Can you share best practices to do impactful market research on a tight budget?

Market research on a tight budget, or what I like to call "Scrappy research" - my favorite! First, let me start with a quote - “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” Many a research project hasn’t gotten off of the ground for fear it won’t be statistically significant or have thousands of responses. But guess what? Some market research is much better than NO market research.

Here are some quick ideas:

• Email a survey to your existing customer base 
• Message targets on LinkedIn with surveys 
• Conduct phone interviews with existing clients 
• Use Respondent.io for quick interview recruiting of non-clients
• Bring an ipad to a conference with your customers / prospects and offer $5 or a starbucks gift card (right then!) to take your survey
• Pull Google search trends to show the rise of certain key terms 
• Launch user testing on your website 

I also wrote a post on this - here if you want to go deeper.

Most of the cost associated with research is actually the cost of accessing a sample, so if you can figure out that piece, you should be in a much better spot. A couple of ideas: 

1/ Talk to your happiest, unhappiest customers, customers that churned, and "prospects", if possible. Use your budget for incentives. This sample will at least give you the "extremes" of attitudes. 

2/ There are some helpful online tools that you can sign up for and "trial" them at no cost- Optimal Sort, UserTesting, SurveyMoney, GetFeedback all have some sort of free trial. You can even take respondents through design files on something like Figma if you're looking for product feedback. 

3/ Figure out beforehand what you need for "significance". Some organizations really do need the quantitative, large sample required to get to statistically significant answers, but if you're looking for a "gut check", you'll be fine with a small (n= 30) sample! 

For Primary Research on a tight budget, surveys via any number of free online tools are super common and can provide at least directional insights, though you may have to clear legal/privacy issues and you'll definitely have to be thoughtful about how you structure your survey (i.e. a small number of the most strategic questions) for maximum impact. Customer and prospect interviews provide higher fidelity insights since your subjects will be more engaged and you can blend exploratory with directed research. Whether it's via Beta programs, Customer Advisory Boards (CABs), Insider or MVP programs, be sure you have some structured mechanism to regularly reach out to customers to conduct interviews so you don't spend a ton of time recruiting subjects. If your company has a Customer Success team, become their best friend. Even better than interviews alone if you're doing any type of use case, Job-to-be-done (JTBD) or product research is observing a customer or prospect practitioner actually doing the things your product presumes to improve, streamline or re-imagine. Try to conduct this type of research regularly not only for primary research purposes, but also to develop empathy and understanding for your customers. If hearing what customers say in an interview is more valuable than what they put down on a survey, than observing what they actually do is that much more valuable than what they may say. For more on this idea, check out the Lead User Research work Eric von Hippel did at MIT.

For Secondary Research, if you're looking for user or buyer research (as opposed to 3rd party TAM/SAM/SOM or other market sizing research that can be expensive), great places to glean insights for little or no cost are online user forums (Reddit, Stack Overflow, as well as industry-specific forums and persona specific forums). These forums can skew toward vocal minorities but have plenty of nuggets of wisdom buried in there. Also be sure to frequent 3rd party product review sites (G2, TrustRadius) to see what customers have to say (good and bad) about your products as well as how your offerings are positioned and compared against competitors'. If your company has an enterprise GTM motion that involves responding to formal Requests for Proposals (RFPs), read them methodically - they're gold! RFPs are jam-packed with valuable insights about what problems customers identify as having and what they're looking for in a solution. And as a PMM, RFPs are also a great way to refine messaging because they include the language your customers use to talk about what they're looking to buy. So before you get too clever with branded buzzwords and vague abstractions, pour through a bunch of RFPs.

That all depends on the type of research, its purpose and the impact you hope it will have. The most impactful research, for me, has always been primary market research in the form of interviews with a population representative of the intended audience. All that costs is my time ("opportunity cost" is a discussion for another day). 

On the other hand, sometimes the impact comes from the existence of the research in and of itself. For example, a report commissioned from a big-name research firm meant to drive awareness and credibility. Those become much more difficult to do on a budget.

The most important thing is to know what you're looking to get out of the research, and then assess the various options for getting there. And yes, I realize that's a bit of a non-answer...