific types of market research

You can also check out our free template library.

But first, let’s revisit market research.

What is market research?

Market research is the process of determining the viability of a new service or product through surveys and questionnaires with prospects and/or customers. It involves gathering information about market needs and prospect/customer preferences .

Through market research, you can discover and/or refine your target market, get opinions and feedback on what you provide to them and uncover further prospect/customer pain points and expectations of your service or product .

Market research can be conducted in-house, either by you and your research team, or through a third-party company that specializes in it (they will typically have their own research panels or be capable of creating a research panel to suit your requirements).

The four common types of market research

There are lots of different ways to conduct market research to collect customer data and feedback , test product concepts , and do brand research, but the four most common are:

The most commonly used form of market research, surveys are a form of qualitative research that asks respondents a series of open or closed-ended questions , delivered either as an on-screen questionnaire or email.

Surveys are incredibly popular because they’re cheap, easy to produce, and can capture data very quickly, leading to faster insights.

2) Focus groups

Why not bring together a carefully selected group of people in your target market using focus groups? Though more expensive and complex than surveys and interviews, focus groups can offer deeper insight into prospect and customer behavior – from how users experience your products and services to what marketing messages really resonate with them.

Of course, as a market research method that’s reliant on a moderator to steer conversation, it can be subject to bias (as different moderators might have preferred questions or be more forceful) and if you cut corners (not asking all the necessary questions or making assumptions based on responses), the data could get skewed.

3) Observation

As if you were a fly-on-the-wall, the observation market research method can be incredibly powerful. Rather than interviewing or surveying users, you simply take notes while someone from your target market/target audience engages with your product . How are they using it? What are they struggling with? Do they look as though they have concerns?

Observing your target audience/target market in this fashion is a great alternative to the other more traditional methods on this list. It’s less expensive and far more natural as it isn’t guided by a moderator or a predefined set of questions. The only issue is that you can’t get feedback directly from the mouth of the user, so it’s worth combining this type of research with interviews, surveys, and/or focus groups.

4) Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions (both in-person and virtually), allowing for more natural conversations with participants.

For gleaning deeper insights (especially with non-verbal cues giving greater weight to opinions), there’s nothing better than face-to-face interviews. Any kind of interview will provide excellent information, helping you to better understand your prospects and target audience/target market.

Use cases for market research

When you want to understand your prospects and/or customers, but have no existing data to set a benchmark – or want to improve your products and services quickly – market research is often the go-to.

Market research (as mentioned above), helps you to discover how prospects and customers feel about your products and services, as well as what they would like to see .

But there are more use cases and benefits to market research than the above.

Reduce risk of product and business failure

With any new venture, there’s no guarantee that the new idea will be successful. As such, it’s up to you to establish the market’s appetite for your product or service. The easiest way to do this is through market research – you can understand the challenges prospects face and quickly identify where you can help. With the data from your market survey, you can then create a solution that addresses the needs and expectations of would-be customers.

Forecast future trends

Market research doesn’t just help you to understand the current market – it also helps you to forecast future needs. As you conduct your research and analyze the findings, you can identify trends – for example, how brands and businesses are adopting new technology to improve customer experiences or how sustainability is becoming a core focus for packaging. Whatever it is you’re looking to understand about the future of business in your market, comprehensive market research can help you to identify it.

Stay ahead of the competition

Understanding your market and what prospects and customers want from you will help to keep you ahead of the competition . The fact is that the top businesses frequently invest in market research to get an edge, and those that don’t tap into the insights of their audience are missing low-hanging fruit.

As well as helping you to stay in front, you can also use market research to identify gaps in the market, e.g. your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses . Just have participants answer questions about competitor products/services – or even use the products/services – and work out how you can refine your offerings to address these issues.

Plan more strategically

What’s the foundation of your business strategy? If it’s based on evidence, e.g. what people expect of your products and services, it’ll be much easier to deliver something that works. Rather than making assumptions about what you should do, market research gives you a clear, concrete understanding of what people want to see.

Check out our guide to market research for a more comprehensive breakdown.

How do you write a market research plan/template?

A market research plan is very similar to a brief in that it documents the most vital information and steps about your project. Consider it a blueprint that outlines your main objective (summary), key questions and outcomes, target audience and size, your timeline, budget, and other key variables.

Let’s talk about them in more detail.

Elements of a great market research plan

1) overview or summary.

Use the first section of your market research plan to outline the background to the problem that you are attempting to solve (this is usually your problem statement or problem question). Include background information on the study’s purpose and the business to provide context to those who would read the report, as well as the need for the research. Keep the overview simple and concise; focus on the most salient elements.

2) Objectives

What is it that you hope to achieve with this survey? Your objectives are the most important part of the survey. Make sure to list 3-5 of the decisions or initiatives that the research will influence.

For example:

Understand the most-used channels for customer engagement and purchasing to decide where to prioritize marketing and sales budget in Q1 2022. Determine what’s causing customer churn at the later stages of the buyer journey and implement a new retention and sales strategy to address it.

Your objectives should be smart, that is: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

3) Deliverables (or outcomes)

This section should focus on what you expect to have at the end of the project. How many responses are you looking for? How will the data be presented? Who will the data be shared with? (Stakeholders, executives) What are your next steps? Make sure you state how you will collect and analyze the data once it’s available.

Products such as Qualtrics CoreXM make this process fast and incredibly easy to do, drastically reducing the time to insights so you can make more meaningful changes, faster.

4) Target audience

Not to be confused with your market research sample, your target audience represents who you want to research. Of course, your sample may include ideal buyers from your target audience. Here you want to define the main variables or factors of your audience: demographic , age, location , product interaction, experience, and so on. It’s worth building out your buyer personas (if you haven’t already) and including a quick breakdown of them here.

5) Sample plan

How many participants do you want to research and what kind of groups do you want to reach? Depending on these two variables, you may have to use qualitative, quantitative , or multi-method approaches.

6) Research methods

What methods will you use in your market research project? The insights (and the granularity of those insights) will depend on the methods and tools you choose. For example, and as mentioned earlier, surveys are often the go-to for many organizations as they’re affordable and straightforward, but if you want to get more personal views from your respondents, one-to-one interviews might be more applicable. You might even want to take a hands-off approach and simply observe participants as they use your products, or try a combination of research methods. Make sure to outline what methods you will use as part of your research plan.

7) Timeline

How long will your research project run? It’s worth putting together a Gantt chart to highlight key milestones in the project, along with dependencies, and to break down tasks as much as possible. Schedule in contingency time in case some tasks or research runs over – or you need more responses.

Set a budget for the overall program and list it in your plan. Though this might be the most difficult aspect of any research plan, it helps you to be more strategic about tasks and hold people accountable at each stage of the process. If costs go over, that’s good to know for future market research. If costs are lower than anticipated, you then have the opportunity to do further research or prop up other areas of the study.

9) Ethical concerns or conflicts of interest

One of the most important parts of your market research plan, you should highlight any ethical concerns. To begin with, it’s your duty to state whether or not responses will be kept confidential and anonymous as part of the study. It’s also important to allow participants to remain anonymous and ensure you protect their privacy at all times.

Another issue to consider is stereotyping. Any analysis of real populations needs to make approximations and place individuals into groups, but if conducted irresponsibly, stereotyping can lead to undesirable results.

Lastly, conflicts of interest – it may be that researchers have interests in the outcome of the project that lead to a personal advantage that might compromise the integrity of your market research project. You should clearly state in your market research report that any potential conflicts of interest are highlighted and addressed before continuing.

But I want a faster solution!

Well, there’s a quicker and far easier way to do all of the above and get the data you need – just use a market research survey template. In our next section, we’re going to share a whole list of templates that you can use.

Free market research survey templates

No matter what kind of research you want to conduct, we have templates that will remove the complexity of the task and empower you to get more from your data. Below we’ve compiled a list of templates for four key experience areas: Brand , Customer , Employee , and Product .

All of our research templates are free. All you need to do is sign up for a free Qualtrics account to access them.

Brand experience market research templates:

• Logo testing : Collect feedback to help you evaluate and iterate on your logo designs and concepts
• Brand awareness : Track the level of brand awareness in your target market, including current and potential future customers
• Ad testing : Evaluate your consumers’ reaction to an advertisement so you know which campaigns to deploy before you invest
• A/B testing : Quickly and easily compare to versions or options in a study, whether it’s a design, headline, color palette or a mock-up of your latest ad campaign

Customer experience market research templates

• Student satisfaction : Gather feedback on how your institution is delivering on the student experience
• Net promoter score (NPS) : Measure customer loyalty and understand how they feel about your product or service using one of the world’s best-recognized metrics
• Customer satisfaction : Evaluate how satisfied your customers are with your company, including the products and services you provide, and how they are treated when they buy from you
• Customer service : Gain insights into the contact center experience, so you can achieve and maintain optimum levels of customer experience (CX) performance
• Event feedback : Measure the effectiveness of your events and how well they meet attendee expectations so that you can continuously improve your offering
• IT help desk : Understand how satisfied your employees and customers are with your IT help desk experience
• Website suggestion box : Collect visitor feedback on how your website can be improved
• Website satisfaction : Find out how satisfied visitors are with your website’s design, usability, and performance
• Store purchase feedback : Capture customer experience data at the point of purchase to help you improve the in-store experience
• Online purchase feedback : Find out how well your online shopping experience performs against customer needs and expectations

Employee experience market research templates

• Employee satisfaction : Get an overview of your current employee experience
• Manager feedback : Improve your skills as a leader with valuable feedback from your team
• Employee engagement : Find out how employees find the current experience at your workplace with this entry-level engagement survey
• Employee exit interview : Understand why your employees are leaving and how they’ll speak about your company once they’re gone with this survey template
• Employee onboarding : Improve your onboarding program by understanding what’s working and what’s not
• Team event planning : Collect inputs from employees to plan a team event that works for everyone
• Meeting feedback : Check-in with team members after a meeting to see how well your company is running and what improvements can be made
• Interview feedback : Improve your candidate experience by gathering actionable insights about the interview process
• Employee suggestion box : Gather anonymous data to help address concerns and improve the employee experience in your organization
• Candidate experience : Improve your candidate experience to increase brand perception, offer acceptance rates, and hiring process efficiency with this single-touchpoint survey template
• Employee suggestion action : Take employee feedback a step further by working with your staff to quantify solutions based on their experience data

Product experience market research templates

• Product research : Evaluate your consumers’ reaction to a new product or product feature across every stage of the product development journey
• Pricing : Understand how to set the exact price point for your product or service, according to your target consumers
• Feature prioritization : Compare and contrast product features using conjoint analysis to find the optimal mix for your customers
• Product package testing : Collect feedback on your product packaging to see how well it meets the needs and expectations of your customers

Armed with the right market research templates, getting the information you need across brand, product, customer and employee disciplines — as well as beyond — is significantly easier.

But if you want help putting together complex market research and scaling your in-house research team to get agile insights, check out our guide to building an agile research function.

Insights are more important than ever, especially during times of change, but building a great team takes a lot of time and money.

In our eBook, we’ll explain how you can:

• Scale your research team
• Build a smart partner strategy
• Ensure you have the right technology for market research and data analysis

Tackle your market research with our agile market research eBook

Related resources

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, primary vs secondary research 14 min read, request demo.

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The Ultimate Guide to Market Research [+Free Templates]

A comprehensive guide on Market Research with tools, examples of brands winning with research, and templates for surveys, focus groups + presentation template.

Rakefet is the CMO at Mayple. She manages all things marketing and leads our community of experts through live events, workshops, and expert interviews. MBA, 1 dog + 2 cats, and has an extensive collection of Chinese teas.

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Natalie is a content writer and manager who is passionate about using her craft to empower others. She thrives on team dynamic, great coffee, and excellent content. One of these days, she might even get to her own content ideas.

Updated February 26, 2024.

Before you do anything in business you have to have a good grasp of the market. What’s the market like? Who are your competitors? And what are the pain points and challenges of your ideal customer? And how can you solve them? Once you have the answers to those questions then you are ready to move forward with a marketing plan and/or hire a digital marketing agency to execute it.

In this guide we break down what market research is, the different types of market research, and provide you with some of the best templates, tools, and examples, to help you execute it on your own.

Excited to learn?

Let’s dive in.

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to determine the success of your product or service, make changes to your existing product, or understand the perception of your brand in the market.

“Research is formalized curiosity, it is poking and prying with a purpose.” - Zora Neale Hurston

We hear the phrase "product-market fit" all the time and that just means that a product solves a customer's need in the market. And it's very hard to get there without proper market research. Now, I know what you're going to say. Why not get actionable insights from your existing customers? Why not do some customer research?

The problem with customer research is two-fold:

• You have a very limited amount of data as your current customers don't represent the entire market.
• Customer research can introduce a lot of bias into the process.

So the real way to solve these issues is by going broader and conducting some market research.

Why do market research?

There are many benefits of doing market research for your company. Here are a few of them:

• Understand how much demand exists in the market, the market size
• Discover who your competitors are and where they are falling short.
• Better understand the needs of your target customers and the problems and pain points your product solves.
• Learn what your potential customers feel about your brand.
• Identify potential partners and new markets and opportunities.
• Determine which product features you should develop next.
• Find out what your ideal customer is thinking and feeling.
• Use these findings to improve your brand strategy and marketing campaigns.

“The goal is to transform data into information, and information into insight.” - Carly Fiorina

Market research allows you to make better business decisions at every stage of your business and helps you launch better products and services for your customers.

Primary vs secondary research

There are two main types of market research - primary and secondary research.

Primary research

Primary market research is when researchers collect information directly, instead of relying on outside sources of information. It could be done through interviews, online surveys, or focus groups and the advantage here is that the company owns that information. The disadvantage of using primary sources of information is that it's usually more expensive and time-consuming than secondary market research.

Secondary research

Secondary market research involves using existing data that is summarized and collected by third parties. Secondary sources could be commercial sources or public sources like libraries, other websites, blogs , government agencies, and existing surveys. It's data that's more readily available and it's usually much cheaper than conducting primary research.

Qualitative vs quantitative research

Qualitative research is about gathering qualitative data like the market sentiment about the products currently available on the market (read: words and meanings). Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics. It's data that is numbers-based, countable, and measurable.

Types of market research

1. competitive analysis.

Every business needs to know its own strengths and weaknesses and how they compare with its largest competitors in the market. It helps brands identify gaps in the market, develop new products and services, uncover market trends, improve brand positioning , and increase their market share. A SWOT analysis is a good framework to use for this type of research.

2. Consumer insights

It's also equally important to know what consumers are thinking, what the most common problems are and what products they are purchasing. Consumer research can be done through social listening which involves tracking consumer conversations on social media. It could also include analyzing audiences of brands , online communities, and influencers, and analyzing trends in the market.

3. Brand awareness research

Brand awareness is a super important metric for understanding how well your target audience knows your brand. It's used to assess brand performance and the marketing effectiveness of a brand. It tells you about the associations consumers make when they think of your brand and what they believe you're all about.

4. Customer satisfaction research

 Customer satisfaction and loyalty are two really important levers for any business and you don't have to conduct in-depth interviews to get that information. There is a wide range of automated methods to get that kind of data including customer surveys such as NPS surveys, customer effort score (CES) surveys, and regularly asking your customers about their experience with your brand.

5. Customer segmentation research

 Customer segmentation research involves figuring out what buckets consumers fall into based on common characteristics such as - demographics, interests, purchasing behavior, and more. Market segmentation is super helpful for advertising campaigns, product launches, and customer journey mapping.

6. Interviews

Customer interviews are one of the most effective market research methods out there. It's a great way for business owners to get first-party data from their customers and get insights into how they are doing in real time.

7. Focus groups

Focus groups are a great way to get data on a specific demographic. It's one of the most well-known data collection methods and it involves taking a sample size of people and asking them some open-ended questions. It's a great way to get actionable insights from your target market.

8. Pricing research

 Pricing strategy has a huge influence on business growth and it's critical for any business to know how they compare with the leading brands in their niche. It can help you understand what your target customer is willing to pay for your product and at what price you should be selling it.

To start, get automated software to track your competitors' pricing . Then, summarize your research into a report and group the results based on product attributes and other factors. You can use quadrants to make it easier to read visually.

9. Campaign research

It's also important for a brand to research its past marketing campaigns to determine the results and analyze their success. It takes a lot of experimentation to nail the various aspects of a campaign and it's crucial for business leaders to continuously analyze and iterate.

10. Product/service use research

Product or user research gives you an idea of why and how an audience uses a product and gives you data about specific features. Studies show that usability testing is ranked among the most useful ways to discover user insights (8.7 out of 10), above digital analytics and user surveys. So it's a very effective way to measure the usability of a product.

Now that you know the different types of market research let's go through a step-by-step process of setting up your study.

How to conduct a market research study

Looking for your next business idea? Want to check which niche markets are going to be best for it? if it's going to Here's a pretty simple process for conducting

1. Define your buyer persona

The first step in market research is to understand who your buyers are. For that, you need a buyer persona (sometimes called a marketing persona) which is a fictional generalized description of your target customer. You could (and should) have several buyer personas to work with.

Key characteristics to include in your buyer personas are:

• Job title(s)
• Family size
• Major challenges

Now that you've got your customer personas it's time to decide who to work with for your research.

2. Identify the right people to engage with

It's critical that you pick the right group of people to research. This could make or break your market research study. It's important to pick a representative sample that most closely resembles your target customer. That way you'll be able to identify their actual characteristics, challenges, pain points, and buying behavior.

Here are a few strategies that will help you pick the right people:

• Select people who have recently interacted with you
• Pull a list of participants who made a recent purchase
• Call for participants on social media
• Leverage your own network
• Gather a mix of participants
• Offer an incentive (gift card, product access, content upgrades)

3. Pick your data collection method(s)

Here's a quick breakdown of all the different ways you could collect data for your market research study.

Surveys are by far the fastest method of gathering data. You could launch them on your site or send them in an email and automate the whole process. Regular surveys can also help brands improve their customer service so they help kill two birds with one stone.

Interviews take a little longer and require a detailed set of interview questions. Never go into an interview without a clear idea of what you're going to be asking. It's also a little more difficult to schedule time and to get your potential or current customers on the phone or on Zoom.

Focus group

Focus groups are controlled interviews with groups of people led by facilitators. Participants in focus groups are selected based on a set of predetermined criteria such as location, age, social status, income, and more.

Online tracking

Online tracking is done through digital analytics tools like HotJar or Google Analytics. Tracking user behavior on your site gets you an accurate analysis of who your demographic is and what are the types of products or content that they engage with.

The problem here is that you never get to find out the 'why' - the reason behind their behavior - and that's why you need to combine digital analytics with other data collection methods like surveys and usability/product testing.

Marketing analysis

Another great way to collect data is to analyze your marketing campaigns which gives you a great idea of who clicked on your ads, how often, and which device they used. It's a more focused way of using tracking to zero in on a specific marketing campaign.

Social media monitoring

We've talked about this one before. Social monitoring or listening is when you track online conversations on social media platforms. You can use a simple social listening tool to get all the data you need by searching for specific keywords, hashtags, or topics.

Subscription and registration data

Another great way to collect data is to look at your existing audience. That might include your email list, rewards program, or existing customers. Depending on the size of your list, it could give you some broad insights into the type of customers/users you have and what they are most interested in.

Monitoring in-store traffic

Conduct a customer observation session to monitor your actual customers and how they behave in your store (physically or online). Observation is a market research technique where highly-trained market researchers observe how people or consumers interact with products/services in a natural setting.

4. Prepare your research questions

Write down your research questions before you conduct the research. Make sure you cover all the topics that you are trying to gain clarity on and include open-ended questions. The type of questions you use will vary depending on your data collection approach from the last step.

If you're doing a survey or an in-person interview then here are some of the best questions to ask.

The awareness stage

• How did you know that something in this product category could help you?
• Think back to the time you first realized you needed [product category]. What was your challenge?
• How familiar were you with different options on the market?

The consideration stage

• Where did you go to find out the information?
• What was the first thing you did to research potential solutions?
• Did you search on Google? What specifically did you search for? Which keywords did you use?
• Which vendor sites did you visit?
• What did you find helpful? What turned you off?

The decision stage

• Which criteria did you use to compare different vendors?
• What vendors made it to the shortlist and what were the pros/cons of each?
• Who else was involved in the final decision?
• Allow time for further questions on their end.
• Don't forget to thank them for their time and confirm their email/address to receive the incentive you offered

If you noticed, the progression of these questions follows the stages of the buyer's journey which helps you to gain actionable insights into the entire customer experience.

5. List your primary competitors

There are two kinds of competitors - industry competitors and content competitors. Industry competitors compete with you on the actual product or service they sell. Content competitors compete with you in terms of the content they publish - whether that's on specific keywords or they rank higher on topics that you want to be ranked for.

It's important to write a list of all of your competitors and compare their strengths, weaknesses, competitive advantages, and the type of content they publish.

There are different ways to find your competitors. You can look on sites like G2 Crowd and check their industry quadrants.

You could also download a market report from Forrester or Gartner . And you could also search on social media or market research tools like SimilarWeb .

6. Summarize your findings

Now that you've done your research it's time to summarize your findings. Look for common themes in your research and try to present them in the simplest way possible. Use your favorite presentation software to document it and add it to your company database.

Here's a quick research outline you could use:

Background - your goals and why you conducted this study

Participants - who you've talked to. Break down the type of personas and/or customers you've spoken with.

Executive summary - what was the most interesting stuff you've learned? What do you plan to do about it?

Customer journey map - map out the specific motivations and behavioral insights you've gained from each stage of the customer journey (awareness, consideration, and decision).

Action plan - describe what action steps you're going to take to address the issues you've uncovered in your research and how you are going to promote your product/service to your target audience more effectively.

Market research template

Not sure where to begin? Need some templates to help you get started? We got them for you.

1. Market survey template

First and foremost, you need a template to run your market survey. In this template, you will find all the types of questions you should be asking - demographic, product, pricing, and brand questions. They can be used for market surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups.

We also present a variety of question formats for you to use:

• true/false questions
• multiple choice questions
• open response questions

2. SWOT analysis template

A strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis is one of the best ways to do competitor research. It's a really simple analysis. There are four squares and you write down all four of these attributes for each of your competitors.

3. Focus group template

Not sure how to conduct focus groups? Here is a comprehensive template that will help you to take better notes and record your findings during the focus group meeting.

4. Marketing strategy template

The plan of action from your market research should become a vital part of your marketing strategy. We've actually created a marketing strategy template that you could download and use to update your marketing personas, your SWOT analysis, and your marketing channel strategies.

Market research examples

Here are some examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly in market research. Some brands thrive on research and some ignore it completely. Take a look.

McDonald's

McDonald’s sells its food in 97 countries around the world. Their secret? They do a lot of market research before they launch anything. The company uses four key questions in their research process:

• Which products are performing well?
• What prices are most affordable to customers?
• What are consumers reading and watching?
• What content do they consume?
• Which restaurants are most attended, and why?

They also extensively use customer feedback to improve their products. They even put some products up for a vote to see which ones are most loved by their customers.

The iconic coffee brand is valued at almost $30 billion and has over 30,000 coffee shops around the world and part of that success comes from their obsession with customer service. They launched a brilliant idea called “My Starbucks Idea” to try and make the customer feel a part of the journey.

It was an open innovation platform where customers could post their idea for a new coffee drink or food item and if it was good a company representative would actually reach out to them. It had a leaderboard and every year the company would develop some of these ideas.

In 2012, Starbucks launched 73 coffee products from ideas they received from customers. Cake pops and pumpkin spice lattes were born out of this platform, all thanks to market research. Can you imagine a world without pumpkin spice lattes?

For all its innovation Facebook had an epic market research failure. In 2013, Facebook partnered with HTC to launch a smartphone called First. It had Facebook’s interface on its home screen and that was a really jarring change for most people. Instead of taking you to a home screen with your favorite apps, Facebook really took center stage.

To be fair, you could turn it off and get a regular Android home window but that would be missing the entire reason you bought the phone in the first place. So it was a complete mismatch to consumers’ wants and the phone flopped.

Turns out, that nobody wanted to see Facebook when they first opened their phone 😅.

Bloom & Wild

Bloom & Wild is a UK flower delivery brand that was looking for their next campaign. They did some research and found out that people think red roses are cliche and prefer to buy something else as a gift on Valentine’s Day. So the brand chose not to sell roses for Valentine’s Day 2021 and made it into a “No Roses Campaign”.

The results - they saw a 51% increase in press coverage year after year.

Top tools used for market research

Here are some of the top market research and digital analytics tools you should try out for your next research project.

Answer the Public

Answer the public is a free market research tool that helps marketers figure out what questions people ask online. It's really easy to use. You put in a keyword or topic and it spits out a whole variety of questions and subtopics.

Spyfu is a search engine analytics platform that gives you data on where your competitors get their traffic from. It provides info on the kind of both organic traffic and PPC channels down to the specific keywords people used to find each site. It's a great tool to use to map the competitive landscape.

Think with Google

This is an online publication from Google's team where they publish consumer insights from real-time data and their own insights. It uses Google Analytics but presents it to you as a library of information. You can find industry data on a whole array of businesses from educational institutions to counseling services.

Want to do the most extensive market research possible? Use SimilarWeb. It's a competitive analysis and data tool that provides you with literally everything you need.

It has data on:

• Digital marketing data - SEO, traffic, advertising
• Economic trends - economic indicators like annual growth rate, audience, benchmarking
• eCommerce, investing, and even sales data

BuzzSumo is a great tool to use to get actionable insights from social media and content marketing. It aggregates data from various social media channels and shows you the type of content that users engage with and share on their pages.

Typeform is a survey tool that can help you make surveys and fun interactive forms. It's a great tool to use to make your forms more engaging for your audience. The tool has a bunch of easy templates and a ton of integrations to help you visualize that data and share it with your team.

Latana is a brand research tool that helps you understand consumer perception of your brand over time. It helps you answer some key questions about the type of values your customers have, and the type of audiences your competitors are targeting and helps you to focus your campaigns on the right audience for your business.

Statista is one of the most popular consumer data platforms around. It has a wealth of information about consumer markets, business conditions, and industry trends around the world. It's easier to use than most business publications because it aggregates all the data you need in one place. The downside is that it's a little pricy but perfect for teams that have the budget for it.

Dimensions.ai

Dimensions is a search engine for academic publications. It is a great resource if you're looking for deeper insights into things like psychology, micro and macroeconomics, and business trends. A lot of the articles are free to view just make sure you select the " All OA " option which stands for Open Access research.

Otter is an AI-powered transcription software for interviews and meetings. It sits in the background and transcribes your meeting for you and then provides you with a digitized conversation that can be stored, search for specific keywords, and analyzed. It's a great tool to use for doing interviews.

Yelp is a search engine for reviews of local businesses. It's one of the best sources of opinions about a whole variety of products and services. It's a great place to get ideas about the kind of interview questions you want to ask, to find out the pain points of your ideal customer, and to find deeper insights into your target audience.

You have to conduct your market research regularly if you want to see significant results. Try the different methods that we’ve outlined, see what works for you, and remember to keep your team’s focus on the customer. The more knowledgeable they are of your target customer’s needs and wants the better your targeting and marketing strategy will be.

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Discover, Analyze, Succeed: 10 Best Market Research Templates

Praburam Srinivasan

Growth Marketing Manager

February 13, 2024

When promoting your products or launching new ones, it’s essential to understand the market, size up your competition, and have a crystal-clear picture of what your customers want. Once you’ve got that insight, you’re ready to set the stage with a marketing plan .

Market research might sound intimidating, considering the laborious process of collecting and analyzing data. But don’t fret—market research templates swoop in to save the day. They provide a structured roadmap that covers all the vital market research steps, from pinpointing your objectives to gathering and interpreting the data. 🗺️

Come along as we delve into the top 10 free market research templates . We’ll walk you through their unique features, making it a breeze to pick the perfect template that suits your needs.

What Is a Market Research Template? 

What are the key components of a market research template, 1. clickup market research template, 2. clickup market analysis template, 3. clickup business plan template, 4. clickup business development plan template, 5. clickup new product development template, 6. clickup product positioning template, 7. clickup competitive analysis template, 8. clickup customer journey map template, 9. word market research plan template by flexmr, 10. word general market survey template by businessinabox.

Market research is a vast, often time-consuming process that involves gathering essential information about a target market through surveys, interviews, and focus groups. It’s crucial for anticipating trends and maintaining a competitive edge over your rivals. 

A market research template is a pre-designed framework to bring structure to your research processes. It comes with questions and fields for collecting data relevant to specific markets or objectives.

It simplifies the whole exercise by providing a standard format that you can customize to align with your research goals.

Market research templates help you:

• Save time designing and planning your research project
• Save money by removing the need for external research firms
• Ensure consistency in data collection, analysis, and reporting

A market research template is like a recipe for conducting research. It tells you what you need and how to use it. Here are the key components you can find in this template:

• Research objectives : Clearly defined goals of the research project
• Data collection methods : Specific methods and tools for gathering information, such as surveys, interviews, or observations
• Research questions : A set of well-crafted questions to address the research objectives
• Sample selection : Guidelines for choosing the right target audience or sample group
• Data analysis : Instructions on how the gathered data will be analyzed and interpreted
• Reporting : A format for summarizing and presenting the research findings 
• Timeline : A schedule that outlines when you will conduct each research activity
• Budget : Estimated costs associated with the research project
• Contact information : Details of the individuals or teams responsible for the research

10 Best Market Research Templates

We’ve handpicked the most innovative market research templates from Word and ClickUp to help you discover, gather, and analyze data effortlessly. Now, let’s see what makes them stand out! 💖

Market research is your first ally when you want to enhance your brand management and gain insights into your competitors’ strategies. With the ClickUp Market Research Template , you get a user-friendly tool that simplifies the task of gathering and presenting crucial information about your target audience, the state of your product or service, and the broader industry landscape. 🌄

This Task template takes you through the ins and outs of research, covering your approach, data collection techniques, and the valuable insights you’ve gathered from your current or potential customers through Custom Fields.

Adapt the fields to document any information you see fit—add data links and attachments, or choose a research stage like Design , Preparation , and Execution .

Each task comes with a to-do subtask list to keep a record of research steps, like defining a research scope and setting up a research team. The assignees can use it to monitor each subtask’s progress through Custom Statuses like Open, Under Review, or Closed. 

If you’re curious about where your product stands among its competitors, look no further than the ClickUp Market Analysis Template . This tool assists you in identifying and assessing key market trends, gaining insights into customer needs, and examining competitor strategies and performances. ♟️

This extensive market research template sorts competitors into five main types: direct , indirect , potential , future , and replacement (for competitors offering a substitute product).

Use the Growth Share Whiteboard view to evaluate competitor products and decide where to invest your resources. Simply pick the competitor type from the legend, create a sticky note of the corresponding color, and place it on the desired spot. Use the horizontal Quality axis to measure the competitor’s Relative Market Share and the Y-axis to measure their Growth Rate.

The Price vs. Quality Whiteboard view functions similarly, but this time, you’re using a matrix to measure the relation between product quality and price. It gives you a visual grasp of your competitors’ pricing strategy, helping you tactically position your product in the market.

The Competitors List view is your central hub for competitor information, neatly categorized by analysis status like Direct , Indirect , or Potential . Additionally, leverage the Advertisements Board view to see your competitors’ promotional strategies.

Replace traditional, lengthy business plan documents with the ClickUp Business Plan Template and speed up the process. It’s a comprehensive toolkit for documenting every aspect of your business plan and streamlining the drafting process to ensure it’s polished on time. ⏰

This one-page Doc template is neatly divided into several key sections:

• Company description : Provides a company overview, your mission, and vision
• Market analysis : Explains the problem you’re solving, its solution, and the target market
• Sales and marketing strategy : Outlines products and marketing plans
• Operational plan : Covers aspects like your location, equipment, and financial forecasts
• Milestones and metrics : Displays targets and KPIs

Customize the template with your brand logo and contact information. Each section comes with helpful prompts suggesting how to present your data—through bullet lists, pictures, charts, or tables.

Open the Topics List view to see all the sections and subsections included in the comprehensive market research Doc, allowing you to assign them to team members, set due dates, and attach relevant documents.

To track task statuses, switch to the Status Board view and categorize them as To Do, In Progress, Needs Revision, or Complete. Open the Timeline view to monitor potential plan deviations.

Expanding or starting a business is like embarking on an adventure of challenges and surprises. However, a carefully laid-out plan can make this journey much more manageable.

No need to start from scratch, though! Introducing the ClickUp Business Development Plan Template —your business roadmap, equipped with pre-designed sections that will lead you through the entire process, making your path to success smoother. 🛤️

Whether you’re a startup or a growing business, this template offers handy Doc pages to help you document the following:

• Executive summary : For providing an overview of the business you’re growing, outlining the issues you’re addressing, and suggesting solutions
• Key people : For explaining who’s on the executive team and what each person does
• Operations : Lists your business locations and employee count. You can outline the cost of equipment and facilities and map out manufacturing processes on a Whiteboard
• Marketing : Enables sharing the market’s history and growth to foresee potential opportunities, decide on the target audience, and analyze the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
• Financial plan : Gives an estimate of your cash flow and balance sheet, identifying the revenue point where you break even

Of the market research templates in this list, the one comes with ready-made tables and sheets with guidelines on how to fill them in. Feel free to customize any template section to match your business requirements.

Or you can include images to illustrate your plan, add or remove rows, choose your preferred color pallet, and rename the pages to make them your own—all within the target market research template.

Unlocking the path to a successful product launch boils down to one word: preparation. And guess what? The ClickUp New Product Development Template has got your back! 🙌

This comprehensive market research template streamlines the product development process , ensures alignment between your team and milestones, and keeps all tasks organized for seamless collaboration. All this is possible through Custom Fields, allowing you to explore your project from various viewpoints.

The Project Summary List view neatly organizes your tasks by their project phase , from Idea Generation to Product Launch , making it a breeze to track your progress. The list also clearly displays details like Task Complexity and Impact Level through Custom Fields that you can tailor to your needs.

To observe your tasks like a hawk, open the Process Kanban Board view , which turns tasks into cards and groups them by their phases. It’s your go-to spot to quickly identify which tasks are in the pipeline from conceptualization to launch. 

Use the Timeline view for a linear display of your tasks, grouped by the teams working on them and color-coded by phase. This view allows you to efficiently monitor your task schedules and durations by giving you control over your workflow!

You can drag a task to reschedule or tweak its duration by dragging its edges.

Your product’s value directly reflects what your customers think, right? That’s why it’s crucial to figure out where your product slots into the marketplace and how you want your customers to perceive it.

Discover the perfect shortcut to those answers—the ClickUp Product Positioning Template —to implement into your business strategy. This tool helps you better understand your product and find that ideal niche in your target market.

Start by evaluating the product you want to launch in the Product Positioning Assessment view , with pre-made fields like: 

• Product name and description
• Market segment
• Target launch date
• Unique selling points
• Pain points 

Customize the form by renaming the available fields or adding custom ones.

Distribute the form to your team members, and once completed, all the valuable information automatically appears in the Product List view . This view is where you can review the details covered in the form, assign tasks to team members, set priorities , and group tasks by status.

This template also offers a Product Positioning Map Whiteboard view . It features a graph as a visual aid for showcasing how your upcoming product stacks up in terms of value for money compared to the competition. 

Competitive analysis isn’t just a fancy term—it’s your secret weapon if you’re gearing up to introduce a fresh product or service. The ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template is your trusty sidekick for this mission. It assists in revealing competitor strengths and weaknesses, providing a comprehensive industry overview , and cooking up strategies to outshine the competition and nail down your target audience. 🌟

To start your competitive analysis , brainstorm a list of potential competitors. Think about where your customers might go if they didn’t choose your company. Keep it realistic—aim for a list of up to 10 names, leaving time for thorough market research.

After you’ve completed the research, use the provided Matrix to place the competitor’s product concerning the Market Presence and Satisfaction axes. Use the Legend to help you understand the product type , including:

• High market presence and high satisfaction
• High market presence and low satisfaction
• High satisfaction and low market presence
• Low satisfaction and low market presence

Duplicate a color-coded sticky note that matches your product type and drag it over to the quadrant where it fits the best. The Matrix is split into four sections to help you decide whether a product is a Contender , a Leader , a Niche , or a High Performer.

This business strategy template gives you the ultimate freedom to play around with its elements. Add, tweak, and place them wherever you like in the interactive Whiteboard view. 

Have you ever found yourself scratching your head, wondering what your customers want? The ClickUp Customer Journey Map Template is a handy tool that can help you out! 🛠️

Think of it as a guide to better understanding your ideal customer’s user persona . By mapping their journey, you can uncover their needs and expectations and come up with sensible strategies to improve your products and services for your target audience.

This Whiteboard template brims with handy question prompts about customer actions, experiences, touchpoints, and solutions. The template leads you through three key stages:

• Awareness : You introduce customers to your business and what it offers
• Consideration : They start considering your business as a solution to their needs, leading them to research your products or services and compare them to other options 
• Conversion : They go from pondering to action and become paying customers

Each of these stages comes with pre-made sticky notes to get you started, but you’ve got the creative license to add more. Give the Whiteboard a personal touch with freehand drawing, create shapes, insert images, use connectors, and add text from focus groups, customer research, or any market research examples you own. 

If you’re looking for a structured framework to streamline market research, the Word Market Research Plan Template by FlexMR is a handy solution. It’s divided into well-structured sections for every step and features tips and instructions on how to use them.

This Word template is fully customizable, allowing you to modify colors, change font and letter size, add rows and columns to pre-made tables or include graphs and charts. ✍🏻

Use its first section to provide a brief business background. Then, define the project’s scope and specify what you expect to achieve at the project’s conclusion, including target response numbers, data presentation guidelines, and the influence of data on future decision-making .

Additional details the template covers are:

• Target Audience : Describe the customers you aim to research, considering age, demographics, and interactions with the company or product
• Sample Plan : Detail the number of participants you intend to research
• Research Methods : Include qualitative and quantitative methods
• Timeline : Present a project timeline, breaking down tasks and accounting for variations in response rates
• Budget : Outline the budget, providing a cost breakdown and highlighting areas requiring investment
• Ethical Considerations : Address ethical and other considerations that may arise during the project, like conflict of interest with suppliers

To finish up, add Further Considerations to include anything the previous sections don’t cover.

One way to conduct effective market research is through a survey. If you’re unsure about the questions to include for optimal results or need a structured framework to streamline the process, try the Word General Market Survey Template by BusinessInABox. 

This two-page Word document contains open-ended and multiple-choice questions for an effective customer case study . They provide all the essential information to understand the market you’re involved in or planning to enter.

The questions in the template cover customer information like:

• Age and gender
• Education level
• Marital status
• Total annual income 

As this is a Word template, customize it however you like ! Add or tweak questions to dig into the specifics you’re curious about, and make the survey longer or shorter. Feeling fancy? Give it a personal touch by using a different font or changing the background color!

Crack the Code to Market Domination with These Essential Market Research Templates

Market research can be a wild ride, but these top-notch market research templates make it smooth sailing. From gaming insights into customer preferences to uncovering your competitor’s strategies, they provide a structured solution for every research step.

If you’re hungry for more research assets, dive into the ClickUp template library , where you’ll find over 1,000 user-friendly templates waiting to guide you on areas like mapping out customer journeys , performing competitor analysis , and nailing down product positioning with minimal effort. ✌

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Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.

MARKET RESEARCH KIT

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

Updated: 02/21/24

Published: 02/21/24

Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.

Enter: Market Research.

Whether you're new to market research or not, I created this guide to help you conduct a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is market research?

Primary vs. secondary research, types of market research, how to do market research, market research report template, market research examples.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value effectively.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry. But if you ask me, it's hardly a crystal ball that marketers can rely on for insights on their customers.

Market researchers investigate several areas of the market, and it can take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the business landscape.

However, researching just one of those areas can make you more intuitive to who your buyers are and how to deliver value that no other business is offering them right now.

How? Consider these two things:

• Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It‘s very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition’s immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge.
• Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand.

The market research services market is growing rapidly, which signifies a strong interest in market research as we enter 2024. The market is expected to grow from roughly $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 .

Free Market Research Kit

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

Download Free

All fields are required.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.

As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.

By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into the following:

• Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
• Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
• What's trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
• Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
• What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience
• Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
• Whether there‘s demand for the business initiatives you’re investing in
• Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
• Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.

As a result, you can make better business decisions.

To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get , consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.

Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.

That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.

It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.

Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:

• Exploratory Primary Research: This kind of primary market research normally takes place as a first step — before any specific research has been performed — and may involve open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of people.
• Specific Primary Research: This type of research often follows exploratory research. In specific research, you take a smaller or more precise segment of your audience and ask questions aimed at solving a suspected problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).

Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors . The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:

• Public Sources: These sources are your first and most-accessible layer of material when conducting secondary market research. They're often free to find and review — like government statistics (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau ).
• Commercial Sources: These sources often come in the form of pay-to-access market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew , Gartner , or Forrester .
• Internal Sources: This is the market data your organization already has like average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data that can help you draw conclusions on buyer needs.
• Focus Groups
• Product/ Service Use Research
• Observation-Based Research
• Buyer Persona Research
• Market Segmentation Research
• Pricing Research
• Competitive Analysis Research
• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
• Brand Awareness Research
• Campaign Research

1. Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.

3. Product/Service Use Research

Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.

4. Observation-Based Research

Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX , and which aspects of it could be improved.

5. Buyer Persona Research

Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.

6. Market Segmentation Research

Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.

7. Pricing Research

Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy . It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.

8. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition .

9. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs , rewards, remarkable customer service).

10. Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.

11. Campaign Research

Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.

• Define your buyer persona.
• Identify a persona group to engage.
• Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
• List your primary competitors.
• Summarize your findings.

1. Define your buyer persona.

You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.

This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Buyer personas — sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Use a free tool to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

Don't forget to share this post!

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