How do you conduct Marketing Research?

Customer insights are the bedrock of any product marketing function. There are 4 key steps when planning research: 1) knowing your objectives, 2) establishing your hypotheses, 3) discerning which methodology will deliver the right inputs to drive your decisions, and 4) articulating the 'so what'. 

1) Establish your top 2 learning objectives for the exercise. It may be helpful to gather input from key stakeholders on how this study may inform their function. For example, you may be looking to determine the dimensions on which a customer segment evaluates product quality and the segment's willingness to pay. You are likely to find out more than 2 insights while executing research, but it is important to focus your questions and methods on solving a couple of larger objectives. 

2) Synthesize any existing relevant customer research, external papers, and internal customer behavior analysis that can help you establish a baseline on what is understood about your research question today. Use this information to write out your hypotheses. This is an important check to ensure that your selected methodology can actually prove or disprove your hypothesis. 

3) There are many market research tools that product marketers can leverage, ranging from qualitative to quantitative. I have used everything from large sample quantitative surveys to simply having conversations with friends and family. In general, I find that quantitative methodologies like surveys are great for establishing systematic drivers of purchase behavior and customer use cases. Qualitative studies like focus groups provide insight into nuanced elements such as customers' emotional connection to products or their reaction to the tone of messaging or testing new concepts. Once you pick a method, it's time to execute.

4) Articulate your findings with the following: 1) consumer insight, 2) how it changes product or GTM strategy decisions, and 3) further questions that have been raised. It is not a bad outcome to surface new customer questions or dimensions coming out of the research. It usually means you are heading down the right path to uncover something really compelling. 

I wrote a comprehensive guide to doing market research here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/market-research-ultimate-guide/

It walks you through planning & scoping, study design, data collection, analysis, and taking action. Note that it is mostly focused on survey research, but the guide does touch on quantitative and qualitative methods.

There are two parts to this: That research which I actually conduct, and that which I lean on from elsewhere. Typically, the only research I ever conduct myself are 1:1 interviews with either customers or other relevant stakeholders. This is what I use to build my stakeholder profiles (buyer personas) and is meant to inform what's most often/intensely on these stakeholders' minds and what incentives they are responding to.

Other forms of market research I leverage include professional analysts, whether working with them directly or through the reports they write and publish. I also find that colleagues internally, such as sales, customer success and product, know a ton about different aspects of the market, and my job more than anything comes down to putting all of those pieces together to learn a market and tell a story.