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What Is Market Research?

• How It Works
• Primary vs. Secondary
• How to Conduct Research

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How to Do Market Research, Types, and Example

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Market research examines consumer behavior and trends in the economy to help a business develop and fine-tune its business idea and strategy. It helps a business understand its target market by gathering and analyzing data.

Market research is the process of evaluating the viability of a new service or product through research conducted directly with potential customers. It allows a company to define its target market and get opinions and other feedback from consumers about their interest in a product or service.

Research may be conducted in-house or by a third party that specializes in market research. It can be done through surveys and focus groups, among other ways. Test subjects are usually compensated with product samples or a small stipend for their time.

Key Takeaways

• Companies conduct market research before introducing new products to determine their appeal to potential customers.
• Tools include focus groups, telephone interviews, and questionnaires.
• The results of market research inform the final design of the product and determine how it will be positioned in the marketplace.
• Market research usually combines primary information, gathered directly from consumers, and secondary information, which is data available from external sources.

Market Research

How market research works.

Market research is used to determine the viability of a new product or service. The results may be used to revise the product design and fine-tune the strategy for introducing it to the public. This can include information gathered for the purpose of determining market segmentation . It also informs product differentiation , which is used to tailor advertising.

A business engages in various tasks to complete the market research process. It gathers information based on the market sector being targeted by the product. This information is then analyzed and relevant data points are interpreted to draw conclusions about how the product may be optimally designed and marketed to the market segment for which it is intended.

It is a critical component in the research and development (R&D) phase of a new product or service introduction. Market research can be conducted in many different ways, including surveys, product testing, interviews, and focus groups.

Market research is a critical tool that companies use to understand what consumers want, develop products that those consumers will use, and maintain a competitive advantage over other companies in their industry.

Primary Market Research vs. Secondary Market Research

Market research usually consists of a combination of:

• Primary research, gathered by the company or by an outside company that it hires
• Secondary research, which draws on external sources of data

Primary Market Research

Primary research generally falls into two categories: exploratory and specific research.

• Exploratory research is less structured and functions via open-ended questions. The questions may be posed in a focus group setting, telephone interviews, or questionnaires. It results in questions or issues that the company needs to address about a product that it has under development.
• Specific research delves more deeply into the problems or issues identified in exploratory research.

Secondary Market Research

All market research is informed by the findings of other researchers about the needs and wants of consumers. Today, much of this research can be found online.

Secondary research can include population information from government census data , trade association research reports , polling results, and research from other businesses operating in the same market sector.

History of Market Research

Formal market research began in Germany during the 1920s. In the United States, it soon took off with the advent of the Golden Age of Radio.

Companies that created advertisements for this new entertainment medium began to look at the demographics of the audiences who listened to each of the radio plays, music programs, and comedy skits that were presented.

They had once tried to reach the widest possible audience by placing their messages on billboards or in the most popular magazines. With radio programming, they had the chance to target rural or urban consumers, teenagers or families, and judge the results by the sales numbers that followed.

Types of Market Research

Face-to-face interviews.

From their earliest days, market research companies would interview people on the street about the newspapers and magazines that they read regularly and ask whether they recalled any of the ads or brands that were published in them. Data collected from these interviews were compared to the circulation of the publication to determine the effectiveness of those ads.

Market research and surveys were adapted from these early techniques.

To get a strong understanding of your market, it’s essential to understand demand, market size, economic indicators, location, market saturation, and pricing.

Focus Groups

A focus group is a small number of representative consumers chosen to try a product or watch an advertisement.

Afterward, the group is asked for feedback on their perceptions of the product, the company’s brand, or competing products. The company then takes that information and makes decisions about what to do with the product or service, whether that's releasing it, making changes, or abandoning it altogether.

Phone Research

The man-on-the-street interview technique soon gave way to the telephone interview. A telephone interviewer could collect information in a more efficient and cost-effective fashion.

Telephone research was a preferred tactic of market researchers for many years. It has become much more difficult in recent years as landline phone service dwindles and is replaced by less accessible mobile phones.

Survey Research

As an alternative to focus groups, surveys represent a cost-effective way to determine consumer attitudes without having to interview anyone in person. Consumers are sent surveys in the mail, usually with a coupon or voucher to incentivize participation. These surveys help determine how consumers feel about the product, brand, and price point.

Online Market Research

With people spending more time online, market research activities have shifted online as well. Data collection still uses a survey-style form. But instead of companies actively seeking participants by finding them on the street or cold calling them on the phone, people can choose to sign up, take surveys, and offer opinions when they have time.

This makes the process far less intrusive and less rushed, since people can participate on their own time and of their own volition.

How to Conduct Market Research

The first step to effective market research is to determine the goals of the study. Each study should seek to answer a clear, well-defined problem. For example, a company might seek to identify consumer preferences, brand recognition, or the comparative effectiveness of different types of ad campaigns.

After that, the next step is to determine who will be included in the research. Market research is an expensive process, and a company cannot waste resources collecting unnecessary data. The firm should decide in advance which types of consumers will be included in the research, and how the data will be collected. They should also account for the probability of statistical errors or sampling bias .

The next step is to collect the data and analyze the results. If the two previous steps have been completed accurately, this should be straightforward. The researchers will collect the results of their study, keeping track of the ages, gender, and other relevant data of each respondent. This is then analyzed in a marketing report that explains the results of their research.

The last step is for company executives to use their market research to make business decisions. Depending on the results of their research, they may choose to target a different group of consumers, or they may change their price point or some product features.

The results of these changes may eventually be measured in further market research, and the process will begin all over again.

Benefits of Market Research

Market research is essential for developing brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. Since it is unlikely for a product to appeal equally to every consumer, a strong market research program can help identify the key demographics and market segments that are most likely to use a given product.

Market research is also important for developing a company’s advertising efforts. For example, if a company’s market research determines that its consumers are more likely to use Facebook than X (formerly Twitter), it can then target its advertisements to one platform instead of another. Or, if they determine that their target market is value-sensitive rather than price-sensitive, they can work on improving the product rather than reducing their prices.

Market research only works when subjects are honest and open to participating.

Example of Market Research

Many companies use market research to test new products or get information from consumers about what kinds of products or services they need and don’t currently have.

For example, a company that’s considering starting a business might conduct market research to test the viability of its product or service. If the market research confirms consumer interest, the business can proceed confidently with its business plan . If not, the company can use the results of the market research to make adjustments to the product to bring it in line with customer desires.

What Are the Main Types of Market Research?

The main types of market research are primary research and secondary research. Primary research includes focus groups, polls, and surveys. Secondary research includes academic articles, infographics, and white papers.

Qualitative research gives insights into how customers feel and think. Quantitative research uses data and statistics such as website views, social media engagement, and subscriber numbers.

What Is Online Market Research?

Online market research uses the same strategies and techniques as traditional primary and secondary market research, but it is conducted on the Internet. Potential customers may be asked to participate in a survey or give feedback on a product. The responses may help the researchers create a profile of the likely customer for a new product.

What Are Paid Market Research Surveys?

Paid market research involves rewarding individuals who agree to participate in a study. They may be offered a small payment for their time or a discount coupon in return for filling out a questionnaire or participating in a focus group.

What Is a Market Study?

A market study is an analysis of consumer demand for a product or service. It looks at all of the factors that influence demand for a product or service. These include the product’s price, location, competition, and substitutes as well as general economic factors that could influence the new product’s adoption, for better or worse.

Market research is a key component of a company’s research and development (R&D) stage. It helps companies understand in advance the viability of a new product that they have in development and to see how it might perform in the real world.

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How to Do Market Research: The Complete Guide

Learn how to do market research with this step-by-step guide, complete with templates, tools and real-world examples.

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What are your customers’ needs? How does your product compare to the competition? What are the emerging trends and opportunities in your industry? If these questions keep you up at night, it’s time to conduct market research.

Market research plays a pivotal role in your ability to stay competitive and relevant, helping you anticipate shifts in consumer behavior and industry dynamics. It involves gathering these insights using a wide range of techniques, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and observational studies.

In this guide, we’ll explore why market research is crucial, the various types of market research, the methods used in data collection, and how to effectively conduct market research to drive informed decision-making and success.

What is market research?

Market research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a specific market or industry. The purpose of market research is to offer valuable insight into the preferences and behaviors of your target audience, and anticipate shifts in market trends and the competitive landscape. This information helps you make data-driven decisions, develop effective strategies for your business, and maximize your chances of long-term growth.

Why is market research important? 

By understanding the significance of market research, you can make sure you’re asking the right questions and using the process to your advantage. Some of the benefits of market research include:

• Informed decision-making: Market research provides you with the data and insights you need to make smart decisions for your business. It helps you identify opportunities, assess risks and tailor your strategies to meet the demands of the market. Without market research, decisions are often based on assumptions or guesswork, leading to costly mistakes.
• Customer-centric approach: A cornerstone of market research involves developing a deep understanding of customer needs and preferences. This gives you valuable insights into your target audience, helping you develop products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your customers.
• Competitive advantage: By conducting market research, you’ll gain a competitive edge. You’ll be able to identify gaps in the market, analyze competitor strengths and weaknesses, and position your business strategically. This enables you to create unique value propositions, differentiate yourself from competitors, and seize opportunities that others may overlook.
• Risk mitigation: Market research helps you anticipate market shifts and potential challenges. By identifying threats early, you can proactively adjust their strategies to mitigate risks and respond effectively to changing circumstances. This proactive approach is particularly valuable in volatile industries.
• Resource optimization: Conducting market research allows organizations to allocate their time, money and resources more efficiently. It ensures that investments are made in areas with the highest potential return on investment, reducing wasted resources and improving overall business performance.
• Adaptation to market trends: Markets evolve rapidly, driven by technological advancements, cultural shifts and changing consumer attitudes. Market research ensures that you stay ahead of these trends and adapt your offerings accordingly so you can avoid becoming obsolete. 

As you can see, market research empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, cater to customer needs, outperform competitors, mitigate risks, optimize resources and stay agile in a dynamic marketplace. These benefits make it a huge industry; the global market research services market is expected to grow from $76.37 billion in 2021 to $108.57 billion in 2026 . Now, let’s dig into the different types of market research that can help you achieve these benefits.

Types of market research 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Exploratory research
• Descriptive research
• Causal research
• Cross-sectional research
• Longitudinal research

Despite its advantages, 23% of organizations don’t have a clear market research strategy. Part of developing a strategy involves choosing the right type of market research for your business goals. The most commonly used approaches include:

1. Qualitative research

Qualitative research focuses on understanding the underlying motivations, attitudes and perceptions of individuals or groups. It is typically conducted through techniques like in-depth interviews, focus groups and content analysis — methods we’ll discuss further in the sections below. Qualitative research provides rich, nuanced insights that can inform product development, marketing strategies and brand positioning.

2. Quantitative research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, involves the collection and analysis of numerical data, often through surveys, experiments and structured questionnaires. This approach allows for statistical analysis and the measurement of trends, making it suitable for large-scale market studies and hypothesis testing. While it’s worthwhile using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, most businesses prioritize the latter because it is scientific, measurable and easily replicated across different experiments.

3. Exploratory research

Whether you’re conducting qualitative or quantitative research or a mix of both, exploratory research is often the first step. Its primary goal is to help you understand a market or problem so you can gain insights and identify potential issues or opportunities. This type of market research is less structured and is typically conducted through open-ended interviews, focus groups or secondary data analysis. Exploratory research is valuable when entering new markets or exploring new product ideas.

4. Descriptive research

As its name implies, descriptive research seeks to describe a market, population or phenomenon in detail. It involves collecting and summarizing data to answer questions about audience demographics and behaviors, market size, and current trends. Surveys, observational studies and content analysis are common methods used in descriptive research. 

5. Causal research

Causal research aims to establish cause-and-effect relationships between variables. It investigates whether changes in one variable result in changes in another. Experimental designs, A/B testing and regression analysis are common causal research methods. This sheds light on how specific marketing strategies or product changes impact consumer behavior.

6. Cross-sectional research

Cross-sectional market research involves collecting data from a sample of the population at a single point in time. It is used to analyze differences, relationships or trends among various groups within a population. Cross-sectional studies are helpful for market segmentation, identifying target audiences and assessing market trends at a specific moment.

7. Longitudinal research

Longitudinal research, in contrast to cross-sectional research, collects data from the same subjects over an extended period. This allows for the analysis of trends, changes and developments over time. Longitudinal studies are useful for tracking long-term developments in consumer preferences, brand loyalty and market dynamics.

Each type of market research has its strengths and weaknesses, and the method you choose depends on your specific research goals and the depth of understanding you’re aiming to achieve. In the following sections, we’ll delve into primary and secondary research approaches and specific research methods.

Primary vs. secondary market research

Market research of all types can be broadly categorized into two main approaches: primary research and secondary research. By understanding the differences between these approaches, you can better determine the most appropriate research method for your specific goals.

Primary market research 

Primary research involves the collection of original data straight from the source. Typically, this involves communicating directly with your target audience — through surveys, interviews, focus groups and more — to gather information. Here are some key attributes of primary market research:

• Customized data: Primary research provides data that is tailored to your research needs. You design a custom research study and gather information specific to your goals.
• Up-to-date insights: Because primary research involves communicating with customers, the data you collect reflects the most current market conditions and consumer behaviors.
• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Despite its advantages, primary research can be labor-intensive and costly, especially when dealing with large sample sizes or complex study designs. Whether you hire a market research consultant, agency or use an in-house team, primary research studies consume a large amount of resources and time.

Secondary market research 

Secondary research, on the other hand, involves analyzing data that has already been compiled by third-party sources, such as online research tools, databases, news sites, industry reports and academic studies.

Here are the main characteristics of secondary market research:

• Cost-effective: Secondary research is generally more cost-effective than primary research since it doesn’t require building a research plan from scratch. You and your team can look at databases, websites and publications on an ongoing basis, without needing to design a custom experiment or hire a consultant. 
• Leverages multiple sources: Data tools and software extract data from multiple places across the web, and then consolidate that information within a single platform. This means you’ll get a greater amount of data and a wider scope from secondary research.
• Quick to access: You can access a wide range of information rapidly — often in seconds — if you’re using online research tools and databases. Because of this, you can act on insights sooner, rather than taking the time to develop an experiment. 

So, when should you use primary vs. secondary research? In practice, many market research projects incorporate both primary and secondary research to take advantage of the strengths of each approach.

One rule of thumb is to focus on secondary research to obtain background information, market trends or industry benchmarks. It is especially valuable for conducting preliminary research, competitor analysis, or when time and budget constraints are tight. Then, if you still have knowledge gaps or need to answer specific questions unique to your business model, use primary research to create a custom experiment. 

Market research methods

• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• Observational research
• Online research tools
• Experiments
• Content analysis
• Ethnographic research

How do primary and secondary research approaches translate into specific research methods? Let’s take a look at the different ways you can gather data: 

1. Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods for collecting structured data from a large number of respondents. They involve a set of predetermined questions that participants answer. Surveys can be conducted through various channels, including online tools, telephone interviews and in-person or online questionnaires. They are useful for gathering quantitative data and assessing customer demographics, opinions, preferences and needs. On average, customer surveys have a 33% response rate , so keep that in mind as you consider your sample size.

2. Interviews

Interviews are in-depth conversations with individuals or groups to gather qualitative insights. They can be structured (with predefined questions) or unstructured (with open-ended discussions). Interviews are valuable for exploring complex topics, uncovering motivations and obtaining detailed feedback. 

3. Focus groups

The most common primary research methods are in-depth webcam interviews and focus groups. Focus groups are a small gathering of participants who discuss a specific topic or product under the guidance of a moderator. These discussions are valuable for primary market research because they reveal insights into consumer attitudes, perceptions and emotions. Focus groups are especially useful for idea generation, concept testing and understanding group dynamics within your target audience.

4. Observational research

Observational research involves observing and recording participant behavior in a natural setting. This method is particularly valuable when studying consumer behavior in physical spaces, such as retail stores or public places. In some types of observational research, participants are aware you’re watching them; in other cases, you discreetly watch consumers without their knowledge, as they use your product. Either way, observational research provides firsthand insights into how people interact with products or environments.

5. Online research tools

You and your team can do your own secondary market research using online tools. These tools include data prospecting platforms and databases, as well as online surveys, social media listening, web analytics and sentiment analysis platforms. They help you gather data from online sources, monitor industry trends, track competitors, understand consumer preferences and keep tabs on online behavior. We’ll talk more about choosing the right market research tools in the sections that follow.

6. Experiments

Market research experiments are controlled tests of variables to determine causal relationships. While experiments are often associated with scientific research, they are also used in market research to assess the impact of specific marketing strategies, product features, or pricing and packaging changes.

7. Content analysis

Content analysis involves the systematic examination of textual, visual or audio content to identify patterns, themes and trends. It’s commonly applied to customer reviews, social media posts and other forms of online content to analyze consumer opinions and sentiments.

8. Ethnographic research

Ethnographic research immerses researchers into the daily lives of consumers to understand their behavior and culture. This method is particularly valuable when studying niche markets or exploring the cultural context of consumer choices.

How to do market research

• Set clear objectives
• Identify your target audience
• Choose your research methods
• Use the right market research tools
• Collect data
• Analyze data 
• Interpret your findings
• Identify opportunities and challenges
• Make informed business decisions
• Monitor and adapt

Now that you have gained insights into the various market research methods at your disposal, let’s delve into the practical aspects of how to conduct market research effectively. Here’s a quick step-by-step overview, from defining objectives to monitoring market shifts.

1. Set clear objectives

When you set clear and specific goals, you’re essentially creating a compass to guide your research questions and methodology. Start by precisely defining what you want to achieve. Are you launching a new product and want to understand its viability in the market? Are you evaluating customer satisfaction with a product redesign? 

Start by creating SMART goals — objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Not only will this clarify your research focus from the outset, but it will also help you track progress and benchmark your success throughout the process. 

You should also consult with key stakeholders and team members to ensure alignment on your research objectives before diving into data collecting. This will help you gain diverse perspectives and insights that will shape your research approach.

2. Identify your target audience

Next, you’ll need to pinpoint your target audience to determine who should be included in your research. Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or stakeholder profiles. Consider demographic factors like age, gender, income and location, but also delve into psychographics, such as interests, values and pain points.

The more specific your target audience, the more accurate and actionable your research will be. Additionally, segment your audience if your research objectives involve studying different groups, such as current customers and potential leads.

If you already have existing customers, you can also hold conversations with them to better understand your target market. From there, you can refine your buyer personas and tailor your research methods accordingly.

3. Choose your research methods

Selecting the right research methods is crucial for gathering high-quality data. Start by considering the nature of your research objectives. If you’re exploring consumer preferences, surveys and interviews can provide valuable insights. For in-depth understanding, focus groups or observational research might be suitable. Consider using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to gain a well-rounded perspective. 

You’ll also need to consider your budget. Think about what you can realistically achieve using the time and resources available to you. If you have a fairly generous budget, you may want to try a mix of primary and secondary research approaches. If you’re doing market research for a startup , on the other hand, chances are your budget is somewhat limited. If that’s the case, try addressing your goals with secondary research tools before investing time and effort in a primary research study. 

4. Use the right market research tools

Whether you’re conducting primary or secondary research, you’ll need to choose the right tools. These can help you do anything from sending surveys to customers to monitoring trends and analyzing data. Here are some examples of popular market research tools:

• Market research software: Crunchbase is a platform that provides best-in-class company data, making it valuable for market research on growing companies and industries. You can use Crunchbase to access trusted, first-party funding data, revenue data, news and firmographics, enabling you to monitor industry trends and understand customer needs.

• Survey and questionnaire tools: SurveyMonkey is a widely used online survey platform that allows you to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Google Forms is a free tool that lets you create surveys and collect responses through Google Drive.
• Data analysis software: Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are useful for conducting statistical analyses. SPSS is a powerful statistical analysis software used for data processing, analysis and reporting.
• Social listening tools: Brandwatch is a social listening and analytics platform that helps you monitor social media conversations, track sentiment and analyze trends. Mention is a media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords across various online sources.
• Data visualization platforms: Tableau is a data visualization tool that helps you create interactive and shareable dashboards and reports. Power BI by Microsoft is a business analytics tool for creating interactive visualizations and reports.

5. Collect data

There’s an infinite amount of data you could be collecting using these tools, so you’ll need to be intentional about going after the data that aligns with your research goals. Implement your chosen research methods, whether it’s distributing surveys, conducting interviews or pulling from secondary research platforms. Pay close attention to data quality and accuracy, and stick to a standardized process to streamline data capture and reduce errors. 

6. Analyze data

Once data is collected, you’ll need to analyze it systematically. Use statistical software or analysis tools to identify patterns, trends and correlations. For qualitative data, employ thematic analysis to extract common themes and insights. Visualize your findings with charts, graphs and tables to make complex data more understandable.

If you’re not proficient in data analysis, consider outsourcing or collaborating with a data analyst who can assist in processing and interpreting your data accurately.

7. Interpret your findings

Interpreting your market research findings involves understanding what the data means in the context of your objectives. Are there significant trends that uncover the answers to your initial research questions? Consider the implications of your findings on your business strategy. It’s essential to move beyond raw data and extract actionable insights that inform decision-making.

Hold a cross-functional meeting or workshop with relevant team members to collectively interpret the findings. Different perspectives can lead to more comprehensive insights and innovative solutions.

8. Identify opportunities and challenges

Use your research findings to identify potential growth opportunities and challenges within your market. What segments of your audience are underserved or overlooked? Are there emerging trends you can capitalize on? Conversely, what obstacles or competitors could hinder your progress?

Lay out this information in a clear and organized way by conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Jot down notes for each of these areas to provide a structured overview of gaps and hurdles in the market.

9. Make informed business decisions

Market research is only valuable if it leads to informed decisions for your company. Based on your insights, devise actionable strategies and initiatives that align with your research objectives. Whether it’s refining your product, targeting new customer segments or adjusting pricing, ensure your decisions are rooted in the data.

At this point, it’s also crucial to keep your team aligned and accountable. Create an action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities and timelines for implementing the recommendations derived from your research. 

10. Monitor and adapt

Market research isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process. Continuously monitor market conditions, customer behaviors and industry trends. Set up mechanisms to collect real-time data and feedback. As you gather new information, be prepared to adapt your strategies and tactics accordingly. Regularly revisiting your research ensures your business remains agile and reflects changing market dynamics and consumer preferences.

Online market research sources

As you go through the steps above, you’ll want to turn to trusted, reputable sources to gather your data. Here’s a list to get you started:

• Crunchbase: As mentioned above, Crunchbase is an online platform with an extensive dataset, allowing you to access in-depth insights on market trends, consumer behavior and competitive analysis. You can also customize your search options to tailor your research to specific industries, geographic regions or customer personas.

• Academic databases: Academic databases, such as ProQuest and JSTOR , are treasure troves of scholarly research papers, studies and academic journals. They offer in-depth analyses of various subjects, including market trends, consumer preferences and industry-specific insights. Researchers can access a wealth of peer-reviewed publications to gain a deeper understanding of their research topics.
• Government and NGO databases: Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and other institutions frequently maintain databases containing valuable economic, demographic and industry-related data. These sources offer credible statistics and reports on a wide range of topics, making them essential for market researchers. Examples include the U.S. Census Bureau , the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew Research Center .
• Industry reports: Industry reports and market studies are comprehensive documents prepared by research firms, industry associations and consulting companies. They provide in-depth insights into specific markets, including market size, trends, competitive analysis and consumer behavior. You can find this information by looking at relevant industry association databases; examples include the American Marketing Association and the National Retail Federation .
• Social media and online communities: Social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter (X) , forums such as Reddit and Quora , and review platforms such as G2 can provide real-time insights into consumer sentiment, opinions and trends. 

Market research examples

At this point, you have market research tools and data sources — but how do you act on the data you gather? Let’s go over some real-world examples that illustrate the practical application of market research across various industries. These examples showcase how market research can lead to smart decision-making and successful business decisions.

Example 1: Apple’s iPhone launch

Apple ’s iconic iPhone launch in 2007 serves as a prime example of market research driving product innovation in tech. Before the iPhone’s release, Apple conducted extensive market research to understand consumer preferences, pain points and unmet needs in the mobile phone industry. This research led to the development of a touchscreen smartphone with a user-friendly interface, addressing consumer demands for a more intuitive and versatile device. The result was a revolutionary product that disrupted the market and redefined the smartphone industry.

Example 2: McDonald’s global expansion

McDonald’s successful global expansion strategy demonstrates the importance of market research when expanding into new territories. Before entering a new market, McDonald’s conducts thorough research to understand local tastes, preferences and cultural nuances. This research informs menu customization, marketing strategies and store design. For instance, in India, McDonald’s offers a menu tailored to local preferences, including vegetarian options. This market-specific approach has enabled McDonald’s to adapt and thrive in diverse global markets.

Example 3: Organic and sustainable farming

The shift toward organic and sustainable farming practices in the food industry is driven by market research that indicates increased consumer demand for healthier and environmentally friendly food options. As a result, food producers and retailers invest in sustainable sourcing and organic product lines — such as with these sustainable seafood startups — to align with this shift in consumer values. 

The bottom line? Market research has multiple use cases and is a critical practice for any industry. Whether it’s launching groundbreaking products, entering new markets or responding to changing consumer preferences, you can use market research to shape successful strategies and outcomes.

Market research templates

You finally have a strong understanding of how to do market research and apply it in the real world. Before we wrap up, here are some market research templates that you can use as a starting point for your projects:

• Smartsheet competitive analysis templates : These spreadsheets can serve as a framework for gathering information about the competitive landscape and obtaining valuable lessons to apply to your business strategy.
• SurveyMonkey product survey template : Customize the questions on this survey based on what you want to learn from your target customers.
• HubSpot templates : HubSpot offers a wide range of free templates you can use for market research, business planning and more.
• SCORE templates : SCORE is a nonprofit organization that provides templates for business plans, market analysis and financial projections.
• SBA.gov : The U.S. Small Business Administration offers templates for every aspect of your business, including market research, and is particularly valuable for new startups. 

Strengthen your business with market research

When conducted effectively, market research is like a guiding star. Equipped with the right tools and techniques, you can uncover valuable insights, stay competitive, foster innovation and navigate the complexities of your industry.

Throughout this guide, we’ve discussed the definition of market research, different research methods, and how to conduct it effectively. We’ve also explored various types of market research and shared practical insights and templates for getting started. 

Now, it’s time to start the research process. Trust in data, listen to the market and make informed decisions that guide your company toward lasting success.

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Written by Mary Kate Miller | June 1, 2021

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Market research is a cornerstone of all successful, strategic businesses. It can also be daunting for entrepreneurs looking to launch a startup or start a side hustle . What is market research, anyway? And how do you…do it?

We’ll walk you through absolutely everything you need to know about the market research process so that by the end of this guide, you’ll be an expert in market research too. And what’s more important: you’ll have actionable steps you can take to start collecting your own market research.

What Is Market Research?

Market research is the organized process of gathering information about your target customers and market. Market research can help you better understand customer behavior and competitor strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide insight for the best strategies in launching new businesses and products. There are different ways to approach market research, including primary and secondary research and qualitative and quantitative research. The strongest approaches will include a combination of all four.

“Virtually every business can benefit from conducting some market research,” says Niles Koenigsberg of Real FiG Advertising + Marketing . “Market research can help you piece together your [business’s] strengths and weaknesses, along with your prospective opportunities, so that you can understand where your unique differentiators may lie.” Well-honed market research will help your brand stand out from the competition and help you see what you need to do to lead the market. It can also do so much more.

The Purposes of Market Research

Why do market research? It can help you…

• Pinpoint your target market, create buyer personas, and develop a more holistic understanding of your customer base and market.
• Understand current market conditions to evaluate risks and anticipate how your product or service will perform.
• Validate a concept prior to launch.
• Identify gaps in the market that your competitors have created or overlooked.
• Solve problems that have been left unresolved by the existing product/brand offerings.
• Identify opportunities and solutions for new products or services.
• Develop killer marketing strategies .

What Are the Benefits of Market Research?

Strong market research can help your business in many ways. It can…

• Strengthen your market position.
• Help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.
• Help you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Minimize risk.
• Center your customers’ experience from the get-go.
• Help you create a dynamic strategy based on market conditions and customer needs/demands.

What Are the Basic Methods of Market Research?

The basic methods of market research include surveys, personal interviews, customer observation, and the review of secondary research. In addition to these basic methods, a forward-thinking market research approach incorporates data from the digital landscape like social media analysis, SEO research, gathering feedback via forums, and more. Throughout this guide, we will cover each of the methods commonly used in market research to give you a comprehensive overview.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Primary and secondary are the two main types of market research you can do. The latter relies on research conducted by others. Primary research, on the other hand, refers to the fact-finding efforts you conduct on your own.

This approach is limited, however. It’s likely that the research objectives of these secondary data points differ from your own, and it can be difficult to confirm the veracity of their findings.

Primary Market Research

Primary research is more labor intensive, but it generally yields data that is exponentially more actionable. It can be conducted through interviews, surveys, online research, and your own data collection. Every new business should engage in primary market research prior to launch. It will help you validate that your idea has traction, and it will give you the information you need to help minimize financial risk.

You can hire an agency to conduct this research on your behalf. This brings the benefit of expertise, as you’ll likely work with a market research analyst. The downside is that hiring an agency can be expensive—too expensive for many burgeoning entrepreneurs. That brings us to the second approach. You can also do the market research yourself, which substantially reduces the financial burden of starting a new business .

Secondary Market Research

Secondary research includes resources like government databases and industry-specific data and publications. It can be beneficial to start your market research with secondary sources because it’s widely available and often free-to-access. This information will help you gain a broad overview of the market conditions for your new business.

Identify Your Goals and Your Audience

Before you begin conducting interviews or sending out surveys, you need to set your market research goals. At the end of your market research process, you want to have a clear idea of who your target market is—including demographic information like age, gender, and where they live—but you also want to start with a rough idea of who your audience might be and what you’re trying to achieve with market research.

You can pinpoint your objectives by asking yourself a series of guiding questions:

• What are you hoping to discover through your research?
• Who are you hoping to serve better because of your findings?
• What do you think your market is?
• Who are your competitors?
• Are you testing the reception of a new product category or do you want to see if your product or service solves the problem left by a current gap in the market?
• Are you just…testing the waters to get a sense of how people would react to a new brand?

Once you’ve narrowed down the “what” of your market research goals, you’re ready to move onto how you can best achieve them. Think of it like algebra. Many math problems start with “solve for x.” Once you know what you’re looking for, you can get to work trying to find it. It’s a heck of a lot easier to solve a problem when you know you’re looking for “x” than if you were to say “I’m gonna throw some numbers out there and see if I find a variable.”

How to Do Market Research

This guide outlines every component of a comprehensive market research effort. Take into consideration the goals you have established for your market research, as they will influence which of these elements you’ll want to include in your market research strategy.

Secondary Data

Secondary data allows you to utilize pre-existing data to garner a sense of market conditions and opportunities. You can rely on published market studies, white papers, and public competitive information to start your market research journey.

Secondary data, while useful, is limited and cannot substitute your own primary data. It’s best used for quantitative data that can provide background to your more specific inquiries.

Find Your Customers Online

Once you’ve identified your target market, you can use online gathering spaces and forums to gain insights and give yourself a competitive advantage. Rebecca McCusker of The Creative Content Shop recommends internet recon as a vital tool for gaining a sense of customer needs and sentiment. “Read their posts and comments on forums, YouTube video comments, Facebook group [comments], and even Amazon/Goodreads book comments to get in their heads and see what people are saying.”

If you’re interested in engaging with your target demographic online, there are some general rules you should follow. First, secure the consent of any group moderators to ensure that you are acting within the group guidelines. Failure to do so could result in your eviction from the group.

Not all comments have the same research value. “Focus on the comments and posts with the most comments and highest engagement,” says McCusker. These high-engagement posts can give you a sense of what is already connecting and gaining traction within the group.

Social media can also be a great avenue for finding interview subjects. “LinkedIn is very useful if your [target customer] has a very specific job or works in a very specific industry or sector. It’s amazing the amount of people that will be willing to help,” explains Miguel González, a marketing executive at Dealers League . “My advice here is BE BRAVE, go to LinkedIn, or even to people you know and ask them, do quick interviews and ask real people that belong to that market and segment and get your buyer persona information first hand.”

Market research interviews can provide direct feedback on your brand, product, or service and give you a better understanding of consumer pain points and interests.

When organizing your market research interviews, you want to pay special attention to the sample group you’re selecting, as it will directly impact the information you receive. According to Tanya Zhang, the co-founder of Nimble Made , you want to first determine whether you want to choose a representative sample—for example, interviewing people who match each of the buyer persona/customer profiles you’ve developed—or a random sample.

“A sampling of your usual persona styles, for example, can validate details that you’ve already established about your product, while a random sampling may [help you] discover a new way people may use your product,” Zhang says.

Market Surveys

Market surveys solicit customer inclinations regarding your potential product or service through a series of open-ended questions. This direct outreach to your target audience can provide information on your customers’ preferences, attitudes, buying potential, and more.

Every expert we asked voiced unanimous support for market surveys as a powerful tool for market research. With the advent of various survey tools with accessible pricing—or free use—it’s never been easier to assemble, disseminate, and gather market surveys. While it should also be noted that surveys shouldn’t replace customer interviews , they can be used to supplement customer interviews to give you feedback from a broader audience.

Who to Include in Market Surveys

• Current customers
• Past customers
• Your existing audience (such as social media/newsletter audiences)

Example Questions to Include in Market Surveys

While the exact questions will vary for each business, here are some common, helpful questions that you may want to consider for your market survey. Demographic Questions: the questions that help you understand, demographically, who your target customers are:

• “What is your age?”
• “Where do you live?”
• “What is your gender identity?”
• “What is your household income?”
• “What is your household size?”
• “What do you do for a living?”
• “What is your highest level of education?”

Product-Based Questions: Whether you’re seeking feedback for an existing brand or an entirely new one, these questions will help you get a sense of how people feel about your business, product, or service:

• “How well does/would our product/service meet your needs?”
• “How does our product/service compare to similar products/services that you use?”
• “How long have you been a customer?” or “What is the likelihood that you would be a customer of our brand?

Personal/Informative Questions: the deeper questions that help you understand how your audience thinks and what they care about.

• “What are your biggest challenges?”
• “What’s most important to you?”
• “What do you do for fun (hobbies, interests, activities)?”
• “Where do you seek new information when researching a new product?”
• “How do you like to make purchases?”
• “What is your preferred method for interacting with a brand?”

Survey Tools

Online survey tools make it easy to distribute surveys and collect responses. The best part is that there are many free tools available. If you’re making your own online survey, you may want to consider SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, or Zoho Survey.

Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is a breakdown of how your business stacks up against the competition. There are many different ways to conduct this analysis. One of the most popular methods is a SWOT analysis, which stands for “strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” This type of analysis is helpful because it gives you a more robust understanding of why a customer might choose a competitor over your business. Seeing how you stack up against the competition can give you the direction you need to carve out your place as a market leader.

Social Media Analysis

Social media has fundamentally changed the market research landscape, making it easier than ever to engage with a wide swath of consumers. Follow your current or potential competitors on social media to see what they’re posting and how their audience is engaging with it. Social media can also give you a lower cost opportunity for testing different messaging and brand positioning.

SEO Analysis and Opportunities

SEO analysis can help you identify the digital competition for getting the word out about your brand, product, or service. You won’t want to overlook this valuable information. Search listening tools offer a novel approach to understanding the market and generating the content strategy that will drive business. Tools like Google Trends and Awario can streamline this process.

Ready to Kick Your Business Into High Gear?

Now that you’ve completed the guide to market research you know you’re ready to put on your researcher hat to give your business the best start. Still not sure how actually… launch the thing? Our free mini-course can run you through the essentials for starting your side hustle .

About Mary Kate Miller

Mary Kate Miller writes about small business, real estate, and finance. In addition to writing for Foundr, her work has been published by The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Bustle, and more. She lives in Chicago.

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How To Do Market Research: Definition, Types, Methods

Jan 2, 2024

11 min. read

Market research isn’t just collecting data. It’s a strategic tool that allows businesses to gain a competitive advantage while making the best use of their resources. Research reveals valuable insights into your target audience about their preferences, buying habits, and emerging demands — all of which help you unlock new opportunities to grow your business.

When done correctly, market research can minimize risks and losses, spur growth, and position you as a leader in your industry. 

Let’s explore the basic building blocks of market research and how to collect and use data to move your company forward:

Table of Contents

What Is Market Research?

Why is market research important, market analysis example, 5 types of market research, what are common market research questions, what are the limitations of market research, how to do market research, improving your market research with radarly.

Market Research Definition: The process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market or audience.

Market research studies consumer behavior to better understand how they perceive products or services. These insights help businesses identify ways to grow their current offering, create new products or services, and improve brand trust and brand recognition .

You might also hear market research referred to as market analysis or consumer research .

Traditionally, market research has taken the form of focus groups, surveys, interviews, and even competitor analysis . But with modern analytics and research tools, businesses can now capture deeper insights from a wider variety of sources, including social media, online reviews, and customer interactions. These extra layers of intel can help companies gain a more comprehensive understanding of their audience.

With consumer preferences and markets evolving at breakneck speeds, businesses need a way to stay in touch with what people need and want. That’s why the importance of market research cannot be overstated.

Market research offers a proactive way to identify these trends and make adjustments to product development, marketing strategies , and overall operations. This proactive approach can help businesses stay ahead of the curve and remain agile as markets shift.

Market research examples abound — given the number of ways companies can get inside the minds of their customers, simply skimming through your business’s social media comments can be a form of market research.

A restaurant chain might use market research methods to learn more about consumers’ evolving dining habits. These insights might be used to offer new menu items, re-examine their pricing strategies, or even open new locations in different markets, for example.

A consumer electronics company might use market research for similar purposes. For instance, market research may reveal how consumers are using their smart devices so they can develop innovative features.

Market research can be applied to a wide range of use cases, including:

• Testing new product ideas
• Improve existing products
• Entering new markets
• Right-sizing their physical footprints
• Improving brand image and awareness
• Gaining insights into competitors via competitive intelligence

Ultimately, companies can lean on market research techniques to stay ahead of trends and competitors while improving the lives of their customers.

Market research methods take different forms, and you don’t have to limit yourself to just one. Let’s review the most common market research techniques and the insights they deliver.

1. Interviews

3. Focus Groups

4. Observations

5. AI-Driven Market Research

One-on-one interviews are one of the most common market research techniques. Beyond asking direct questions, skilled interviewers can uncover deeper motivations and emotions that drive purchasing decisions. Researchers can elicit more detailed and nuanced responses they might not receive via other methods, such as self-guided surveys.

Interviews also create the opportunity to build rapport with customers and prospects. Establishing a connection with interviewees can encourage them to open up and share their candid thoughts, which can enrich your findings. Researchers also have the opportunity to ask clarifying questions and dig deeper based on individual responses.

Market research surveys provide an easy entry into the consumer psyche. They’re cost-effective to produce and allow researchers to reach lots of people in a short time. They’re also user-friendly for consumers, which allows companies to capture more responses from more people.

Big data and data analytics are making traditional surveys more valuable. Researchers can apply these tools to elicit a deeper understanding from responses and uncover hidden patterns and correlations within survey data that were previously undetectable.

The ways in which surveys are conducted are also changing. With the rise of social media and other online channels, brands and consumers alike have more ways to engage with each other, lending to a continuous approach to market research surveys.

3. Focus groups

Focus groups are “group interviews” designed to gain collective insights. This interactive setting allows participants to express their thoughts and feelings openly, giving researchers richer insights beyond yes-or-no responses.

One of the key benefits of using focus groups is the opportunity for participants to interact with one another. They spark discussions while sharing diverse viewpoints. These sessions can uncover underlying motivations and attitudes that may not be easily expressed through other research methods.

Observing your customers “in the wild” might feel informal, but it can be one of the most revealing market research techniques of all. That’s because you might not always know the right questions to ask. By simply observing, you can surface insights you might not have known to look for otherwise.

This method also delivers raw, authentic, unfiltered data. There’s no room for bias and no potential for participants to accidentally skew the data. Researchers can also pick up on non-verbal cues and gestures that other research methods may fail to capture.

5. AI-driven market research

One of the newer methods of market research is the use of AI-driven market research tools to collect and analyze insights on your behalf. AI customer intelligence tools and consumer insights software like Meltwater Radarly take an always-on approach by going wherever your audience is and continuously predicting behaviors based on current behaviors.

By leveraging advanced algorithms, machine learning, and big data analysis , AI enables companies to uncover deep-seated patterns and correlations within large datasets that would be near impossible for human researchers to identify. This not only leads to more accurate and reliable findings but also allows businesses to make informed decisions with greater confidence.

Tip: Learn how to use Meltwater as a research tool , how Meltwater uses AI , and learn more about consumer insights and about consumer insights in the fashion industry .

No matter the market research methods you use, market research’s effectiveness lies in the questions you ask. These questions should be designed to elicit honest responses that will help you reach your goals.

Examples of common market research questions include:

Demographic market research questions

• What is your age range?
• What is your occupation?
• What is your household income level?
• What is your educational background?
• What is your gender?

Product or service usage market research questions

• How long have you been using [product/service]?
• How frequently do you use [product/service]?
• What do you like most about [product/service]?
• Have you experienced any problems using [product/service]?
• How could we improve [product/service]?
• Why did you choose [product/service] over a competitor’s [product/service]?

Brand perception market research questions

• How familiar are you with our brand?
• What words do you associate with our brand?
• How do you feel about our brand?
• What makes you trust our brand?
• What sets our brand apart from competitors?
• What would make you recommend our brand to others?

Buying behavior market research questions

• What do you look for in a [product/service]?
• What features in a [product/service] are important to you?
• How much time do you need to choose a [product/service]?
• How do you discover new products like [product/service]?
• Do you prefer to purchase [product/service] online or in-store?
• How do you research [product/service] before making a purchase?
• How often do you buy [product/service]?
• How important is pricing when buying [product/service]?
• What would make you switch to another brand of [product/service]?

Customer satisfaction market research questions

• How happy have you been with [product/service]?
• What would make you more satisfied with [product/service]?
• How likely are you to continue using [product/service]?

Bonus Tip: Compiling these questions into a market research template can streamline your efforts.

Market research can offer powerful insights, but it also has some limitations. One key limitation is the potential for bias. Researchers may unconsciously skew results based on their own preconceptions or desires, which can make your findings inaccurate.

• Depending on your market research methods, your findings may be outdated by the time you sit down to analyze and act on them. Some methods struggle to account for rapidly changing consumer preferences and behaviors.
• There’s also the risk of self-reported data (common in online surveys). Consumers might not always accurately convey their true feelings or intentions. They might provide answers they think researchers are looking for or misunderstand the question altogether.
• There’s also the potential to miss emerging or untapped markets . Researchers are digging deeper into what (or who) they already know. This means you might be leaving out a key part of the story without realizing it.

Still, the benefits of market research cannot be understated, especially when you supplement traditional market research methods with modern tools and technology.

Let’s put it all together and explore how to do market research step-by-step to help you leverage all its benefits.

Step 1: Define your objectives

You’ll get more from your market research when you hone in on a specific goal : What do you want to know, and how will this knowledge help your business?

This step will also help you define your target audience. You’ll need to ask the right people the right questions to collect the information you want. Understand the characteristics of the audience and what gives them authority to answer your questions.

Step 2: Select your market research methods

Choose one or more of the market research methods (interviews, surveys, focus groups, observations, and/or AI-driven tools) to fuel your research strategy.

Certain methods might work better than others for specific goals . For example, if you want basic feedback from customers about a product, a simple survey might suffice. If you want to hone in on serious pain points to develop a new product, a focus group or interview might work best.

You can also source secondary research ( complementary research ) via secondary research companies , such as industry reports or analyses from large market research firms. These can help you gather preliminary information and inform your approach.

Step 3: Develop your research tools

Prior to working with participants, you’ll need to craft your survey or interview questions, interview guides, and other tools. These tools will help you capture the right information , weed out non-qualifying participants, and keep your information organized.

You should also have a system for recording responses to ensure data accuracy and privacy. Test your processes before speaking with participants so you can spot and fix inefficiencies or errors.

Step 4: Conduct the market research

With a system in place, you can start looking for candidates to contribute to your market research. This might include distributing surveys to current customers or recruiting participants who fit a specific profile, for example.

Set a time frame for conducting your research. You might collect responses over the course of a few days, weeks, or even months. If you’re using AI tools to gather data, choose a data range for your data to focus on the most relevant information.

Step 5: Analyze and apply your findings

Review your findings while looking for trends and patterns. AI tools can come in handy in this phase by analyzing large amounts of data on your behalf.

Compile your findings into an easy-to-read report and highlight key takeaways and next steps. Reports aren’t useful unless the reader can understand and act on them.

Tip: Learn more about trend forecasting , trend detection , and trendspotting .

Meltwater’s Radarly consumer intelligence suite helps you reap the benefits of market research on an ongoing basis. Using a combination of AI, data science, and market research expertise, Radarly scans multiple global data sources to learn what people are talking about, the actions they’re taking, and how they’re feeling about specific brands.

Our tools are created by market research experts and designed to help researchers uncover what they want to know (and what they don’t know they want to know). Get data-driven insights at scale with information that’s always relevant, always accurate, and always tailored to your organization’s needs.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below:

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A Plain-English Guide to Market Research

Published: January 21, 2021

In some circles, market research is a catch-all term for asking the industry what it wants. "Do we know what the demand is for this product? Who's even looking for our services? Let me do some market research to find out," someone might say.

But what does that actually mean?

Here's a simple definition of market research that encompasses all the possible goals of this practice, in fewer than 100 words:

Market Research Definition

Market research is the process of examining an industry's buyers, the product these buyers want, and where they're currently getting it. By engaging the right people and data, a business can use this research to position itself in the market and predict where the market will go in the future.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry, but 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.

Certainly you can make sound judgment calls based on your experience in the industry and your existing customers. However, keep in mind that market research offers benefits beyond those strategies. There are two things to consider: 

• 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. 

Why is market research important?

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 from knowing the bigger picture.

Here are some examples of insights you can gain from market research:

• Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
• Whether there's demand for the business initiatives you're investing in
• Where to advertise or sell to (geographically or online)
• Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
• Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Getting answers to these questions based on real data can help you make sound business decisions and minimize risk.

Types of Market Research

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.

Let's talk about four different types of market research studies you can conduct , a potential goal of each one, and how these studies help you better understand your market.

Qualitative information

Interviews are the personal, one-on-one conversations you can have with the buyers in your industry. You can conduct interviews in person or over the phone.

Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas. These buyer personas describe your ideal customer's age, family size, budget, job title, the challenges they face at work, and similar aspects of their lifestyle. Having this buyer profile in hand can shape your entire marketing strategy, from the features you add to your product to the content you publish on your website.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are similar to interviews, but in this case, you're assembling a large group of people for one shared interview. A focus group consists of people who have at least one element of your buyer persona in common -- age or job title, for instance.

This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation, or the qualities of your product that make it unique in the marketplace. Consider asking your focus group questions about (and showing them examples of) your services, and ultimately use the group's feedback to make these services better.

Quantitative information

Surveys are a form of quantitative research, and you can distribute them over the phone, via email, or through an online survey. A survey could cater to people who've downloaded content from your website or interacted with a member of your business.

Enough completed surveys can help you determine your customer satisfaction level. This denotes how happy your customers are with what you're selling them. You might include questions like, "How well did we solve your problem?" and "Would you recommend our product to a friend?"

Secondary Data

The interviews, focus groups, and surveys are all sources of primary data. Secondary data , on the other hand, is the public information -- online and offline -- that characterizes your industry. This includes competitor websites, social media business pages, trade magazines, market reports, and even census data published by the government.

If you examine enough secondary data, you can learn how much brand awareness you have in the marketplace compared to the companies that provide the same product or service as you.

The market research you perform doesn't have to include every source of information described above. What data you collect will depend on the needs of your business and what you might be most interested in at the moment. 

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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How To Do Market Research: Types and Templates (2024)

Want to do market research for your brand? Get the best templates and a step-by-step guide in this article.

Market research consists of systematically gathering data about people or companies—a market—and then analyzing it to better understand what that group needs. The results of market research are then used to help business owners make informed decisions about the company’s strategies, operations, and potential customer base.

Market research can help businesses run more efficiently and market more effectively. Ahead, you’ll learn how to do market research for your business, whether you’re breaking into a new market or developing a product .

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering data about people or companies and analyzing it to figure out what they’re looking for. Using market research, which is usually summarized in a report, you can make better decisions about your company’s strategy, operations, and potential customers. There are two main types of market research: primary and secondary.

Primary market research

Primary data is first-hand information you gather yourself, or with the help of a market research firm. You control it. Common ways to do primary market research include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observations. 

Doing your own research has its benefits. You’ll learn exactly what customers want, because you’ve asked them directly. Information is fresh, and you can understand the nuances of your customers, like taste preferences or pricing.

Secondary market research

Secondary data is pre-existing public information, such as data shared in magazines and newspapers or government or industry reports. 

Say you’re a fashion brand expanding its product line to sustainable options, you’d use secondary research to understand market potential. You’d read market reports from Mintel or Nielsen Company to understand consumer demands for sustainable products.

Why is market research important?

Reduce risks for entering new markets.

Misjudging market demand for a new product leads to big financial losses. Market research lowers that risk by providing insights to inform your go-to-market plan, such as:

• Market size
• Income range
• Employment rate
• Market saturation

Gathering this information beforehand helps you understand opportunities and challenges for getting new customers. It also helps you understand emerging trends to stay competitive and identify new growth opportunities.

Understand the competition

A competitive analysis helps you understand the business landscape of a new market and uncovers gaps your business can fill. By analyzing your competitors’ offerings, marketing strategies, and customer feedback, you can create a plan to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. 

Make your business customer-centric

Market research reveals the needs, preferences, and behaviors of potential customers in a new market. For example, if you were expanding into South Korea, you’d want to take into account that shoppers value fast delivery times, readily available products, and the best price possible. 

Armed with this information, you’d want to create a seamless mobile shopping experience with quick load times and quick delivery to appeal to the local market. 

Types of market research

Surveys .

Surveys consist of a list of questions that can be shared with an individual by phone, in person, on a card or paper, or online using a survey software like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics. 

Ask customers a series of questions to better understand how they feel about a product’s features, or about the experience they had. 

Focus groups

Bringing together groups of people with a common characteristic, such as age, hobby, or buying habits, to better understand their likes and dislikes is a focus group. 

Focus groups typically consist of eight to 12 people and a moderator who poses questions for the group to discuss. They are useful ways of getting feedback on a new product, new features, or new ad campaign.

Observation

When the researcher gathers information simply by watching how a subject interacts with a product, the technique is observation. This is often used in comparing preferences for several types of products.

In-depth interviews

Another market research technique is the one-on-one interview with an individual, during which probing questions are posed to better understand that person’s thoughts, opinions, challenges, and product preferences.

Secondary sources

Secondary research is often a good place to start when conducting market research to better understand industry trends and broader shifts. 

Some of the most useful sources include:

• Industry associations and trade groups
• Trade journals specific to your industry
• Government reports, such as the census or annual federal procurement results
• Industry analysts
• University faculty members 

You can also analyze competitor websites and materials to uncover what convinces potential customers to buy from them.

How to conduct market research

1. choose your focus.

Start by defining what you want to achieve from your research. You might want to:

• Understand a target audience
• Develop new product features
• Create a brand identity
• Improve customer experience

If you’re launching a new line of eco-friendly packaging, for example, your focus might be to understand customer attitudes toward sustainability. 

2. Determine your research methods 

Choose how you’ll capture the data based on your objectives and budget. Combine qualitative research (like interviews and focus groups) with quantitative data (like surveys) to understand attitudes and perceptions.

Maybe you’ll decide to conduct a focus group with environmentally conscious consumers to explore their feelings about packaging materials.

3. Collect the data

Depending on your research methods, you might need to prepare questionnaires, conduct interviews, or analyze data courses. You can conduct the process in-house or outsource it to a third party to help speed things along.

4. Analyze the data

Now it’s time to turn that raw data into insights. Identify any patterns or trends that answer your objectives. For example, you may analyze and identify the percentage of customers who prefer sustainable packaging over traditional options.

5. Report your findings

Prepare a report that includes key insights, data, and recommendations based on your findings. Go beyond stating the findings and explain what they mean for your business. What can you conclude about your market, audience, or product? 

For example, if your research finds high demand for eco-friendly packaging amongst the 25-to-34 demographic, you can conclude a targeted marketing campaign to this group could increase sales. 

Market research templates and guides

Behind every successful business is solid market research. But the hardest part is knowing where to start, and that’s where the following templates come in. These guides can help you stay on track and prepare for your market research process. 

• Shopify’s Market Research Competitor Analysis Template : Contains a free template to help you find your product market fit, so you can sell successfully right away. 
• HubSpot’s Market Research Kit : Contains an instructional guide, SWOT analysis template, focus group template, survey template, and more.
• Qualtrics XM : Qualtrics XM offers a collection of pre-made customer, product, and brand survey templates with a free account.

Online vs. offline marketing research

Online marketing research involves using digital platforms and tools to collect data from your audience. It includes surveys, polls, online focus groups, web analytics, and social media listening . 

The benefit of online research is that you can reach a wide audience quickly and at an affordable price. Because it’s done online, it’s convenient for both researchers and participants. However, online marketing research has some drawbacks, like low response rates and poor data quality. People may not give in-depth explanations or observations if they don’t sit in front of you.

In offline research, data is collected through in-person methods, such as interviews or observations. This allows researchers to examine people’s nonverbal cues and emotions in greater detail. However, offline research is expensive to conduct and analyze, and in-person methods may also limit sample size and diversity. 

How market research helps with competitive analysis

Knowing what your competitors are doing makes it easier to break into the market (or stay ahead of it). If you’re starting an ecommerce business , market research can help you:

• Identify industry trends
• Create a benchmark against competitors 
• Determine competitive pricing strategies
• Find gaps in the market

All these elements inform your competitive analysis, whether you’re developing a new product or entering a new market. In this way, you can uncover areas where competition is intense and gain leverage over your competitors.

Free competitor research template

Find a strategic angle to achieve sales success, uncover your product-market fit, and stand out from the competition with our free template.

Market research examples

Before launching a premium cocktail machine into a new category, the team at Bartesian had to identify a common problem: how hard it was to make great-tasting cocktails at home without any professional skill. 

It was a problem the founder, Ryan Close, struggled with himself, as he explains in a Shopify Masters interview . 

“I could never get [drinks] right, so I understood it was difficult to make great tasting cocktails at home if you’re not a bartender,” Ryan says. 

For his market research, Ryan carried a prototype of the machine around the country, getting in-person feedback. He’d go to trade shows and networking events to talk with people, ask about their pain points, and find out what they’d be willing to pay for his cocktail-making machine. These events helped give Ryan the market research needed to launch Bartesian. 

💡 Read more about how Ryan Close launched Bartesian

Beardbrand 

Beardbrand has become a popular men’s grooming brand since its launch in 2012. In 2023, it was estimated to have generated $25.7 million in revenue. Its founder, Eric Bandholz, took an informal approach to market research rooted in his personal experiences. 

He identified the potential for Beardbrand through several key insights:

• Observation: Noticing an increase in beards and mustaches, and a general interest in male grooming in urban areas, Eric recognized a growing trend that had yet to be fully capitalized on.
• Community engagement: By being an active member of the beard community and blogging about beard care and lifestyle, Eric immersed himself in the target market. This direct engagement provided him with firsthand insights into the needs and wants of his potential customers.
• Participation in events: Attending the 2012 West Coast Beard & Mustache Championships in Portland, Oregon, was a pivotal moment. It was here Eric realized the existence of a like-minded community that was underserved in terms of products and content tailored to their interests.
• Using social media for feedback and ideas: Eric leveraged social media platforms, especially Tumblr, to gather product ideas and gauge community interest. This approach allowed for immediate feedback and helped shape the product offering.

Before officially launching Beardbrand, Eric experimented with blogging about beard care products and engaging with the community. This phase acted as an informal market test, providing insights into the market’s receptivity to various products.

Abel Samet and Samuel Bail started Troubadour after unsuccessfully searching for a high-performing weekender bag. This personal experience highlighted a gap in the market for bags that were both aesthetically pleasing and functionally equivalent to sports gear—lightweight, waterproof, and comfortable.

They did market testing by initially offering their products to friends, family, and colleagues, which allowed them to gather valuable feedback. The brand continued to collect qualitative feedback from customers on their likes and dislikes about the bags, as well as quantitative data on sales and returns to understand needs and buying behavior. This allowed them to innovate and expand, taking calculated risks that paid off.

📚  Read: 10 Lessons Learned From Troubadour’s 10 Years in Business

Qualitative vs. quantitative market research

Qualitative and quantitative research are two fundamental approaches to doing market research. 

Qualitative research

Focuses on understanding concepts, thoughts, or experiences through subjective data. It explores the howand why of customers’ behaviors through open-ended questions and discussions. It can involve interviews, observations, and textual analysis to develop a more detailed understanding of the participant. 

Quantitative research

Rooted in quantifying a problem through numerical data, like statistics. You’ll normally use quantitative data to generalize results from a larger sample population. These include surveys, questionnaires, and experiments with fixed questions or conditions. 

Even though these two approaches are different, you can combine them to conduct a mixed methods study. This helps further validate your findings and get a better understanding of the issue at hand. 

Conduct your own market research today

Understanding industry shifts, changing consumer needs and preferences, and legislative trends, among other things, can shape where a business chooses to focus its efforts and resources. That’s the value of market research. Use the templates and market research techniques above to improve your process and grow your business. 

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What is market research? FAQ

What are the 4 types of marketing research.

• Exploratory research
• Descriptive research
• Causal research
• Predictive research

What is an example of market research?

An example of market research would be a company conducting a survey to learn more about their target audience’s preferences and buying habits. They might ask questions about age, gender, income level, and what types of products they purchase. The research would then inform the company’s business and marketing strategy. 

How often should market research be conducted?

Businesses can conduct market research on an as-needed basis. If you are launching a new product or entering a new market, you’ll do market research to support the initiative. Some businesses do market research on an annual basis to stay competitive. 

What are the 4 main purposes of market research?

• Identifying and understanding the target market: Market research helps organizations better identify and understand their target market. It can provide insights into customer demographics, preferences, needs and motivations.
• Product/service development and innovation: Market research helps organizations identify and develop new products or services that meet the needs of their target market. It also helps them understand how new products or services can be positioned in the marketplace.
• Market entry and expansion: Market research helps organizations plan and execute successful market entry and expansion. It can help them identify target markets, assess market potential and evaluate the competitive landscape.
• Brand and reputation management: Market research helps organizations maintain and improve their brand and reputation. It can provide insights into customer perception and help organizations differentiate their brand from competitors.

How much does market research cost?

How much market research costs depends on the research method used. For example, face-to-face interviews are more expensive than phone interviews. The sample size required is also a factor. The larger your sample size, the more expensive it will cost. On average, you can expect to pay between $20,000 and $60,000 for a round of market research from a marketing research firm.

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More From Forbes

Understanding market research for your business plan.

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When you’re building a business plan, market research needs to happen pretty early in the process. It’s where you learn about your audience’s wants and needs and the financial trends in your industry, and where you combine the data, and uncover trends that tell you what customers want and how to provide it most effectively.

The results of that research and analysis will shape aspects of the rest of your business plan. Assessments of your market and competition inform critical decisions in areas such as product design or service offerings, price, marketing methods, and business location.

That means accurate and comprehensive market research matters. To be comprehensive, your information and analysis should answer every possible question about the market you plan to enter and the consumers you believe will buy your product or service, including (but not limited to):

• Demand: Do consumers want what you’re offering?

• Economic indicators: Do they have the money to buy your product/service?

• Pricing: How much will they pay for your product/service?

• Location: Where do they live, and where are they likely to make their purchases?

• Saturation: How many other options do they currently have for that product/service?

First Steps: Budget

You can spend a lot answering these questions. Many large businesses hire firms to do the research and analysis, employing large-scale surveys, focus groups and statistical models, among other methods. However, for entrepreneurs just starting out, marketing budgets are typically too slim to cover that kind of research.

So, the work needs to stay in-house and fit a small marketing budget. Affordable, effective market research is possible. It may not be as specific to your market as the big-budget stuff, but it can get you the information you need to work out a solid understanding of your market.

First Steps: Market-Research Objectives

Before you start your research and analysis, determine your objectives. Decide what you want to learn from the process. It will guide the data you search for and how you use it, so be specific. Write down actual goals – what would give you the most accurate, comprehensive and useful picture of your market? This could include areas such as demographics, competitor offerings and customer pain points.

First Steps: Research Terminology

In market research, you’re basically dealing with two types of research and two types of data:

• Primary research: This is research you perform yourself in order to get very specific insights into your very specific business. It includes methods such as surveys, interviews and direct observations (by visiting competitor locations, for instance). It can help you gather qualitative data. This is data that goes beyond statistics and market trends. It can tell you what your consumers want, what they don’t want and how they feel about your offerings.

• Secondary research: This is research other people have performed and analyzed. To conduct secondary research, you can visit government websites such as the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as private data collectors such as Google and market-research companies. It can help you gather quantitative data. This is generally statistical data and can reveal insights on consumer demographics, spending patterns, market trends and earnings projections.

Where To Start Your Market Research

There’s a ton of existing research out there, and a lot of it is totally free. The Small Business Administration website has a list of free government sources for various types of quantitative data, such as industry statistics, consumer demographics, consumer demand and spending, and sales indicators. Much of it comes from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A simple search will turn up enough places to start gathering secondary research to build a picture of your market.

With a good understanding of your market from secondary sources, you’re in a good position to know which types of primary research, if any, would be worth an investment of your time and energy. Maybe a well-designed survey completed by everyone you know could help fill in some holes.

You can also conduct primary research by visiting and speaking with your would-be competition and their customers; through crowdsourcing forums such as Quora, where you can glean raw data from comments and responses and post questions related to your product, service and market; on social-media websites such as Facebook, where you can parse conversations in relevant interest groups; and by reading product and service reviews on sites such as Amazon or Yelp.

Analyzing Your Market Research

Armed with all your data, you’ll draw conclusions that will help guide many of your business decisions.

But first, make sure all of your data will benefit those decisions. Don’t start analyzing until you weed out extraneous information that will waste your time and hinder focused insights. If it doesn’t relate directly to your business and your market, set it aside.

Then organize the relevant data into tables, graphs, lists and pie charts, and see what trends emerge. What do those trends mean for your business? Your product? Your location? Your planned promotions?

Be open to whatever the data tells you. Even if your research findings are unexpected, embrace them, and make any necessary adjustments. Listening to good market research can save you a lot of headaches down the road: The better you know your consumers, the better your chances of successfully selling to them.

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Home Market Research

Marketing research: Definition, steps, uses & advantages

What is marketing research?

Marketing research is defined as any technique or a set of practices that companies use to collect information to understand their target market better. Organizations use this data to improve their products, enhance their UX, and offer a better product to their customers. Marketing research is used to determine what the customers want, and how they react to products or features of a product.

Gather research insights

Four standard marketing research methods

The four most common marketing research methods are surveys, interviews, customer observations, and focus groups. You can research various ways without limiting yourself to just one way. Let’s dive deeper into each of these marketing research techniques.

Researchers collect responses by deploying surveys and managing data via online questionnaires or on-screen surveys at the POS. These surveys contain closed-ended and open-ended questions. They are popular and are the most widely used research techniques.

Why are online surveys popular?

Surveys are inexpensive, simple to set-up, deploy, and gather responses. It gets easy to collect multiple answers from a tailored audience group using surveys. Researchers rely on quantitative data, and online surveys provide quick responses compared to the more traditional offline methods. You can collect large amounts of data within minutes from anywhere in the world.

2. Interviews

Face-to-face or personal interviews are a more traditional way of doing marketing research. It is a slow and more expensive way of collecting responses. Researchers doing large scale marketing research do not prefer this method to collect a large number of responses. Interviews are conducted both in-person and on the telephone (CATI). 

Why are interviews important?

Personal interviews may not be widely used but play a significant role in understanding precisely what the respondent feels. You can record more than just verbal responses and understand the customer better. Often, when two humans interact with each other, more information is shared because of the dialogue. Personal interviews are useful in small-scale studies, where the researcher wants to interview a specific group of local respondents. CATI’s are helpful when the respondent base is more expansive.

3. Focus groups

Focus groups or online focus groups involve several respondents who participate in discussions about a particular topic. A researcher conducts focus groups to obtain richer information. The main reason for a focus group is to hold a dialogue between various people on a particular topic of interest. Unlike interviews, focus group members are allowed to interact with each other and influence one another.

Why are focus groups impactful?

It is no secret that focus groups are hugely impactful in decision making. Researchers gain a lot of information by organizing focus groups. Often, focus groups bring up issues not foreseen by researchers. Online or video focus groups have a broad reach, and many organizations have now started creating and nurturing research communities for better respondent handling and data gathering. Direct interaction of business groups and customers positively impacts users because they feel that their voices are heard.

4. Observation

Observation, though not popular and widely used, gives intuitive feedback. Research companies organize customer observation sessions to gather information on how they engage with the product or service (or a similar competitor product or service). Feedback from people’s behavioral attitudes is a powerful tool for researchers looking to improve their products and services.

What makes observation so powerful?

Observational market research is an excellent alternative to focus groups. It’s not only an inexpensive research tool, but you will also witness people interacting with and using your product in a natural environment. The downside is that you will have to make inferences about their feelings and reactions.

LEARN ABOUT: market research trends

How to conduct marketing research

Follow these four marketing research steps to help you understand what your users think and feel about your product, service, or business.

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Research

1. Create simple user personas

A user persona is nothing more than a fictional character that represents a user or a customer. Understanding user personas will help you gauge how different persons react to other products and services to understand their needs. To create a persona, your questions must answer these types questions about the user or customer:

• Who are they?
• What’s their primary goal?
• What stops them from achieving that goal?

2. Conduct observational research

Use both overt and covert observation methods to observe and take notes while users use your products or a similar one.

Overt vs. covert observation

• Overt observation asks users if they will allow you to watch them use your product. 
• Covert observation studies users in a natural environment without them knowing. This type of observation generally works only if you sell a product that consumers buy and use regularly. It brings in the purest observational research data as people act naturally while using the products. 

3. Conduct personal interviews

One-on-one conversations with your target population allow you to explore and dig deep into their concerns, revealing answers to many questions. Here are a few tips for conducting personal interviews.

• Be a journalist and not a salesperson. Ask users about their frustrations, needs, and areas where they think they need an improvement in the product. 
• Pose the ‘why’ question to dig deeper. Dive into the details to know more about their past behavior.
• Recording the conversation helps you focus on it rather than take notes simultaneously.

4. Analyze the data

The idea of conducting lean marketing research is to receive quick, actionable insight data. Analyze the information you have collected using various techniques to draw patterns into what customers like and dislike, what they want, and what they do not need. Create a simple visual representation of how people will interact with each other and the product to assess their needs in a better way.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

Why is research so valuable?

Without research, it is impossible to gauge and understand your customers. Of course, you will have an idea of what they need and who they are and, but you must dive deeper to win their loyalty. Here is why marketing research matters:

• Attract potential customers: The primary aim of marketing research is to find ways to attract potential customers. It also helps to keep current happy and coming back for more. Understanding your customers entirely is the only way to progress. You’ll lose potential customers if you stop caring about improving your user experience.
• Answer the why’s: Marketing research gives you the answer to the ‘why.’ Make use of user analytics, big data, and reporting dashboards in marketing research to tell you what your users are thinking and why they think and act that way. For example, only marketing research can explain why customers leave you.
• Data-backed decisions: Research beats trends, assumptions, and so-called best business practices. Bad decisions are often taken due to emotional reasoning and guesswork. Focusing on customer experience by listening to your customers directs you in the right direction.
• Better planning: Research keeps you from making absurd decisions by planning in a vacuum. You might not fully gauge what your customers experience and feel while using your product. Customers may use products in a way that surprises you, and they may get confused by features that seem obvious to you. Conducting too much planning but not testing your assumptions will waste your money, time, efforts, and resources. Research helps you save up on all these factors.

LEARN ABOUT: 12 Best Tools for Researchers

Advantages of MKT research

Marketing research and user experience (UX) design help you continuously improve your product by acting on your feedback. Here are the advantages of conducting marketing research:

• Improved efficiency: Efficiency draws you closer to your users. You can improve the efficiency of delivering the product to the market and also increase its usability.
• Cost-effective: Marketing research helps you make the right decisions based on consumer demand, thus saving you costs in creating something that customers do not like or want.

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

• Competitive edge: Quicker, more robust insights can help you place your services and products strategically, gaining a competitive advantage over others.
• Build strategies: You can quickly build, alter, or design new approaches to attract your users and consumers.
• Improved communication: Bridge the communication gap by interacting with consumers and hearing them out. This helps consumers feel wanted and special.
• LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

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Market Research: The Definitive Guide (2023 Update)

February 2, 2022

Starting a business is a challenging endeavor that requires time, money, and continuous learning. In our blogs, we cover how to start a business with brief overviews. In our hub, we aim to provide you with everything you need to go through each step. Our first step is conducting market research.

Throughout the steps, we’ll provide insights from Paul Akers, the owner of FastCap, and a Lean Expert who has created hundreds of products for woodworkers and cabinet makers.

There are four basic steps to conducting market research:

• Understand “what is marketing research and which type is right for my business?
• Perform market research.
• Analyze the data.
• Use the research to make decisions.

We’ll start by exploring some of the concepts involved in market research analysis to help you perform it yourself.

Step 1: What is market research in business?

Market research is the process of gathering information about target customers to better understand their views about a product or service. The primary ways of classifying market research are:

• The method of the collection
• Common types of market research

Let’s look at each.

The method of collection

Market research normally uses six methods of collection when looking for answers:

Primary market research

Secondary market research.

• Qualitative research

Quantitative research

Exploratory research.

• Specific Research

Primary research is the original research conducted directly by an organization. It is used to find out what customers are interested in. It can be done through questionnaires, interviews, or videos. Primary market research is used for understanding the underlying needs and desires of consumers.

Primary market research helps us to understand the needs, wants, and behaviors of potential buyers. It is the basis for the buyers’ persona. It helps us to formulate marketing strategies that can be used to meet those needs and wants.

Secondary market research is a process of finding information about a product or service through other sources. This includes looking up other companies that are in the same market as your company and finding out what they are doing.

A company should conduct secondary market research to find out if the product or service has been done before, which will help them figure out how they can differentiate their product from competitors.

Secondary research can be used to gain information about competitors, pricing, distribution channels, etc. It also helps the company save time by not having to conduct primary research that has already been performed.

Researching competitors before you start your business is not only crucial for success but essential for survival in the business world where everyone is trying to get ahead.

What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?

One is focused on themes while the other is focused on information that can be processed numerically. Let’s look at each.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is focused on finding themes that run through interviews and surveys. This type of research is more focused on opinions and is more art than statistical analysis, but in some cases, you can turn this type of research into data that can use statistical analysis.

For instance, a question like the one below converts a qualitative data point into a quantitative data point, making it easier to compare how happy someone was with their food.

You might perform qualitative research along with market validation after you have created a prototype of a new product.

This research is focused on information that can be easily processed with statistical analysis software. For instance, median household income would be easy to statistically calculate if you gather the data for the target customers’ income. Market research analysts love this kind of data because it is easier to process.

Exploratory research is market research that looks for a better understanding. For instance, you may have come to this site doing exploratory research about how to do market research for a startup. After you’ve gained broader information about marketing research methods, you might move on to more specific research.

Specific research

Specific research is when market researchers are looking to answer a very specific question using market data. This research might include searching for a specific concept or item. For example, the lowest cost statistical software for a company that will have ten users of the software. You might also want to research the history of a business location before deciding to sign a lease because some shopping centers have high turnover.

To find the answer, you’ll probably want to go with Google Workspace because Forms, Sheets, and other useful business tools are included in the same package as your email. Google is the primary email provider for small and medium-sized businesses.

Market research may include a combination of primary and secondary data, quantitative and qualitative data, exploratory and specific research. Now that you understand the market research definition, let’s look at the common market research methods and what questions they are trying to answer.

Common types of market research methods

Most companies will perform 13 types of market research:

• Literature reviews

Focus Groups

Observation, customer utilization research.

• Buyer Persona Research

Market Segmentation Research

Pricing research, competitive analysis research, customer satisfaction and loyalty research, brand awareness research, campaign research.

In each of these, market researchers attempt to answer different questions. Let’s discuss each.

Literature Reviews

One of the leanest ways to do market research is a literature review. With your laptop or cell phone, you can easily find vast amounts of data about your market through sources like:

• Statista – Provides graphs that are easy to process for most economic subjects
• Competitors’ research – Your competitors have probably already done the research. Find it so you don’t have to duplicate the effort.
• Industry trade organizations – Companies
• Think with Google – Helps marketers gather information using Google’s extensive database of consumer behaviors
• Census Bureau – The U.S. Census Bureau is a government agency that collects data on a variety of subjects including a full count of the U.S. population every decade.

After you’ve gathered everything available through market research, it’s time to create some surveys.

Surveys are the most common type of market research because they are so easy to conduct and are low-cost. With software like Google Forms and Facebook, you can easily create a survey, distribute it, and analyze the data on your own.

When creating a survey, it is important to be aware of some best principles including:

• Use a variety of style questions: scaled, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions are typically used with success.
• Avoid biased questions that lead the survey participants to a preferred answer. They will harm the validity of your research.
• Be respectful of the participants’ time. Unless you are paying them, try to keep the survey to 10 questions or less. If you are paying them, $50-$100 per hour is typically what market research firms will pay for longer surveys.
• Make sure to gather demographic data and contact information for follow-up.
• Practice proper sampling methods. In most cases, you won’t need more than 1,000 survey participants, but you can use the table below to establish how many people to include in your survey.

You can normally gather the data you need through this method for under $5 per survey participant, making it one of the most effective and lean methods of gathering market research.

Another great tool is a market research interview. They follow the same principles of surveys but have the benefit of the ability to ask follow-up questions. Using these with select survey participants who gave meaningful input might be useful.

Interviews are much more labor and capital intensive than surveys, so only use them for follow-up questions for your target market.

Keep reading to learn about focus groups.

A focus group brings 5-10 people together to discuss a product or service with a moderator. These will typically run $4K-$10K per group, and they are not conducive to being conducted by novices because of the challenges involving focus groups dynamics.

If you are going to use this type of research, we’d suggest hiring a professional market research firm to assist you in the recruiting and managing of a focus group. If you are trying to run lean market research, you should skip focus groups entirely.

Keep reading to learn about observations as a market research tool.

Observation can be an extremely powerful market research tool. Using observation, you can learn how people actually interact with your product and service, but it doesn’t allow you to actually communicate with them.

Observation is particularly powerful for software products because tools like Google Analytics and Crazy Egg help you see how people interact with the software. This makes it easier to fix areas where customers stop interacting with the application.

You can perform market research through observation in different ways. The primary ways of conducting market research through observation are covert observation and overt observation.

Covert observation is collecting market research data without the participants’ knowledge. This type of data collection can be achieved through analytics software on the web or using security cameras in stores where people can test your product.

Overt observation is when the participants are aware of the marketing research and provide feedback to questions. When you conduct market research about a product or service this way you will get more information about potential customers’ opinions, but it may be influenced by their awareness that you are conducting market research.

Effective market research can gain actionable insights from both methods. Overt observation is better when you know who your potential customers are and you want to establish whether they like your business idea, while covert observation is helpful for establishing who naturally gravitates to a product or service.

You’ll want to take notes any time someone performs a desired or undesired action. If the participant is aware of the market research analysts, you’ll also want to ask them what influenced the decision.

Cautionary Tale: During the early stages of FastCap, Paul would gain actionable insights from conventions, but he stopped conducting research at such events because he found them costly to collect data. He also found that competitors would try to steal his ideas.

To truly make the most out of this tool, you’ll need to combine it with other research methods like surveys to gain user input after the observation.

Customer utilization research is focused on how your current customers use your products or services. Marketing professionals will normally use customer surveys to perform this exploratory research. The following questions are questions that an online survey might include:

• How often do you use our product or service?
• What do you like most about our product or service?
• With 1 being highly dissatisfied and 5 being highly satisfied how would you rank our product?
• What do you like least about our product or service?
• With 1 being highly dissatisfied and 5 being highly satisfied how would you rank our customer service?
• Have you tried any of the competitors’ products? If so, which ones? How does our product compare to theirs?
• What features would you like added to our product?
• With 1 being highly dissatisfied and 5 being highly satisfied how would you rank our pricing?

You can replace “product” with “services” in any of the questions above. In addition, it would make sense to include the name of the specific product or service they bought instead of the word product or service.

These questions will help you establish what real customers think of your products and services. This type of market research data provides insight into aspects including competitive advantage and creating buyer personas for potential clients based on the data collected.

FastCap has an interesting take on this type of market research. They actually offer tradesmen a 2-5% royalty for product suggestions that they decide to take to market.

Buyer Persona: Identify Your Target Market

A user persona is a character that represents your target market. A user persona will include aspects including:

• Demographics – age, gender, location, marital status, number of kids (if applicable to your product)
• Financial Information – Employment status, job title, household income, homeowner status
• Behaviors and Interests – Hobbies, products they like, buying habits, where they get information about products and services
• Market size and market trends

You can create similar personas for B2B businesses using stats like:

• Number of employees
• Age of company
• Titles of decision-makers
• Market size

If you are using analytic tools, they collect most of this information. You can add a form to check out or that opens when the user is leaving the site to ask questions about:

• Who are they? In FastCap’s case, they would be carpenters and cabinet makers.
• What are they trying to achieve? They don’t want exposed screw holes in their cabinets.
• What is the main obstacle? The products on the market are ugly, difficult to use, and expensive.

What if you find that your buyer persona is too broad to use to identify potential clients? We’ll discuss how to address that next

A small business might need to do market segmentation research if all their clients don’t fit neatly into a single user persona. For instance, FastCap would have at least three market segments that they might want to prepare marketing materials for:

• Distributors that will be selling their products to carpenters
• Tradespeople who will be using their products
• Coffee shops that buy caps for drinks so people don’t burn themselves (it’s an ancillary use for a FastCap that he decided to market to restaurants with To-Go cups)

As you can guess, each market segment would have characteristics that make them different, and you wouldn’t want to market to them all the same. You’d use market segmentation research to identify what those key characteristics are and create a user persona for each.

The term pricing research is refers to establishing a fair price. Pricing research should be done before you open a business or launch a new product because it can impact whether the business is worth starting.

To understand the benefits of pricing research I should discuss pricing strategies first. Businesses normally use either the value-added method or the cost of doing business.

The value-added method charges a price that is based on the value that is provided to a client. An example of this pricing is how Tesla prices solar roofs. They determine the price using the cost of a comparable roof plus the net present value of 30 years of energy in the target market.

The cost of doing business is calculated by adding up all your expenses (including taxes) and adding the amount of profit you want to make, then dividing by the number of units you want to sell.

Both of these pricing strategies have issues though. In the value-added method, how do you determine the value that is added? In the cost of doing business method, what is the maximum your target market can sustain? Both of these are answered by researching comparable products.

While there may not be something identical on the market, there is always something that serves a similar purpose. For instance, when portable MP3 players were created, the cost of the MP3 player plus downloading songs should have been compared to the cost of a portable CD player plus the cost of all the CDs.

Competitive analysis research is focused on developing a thorough understanding of the market and identifying how you want to differentiate yourself in a market of comparable competitors. This type of research will be included in a business plan . You’ll want to focus on aspects of the industry including:

• Identify competitors and the products they offer. This can be done through their websites.
• Analyze sales trends. You can use industry resources and company quarterly reports.
• Research how economic indicators impact the industry. For instance, consumer staples tend to do better during a recession, while consumer discretionary products tend to do better as an expansionary cycle matures.
• Understand the impact government agencies have on the industry.
• Has the industry reached market saturation? If 9 out of 10 people have already purchased the product you are selling, you are probably late to the game. Before you spend money in an industry that is at capacity, you should review the following bullet point.
• What is the job outlook for the industry? The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) creates an occupational outlook handbook for every industry. You want to be aware of the growth prospects. If both of the last two bullet points are going in the wrong direction stay clear.

The document you create from this research should be detail-oriented, contain lots of external links to prove sources, and show analytical skills that show an understanding of the industry. This research and the communication skills used to present it are often deciding factors when applying for loans.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research are focused on building relationships that increase the lifetime value of your existing customers. With big data and rewards programs becoming more affordable, small business owners can now offer similar types of rewards to what people see at major chains.

You’ll want to use the market research process to establish the answer to questions like:

• Should I use a point system or a number-of-purchases reward system?
• How big of a reward should I offer for repeat customers?
• Should I offer referral bonuses? If so, how much is meaningful?
• What are my competitors doing?

To answer these questions, you’ll need to establish:

• How often your average customer buys your product or services. You can find this in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Alternatively, you can sort receipts by credit card if you don’t already have an app or loyalty program that people sign up for.
• If you have a CRM, establish what percent of customers interact with your business daily, weekly, monthly, or irregularly. Also, calculate the first two bullet points for each group to see if different promotions make sense.
• How much your average customer spends on each trip. Calculate revenue or number of receipts.

For example, you might target people differently by offering daily customers a free upgrade every $50 spent, while weekly customers you might want to offer every 5th visit they get a free product. In both scenarios, this can reward customer loyalty and encourage more spending in the future by slightly shifting their habits.

Let’s look at how to understand brand awareness.

Brand awareness research is focused on establishing what your target audience knows about your business, how they perceive it and giving you input on improving brand awareness.

Facebook has a feature for brands running ads that is really useful for establishing brand awareness called Brand Survey Tests . It is currently an experimental stage, but here’s how it works:

• Divides target market into two groups, one that is shown ads and one that is not shown ads.
• Collects data on both groups’ clicks, purchases, and other actions with your company
• Required: “Do you recall seeing an ad for [page name] online or on a mobile device in the last two days?”
• “Have you heard of [page name]?”
•  “How would you describe your overall opinion of [page name]?”
• “Are you familiar with [Page name]?”
• “Will you recommend [page name] to a friend?”
• Provides an analysis of what the market research process found.

This can be a great tool for understanding if people recognize your brand name .

Campaign research is focused on reviewing past business strategies to promote your products and services so that you can establish what worked, what didn’t, and why. In today’s marketing boom, people often forget the importance of including lessons learned when closing a project.

During this process, you’ll want to look at questions like:

• Did we reach enough people to be a representative sample? Typically, over 500 will be enough to count as a representative sample,
• What was the return on investment?
• Where did people drop out of the sales funnel?
• Did the campaign have a favorable reception?
• Should we try to duplicate the content in future campaigns?
• What should we avoid in future campaigns?

Now that you know about some of the types of market research techniques, keep reading to learn why market research is so important.

Why is market research important?

Because market research is the act of investigating consumer preferences as well as economic, social, and statistical data, it helps to better understand the customer and guides business decisions in the areas of:

• Customer insights – Market research can be used to gain insight into how customers behave, what they like and dislike about products, and what they think about different marketing strategies.
• Marketing strategy development – Market research can be used to develop a marketing strategy by identifying the needs of the market, target audience, and competitors in the industry.
• Product development – Market research is key for product development because it helps companies discover what customers want to buy or use next. It also helps companies see how their product will fare against other similar products on the market today or in the future.
• Product pricing considerations – Market research helps companies determine prices for their products by understanding expenses to continue production.

Now that you understand why market research matters so much to businesses, let’s take a look at how to conduct market research.

Step 2: Conduct market research

As you begin to get a handle on your goals and the questions you need to answer, it’s time to do the market research. At UpFlip, we are fans of Lean methodologies , so we figured we’d give you an introduction to lean market research.

• Put together the list of questions you are trying to answer based on the previous sections. Structure them in a way that answers can be analyzed easily.
• Seek out data that is already available and document the findings that impact you under each question.
• Establish the minimum number of online surveys or observations needed for a statistically accurate sample using our calculator.
• Find participants and gather data. When possible use software for collecting data.
• Proceed to analyze data.
• Implement business strategies.

Using these strategies will make it easier to do effective market research quicker and at a lower cost. No need for costly market research analysts.

If you’d like to learn more about how one of the United State’s most successful Lean practitioners approaches market research check out our interview with Paul below.

Keep reading to learn about analyzing the results

Step 3: Analyze the results

Market research analysts look for trends in data gathered from market research. The analysis involves both statistics and looking for patterns. To make it easier to analyze data, it is helpful to use software while gathering the data. If you don’t, you’ll have to input it into a spreadsheet manually.

The first step is to clean up data. This means fixing misspellings and other improper collection like zip codes where state names should be. Next, remove obvious deviations from the sample. (If someone says they buy your products 100 times per day, that’s probably not right.)

After that, you can do data analysis using functions like:

• Mean – sum divided by the number of surveys
• Median – (Number of surveys+1)/2
• Mode – Most common answer
• These can also use conditional statements such as “IF male and Under 45 mean”

With some forms of data, you might find visualization easier, so we are providing some market research examples of visualization of data. Let’s look at some common visualization methods.

The flow model is simply a visual representation of how interactions occur. Check out the behavioral flow for website visitors in Google Analytics. This model can be useful for establishing where issues occur and how processes work.

Affinity Diagram

An affinity diagram is used to group people, businesses, or other items together by a common feature. For instance, you might group by male and female, profession, or age. This can make it easier to tell whether one group tends to prefer your product or service more than another group does.

If you want to learn how to do this in Microsoft Excel, check out the video below.

Lucidcharts is another software you can use for affinity diagrams.

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the path people take from being unaware of your product to becoming a paying customer, and eventually a potential advocate. Customer journeys are typically broken into five steps in the process:

• Awareness – The customer knows about the product
• Consideration – When the customer starts researching the product
• Purchase – The customer buys the product
• Retention –Keeping the customer happy, repeating purchases
• Advocacy – When the customer goes from being a satisfied customer to singing your praises to others.

The stages can vary for different groups of people, but awareness is typically a matter of advertising. This can be in the form of an online ad, a coming soon sign when preparing to open up a location, or even current customers (or influencers) advocating for your brand.

Consideration begins when the customer starts researching your company. This phase might  be:

• Short : Searching “gas stations near me” and immediately going to get gas
• Long : Spending hours researching the best shoe, best price, and best place to buy it.

The point of understanding a journey map is to be able to understand how many points of reference a person has before buying your product. Then you can use that to speed up the awareness and consideration phases while encouraging advocacy by your long-term customers.

Now that you understand “what is market research?” how to perform the market research, and how to analyze the research, there’s only one thing left…

Step 4: Use the info for decision making

The final and most important part of performing your own market research is converting the research into business practices to improve revenue. Depending on what you find in the research, this step may include:

• Adding new user personas and marketing campaigns
• Narrowing your target audience
• Discontinuing marketing campaigns
• Investing in software to increase customer loyalty or lifetime value
• Documenting the planned strategies for a business plan
• Rejecting the business idea completely

Thank you for reading!

Wherever the research leads you, UpFlip is here to help you run a better business. We use your feedback to create content that helps you build a better business. Which sections of this did you find beneficial and which would you like to learn more about?

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27 Best Business Ideas For Women 2024

Did you know that 42% of small businesses are started by women? But wait—it gets better! Female business owners break the glass ceiling by earning more revenue and growing businesses faster than men. That’s why we created a list of the best business ideas for women.

These business ideas cover the full span of the U.S. economy, showing that the ladies can do anything men can do—and often, they do it better! 

3 Best Business Ideas For Women

3 manufacturing business for ladies ideas, 3 online business ideas for women, 3 best small business ideas from home for ladies, 3 self-employed ideas for females, 12 unique business ideas for ladies.

#1. Real estate

• Average Annual Revenue: $298,870 • Average Profit Margins: 44.6% • Startup Costs: $500-$5K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: -0.3% • Best for: strong saleswomen and negotiators, female entrepreneurs who want a passive income

If you want to pick up on strategies and methods to get into the real estate business, watch how Thach Real Estate Group became a successful business through the learnings and experience of the founder, Thach Nguyen.

Two of the largest real estate companies in the U.S., Howard Hanna and Perry Homes, are owned by women . If you have financial resources, investing in real estate is among the best business ideas for women who want to grow their company to 7 figures and beyond.

Multi-unit residential properties are among the most reliable recession-proof investments available. That’s where Emma Powell built her company, which today manages more than 300 units and earns revenue of over $25,000 a month. Listen to her podcast interview below to hear how she got started in investing: 

#2. Restaurants

• Average Annual Revenue: $1,177,860 • Average Profit Margins: 4% • Startup Costs: $100K-$3.5M • Time To Revenue: 6-18 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 0.2% • Best for: foodies and cooks, people with strong customer service and time management skills, effective leaders, managers, and motivators

Opening a restaurant is a risk, but it’s one that can pay off big time. The female-owned Panda Express chain of restaurants had revenue over $4.5 billion in 2022 , for example. The industry as a whole was projected to reach $997 billion in 2023, so there’s plenty of revenue to go around in this industry. 

For those who don’t have the financial resources to open a brick-and-mortar business, food trucks are great business ideas for women. Jen Gustin started Boss Mama’s Kitchen to break free from her corporate job and become her own boss. Two years later, she was named Food Truck of the Year by South Sound Magazine. Hear how she grew her business in this video:

#3. Human resources

• Average Annual Revenue: $216,855 • Average Profit Margins: 10.2% • Startup Costs: $500-$5K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.4% • Best for: system-driven and organized entrepreneurs who are strong leaders and communicators

When Janice Bryant Howroyd started her human resource management company, she only had $1,500 to her name. Now, it’s a $2.5 billion firm with more than 17,000 clients around the world. 

What makes HR one of the top business ideas for women is that it’s always in demand. Every company needs employees to function, and managing that team is a challenge for many entrepreneurs. If you excel at communication, leadership, and organization, you can make a good living helping them solve that challenge. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell started her HR firm, Workology, in 2005, and has gained national recognition, being honored by Forbes as one of the top recruitment resources. Hear her story and advice in this podcast:

#1. Build custom sheds

• Average Annual Revenue: $696,950 • Average Profit Margins: 3.4% • Startup Costs: $1K-$100K • Time To Revenue: 1-6 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: -1.3% • Best for: designers, makers, and builders, people with strong visualization, problem-solving, and sales skills

If you’re looking for fun business ideas and love building things, a small business making custom sheds can be a great way to earn money. While you will need some construction knowledge and permits, the licensing requirements are less stringent than with full home construction, giving it a lower barrier to entry. 

Susan Frair drew on her expertise in sales when she started Shed Gal, and in a few short years, grew to the number one shed dealer in the state of Washington. You can learn more about her business model and how she finds business opportunities in this video:

#2. Make your own beauty products

• Average Annual Revenue: $1,489,574.8 • Average Profit Margins: 5.7% • Startup Costs: $500-$250K • Time To Revenue: 3+ months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.2% • Best for: make-up artists, beauty influencers, cosmetic chemists, hair and skin care experts

The manufacturing segment of the beauty industry is massive, valued at $49.7 billion in 2022 . There are still plenty of underserved niches in this market, too, and if you have ideas for products to fill them, it can be a very lucrative business idea. 

Charmaine Nicole started her small business, Black Hair and Skincare, based on her own struggles to find beauty products designed for people with alopecia. She’s grown it not just into a successful business, but also a community for people of color around the world. Learn how she started and grew her business in this podcast interview:

#3. Start your own shoe or clothing line

• Average Annual Revenue: $114,700 • Average Profit Margins: 10.3% • Startup Costs: $500-$250K • Time To Revenue: 3+ months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 2.0% • Best for: fashionistas tuned into fashion trends, designers, and artists with strong sales and marketing skills

The fast pace of change in the fashion industry is both a challenge and an opportunity for female entrepreneurs. On the negative side, it can make sustaining your own business a challenge. That said, the fashion world is always looking for what’s next, and that makes a clothing or shoe line good business ideas for women able to anticipate these trends. 

Afshan Abbas was inspired to start a new business, Fuchsia Shoes, after buying a unique pair of artisan shoes in Pakistan. That proved to be a lucrative business venture, especially once she partnered with online influencers. Hear her full story in this video:

#1. Start an online store

• Average Annual Revenue: $60K-$120K • Average Profit Margins: 5-15% • Startup Costs: $100-$10K • Time To Revenue: 30-90 days • Annual Market Growth Rate: -9.3% • Best for: artists and makers, graphic designers, women entrepreneurs with strong sales and marketing skills

Selling products through an online store is one of the easiest and most affordable online business ideas to start. It can be a very profitable business idea, too, especially if you have digital marketing skills or a large social media presence. 

As far as what you can sell, the options are just about endless. Jewelry, custom apparel, and home decor are popular niches, especially for those who enjoy productive crafts like knitting and woodworking. 

Jazmin Richards, for example, started making clean-burning candles for her own use. She turned that into an online store, Blk Sunflower, and made $300,000 in her first 18 months. Hear how she grew her business in this video:

If you’d rather not deal with inventory, a print-on-demand store can make an excellent small business for women. Kerry Egeler from The Shirt School shared his advice on starting a custom apparel business online in this podcast: 

#2. Make and sell online courses

• Average Annual Revenue: $234,540 • Average Profit Margins: 5.8% • Startup Costs: $100-$1K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.1% • Best for: people with in-demand or niche skills and knowledge, teachers and educators

One advantage to online courses is that they’re a mostly-passive source of income once you make and release them. Because of this, an online course is one of the best online business ideas for women who are parents, students, or otherwise can’t always devote full-time hours to a business. 

The biggest challenge with an online course is that you have to put in a lot of time to make it before you can start earning revenue. People who already create educational content have an advantage here since they can repurpose blog posts, lesson plans, or other materials into their courses. 

For more advice on how to make money online selling courses, check out this podcast interview with Jacques Hopkins. He turned his hobby playing piano into a very lucrative business idea:

#3. Social media management

• Average Annual Revenue: $817K • Average Profit Margins: 6.9% • Startup Costs: $100-$10K • Time To Revenue: 1-6 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 19.4% • Best for: writers, marketing and digital media experts, women entrepreneurs with advertising and PR expertise

Social media marketing has become the go-to way for both online and brick-and-mortar business owners to connect with customers. Many small business owners don’t have the time or skills to effectively use social media for their small businesses, though, or the budget to hire an in-house social media manager. 

This makes opening your own digital marketing agency a good business idea for a business woman who has social media management skills and experience. With a 2022 market size of over $193 billion and an annual growth rate of 19.4%, there is ample profit to go around in this industry. 

The biggest challenge of opening your own business as a social media manager is often finding clients and building their trust. Jason of Socialistics shared how he started and grew his marketing agency in the video below:

#1. Photography business

• Average Annual Revenue: $50K • Average Profit Margins: 7.3% • Startup Costs: $1K-$10K • Time To Revenue: 1-6 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 0.3% • Best for: photographers and visual artists with strong customer service, communication, and organization skills

Have you ever wanted to turn a hobby into a lucrative business? Check out how Korbin and Whitney started out, turning their passion into a business they find enjoyment in doing.

There are a variety of ways to start your own photography business from home. You could convert a spare room into an in-home portrait studio, provide mobile photography services for events, or work with other small business owners to help them make marketing materials and promote your brand. 

If you’d rather set your own schedule, a photography business can also make money online by selling prints or print-on-demand products in an online store, taking on freelance clients, or selling stock images to websites like Shutterstock or Getty Images. 

The variety of potential revenue streams is one reason it’s among the best business ideas for women at home who have an artistic eye and photography skills. As you gain skills and grow your brand, you can even make money sharing those skills through a coaching business or online course. That’s how Katelyn James Photography makes a mostly-passive 7-figure revenue with her photography business. Hear how she did it in this podcast interview:

#2. In-home childcare business

• Average Annual Revenue: $143,110 • Average Profit Margins: 0.9% • Startup Costs: $0-$1K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 51.7% • Best for: stay-at-home moms, teachers, and babysitters who are detail-oriented, patient, and have strong interpersonal skills

Offering childcare services is an excellent way for moms and caregivers to become small business owners. As more companies call their workers back to the office, babysitting and childcare services are increasingly in demand, especially in urban areas with a high number of potential customers.  

The advantage of an in-home daycare, as opposed to a nanny or babysitting service, is that you can watch multiple kids at once, expanding your potential revenue. 

#3. Wedding planning business 

• Average Annual Revenue: $93,796 • Average Profit Margins: 13.8% • Startup Costs: $500-$5K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: -0.9% • Best for: strong networkers with organization, planning, and customer service skills

If you excel at organizing parties, meetings, and other gatherings, event planning is a great business idea to pursue. Wedding planning specifically is one of the most profitable business ideas in the event planning niche, with a market value of around $900 million in the U.S. in 2022.

While people of any gender can work in event planning, the majority of wedding planners are female entrepreneurs. Not only is this an easy small business idea to start from home, it also has low startup costs and ongoing expenses, with typical profit margins of up to 90%.

These low costs are one reason it’s among the top home business ideas for women who are skilled planners and communicators. Since most weddings take place on the weekend, it’s also among the best side business ideas for ladies looking to make extra money to supplement a full-time job.

#1. Freelance writing business

• Average Annual Revenue: $712K per employee • Average Profit Margins: 14.6% • Startup Costs: $100-$200 • Time To Revenue: 1 month to 3 years • Annual Market Growth Rate: -1.5% • Best for: language experts, bloggers, writers with search engine optimization and marketing skills

Freelance writers can make money in a lot of ways. The type of content you write can range from a blog post or news article to an entire book. The flexibility freelance writers enjoy makes it a great side business idea, as well as a potential full-time job. If you’re skilled with grammar and detail-oriented, you can expand your services with a freelance editing business.

It also doesn’t cost anything to become a freelance writer, and you can start your business online from home. This puts it among the most popular small business ideas for girl students, as well as an affordable online business for women with a strong command of the English language.

#2. Graphic design business

• Average Annual Revenue: $123,240 • Average Profit Margins: 13.5% • Startup Costs: $500-$5K • Time To Revenue: 3+ months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 2% • Best for: visual artists, creative entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs with web design, user interface, or similar tech skills

For visual artists, doing freelance graphic design work is a great way to make extra money, and is among the best home business ideas for ladies with artistic skills. People and businesses who need logos, website graphics, and other images often hire freelancers on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork . Create an account, and you can start making money right away.

You don’t need to take on clients to start your own business in graphic design, either. Another option is to sell products featuring your designs. That’s what Vlad Kuksenko did when he started his 7-figure Etsy shop TagPup (see his story in the video below):

#3. Data entry

• Average Annual Revenue: $35K-$50K • Average Profit Margins: 10.5% • Startup Costs: $100-$200 • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.9% • Best for: detail-oriented and organized entrepreneurs, fast typers, coders, and automation experts

You don’t need much to offer data entry services—just some basic computer equipment, an eye for detail, and decent typing skills. The low barrier for entry and flexibility of the work are ideal for women seeking home-based small businesses they can easily fit into their life.

#1. Interior design

• Average Annual Revenue: $168,360 • Average Profit Margins: 10.6% • Startup Costs: $1K-$100K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.2% • Best for: creative entrepreneurs with strong communication, collaboration, and organization skills

Interior design is among the best small business ideas for women who don’t just have an artistic eye but are also able to bring other people’s creative vision to life. Making connections with other local small businesses is often the best way to grow a business in this niche, so it’s a great small business idea for creative women who excel at networking.

#2. Virtual bookkeeping business

• Average Annual Revenue: $206,910 • Average Profit Margins: 13.9% • Startup Costs: $500-$5K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.6% • Best for: accountants, business and financial experts

Keeping track of financial transactions is critical for a small business, and virtual bookkeepers help business owners to do so. While you will need strong math and accounting skills, you don’t need to be licensed as a CPA to start. 

That lower barrier to entry, along with the flexibility and low startup costs it offers, is why a virtual bookkeeping business is among the top business ideas for women who are mathematically-minded.

#3. Resell shoes or vintage clothes

• Average Annual Revenue: $60K-$120K • Average Profit Margins: 5-15% • Startup Costs: $100-$1K • Time To Revenue: 30-90 days • Annual Market Growth Rate: -9.3% • Best for: shoppers and collectors, fashionable entrepreneurs, women with strong sales skills

If you have a knack for finding the best items at thrift stores and garage sales, reselling is one of the small business ideas you should consider. 

All you need to get started is knowledge of fashion trends and brands and a minimal budget to get your first items. You can reinvest the profit from those sales to grow the business further. Sneak City started this way, with just $50 and working out of a garage. Now they’re a thriving brick-and-mortar business with multiple storefronts. They shared their story in this YouTube interview:

#4. Professional organizer

• Average Annual Revenue: $168,360 • Average Profit Margins: 10.6% • Startup Costs: $1K-$100K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.2% • Best for: highly organized entrepreneurs, strong planners, communicators, and collaborators, creative problem-solvers

Being a professional organizer is among the best business ideas for women who have both right-brain and left-brain intelligence. 

Organizers help others to declutter and order their homes, offices, or other spaces, improving their clients’ mental health along the way and giving them tools to maintain the system you help them establish. To do this, you need a lot of empathy and strong communication skills, along with analytical, problem-solving, and spatial reasoning skills.

Since you’ll work in the client’s space, this is among the top business ideas for women at home, and it also offers a low start-up cost and high flexibility. The biggest challenge is often establishing your reputation to build a client base. If you’re a strong marketer or networker, that can be an advantage for growing your new business faster.

#5. Start a farm

• Average Annual Revenue: $263,500 • Average Profit Margins: 27.9% • Startup Costs: $100K-$3.5M • Time To Revenue: 6-18 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: -0.5% • Best for: women entrepreneurs who love working outside with their hands; hard-working, patient, and organized problem solvers

People don’t think of farming as a lucrative profession, but the truth is the median household income of farmers was $92,239 in 2021 , higher than the American average. Roughly 89% of farms in the U.S. are small businesses, so there’s a lot of room in this space for future women entrepreneurs who want to work the land for a living. 

Marion Acres started from scratch in 2012 as a way for two families to grow their own food. It’s now a thriving chicken farm with its own market and processing plant. You can see how they got started in this video:

#6. Dropshipping business

• Average Annual Revenue: $36K-$50K • Average Profit Margins: 5% • Startup Costs: $150-$500 • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 25% • Best for: experts in social media and marketing, process-oriented and organized entrepreneurs, people seeking flexibility and passive income

Dropshipping is an ideal way for women entrepreneurs to make money online and set their own schedules. In a dropshipping business model, the things you sell are stored and shipped from elsewhere, giving it very low start-up and ongoing costs.

The flexible time commitment of dropshipping makes it a great way to start your own online business while still working a full-time job, and it can bring in enough revenue to serve as your sole income stream if you have the time to commit to it. 

Heather Johnson started her print-on-demand dropshipping business to make extra money when her hours were cut during the pandemic. In a few short years, she’s grown it to $15,000 a month in revenue. Hear her story in this interview:

#7. Open a bakery business

• Average Annual Revenue: $1.52 million per year • Average Profit Margins: 5.4% • Startup Costs: $100-$3M • Time To Revenue: 1-6 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.1% • Best for: food-lovers, creative entrepreneurs with strong customer service skills

Like other businesses in the food industry, opening a bakery can be a big investment, but with an equally big potential payoff. It’s among the best small business ideas for women who love to bake and love interacting with people.

There are many niches you can choose as a bakery, too. Some focus on treats like cupcakes and pastries, while others make bread and other baked goods to sell to restaurants and stores.The right niche for you will depend on both your interests and your local market.

#8. Personal trainer

• Average Annual Revenue: $16,867 • Average Profit Margins: 10.9% • Startup Costs: $500-$5K • Time To Revenue: 1-6 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 0.6% • Best for: athletes and fitness experts, outgoing female entrepreneurs who excel at motivating and communicating with others

The fitness industry is large and growing, projected to reach a total market value of $5.77 billion by 2027. This makes a fitness training business a great small business idea for female entrepreneurs who are passionate about exercise and health. It’s also a potentially profitable business, with the average independent personal trainer earning just over $54,000 a year in take-home income. 

A personal trainer business has very low upfront costs, in part because you don’t need your own brick-and-mortar storefront. You can open a home-based studio if you have the space, or offer mobile services, working with clients in their homes. You can even offer remote services with video conferencing, or in an online course that can serve as an extra passive income stream.  

In this interview with Bedros Keuilian, see how this self-made entrepreneur went from eating from bins to making $200 million a year with his franchise Fit Body Boot Camp and business coaching company Empire Systems.

#9. Home, office, or Airbnb cleaning business

• Average Annual Revenue: $74,880 • Average Profit Margins: 6.7% • Startup Costs: $1K-$30K • Time To Revenue: 1-6 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.2% • Best for: housekeepers and homemakers, organized and tidy entrepreneurs

Cleaning is one of those things every home or business needs but most people don’t like to do. This makes it a perfect business idea for women business owners who enjoy bringing order to chaos and don’t mind getting their hands dirty now and then. 

Chris Mondragon started Queen Bee Cleaning with about $5,000 and now teaches other business owners how to do the same in his 7-Figure Cleaning Business Blueprint . You can see what a typical day in his life is like in this video if you’re curious about the day-to-day of starting your own business:

The variety of cleaning jobs available is another reason this is a great business idea. Chris gets a lot of his revenue from cleaning Airbnbs, in addition to his residential cleaning clients. If you’re not sure which niche to choose, do some market research on the services already offered in your area to see where there’s a gap you can fill. 

#10. Life coach

• Average Annual Revenue: $63,400 • Average Profit Margins: 10.5% • Startup Costs: $500-$5K • Time To Revenue: 1-3 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 1.5% • Best for: Strong motivators and communicators, problem-solvers, mental health professionals

A life coach helps their clients overcome challenges in their career, relationships, or other areas of their life. That makes it a very rewarding career and the best business for women who love helping others thrive. If you’re the person your friends always turn to for advice, becoming a life coach is a natural way to start your own business sharing that problem-solving talent with others. 

#11. Laundry business

• Average Annual Revenue: $311,220 • Average Profit Margins: 22.1% • Startup Costs: $100K-$3.5M • Time To Revenue: 6-18 months • Annual Market Growth Rate: -0.1% • Best for: customer service pros with high attention to detail

Laundry is a universal chore, but not everyone has the equipment at home (or the time) to do it themselves. A laundry business provides a useful service that’s consistently in-demand, making it a great choice as a woman-owned small business. 

Opening a laundromat does require more up-front investment than other options on the list. On the plus side, though, it has potential to be a mostly-passive income stream with the right team. Hear how Rosie Wash Express Laundry started and grew her laundromat business in this interview:

#12. Baby equipment rental business

• Average Annual Revenue: $2,157,420 • Average Profit Margins: 3.9% • Startup Costs: $500-$250K • Time To Revenue: 3+ months • Annual Market Growth Rate: 2.7% • Best for: moms, childcare professionals, organized and system-oriented entrepreneurs

Baby equipment is expensive—which makes it even more frustrating considering how quickly they grow out of it. A rental business lets you help parents get high-quality equipment for less. It’s among the best business ideas for parents because you can make money from items your kids have outgrown rather than letting them sit unused. 

FAQs About What is a Good Business to Start for a Woman

What is the best business for a woman to start.

Great new business ideas for women can come from any industry. According to the most recent data , the most popular entrepreneur ideas for women are in retail (26%), health, beauty and fitness (17%), and food and restaurants (14%). That said, though, the number of female-owned businesses is growing across sectors, and any of the business ideas for a woman on this list can be a great choice for the right entrepreneur.

What percent of women own businesses?

49% of startups are women-owned , but only 7.1% of the female population are business owners. (We calculated this figure using the number of female-owned businesses divided by the number of women in the population.)

Meanwhile, 10.8% of men are small business owners.

How to start a business as a woman

UpFlip’s ultimate guide on how to start a business is an excellent resource that answers this question step-by-step.

Where can I find women in business scholarships?

There are several organizations that offer scholarships for women in business. This College Guidepost list of 16 national business women scholarships is a great place to explore your options.

What is the best way to get a business loan for women?

The Small Business Administration has women-owned business loan resources that you can explore. You can also get advice on finding and obtaining start-up business loans for women in this podcast interview with National Business Capital founder Joseph Camberato, whose company has helped entrepreneurs secure more than $2 billion in funding:

Which Business Idea Will You Choose?

Ladies, y’all are doing phenomenal at raising the bar, creating a more compassionate business culture, and driving success in business. 

It doesn’t matter what business you choose to enter—you are more likely to find success than men.

Keep doing what y’all do well, and, hopefully, we’ll get the better world many of us are trying to build. I hope whatever industry you choose, you make it better for everyone. 

Which of the small business ideas for women will you choose for your next business venture?

Side Jobs From Home: 23 Extra Income Ideas for 2024

Are bills and necessities eating all your money?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, more than 41% of Americans struggle to pay their bills each month.

We believe everyone should make enough to meet their needs and pay their bills. The reality is, many of us have to work side jobs from home to make ends meet, feed our families, and pursue our interests.

[su_note note_color="#dbeafc"]In this article, we discuss the top at-home side jobs. Click on any of the links below to jump to the side hustle ideas that interest you, or just continue reading.

Side Job, Defined

What is the highest-paying side job, #1. vending machines, #2. equipment rental, #3. search engine optimization (seo), #4. stock image photography, #5. online tutoring, #6. social media management, #7. customer service, #8. data entry, #9. virtual assistant, #10. job search assistant, #11. human resources, #12. web design, #13. health coaching, #14. affiliate marketing, #15. freelance writing, #16. copy editing, #17. youtube, #18. selling stuff, #19. running errands, #20. working with pets, #21. teach money management, #22. become a brand ambassador, #23. teach the english language, how to start a side business, frequently asked questions, learn easy ways to make money.

• Conclusion   [/su_note]

A side job is a second job that someone takes on to supplement the income from their primary job. Side jobs are often done on a remote, on-call, or seasonal basis, and may be referred to as a side gig or side hustle.

The difference between a side hustle and a part-time job is the ability to control when you work, what you do, and how much time you spend doing it.

You might want to get a side job to:

• Learn new skills
• Gain experience in a different field
• Pursue a passion
• Save for a specific goal
• Test-drive a career change
• Try a business idea

The most lucrative side hustles largely align with the most lucrative careers.

For example, businesses are always in the market for freelance web designers, developers, and other tech experts. All of these fields can make six-figure incomes as a side job.

The Top At-Home Side Jobs in 2024

Vending machines in good locations can make over $2,000 per month . As a vending machine owner, you earn most of your money at home; you’ll just need to buy machines, place them, then fill them on nights or weekends.

Check out our interview with vending machine entrepreneur Adam Hill.

One of the best ways to make money is to rent items that people need occasionally, but not all the time. Think chairs for weddings, sound equipment for dances, or even scuba scuba gear.

Check out how wedding DJ Josh Pather developed a $6M-per-year business with a similar model.

Ways to Make Money Online

You can make extra income by offering SEO services to clients. There are several areas of focus in this field, including:

• Keyword research: Finding keywords that will help businesses reach their target market online.
• Backlink building: Performing email outreach, creating press releases, and writing guest blogs are ways to get authoritative sites to link to your client.
• Content creation: Creating blogs and videos that position a business as a subject matter expert (which search engines tend to value) is a great online side job.
• Technical SEO: Developers and other technically savvy people make extra money by helping reduce load time and making it easier for web crawlers to understand a website.

Learn more about making extra money with SEO and marketing below:

Another way to make extra money is selling your photos on stock image sites, like Getty Images and iStock . It can take some time for this side hustle to pay off, but once you develop a reputation, it can be highly profitable.

Before you get going, read these stock photography tips from Format .

According to ZipRecruiter , the average hourly pay for a tutor is $20.22, with most making between $14.42 and $24.04 per hour. This online side job makes it easy to make some extra money and share your knowledge while controlling your schedule.

Pro Tip: Check out our blog about how two entrepreneurs created a successful tutoring app .

Do you love communicating with people on social media? Do you get a rush out from your popular posts? A side job as a social media manager might be a good side hustle.

Freelance social media managers make between $22.84 and $36.78 with an average of $31 per hour, according to ZipRecruiter .

Learn how to make money from home with social media marketing below:

Providing customer support from home can make you between $15.38 to $20.91 per hour, per ZipRecruiter .

Note that customer service side jobs may require specific hours, and you’ll normally need to go through a period of training, which may not be paid if you are an independent contractor.

Data entry side jobs focus on inputting information into systems for businesses. According to Indeed , you can make an average of $19.49 for this work-from-home job.

According to ZipRecruiter , Virtual assistant jobs pay between $20.43 and $27.40 in the U.S. The competition might be fierce, however, as many companies hire virtual assistants in other countries (and pay them lower wages).

According to GlassDoor , a job search assistant side hustle will make between $20.50 and $30.50. If you’re acting as a recruiter, you might even get a commission based on the annual pay if the person accepts a regular job in a high-paying field.

According to ADP , 70% of small businesses don’t have an official HR person. You can take online side jobs as an HR consultant if you have experience in human resources.

According to Payscale , this side hustle job can get paid $27.50 to $59 per hour.

Graphic design includes designing websites, mobile applications, or even visual content for social media. A graphic designer gig is a fun side hustle for creatives who need to make extra cash in their free time.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , you can expect to make $38.81 hourly and the demand for graphic designers will increase by 16%.

A health coach helps people identify what they want, what’s important to them, and how they can achieve those goals within the constraints of their lives.

Reputable health coaches attain certifications through organizations like the National Board for Health & Wellness Coaching . A certified health coach may earn $31 to $51 per hour, according to AFPA , and may be eligible for insurance billing with a doctor’s referral.

People often pursue an online side hustle discussing what they are passionate about, then make money referring people to products they love.

This online side gig can be done in your free time and doesn’t require you to find clients like most freelance work. According to GetResponse , some of the top side hustle ideas in affiliate marketing are:

• SaaS and marketing software
• The adult niche
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Beauty and cosmetics

Find out how Matt Diggity does affiliate marketing in our interview with him below:

Writing side hustles can bring in great money. You can take as many or as few jobs as you want when you work this side gig. It might even turn into a full-time job.

Writers typically make between $20 and $85 per hour, but they might also charge on a per-word or per-project basis. Your wages will likely start low and rise as your experience does.

To get into the industry, whip up a portfolio and consider joining freelancing sites such as UpWork or Fiverr. As you gain clients, you could gain new ones through word of mouth and outreach.

Get paid for reviewing other people’s writing for errors. Editors typically get paid similarly to what writers get paid, depending on their skill set and experience. They typically find work in the same way, too: freelancing sites, outreach, and word of mouth.

While it helps to have a bachelor’s degree in English, attention to detail and a mastery of grammar are more important.

Start a side hustle from home by making videos that interest you. As you gain a following on YouTube, you can earn extra cash from ads, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, or selling your products.

It will take some time for this side gig to make good money, but with drive and luck, people have made millions on YouTube. Find out how to start a YouTube Channel .

More Side Hustles From Home

Selling your stuff is quick, it’s easy, and it gets unwanted things out of your home. You can sell stuff online on sites such as Etsy, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace.

Alternatively, you can run garage sales out of your home or take your stuff to a pawn shop to meet your money goals quickly. Either way, share what you’re doing on social media to help spread the word.

The money you’ll make will depend on the quality of the products you sell and where you sell them. You’ll normally make more money if you have time to wait for higher offers.

Check out how to make money online reselling sneakers below:

Lots of people work side hustles delivering food, groceries, or packages to make money. You’ll need a valid driver’s license and a car, but you can make $15 to $45 per hour, and most of the extra money isn’t taxable because you get to deduct the IRS mileage rate from the earnings.

Animal lovers need people to help them take care of their pets. Dog sitting or dog walking services are some of the best side hustles if you like to work with animals. Sites like Rover or Wag help you find jobs to pet sit.

Anyone who has figured out how to attain financial independence has a story to tell about how they improved their bank account. You can create a side hustle sharing the strategies you used to make more money, manage your time, and rise above challenges.

More Online Side Jobs

A brand ambassador promotes a company and its products to their network. Brand ambassadors are also called influencers or corporate ambassadors.

Brand ambassadors increase brand awareness by promoting the company’s products and educating customers on the benefits through social media, online reviews, and public appearances.

According to salary.com , this side hustle normally makes between $15 and $40 per hour, with most influencers earning around $25 per hour.

Anyone with an internet connection and a native (or fluent) understanding of English can run a side hustle teaching the language online.

According to Bay Atlantic University , many employers require a bachelors degree, but pay more if you have a masters, doctorate, or additional certifications. Pay can range from $15 to $35 per hour.

Once you’ve decided how to make extra income while working full-time, you’ll want to start your side job. When starting a side job, you should:

• Identify your skills and interests.
• Research the market.
• Research trending platforms.
• Plan your side hustle.
• Set up your side hustle.
• Promote and grow your side hustle.

Let’s look at each step below.

Identify Your Skills and Interests

Make a list of your interests and skills. Whether you’re taking gig jobs or creating content, think about what you’re good at and what you should pay someone else to do.

Research the Market

You’ll want to look at the industry and what successful businesses are doing, and duplicate where possible (and ethical) while looking for ways to stand out from your competitors.

Research Trending Platforms

Look for new trends and platforms. Be one of the first to move into a space. You’ll face less competition and it will be easier to rank on search engines for the subject. Once other people catch up, you’ll be so far ahead, it may be hard to catch up.

Plan Your Side Hustle

Your business plan doesn’t need to be complex, but you should at least set time aside to work on a business plan. You’ll also need to know how much it costs to start your side hustle.

Set Up Your Side Hustle

Many side jobs from home will require software, tools, special licenses, or business insurance. Make sure you get everything you need to take on good side jobs from home.

Promote and Grow Your Side Hustle

You’ll want to market your side hustle using social media, business cards, and other marketing strategies. If you want to grow your side hustle even faster, you can use paid advertising, too.

How can I make $15 an hour online?

Many ways of making money online pay more than $15 per hour. Look at sites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com to find online side jobs that pay more than $15 hourly.

Can I make an extra $1,000 a month?

Yes, you can make an extra $1,000 monthly from a side job. It just might take some time to build to that level.

When you accept traditional side gigs like a virtual assistant or data entry, but you might not get paid for 1 to 2 weeks. Meanwhile, things like furniture flipping or online stores can take longer to build a client base. 

What are the seven streams of income?

There are seven basic ways to make extra money. Consider using a combination of the seven ways to build a consistent stream of extra income:

• Earned income: You’ll earn this from any jobs where you are an employee.
• Rental income: Buying and renting assets creates a good stream of passive rental income.
• Interest income: Earn interest from saving or lending money. Higher interest rates tend to go with higher risk.
• Royalty income: Copyright and patent owners can earn royalties by licensing materials.
• Business income: Start and run a business to earn business income in the form of profits.
• Dividend income: Invest in real estate investment trusts or stocks that pay dividends to earn passive income.
• Capital gains income: Sell assets like property, stocks, or crypto for more than the purchase price to earn capital gains income.

While it might be slow growing at first, the more of these income streams you have, the more financial security you’ll have if your primary job suddenly becomes unavailable.

How can I build my savings?

First, you have to establish that your income is more than your expenses and create a budget. Then you’ll want to establish how much you have to spend to survive and how much you have left each paycheck.

Find a high-interest savings account and start sending 8% to 20% of your paychecks to it.

Next, increase your skill set, earn extra income, and keep sending 20% of the extra money into your savings account. Once you’ve built three months to a year of expenses for an emergency fund, then you can start expanding into more profitable and higher-risk ways of making money. 

What is the 50/30/20 rule?

The 50-30-20 rule is a budgeting method where half your pay goes to needs (food, clothing, shelter, utilities, and transportation), 30% to non-essentials (like concerts, restaurants, dates, and vacations), and 20% to savings and investments.

It might be hard for people making under $100K to follow these perfectly given many locations require $75K or more in income to afford a three-bedroom home.

The table below gives you the breakdown for values to attribute to each category based on incomes between $10K and $1M.

How can I earn money online easily?

Selling used stuff online is easy and can make you money quickly. You might also consider passive income plays like affiliate marketing or running an online rental company.

How can I make money fast at home?

The fastest ways to make money from home include selling electronics or used clothes, running a child care agency , and renting out extra rooms.

How can I make money right now?

It’s hard to find ethical money-making activities on the spot, but it’s possible. It’s easiest to find quick side gigs and odd jobs in the service industry. Consider food delivery, moving furniture, or painting fences.

Want some help getting into the best side jobs from home? We create courses with successful service providers to help you learn how to earn money fast.

Check out our free courses about starting legitimate side jobs from home.

In a world where many struggle to keep up with bills, finding side jobs from home has become essential for financial stability. Whether it's to supplement income, gain experience, or pursue passions, there are numerous opportunities available.

From online tutoring to social media management, and from data entry to starting a YouTube channel, the options are diverse.

The process of starting a side hustle involves identifying skills, researching markets, and planning, setting up, and promoting the venture. With dedication and resourcefulness, individuals can navigate the landscape of side jobs to achieve financial goals and secure their future.

Have you ever worked remote jobs? Which side jobs from home are you considering?

Vending Machine Business Plan: The Ultimate Guide

You’ve looked into the steps of starting a vending machine business, but you haven’t developed business plans. We’ll help you create a vending machine business plan.

Adam Hill has owned and operated Hill Vending since 2014, when he bought a $120 vending route. Now he’s making over $600K in annual sales. He’ll share vending machine tips so you know how to estimate vending machine profits and other costs.

[su_note note_color="#dbeafc"]

We’ll explain everything you need to know to communicate your business plan. These vending machine business links will send you directly to the section of the blog you want to read:

What Is a Vending Machine Business Plan?

Why you need a vending business plan, how to buy vending machines, vending machine business plan template, executive summary, company analysis, vending machine industry analysis, customer analysis, competitive analysis, marketing plan, operations plan, management team, income statement, balance sheets, cash flow statement, how much are vending machines, how to start a vending machine business, how much does a vending machine make, what do i need to start a vending machine business.

• Write Your Vending Machine Business Plan [/su_note]

A vending machine business plan provides a snapshot of where your business is, where it’s going, and how you will achieve the business goals over the next three to 10 years.

Vending business plans will include market research on the vending machine industry, local vending machine associations, a marketing plan, an operations plan, and a financial plan to provide a clear path of how you expect your vending machine company to make money and grow.

Your chances of starting a successful vending machine business double by writing and following a vending machine business plan. Plus, companies that follow their business plans grow nearly 30% faster and get more funding than those without a business plan.

Make sure to update your vending machine business plan annually as your company grows and achieves its goals.

The main ways to buy a vending machine business are personal savings, credit cards, private loans from the current business owner, bank loans, and angel investors.

Private Loans

One of the top ways to get into the vending machine industry is to buy an existing vending machine business. Business owners will often agree to owner financing, where you pay 0-20% down and then pay off the remainder over one to five years.

Banks will want to review your vending machine business plan and decide whether they believe you can accomplish the goals you’ve included. More specifically, a loan officer will want to see a professional vending machine business plan to verify that your financial assumptions are reasonable.

Angel Investors

Another way to fund a vending machine business is by taking a loan or equity deal from angel investors. An angel investor is just a wealthy individual who helps people start businesses in exchange for a share of the profits.

Learn more about buying a vending machine .

You’ll want a business plan template for your vending machine business. Download our free vending machine business plan template below.

You’ll also get our How to Start a Vending Machine Business PDF.

Check out our other business plan templates for more resources or watch our interview with a business owner who started one of the fastest growing franchises in North America to learn how he writes a business plan.

What Should I Include in a Vending Machine Startup Business Plan?

A business plan for a vending machine company should include:

• Competitor Analysis
• Vending Machine Marketing Plan
• Vending Machine Operations Plan
• Vending Machine Financial Plan

Keep reading to learn what vending machine operators should include in their business plans. We’ll also provide examples of what key parts of a vending machine business plan might look like.

Vending machine operators should start their business plan with an executive summary. All an executive summary does is summarize what the rest of the document is about.

The executive summary should be under a page long and should include a sentence or two about each section so that people can get the main points quickly.

This section of your vending machine business plan should include:

• An introduction to your company
• Your company’s mission and values
• The vending machine services you’ll offer
• Your competitive advantage

In your industry analysis, you need to provide an overview of the vending machine business. Your research will help you understand the market, improve your strategy to utilize market trends, and prove to readers you know what you’re talking about.

Your vending machine business plan should answer the following questions about the vending industry:

• How much do vending machines make a month? (Both as an industry and per machine)
• How much of the industry revenue is in the local market? Use the industry revenue multiplied by your location divided by the U.S. population.
• Is the market growing or shrinking?
• Who are the market leaders in the industry?
• Who are the primary vending machine manufacturers and suppliers of products?
• What vending machine business trends will impact the industry?
• What is the vending industry’s 5-10 year growth forecast?

I suggest using the IBIS World report we linked to earlier because it includes all the information about the U.S. vending machine market. You may need to purchase a local plan as well.

Industry Analysis Example

The vending machine industry makes $10 billion per year across 17,739 vending operators in the U.S. That means they make an average of $563,729 per year.

The average monthly revenue of a vending machine is approximately $2,000, which means a company needs 24 machines to earn the average across the industry.

The Las Vegas vending machine business market is approximately $69,343,972.03, and there are 99 vending machine operators , which means each vending machine operator is making approximately $140K per year more than the national average.

The market is expected to slightly decline in revenue, but companies that capitalize on existing trends like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and specialized vending machines are able to see growth by creating new markets in high-traffic areas.

According to ThomasNet , the major vending machine equipment manufacturers and suppliers are:

Adam suggested two manufacturers of vending machines he prefers to use.

[su_quote] AMS and Vendo are by far the best machines I’ve used. [/su_quote]

In addition, snack foods and drinks are available from stores like:

• Coke distributors
• Pepsi distributors
• Other distributors

Your vending machine business plan should describe the target market you will be providing vending.

Your target market will impact the pricing and product options you carry. Make sure to understand the demographics of the customers in each type of facility you serve. You won’t want to offer the same vending machine products in a gas station as you would a cardiac wing in a hospital.

Analyze customer demographics. You’ll want to discuss the age, gender, location, and income levels of decision-makers, their customers, and where you want to place your vending machines .

You’ll also want to include psychographic profiles, meaning the details of your customers’ wants and needs. You wouldn’t want to offer all candy and soda in a yoga studio vending machine because the students will probably want water and healthier snack choices.

Your vending machine business plan should include a competitive analysis that shows your understanding of the direct and indirect competitors you will be competing with for your target customers.

Direct competitors are limited to vending machine operators in the local area, while indirect competitors are any type of business where your target customers can get the same products.

A vending machine business will have indirect competitors, including grocery stores, convenience stores, delivery apps, pharmacies, and fast food restaurants.

Not mentioning these vending machine competitors may show lenders that you don’t realize there are other places where someone can buy the same products even when in a rush.

You want to describe in greater detail the other vending machine businesses you’ll compete with. Your direct competitors will be other vending machine locations within a mile of your machine.

Create an analysis of each local vending machine company that answers the following:

• What locations does each business serve?
• What items do they sell in the vending machines?
• How do they price each item?
• What are the machine owners’ competitive advantages?
• What opportunities do they leave open?

After you’ve done this, you should be able to answer questions like:

• How can I provide superior products?
• What products can I offer that competitors do not?
• How can I create an excellent customer service culture?
• Can I beat their pricing?

Finding ways to provide better customer service at a similar or lower cost will provide a competitive advantage. Just make sure the pricing is correct for your vending machine business to be successful.

Have you ever heard of the 4Ps of marketing?

Every vending machine business should include them in its marketing plan.

This section of your vending machine business plan should remind the reader what type of vending machine business you are. Make sure to be specific about the products you’ll be offering in your vending machines. You’ll want to keep the product list consistent across vending machines.

You should have already analyzed how other vending machine businesses sell their products. Now it’s time to create your pricing guide. Adam suggests pricing the products at twice what you pay for them.

If you buy a 12-pack of soda from Sam’s Club for $12.99, then your vending machine company should be selling each can for $2.25 if the market will allow it. At the very least, factor in 50 cents profit per item.

Where will you be placing your vending machines? Document every location, the types of vending machines at the location, and how often you’ll need to check it.

You should also explain why each location is a good spot for a vending machine in your vending machine business plan. Learn more about vending machine placement .

The promotion section of a vending machine marketing plan documents how you will help people find your vending machine company and the locations where you have placed a vending machine.

Some promotional methods you might use for a vending machine company include:

• A vending machine website
• Adding your branding to your vehicle
• Creating brochures for business owners
• Focusing on vending machine experience and user experience (UX)
• Keeping your vending machines clean and branding them to help people recognize your brand
• Placing vending machines in strategic locations
• Providing maps that show where your vending machine business is located
• Sharing cool features of your vending machines on social media

You could also create a course to help other people learn how to start a vending machine business. That’s one of the ways that Adam has built upon his vending machine business. Check out our free vending machine training .

An operations plan is part of your vending machine business plan that explains your daily operations. Your operations plan should include two sections:

• Long-term goals
• Processes for operational excellence

Long-Term Goals

What milestones do you want to achieve in your vending machine company?

Your long-term goals might include the number of machines you want by a certain date, when you want to hire employees, and how much revenue you want within five years.

Make sure to add these details to your vending machine business plan.

Processes for Your Vending Machine Business

Your processes are the steps you will take during the day to keep your vending machine business running smoothly. Your main tasks will include:

• Buy vending machine products
• Store vending machine products
• Deliver machines
• Restock vending machines
• Clean vending machines
• Buy new vending machines
• Secure contracts for vending machine placement
• Buy vending machine routes
• Provide customer service

You should also include your management team and business structure in your vending machine business plan. Planning for a team shows that you have thought through starting a vending machine business and realize that you can’t do everything.

While vending machine businesses are typically able to be run by a single person, that doesn’t mean you won’t need help from other professionals including:

• Vending Machine Repair Person
• Sales and Marketing

Hiring people to manage portions of the company you don’t understand will make starting a vending machine business much easier. Emphasize how your leadership team is going to make you more successful by touting their past experience.

Direct experience in the vending machine business is best, but if your team has experience in other areas that are related, it works well, too. An advisory board familiar with vending machines is also an option.

Financial Plan

When you own vending machine business assets, you need a financial plan. Your financial plan should cover one to five years from your vending machine business starting.

Three financial statements should be included with your business plan:

• Income statement
• Balance sheet
• Cash flow statement

A Profit and Loss statement, P&L, or income statement shows your revenues and expenses to show how much money you made or lost.

You’ll have to make some assumptions when you create an income statement. Vending machine owners will need to make and document assumptions that answer the following:

• How many products will you serve?
• What will inflation be?
• How much will revenue grow each year? How?

Example Vending Machines Income Statement

Let’s assume the following:

• We bought 10 vending machines for $20,000 with $0 down and one year to pay $25K.
• Revenue is $2K/month per machine .
• Gross margins are 50% .
• Taxes are 20% .
• Marketing costs $1,000 annually .

Note: EBITDA = Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization

Balance sheets are used to compare your assets and liabilities. Your balance sheet will show five sections:

• Current Assets: Cash and items that can be turned into cash within a year, including accounts receivable, inventory, prepaid expenses, and marketable securities.
• Long-Term Assets: Items that cannot be sold fast, like land, patents, brands, trademarks, goodwill, and vending machine equipment.
• Current Liabilities: Any debt due within a year, including accounts payable, debt financing, payroll, rent, utilities, and other accrued expenses.
• Long-Term Liabilities: Any debts that last longer than a year, including bonds payable, deferred taxes, leases, loans, and pensions
• Shareholder Equity: Shares, reserves, and retained earnings are all parts of owners’ equity

Effectively, you are aiming to balance the equation:

Current Assets + Long Term Assets = Current Liabilities + Long-Term Liabilities + Shareholder Equity

Learn more about balance sheets .

Your cash flow statement shows how much money you need in your business bank account to cover startup costs and operating expenses until you are fully self-sustaining.

Your cash flow statement adjusts the net income to add:

• Depreciation
• Decreases in accounts payable
• Increases in taxes payable
• Increases in accounts receivable

Then you’ll want to subtract the cost of any inventory to get the cash from operations. You’ll also want line items for any investment or financing you need for the following items:

• Cost of equipment like vending machines, refrigerated delivery trucks, etc.
• Cost of maintaining an adequate amount of inventory
• Payroll or salaries paid to staff
• Business insurance
• Taxes and permits
• Legal expenses

The final part of your vending machine business plan should be an appendix that includes all the supporting documentation for your business plan. You’ll want to include tables, links, and citations so that anyone reviewing your vending machine business plan can verify your facts.

For the sake of brevity, in this Example Appendix, I am only including the formula I used for the Las Vegas Vending Machine Industry calculation.

Vending Machine Business FAQs

Buying a vending machine will cost anywhere from $100 for a small candy vending machine to a few thousand dollars for new and used drink or snack machines. The custom vending machine cost can reach $20,000.

Starting a vending machine business requires:

• Establishing if the vending machine business will be profitable
• Creating financial projections
• Writing a vending machine business plan
• Forming your vending machine business
• Buying a vending machine
• Getting products to fill your vending machine
• Finding a location for your vending machine
• Storing vending machine products
• Maintaining vending machines
• Restocking and collecting money from your vending machine investment

According to Adam, most vending machines make around $2,000 per month if they are in good locations.

Market research may show that other vending machines can have even better results, but use $2,000 a month per machine in financial projections for your business plan unless you can document that your machines will have better returns.

Of the $2,000, approximately 30% should be profits or wages.

The vending machine business model normally requires a:

• Vending machine
• Business license and LLC
• Location for the vending machine
• Way to handle refunds

Write Your Vending Machine Business Plan

Whether you decide to offer ice cream vending machines, coffee vending machines, or bulk vending machines, a vending machines business plan will help you make the most out of your new venture.

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to download your free business plan.

What will be your vending machines business model?

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Market Research

By Entrepreneur Staff

Market Research Definition:

The process of gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a market, about a product or service to be offered for sale in that market, and about the past, present and potential customers for the product or service; research into the characteristics, spending habits, location and needs of your business's target market, the industry as a whole, and the particular competitors you face

Accurate and thorough information is the foundation of all successful business ventures because it provides a wealth of information about prospective and existing customers, the competition, and the industry in general. It allows business owners to determine the feasibility of a business before committing substantial resources to the venture.

Market research provides relevant data to help solve marketing challenges that a business will most likely face--an integral part of the business planning process. In fact, strategies such as market segmentation (identifying specific groups within a market) and product differentiation (creating an identity for a product or service that separates it from those of the competitors) are impossible to develop without market research.

Market research involves two types of data:

• Primary information. This is research you compile yourself or hire someone to gather for you.
• Secondary information. This type of research is already compiled and organized for you. Examples of secondary information include reports and studies by government agencies, trade associations or other businesses within your industry. Most of the research you gather will most likely be secondary.

When conducting primary research, you can gather two basic types of information: exploratory or specific. Exploratory research is open-ended, helps you define a specific problem, and usually involves detailed, unstructured interviews in which lengthy answers are solicited from a small group of respondents. Specific research, on the other hand, is precise in scope and is used to solve a problem that exploratory research has identified. Interviews are structured and formal in approach. Of the two, specific research is the more expensive.

When conducting primary research using your own resources, first decide how you'll question your targeted group: by direct mail, telephone, or personal interviews.

If you choose a direct-mail questionnaire, the following guidelines will increase your response rate:

• Questions that are short and to the point
• A questionnaire that is addressed to specific individuals and is of interest to the respondent
• A questionnaire of no more than two pages
• A professionally-prepared cover letter that adequately explains why you're doing this questionnaire
• A postage-paid, self-addressed envelope to return the questionnaire in. Postage-paid envelopes are available from the post office
• An incentive, such as "10 percent off your next purchase," to complete the questionnaire

Even following these guidelines, mail response is typically low. A return rate of 3 percent is typical; 5 percent is considered very good. Phone surveys are generally the most cost-effective. Here are some telephone survey guidelines:

• Have a script and memorize it--don't read it.
• Confirm the name of the respondent at the beginning of the conversation.
• Avoid pauses because respondent interest can quickly drop.
• Ask if a follow-up call is possible in case you require additional information.

In addition to being cost-effective, speed is another advantage of telephone interviews. A rate of five or six interviews per hour is typical, but experienced interviewers may be able to conduct more. Phone interviews also can cover a wide geographic range relatively inexpensively. Phone costs can be reduced by taking advantage of less expensive rates during certain hours.

One of the most effective forms of marketing research is the personal interview. They can be either of these types:

• A group survey. Used mostly by big business, group interviews or focus groups are useful brainstorming tools for getting information on product ideas, buying preferences, and purchasing decisions among certain populations.
• The in-depth interview. These one-on-one interviews are either focused or nondirective. Focused interviews are based on questions selected ahead of time, while nondirective interviews encourage respondents to address certain topics with minimal questioning.

Secondary research uses outside information assembled by government agencies, industry and trade associations, labor unions, media sources, chambers of commerce, and so on. It's usually published in pamphlets, newsletters, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers. Secondary sources include the following:

• Public sources. These are usually free, often offer a lot of good information, and include government departments, business departments of public libraries, and so on.
• Commercial sources. These are valuable, but usually involve cost factors such as subscription and association fees. Commercial sources include research and trade associations, such as Dun & Bradstreet and Robert Morris & Associates, banks and other financial institutions, and publicly traded corporations.
• Educational institutions. These are frequently overlooked as valuable information sources even though more research is conducted in colleges, universities, and technical institutes than virtually any sector of the business community.

Public Information Sources Government statistics are among the most plentiful and wide-ranging public sources. Helpful government publications include the following.

The State and Metropolitan Area Data Book provides a wide variety of statistical information on states and metropolitan areas in the United States. Published by the U.S. Census Bureau, it's available online for $31 through the U.S. Government Printing Office and at larger libraries.

The Statistical Abstract of the United States provides tables and graphs of statistics on the social, political and economic conditions in the United States. Published by the Census Bureau, it's available online for $48 through the U.S. Government Printing Office and at larger libraries.

U.S. Industry and Trade Outlook presents recent financial performances of U.S. manufacturers and identifies emerging trends. Published by the Commerce Department in cooperation with McGraw-Hill, it's available online for $76 through the U.S. Government Printing Office and at larger libraries.

The U.S. government online bookstore at the U.S. Government Printing Office has an abundance wealth of publications on topics ranging from agriculture, aviation, and electronics, to insurance, telecommunications, forest management, and workers' compensation.

The U.S. Census Bureau website also contains valuable information relevant to marketing. The Bureau's business publications cover many topics and trades--such as sales volume at furniture stores and payrolls for toy wholesalers--and are useful for small businesses as well as large corporations in retail, wholesale trade, and service industries. Also available are census maps, reports on company statistics regarding different ethnic groups, and reports on county business patterns.

One of the most important information resources you'll find is the SBA . The SBA was created by Congress in 1953 to help American entrepreneurs start, run, and grow successful small enterprises. Today there are SBA offices in every state, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Among the services offered by the SBA are financial assistance, counseling services through Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) , management assistance through programs like SCORE , and low-cost publications. The counselors at SCORE can provide you with free consultation on what type of research you need to gather and where you can obtain that information. They may also be able to suggest other means of gathering the information from primary sources. SBDCs generally have extensive business libraries with lots of secondary sources for you to review.

One of the best public sources is the business section of your public, or local college or university, library . The services provided vary from library to library but usually include a wide range of government publications with market statistics, a large collection of directories with information on domestic and foreign businesses, and a wide selection of magazines, newspapers and newsletters.

Almost every county government publishes population density and distribution figures in accessible census tracts. These show the number of people living in specific areas, such as precincts, water districts or even ten-block neighborhoods. Some counties publish reports that show the population ten years ago, five years ago, and currently, thus indicating population trends.

Other public information resources include local chambers of commerce and their business development departments, which encourage new businesses to locate in their communities. They will supply you (usually for free) information on population trends, community income characteristics, payrolls, industrial development and so on.

Don't overlook your bank as a resource. Bankers have a wealth of information at their fingertips and are eager to help their small business customers get ahead. All you have to do is ask.

Commercial Information Sources Among the best commercial sources of information are research and trade associations. Information gathered by trade associations is usually limited to that particular industry and available only to association members, who have typically paid a membership fee. However, the research gathered by the larger associations is usually thorough, accurate, and worth the cost of membership. Two excellent resources to help you locate a trade association that reports on the business you are researching include the Encyclopedia of Associations (Gale Research), and the Encyclopedia of Business Information Sources (Gale Group).

Local newspapers, journals, magazines, and radio and TV stations are some of the most useful commercial information outlets. Not only do they maintain demographic profiles of their audiences (their income, age, gender, amount of disposable income, and types of products and services purchased, what they read, and so on), but many also have information about economic trends in their local areas that could be significant to your business. Contact the sales departments of these businesses and ask them to send you their media kit, since you're working on a marketing plan for a new product and need information about advertising rates and audience demographics. Not only will you learn more about your prospective customers, you'll also learn more about possible advertising outlets for your product or service.

Dun & Bradstreet is another commercial source of market research that offers an abundance of information for making marketing decisions. It operates the world's largest business database and tracks more than 62 million companies around the world, including 11 million in the United States. For more information, visit the Dun & Bradstreet Small Business Solutions website .

Finally, there are educational institutions that conduct research in various ways, ranging from faculty-based projects often published under professors' bylines, to student projects, theses, and assignments. You may be able to enlist the aid of students involved in business classes, especially if they're enrolled in an entrepreneurship program. This can be an excellent way of generating research at little or no cost, by engaging students who welcome the professional experience either as interns or for special credit. Contact the university administration and marketing or management studies departments for further information.

More from Market Research

Demographics.

A statistical view of a population, generally including age, gender, income, schooling, occupation and so on

Market Surveys

The study of the spending characteristics and purchasing power of the consumer who are within your business's geographic area of operation; a research method for defining the market parameters of a business.

Market Testing

To test multiple marketing scenarios and select the most promising for expansion.

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Blog / Small business tips / How to conduct market research for your business idea

How to conduct market research for your business idea

If you don’t know who you’re selling to, you may miss important acquisition opportunities. Market research helps you to uncover key information about your target market so that you can reach, engage and ultimately convert your ideal customers into buyers.

The internet has made it easy for customers to find out information about brands online. The same is true for small business owners looking to figure out how to do market research for a business idea .

Market research will help you to discover who your ideal customers are, where they hang out online or in-person and how and why they make purchasing decisions. Armed with this information, you can get in front of your ideal audience in the right place at the right time, thus grabbing their attention and motivating buying behaviour.

In this article, we’ll explain what market research is and why it’s important, outline several types of market research and detail how to do your own market research to boost reach, drive conversions and increase revenue.

Top Tip: Conducting market research is a key part of ensuring that your start-up idea is something that people actually want and/or need. Once you’ve finished your research, you’ll need to get into the nitty gritty of creating a brand for your business, choosing your company formation structure, educating yourself on business laws and regulation, sourcing funding (if necessary), and marketing your business. You can learn how to do all of this and more in our guide to 10 effective steps to start your business in the UK 📌. 

Table of contents:

What is market research.

• Why is market research valuable? 

Types of market research

• How to conduct market research in 5 steps

5 common market research questions

Wrapping up.

Market research is the process of identifying information about your target industry as well as your target customers. 

When starting a new business, it will help you to answer the following questions:

• Demand: Is there a desire or need for your product or service? If so, what problem or pain points does your offering solve and how can you better align it to suit this demand? 
• Market saturation: How many similar options are already available to consumers?  Further, what are those businesses who are already in the space doing well and where are they missing opportunities? What can you do differently to fill in these gaps?
• Market size: How many people would be interested in your value proposition? This will help you to forecast your startup budget or, for businesses that are post-launch, this new product or service budget. From there, you can also predict revenue and profitability.
• Economic indicators: What’s the income range and employment rate of your target audience? This is the first step in customer research and it will help you to create detailed customer personas (more on these later on).
• Location: Where do your customers live and hang out, both geographically and online, and where and how can your business reach them?
• Pricing: What do potential customers pay to your competitors? This will help you to figure out exactly how to price your products or services so that you can stay competitive and achieve profitable markups. 

The results from this research will help you tailor your marketing efforts and brand messaging to better engage your audience. And, it will help you to design and package your product or services in a way that aligns with your audience’s needs. All of this leads to better conversion rates, sales and revenue. 

Why is market research valuable?

Understanding your customers is the most effective way to drive engagement and increase loyalty. Knowing their desires, needs and pain points helps you create a better user experience and cater to audience demand.

Market research is invaluable because it gives you compelling insights into user behaviour. While data and analytics give you a high-level overview of behaviours, market research goes a step deeper and uncovers what drives user intent. If you can unearth user intent, you can speak directly to your consumer with personalised messaging that motivates them to take action.

Market research also helps you uncover industry trends, ensuring you’re staying in line with what customers want and need out of similar products or services within the same industry. 

Competitor research like this helps you figure out what your competitors are doing well and where there are gaps in their strategy that you can fill. Plus, getting a sense of small business trends in your target market will help you to understand how they will impact your revenue and profits. 

There are two main types of market research methods: primary and secondary. Primary research entails speaking directly to the source, or direct-to-consumer, and secondary research is the act of gathering data from existing third-party sources. 

Both main types of research utilise qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.

Qualitative research focuses on data from first-hand observations, such as interviews, focus groups and questionnaires.

Quantitative market research , on the other hand, focuses on collecting and analysing big data from larger sample sizes, such as demographics, spending behaviour and opt-in rates.

To conduct the most well-rounded market research, you should incorporate both types of research and methodologies. It’s easier to start with secondary research and move into primary research once you have an idea of general industry and consumer trends. As secondary research has already been compiled and published by others, it’s less time-consuming and often cheaper than primary research. 

If you’re starting a new business, whether a full-time endeavour or a side business for extra income, this market research will be critical when creating a market analysis section in your business plan . Showcasing exactly what your competitors are doing, how your business will fill industry voids and your plan to attract your target audience will help to generate interest in your business idea.

Let’s dive into the two types of market research in more detail.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is third-party data that gives you a high-level overview of your target market. This data can be found in trend reports, market statistics, industry content, your own sales data if your business is post-launch, studies by government agencies, trade associates or other businesses. 

There are two main ways to access secondary research data.

• Public Sources: These include government statistics, academic databases, news sources, published books, published studies, and so on. Publicly sourced information is often free and you can find it online or in libraries. Such sources in the UK include the Office for National Statistics , the British Chambers of Commerce and the Federation of Small Businesses and more. 
• Commercial Sources: These sources are often in the form of statistics from private-groups that you have to pay money to gain access to. Such companies include Forrester , Gartner , International Data Corporation (IDC) , Everest Group , Mintel , Euromonitor , YouGov and more. You can also use online sources (both free and paid) that analyse online behaviour and trends like Google Trends , Product Hunt , Social Mention and SimilarWeb .

Primary Research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself in order to gather more detailed information about your specific target audience. You should begin primary research only after you’ve completed secondary research as it’s meant to fill any missed gaps from third-party sources.

There are three main ways to do primary research.

• Exploratory research: This involves talking directly with people. You should have an initial sense of your target audience from your secondary research, so this is the first time you’ll be communicating directly with them. Start with broad, open-ended interviews in an attempt to narrow down this group into a more niche audience.
• Specific Research: Once you’ve generated this smaller, more niche group, use the same methods that you applied to your exploratory research. But this time, ask more specific questions to get more valuable and intent-driven answers. 
• Internal Sources: If you’ve already launched your business and are conducting market research to see if the industry has changed since launch, collaborate in-house to see what your existing customers are saying. What were their challenges and pain points at launch and how have they changed? What are your customer’s biggest needs now? What do they say you can be doing better? The idea is to learn from and improve upon your original research by combining historical with updated customer-driven insights. 

How to conduct market research

There’s no one specific way to do market research. Generally, you want to start broad and narrow your research as you learn more. 

Once complete, you should be able to define your buyer persona, know their specific needs and pain points, understand how your competitors are positioning themselves in the market and identify your opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

Here are five steps you can follow to organise and optimise your market research process.

1. Define your buyer persona

The key to driving brand engagement and purchasing behaviour is the ability to connect with your target audience. Otherwise, you’ll be promoting your product or service to a wide array of potentially uninterested parties, wasting valuable time and money.

Defining your target audience is the first step of your primary research efforts. Once you understand who you are selling to and what their interests are, you can and subsequently reach out directly via your secondary research initiative (we will explain how to do this in step 2 below). 

From there, you can begin to create a buyer persona. Use your target audience research to create buyer personas that answer the following questions:

• Who are your customers and why are they interested in buying your product or service?
• What characteristics, interests, desires, pain points and needs do they share?
• Where do they live?
• How old are they?
• What is their education level?
• What is their income range?
• Which types of websites do they frequently visit?
• Where do they currently buy similar products?
• Which languages do they speak?
• What industry do they work in?

Use the aforementioned public and commercial resources to gather and compile this data. Once complete, you can build your customer persona. This step is important because you can distribute a detailed, shareable document amongst your team or potential investors to guarantee everybody clearly understands your target audience. 

You can use online tools like HubSpot’s customer persona creator , Xtensio , Userforge or Smaply to build basic buyer personas quickly. 

Top Tip: This is the first step in building a marketing strategy that will help you gain traction and boost brand awareness. To learn more about how to attract your ideal audience, read our guide on how to build a go-to-market strategy .

2. Engage with a small target sample

Now that you’ve completed your initial customer personas and market research, it’s time to dive deeper into your audience’s behaviours. This is where your secondary research efforts come into play.

You can reach out to your target audience in several ways across many mediums. Remember to begin with exploratory research by asking open-ended questions and follow up with specific research that unveils invaluable insights. 

• Surveys: Use online surveys to ask a group of people a set of questions. Often, an online survey is delivered via email, but it can also be posted on social media platforms or online forums. Surveys are easy and cheap to conduct, the results come in quickly and the data is straightforward to analyse. You can use platforms like Survey Monkey , JotForm , Google Forms , LimeSurvey and more.   
• Emails: Send a cold email asking if they will be open to answering some of your questions. You can attach your survey to this email and/or use it as a platform to schedule a more in-depth phone interview. 
• Phone calls: Phone interviews allow you to speak directly with your potential customers. Use their answers to formulate your follow up questions to dive deeper into intent and expose insightful trends. 
• Face-to-face: This will be exactly the same as the phone interview, but one-on-one in person. In-person or interviews via video conferencing can be more valuable than phone calls as they give you the opportunity to see body language. Sometimes, you can learn more about what a person is feeling based on their body language rather than their words. Observation is key in face-to-face meetings.
• Focus groups: Focus groups bring together a group of selected participants to answer questions in real-time. Usually, a trained moderator will lead the discussion and ask questions about your product or service, user experience, user expectations, competitor products or services, marketing and branding messaging and more. 
• Call for participants via social media: Post on social media platforms to generate interest about participating in any of the above methods. Make sure you are posting your questions in the places that your target audience hangs out online, such as LinkedIn , Facebook groups, Twitter , Reddit , and so on, so that you attract people that align with your unique customer personas.
• Leverage your network to get participants: Apply the same methodology as your social media call for participants when leveraging your own network. Reach out to friends, former coworkers, family members and more to see who among them fits into your customer persona and is willing to participate.

3. Identify competitors

Gathering information about your competitors helps you figure out who their audience is, how they communicate with them and how they position themselves in the marketplace. This will help you to learn from their successes and failures so that you can replicate the fruitful tactics and avoid messaging or branding that received negative feedback.

There are two types of competitors to identify.

• Industry competitors: Industry competitors are those that saturate your target marketplace. For example, if you are selling a SaaS video conferencing tool, your competitors will be businesses like Zoom or GoToMeeting.
• Content competitors: Content competitors may not be competing in terms of the products or services they sell, but they are competing in terms of content creation. For example, if you run a leadership training business, a content competitor will be a business that creates content about how to be a great leader. This content competitor could run a finance business, a retreat business, a SaaS business or so on, but because they create content that targets similar keywords, they are a competitor in that specific space. 

It’s important to understand as much as you can about your competitors so that you can make better decisions. Learn everything about your competitor’s audience and apply those insights to your branding and marketing strategy.

4. Analyse data

You will amass a ton of information throughout this process. Make sure that you are using a system that helps you organise it so that it doesn’t become overwhelming.

Here are some ideas on how to do this:

• Sort your data into groups to better understand the big picture
• Create several distinct customer personas if you learn that you have more than one audience type
• Build a matrix chart to see how often pain points, desires, needs and attributes overlap 
• Generate a customer journey map to outline the journey from awareness to purchase, using free or paid tools like LucidChart , HubSpot or Visual Paradigm .

Once organised, you can draw meaningful insights from your data collection. This will help you to further shape your offering and messaging. 

5. Summarise findings

Summarise your findings in a simple and shareable format. Draw inspiration from the common themes you discovered to help tell a story about your target audience. 

This will guide future marketing and branding efforts and help your team and potential investors develop a clear picture of who your ideal audience is in their minds.

Add in quotes, diagrams, call clips, video clips and more to amplify the audience’s voice. Outline who you talked to, common themes and if you will stay on course or pivot based on any common feedback threads. End the summary with immediate next steps and action items.

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The most effective questions get to the heart of the matter and help you obtain invaluable insights. These insights will affect who you target, where you position your brand, what your messaging will be, what voice and tone you will use and much more. 

Here are some common market research questions.

1. What do you look for in a brand?

This will help you figure out what matters the most, at a high-level. For example, does your audience care about engaging with brands that support a good cause, or do they prioritise quality above all?

From this answer, you’ll have a better idea of what to include in your messaging. If your audience prefers brands that support a good cause, you can forge partnerships with nonprofits or charities and commit to donating a portion of your proceeds to them. Then, add this messaging on your website or in your content to make sure your audience is aware of your stance.

2. What are the reasons or actions that drive you to make a purchase?

Based on that answer, you can ask more specific follow up questions such as:

• Do you prefer testing products with free trials, or are explainer videos sufficient to pique your interest? 
• Do you prefer when a company is active on social media or do you not care so much?
• How much does a business’s customer service response influence your brand loyalty?

Use these answers to uncover desires, expectations and experiences that influence your focus in these areas.

3. What problem were you trying to solve or what goal were you trying to achieve when you purchased from [COMPETITOR]?

This answer will help you understand your competitor’s audience to see what their intent was before making a purchase. You can use these insights to position your business as a better solution to their problems.

4. What challenge(s) at work has [COMPETITOR’S] solution failed to solve?

From this answer, you can identify pain points that your competitors have yet to build a solution to. Ideally, you can get to market before them and present your product or services as the solution that will fix their ongoing problem.

5. What does your day look like?

While broad and open-ended, this question will help you learn more about your target audience in general. You need to not only understand what drives their buying behaviour, but who they are in a larger sense. 

This will help you build empathy for your audience, which will only serve to help you when speaking directly to them and personalising messaging. Plus, you may uncover something you didn’t previously know about their buying habits from this answer.

Market research is crucial in order to identify, understand and segment your target audience. Further, it allows you to gain a high-level understanding of your target industry as a whole, giving you the data you need to competitively price your products and forecast revenue.

Without market research, you will be selling blind. The most successful companies not only understand their place in the market and exactly who they are selling to, but how and where to target them. 

Plus, they know why their target audience makes certain purchasing decisions, helping them to skew their messaging in a way that captivates, engages and produces results.

Photo by Startup Stock Photos, published on Pexels

Valentine Hutchings

Head of Community and small business enthusiast

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Business research: definition, types & methods.

10 min read What is business research and why does it matter? Here are some of the ways business research can be helpful to your company, whichever method you choose to carry it out.

What is business research?

Business research helps companies make better business decisions by gathering information. The scope of the term business research is quite broad – it acts as an umbrella that covers every aspect of business, from finances to advertising creative. It can include research methods which help a company better understand its target market. It could focus on customer experience and assess customer satisfaction levels. Or it could involve sizing up the competition through competitor research.

Often when carrying out business research, companies are looking at their own data, sourced from their employees, their customers and their business records. However, business researchers can go beyond their own company in order to collect relevant information and understand patterns that may help leaders make informed decisions. For example, a business may carry out ethnographic research where the participants are studied in the context of their everyday lives, rather than just in their role as consumer, or look at secondary data sources such as open access public records and empirical research carried out in academic studies.

There is also a body of knowledge about business in general that can be mined for business research purposes. For example organizational theory and general studies on consumer behavior.

Free eBook: 2024 global market research trends report

Why is business research important?

We live in a time of high speed technological progress and hyper-connectedness. Customers have an entire market at their fingertips and can easily switch brands if a competitor is offering something better than you are. At the same time, the world of business has evolved to the point of near-saturation. It’s hard to think of a need that hasn’t been addressed by someone’s innovative product or service.

The combination of ease of switching, high consumer awareness and a super-evolved marketplace crowded with companies and their offerings means that businesses must do whatever they can to find and maintain an edge. Business research is one of the most useful weapons in the fight against business obscurity, since it allows companies to gain a deep understanding of buyer behavior and stay up to date at all times with detailed information on their market.

Thanks to the standard of modern business research tools and methods, it’s now possible for business analysts to track the intricate relationships between competitors, financial markets, social trends, geopolitical changes, world events, and more.

Find out how to conduct your own market research and make use of existing market research data with our Ultimate guide to market research

Types of business research

Business research methods vary widely, but they can be grouped into two broad categories – qualitative research and quantitative research .

Qualitative research methods

Qualitative business research deals with non-numerical data such as people’s thoughts, feelings and opinions. It relies heavily on the observations of researchers, who collect data from a relatively small number of participants – often through direct interactions.

Qualitative research interviews take place one-on-one between a researcher and participant. In a business context, the participant might be a customer, a supplier, an employee or other stakeholder. Using open-ended questions , the researcher conducts the interview in either a structured or unstructured format. Structured interviews stick closely to a question list and scripted phrases, while unstructured interviews are more conversational and exploratory. As well as listening to the participant’s responses, the interviewer will observe non-verbal information such as posture, tone of voice and facial expression.

Focus groups

Like the qualitative interview, a focus group is a form of business research that uses direct interaction between the researcher and participants to collect data. In focus groups , a small number of participants (usually around 10) take part in a group discussion led by a researcher who acts as moderator. The researcher asks questions and takes note of the responses, as in a qualitative research interview. Sampling for focus groups is usually purposive rather than random, so that the group members represent varied points of view.

Observational studies

In an observational study, the researcher may not directly interact with participants at all, but will pay attention to practical situations, such as a busy sales floor full of potential customers, or a conference for some relevant business activity. They will hear people speak and watch their interactions , then record relevant data such as behavior patterns that relate to the subject they are interested in. Observational studies can be classified as a type of ethnographic research. They can be used to gain insight about a company’s target audience in their everyday lives, or study employee behaviors in actual business situations.

Ethnographic Research

Ethnographic research is an immersive design of research where one observes peoples’ behavior in their natural environment. Ethnography was most commonly found in the anthropology field and is now practices across a wide range of social sciences.

Ehnography is used to support a designer’s deeper understanding of the design problem – including the relevant domain, audience(s), processes, goals and context(s) of use.

The ethnographic research process is a popular methodology used in the software development lifecycle. It helps create better UI/UX flow based on the real needs of the end-users.

If you truly want to understand your customers’ needs, wants, desires, pain-points “walking a mile” in their shoes enables this. Ethnographic research is this deeply rooted part of research where you truly learn your targe audiences’ problem to craft the perfect solution.

Case study research

A case study is a detailed piece of research that provides in depth knowledge about a specific person, place or organization. In the context of business research, case study research might focus on organizational dynamics or company culture in an actual business setting, and case studies have been used to develop new theories about how businesses operate. Proponents of case study research feel that it adds significant value in making theoretical and empirical advances. However its detractors point out that it can be time consuming and expensive, requiring highly skilled researchers to carry it out.

Quantitative research methods

Quantitative research focuses on countable data that is objective in nature. It relies on finding the patterns and relationships that emerge from mass data – for example by analyzing the material posted on social media platforms, or via surveys of the target audience. Data collected through quantitative methods is empirical in nature and can be analyzed using statistical techniques. Unlike qualitative approaches, a quantitative research method is usually reliant on finding the right sample size, as this will determine whether the results are representative. These are just a few methods – there are many more.

Surveys are one of the most effective ways to conduct business research. They use a highly structured questionnaire which is distributed to participants, typically online (although in the past, face to face and telephone surveys were widely used). The questions are predominantly closed-ended, limiting the range of responses so that they can be grouped and analyzed at scale using statistical tools. However surveys can also be used to get a better understanding of the pain points customers face by providing open field responses where they can express themselves in their own words. Both types of data can be captured on the same questionnaire, which offers efficiency of time and cost to the researcher.

Correlational research

Correlational research looks at the relationship between two entities, neither of which are manipulated by the researcher. For example, this might be the in-store sales of a certain product line and the proportion of female customers subscribed to a mailing list. Using statistical analysis methods, researchers can determine the strength of the correlation and even discover intricate relationships between the two variables. Compared with simple observation and intuition, correlation may identify further information about business activity and its impact, pointing the way towards potential improvements and more revenue.

Experimental research

It may sound like something that is strictly for scientists, but experimental research is used by both businesses and scholars alike. When conducted as part of the business intelligence process, experimental research is used to test different tactics to see which ones are most successful – for example one marketing approach versus another. In the simplest form of experimental research, the researcher identifies a dependent variable and an independent variable. The hypothesis is that the independent variable has no effect on the dependent variable, and the researcher will change the independent one to test this assumption. In a business context, the hypothesis might be that price has no relationship to customer satisfaction. The researcher manipulates the price and observes the C-Sat scores to see if there’s an effect.

The best tools for business research

You can make the business research process much quicker and more efficient by selecting the right tools. Business research methods like surveys and interviews demand tools and technologies that can store vast quantities of data while making them easy to access and navigate. If your system can also carry out statistical analysis, and provide predictive recommendations to help you with your business decisions, so much the better.

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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What, exactly, does “cost of living” mean — and how is it calculated?

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The phrase “cost of living” has been popping up a lot as inflation has boosted prices in the last few years. It’s also top of mind for policymakers — and for employers when they set salaries and benefits. 

But there are many ways to measure the cost of living, each with its own set of components.

The Council for Community and Economic Research’s cost of living index, which is licensed to NerdWallet, Bankrate and other websites, includes items like a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs and a 12-inch Pizza Hut pizza. The data can get pretty in the weeds. Take dishwasher detergent: Do you sample the price of powder, liquid or pods?

“If we’re noticing Walmart, Target, Safeway, they all have the 72-count dishwashing pods, you know. That’s what we’re probably going to price,” said Tyler Baines, one of the index’s project managers.

The index includes items that are most popular among households. But to figure that out requires a prototype. In other words, whom are you measuring the cost of living for? In this case, it’s an upper-middle-class consumer whose residence is a four-bedroom, two-bathroom, 2,400-square-foot house. The prices come from a mix of retailer and government data and information reported by volunteers. 

“They have to call these hospitals and these local practitioners and ask them, you know, what the price of a standard office visit is,” Baines said.

Health care is a given in most cost of living indexes, of which there are many. The Living Wage Institute calculates the bare minimum it takes to get by in any given area. 

“There’s no budget for eating out at a restaurant or leisure time, holidays or unpaid vacation,” said founder Kavya Vaghul. “And it doesn’t account for really important factors for long-term financial security like savings, retirement and investments.”

The living wage index gets updated for inflation every year. And though it began mostly as an advocacy tool, employers increasingly use it to calculate the cost of expanding their business into a new area.

“That benchmark is such a critical first step,” Vaghul said.

These benchmark tools are helpful. But they’re also pretty imperfect. “That’s because there is no theoretically correct way to do this that’s very clean,” said Jonathan Parker, a finance professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s actually always based on a set of assumptions.”

For instance, many cost of living calculators will use the regional price of a gallon of gasoline to compare transportation costs. But in some cities, commuters may opt for public transit instead.

“These often don’t necessarily line up with the way different people experience changes in the cost of living,” Parker said.

And of course, they don’t account for quality of life. Maybe housing in one place is more expensive, but the public schools are better. 

“So you can look at the different cost of living indexes, but not really understand that some of what you’re paying for in the cost of living is what you’re getting on the other side in benefits,” he said.

It turns out the true cost of living is a little subjective. 

Correction (May 30, 2024): A previous version of this story misidentified the organization behind the cost of living index.

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U.S. job market remains hot, adds 272,000 positions in May

The U.S. economy added 272,000 jobs in May, bringing good news for workers but potentially complicating the Federal Reserve's ongoing crusade against inflation.

The data, published Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, offers a counterpoint to some employment market indicators that had shown signs of slowing as recently as this week. Economists had expected the economy to add 190,000 jobs , according to a Dow Jones survey.

“A long feared substantial slowdown in hiring has yet to show up,” Bankrate Senior Economic Analyst Mark Hamrick said in a statement Friday.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 4% but remains historically low, extending a 30-month streak of unemployment at or below that level. And in another bright spot for workers, average hourly earnings jumped 4.1% in May from the year before, up from a 3.9% annual rate in April.

Friday's data reinforces expectations that the Federal Reserve will hold off cutting interest rates when it meets next week.

"Fed members and investors had clearly been hoping for a softer report, which would have raised confidence in the appropriateness of a July or September rate cut," ZipRecruiter Chief Economist Julia Pollak said in a statement Friday. "Instead, economic data has been mixed."

The central bank's next decision on rates is due Wednesday afternoon, hours after a fresh Consumer Price Index offers another inflation snapshot.

Despite last month's hiring gains, job growth overall this year has cooled. In the run-up to Friday's report, many economists said the steady slowdown looked more like normalization toward pre-pandemic hiring trends than a sign of an imminent recession.

On Wednesday, payroll processor ADP found private employers added just 152,000 roles in May , far fewer than expected. And earlier this week, the BLS reported that the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings had climbed back to the level seen just before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.

But the change in that figure is primarily a result of firms deciding they don't need to fill as many roles, and not because of a surge in unemployment, analysts say.

"Businesses are just not laying off [many] workers," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics financial services group, said Thursday, ahead of the report. "There's still underlying job growth," he said, even though many companies are cutting back on hiring, hours and temporary work.

The U.S. economy overall is still on firm footing. Fed officials continue to say uncertainty remains about how much longer the rapid price growth that has bedeviled consumers for the last couple years will continue. Since peaking above 9% in summer 2022, inflation is much slower but has largely hovered above 3% all year — higher than the Fed's 2% target.

A slower pace of job growth, economists say, should cool inflation further, as employers ease up on raising pay to attract workers, who in turn should rein in their spending, leading businesses to pull back their price hikes — a virtuous circle.

Already, fewer people who are currently employed are seeking opportunities elsewhere. The BLS also reported this week that the rate of workers quitting has held steady for six months, even as it's down significantly from its post-pandemic high.

It’s a sign that the “great resignation,” which saw workers taking up new roles in droves — usually for higher pay as businesses reopened during the pandemic — is mostly behind us, replaced instead by the " g reat s tay."

Robust hiring for lower-paid workers

Friday's report showed job gains in a range of sectors, led by health care, government, leisure and hospitality and a category of "professional" services that includes many tech roles.

Vanguard, a financial services group, has found hiring for middle- and high-income workers h as slowed , while lower-paid workers continue to be hired at a healthy clip. Lower-paid workers are now making more than they were before the pandemic, even though inflation has eaten into their spending power. Hiring forums show McDonald's now pays its hourly employees as much as $13 an hour, compared with as little as $10 pre-pandemic.

“We’re certainly seeing, within firms, that the hire rate among more costly or higher-paid workers has been going down,” said Fiona Grieg, global head of investor research and policy at Vanguard.

Some consolation for higher-paid workers may be found in LinkedIn data, which shows that although hiring rates are still down 10% year on year, they're better than the trends seen for much of 2023.

Applicant ranks swell

But stabilization does not mean strength. LinkedIn told NBC News the number of job applications per applicant rose 14% from November 2023 to March of this year. Over the same period, 25% more U.S. LinkedIn users marked themselves as "open to work" on the platform.

“If you’re a high-wage worker right now and you’re sitting on the sidelines, the job search may take some time,” Vanguard's Grieg said.

Tre Gripper, 32, posted to X this week to say that since being laid off in June 2023, he had unsuccessfully applied to approximately 463 roles. 

"It’s demoralizing," Gripper told NBC News. "I’ve worked really hard in my field and to keep not getting anything."

The Houston resident has supported himself in part thanks to a generous transition bonus and severance package he received from his previous employer. But those resources have since been depleted, Gripper said, and now he and his husband are planning to move to Seattle for both of their careers.

And since his X post, which now links to his LinkedIn profile, went viral — racking up more than 12 million views — he's seen a surge in opportunities.

His takeaway: "Unless someone is pushing you through, recruiters aren’t even seeing your application."

Rob Wile is a breaking business news reporter for NBC News Digital.