How do you get quality market research data creatively, without leveraging market research reports that cost thousands of dollars?
Some ideas:
Free: Use polls on LinkedIn. You can see who responds (their title, positions held in the past etc)
Free: Unincentivized user surveys
Cheap: Incentivized user surveys
Cheap: SurveyMonkey or Wynter for market surveys
Cheap: Wynter for buyer interviews (compared to other consulting companies who source and interview I’ve found Wynter to be a fraction of the cost per interview)
If you have a large enough prospect/customer base, you can do some scrappy research yourself. Set up a quick survey, incentivize folks to complete it, and just like that you've created your own version of trend data. You can use a similar approach to do qualitative interviews with target personas and drill into more substantial topics.
The best part? You can use those outputs not just as data to help inform things like product strategy, messaging, and other things, but they also make for great marketing content!