Refine Your Data With the Right Market Research Questions

TL;DR:

• Market research happens any time you gather information on market trends, competitors, or customer needs.
• You can use the information gathered to develop new products, enhance marketing, improve customer satisfaction, and more.
• To conduct market research effectively, you’ll need to focus your questions around a goal — like product development, improving your website, or something else.
• Best practices for market research include asking the right questions, asking those questions of the right people, and asking questions in the right way in terms of timing and format.
• See how Howes used Jebbit to create a fantastic market research survey for their agriculture-focused business.

Imagine having access to a virtually unlimited pool of information that can help you achieve just about any business goal you desire. You want to develop new products? This information will show you what your customers want to buy. You want to make your marketing messages even better? Your information can help here too.

While it might sound like a crystal ball, it’s not. Actually, we’re talking about market research. When you’ve learned how to effectively conduct market research — namely, through learning how to develop and launch smart surveys and questionnaires — you can fill just about any gap in your knowledge so that you can make better business decisions.

Get ready because we’re going to show you how to develop a great set of market research questions, plus best practices to help you get the most from your efforts.

What Is Market Research?

Any time you gather information on market trends, your competitors, or customer needs and preferences, you’re conducting market research. You’re probably familiar with the idea of focus groups, which are one of the first things that people think about when they think of market research, but modern market research approaches include on and offline surveys, questionnaires, insights from social media, contests, and more.

Why You Need to Conduct Market Research

So what is it that makes market research an essential practice? It goes back to that old saying: Knowledge is power. With the right market research, you can accomplish virtually anything. You can:

• Find out how you can improve customer satisfaction.
• Learn why similar products from competitors are popular.
• Research and develop new products that customers want to buy.
• Find unfilled niches in your current product lineup.
• Discover how you can refine an existing product to make it better.
• Learn how your marketing campaigns are perceived — and how you can improve them.
• Refine your market segmentation to better target your audience.

And that’s just the beginning. As you read below, you’ll discover how to get even more from your market research.

Types of Market Research Questions and Examples

The biggest benefit of market research is that you can use it to learn about virtually anything. However, you can’t just throw a list of questions out there to see what sticks. The best way to approach market research is to identify the gaps in your knowledge or data. Then create a set of questions designed to fill these gaps.

With that in mind, we’ll show you some of the most common market research goals among marketers — along with some example questions to get you started.

New Product Ideas

You want to add new products to your lineup, but how do you know if your customers will actually be interested in them? This is what makes market research a crucial part of product development. Create questions not only to gauge interest in a new product but also to learn how you could possibly tweak or improve that product with sought-after features and benefits.

Example market research questions:

• If this product were available for you to buy, would you? Why or why not?
• When you’re searching for products like ours to purchase, what problems are you trying to solve?
• Are there any must-have features or benefits missing from this product?
• What can we add to this product that would make it a must-have?

Product Feedback

And what about your current products? Market research can help you here, too. To get product feedback, ask questions about the user experience, their perceptions of your product, their likes and dislikes, or new features and benefits they might like to see in future versions.

Example questions:

• How often do you use this product?
• Are there things about this product that you wish were different?
• How disappointed would you be if this product were no longer available?
• Can you rate the product’s features according to how important they are to you?

Pricing and Value

Is your product a budget-friendly option? Or are people paying the high price but only begrudgingly? Maybe sales are lagging, profitability is low, and the problem is that people aren’t buying because they aren’t getting the value they want for the price you’re charging. Market research surrounding pricing and value should seek to understand your product’s value proposition — and what you can do to improve it.

Example market research questions:

• Would you purchase this product at this price?
• When you’re purchasing this product, is the pricing clear?
• What do you think the ideal price or price range for this product should be?

Your Competitors

What are your competitors up to? Do a competitive analysis to find out. Ask your target customers about their perceptions of your product compared to the competition, features they like or dislike about competing products, and what makes them choose a particular product among a range of options. 

Example market research questions:

• Have you seen any products/services that are similar to ours?
• Of those products, would you consider any to be a good alternative to ours?
• What made you choose one product over the others?
• In terms of quality, is our product better, worse, or about the same as the competition?
• In terms of features, is our product better, worse, or about the same?

Website Feedback

Customer feedback is important not only where your products are concerned but also for other aspects of your business. Since your website is one of the primary ways that potential customers will interact with your brand, it’s essential to learn what people like and dislike about your site, what they find difficult to navigate, and what you can do to create an overall better user experience.

Example market research questions:

• How well does our brand’s website meet your needs?
• Are there any areas that you find difficult to navigate?
• Is information presented clearly?
• Can you rate our website based on the following aspects (design, usability, website copy, etc.)?
• Is it easy to find answers to questions you have about products?
• What other information could be provided on the website?
• What would make the website easier to use?

Messaging and Advertising

The customer experience encompasses every interaction that consumers make with your brand, from the time they discover it to the purchase decision — and beyond. Marketing messaging and advertising are huge components of this experience. To learn more about the efficacy of your marketing strategies, ask questions to discover where people are seeing your messages, and their sentiment surrounding them.

Example market research questions:

• Which of these advertisements do you prefer, and why?
• Where have you seen our brand’s marketing and advertisements?
• How does this advertisement make you feel?
• What part of this marketing message first captured your attention?

Audience Segmentation

Understanding your target audience is critical, not only so you can develop the products they want but also so you can understand the best ways to market to them and to motivate purchase decisions. Through market research, you can gather data on your target market to create and refine audience segments, create accurate buyer personas, and get a better understanding of your customer base.

Example market research questions:

• What are your interests or favorite hobbies?
• What physical activities do you enjoy?
• Which is the top priority in your life: family, work, or social life?
• What is your current profession?
• If you have a degree, what type of degree is it?

Demographic Information

Through demographic questions, you can get a more accurate picture of who your customers are — and that in turn enables you to refine your marketing so that you’re targeting the ideal customer rather than anyone and everyone. 

Demographic information can also help you better understand market trends in your industry. You can discover who buys products like yours, and how customer needs differ from one group to another. For example, most adults in the United States need a car, but demographics plays a large part in whether they’ll want an SUV, a pickup truck, an economy car, or a sports car.

Example market research questions:

• What is your age?
• What is your gender?
• What is your highest level of education?
• What is your monthly or yearly household income?
• What is your marital status?

Customer Preferences

If you want a competitive advantage, then it’s critical to understand your customers’ decision-making process. Their preferences are a huge part of that. What if your competition is getting larger portions of your industry’s market share because consumers prefer something about their product’s features? 

It could be something simple, like the colors of a competitor’s product, or something more complex, like when a competitor’s product offers more functionality or features better designed to address specific pain points. Either way, market research into customer preferences will help you identify these concerns. 

Example market research questions:

• When purchasing a product like this, do you prioritize price or quality?
• How do you prefer to purchase this product — online or in-store?
• Are there features or benefits that we can add that would make you more likely to purchase this product?
• What persuaded you to purchase this product?
• When you need to make another purchase, will you re-purchase this product or search for another option? If you plan to search for another option, can you detail why?

Brand Awareness

Is your brand a household name, or is it relatively unknown? How are people discovering you and your products? Many marketers make the mistake of relying on social media metrics and engagement statistics to get a ballpark idea of overall brand awareness — but perspective is a tricky thing. Focus groups or survey questions can help you learn more about brand awareness from the customer’s perspective and that can help you take brand awareness to new heights.

Example market research questions:

• Have you heard of our brand before?
• How did you first hear about our brand?
• Have you seen this brand via advertisements, on social media, or elsewhere?
• Have you purchased this brand before?
• Do you currently purchase this brand?
• Of all the brands you can think of in this category, rate them according to their popularity.

Brand Perception

Brand perception is adjacent to brand awareness — but instead of seeking to understand general awareness levels surrounding your brand, you’ll be gauging overall sentiment. In other words, do people love your brand, hate it, or are they somewhere in the middle? Ask questions to find out and also to get valuable insights to help you improve the way people perceive your brand.

Example market research questions:

• In just a few words, or in one sentence, how would you describe our brand?
• What do you like most or the least about our brand?
• How do you feel about this brand?
• Which brand would you rate as the best in this category, and why?

3 Best Practices for Designing Market Research Surveys

Developing a great set of questions is only half the battle. You’ll also want to maximize response rates while ensuring that you're collecting high-quality, accurate information. For that, follow the best practices below.

1. Ask the Right Market Research Questions

In market research, you’ll encounter two broad types of questions: open-ended questions and closed-ended questions. Open-ended questions are kind of like essay questions. The answers don’t necessarily have to be long, but respondents are free to express their thoughts in a few words or sentences. 

Closed-ended questions have a specific, single answer. These are often yes or no, true or false, a numerical rating, or multiple choice answers.

So, how do you choose which one to use for the market research that you’re doing? You’ll need to consider the format. For example, in focus groups or other types of round-table discussions with customers, open-ended questions can get conversation going and help you obtain some great insights.

However, if you’re creating a market research questionnaire that customers will fill out on their own, closed-ended questions typically work a lot better. That’s because most consumers simply don’t have the time (or motivation) to write out thoughtful answers. You can increase response rates simply by allowing your customers to quickly read through questions and click the answer that best applies to them.

2. Ask the Right People

You could stand on the sidewalk with a microphone and video camera asking questions of random passersby — but the results likely won’t be worth your time. Instead, when you’re doing market research, you need to choose the right people. In marketing terms, this group of people is called a “representative sample,” and it’s crucial to get this right so that you can get the most accurate, relevant data possible. 

While there are a variety of sample methods that you can use, most rely on random sampling to choose a group of people. That’s because this sampling method is least likely to suffer from sample bias, which happens when your group inadvertently skews in a particular direction (like a disproportionate number of people from a particular age group, for example).

Keep in mind that a big part of the sampling process will ultimately depend on your research goals. For instance, if you’d like to improve upon an existing product, it will likely be best to sample from existing customers who have purchased the product. But for market research surrounding competitors, brand awareness, or brand perception, you’ll need a sample that goes beyond your current customer base.

3. Ask the Right Way

These days, surveys and questionnaires are among the most popular ways to do market research. That’s because they’re easy and accessible for both brands and customers — especially for brands that may not have enormous budgets to devote to focus groups and other expensive research methods.

Before you start sending out surveys to your email list, keep in mind that there are right ways and wrong ways to go about this type of research.

• Timing is critical: For example, if you want product feedback, send out surveys after purchasers have had a chance to use the product — but don’t wait so long that they’ve used and then forgotten about it.
• Relevancy is key: Send out feedback forms about your customer service after customer service interactions, post-purchase surveys after a purchase, and so on. This enables you to keep your questionnaires short and super relevant, which in turn makes it more likely that customers will spend a few minutes on a response.
• Format is important: The design should be attractive and feature your branding, and it should be easy as possible for respondents to provide answers.

A Case Study on the Right Way to Do Market Research

Want to see an example of a company that is doing it right? Check out Howes, which is a family-owned and operated business in the agricultural industry. Through Jebbit, they created a market research survey that has been very successful. 

When you look through this survey, you’ll discover that it checks all the boxes:

• It features an attractive design using the company’s branding.
• It’s short and easy to navigate on mobile and desktop platforms.
• The question set is well-designed to gather information for product development and audience segmentation.
• Since Howe presented this survey to a look-alike audience, they gathered information from a sample that aligns well with their customer base.

In terms of market research, this survey has proven indispensable. With it, Howes has collected more than 12 million attributes, which is a whole lot of data that they can use to create better products, refine their messaging, and more. With that, the brand was also able to simultaneously increase conversions among their look-alike audience by 250%, and they built brand awareness with more than 1.2 million impressions.

Let Jebbit Help You Conduct Market Research

The right market research questions can help you develop new products, refine existing ones, improve your marketing, and much more. To conduct effective research, you’ll need to focus your questions around a central goal — and then you’ll need to create an attractive, engaging questionnaire that is easy for consumers to interact with.

That’s where Jebbit can help. Use our Experience Builder to create beautiful questionnaires and surveys that you can launch across a variety of channels. To learn how you can get started, schedule a call with one of our Experience Experts!