What type of market research is most important for product marketing?
In general, research should be mapped to business objectives. Specifically, and from a discovery mode, I advocate for research into value (for the purpose of pricing and packaging), segmentation (for targeting and sizing purposes), and persona (for messaging and campaigning). In terms of validation, message testing and website heatmaps. One tool that helps with many of these is questionpro
Market & customer research are critical to Product Marketing's ability to influence product strategy and build effective GTM. I'd say the following types of research are most important.
Market & Competitive - This means going deep and understanding the TAM, key competitors, points of differentiation and positioning, and where you stand relative to the competition. This type of research can heavily inform your positioning, messaging, product and pricing decisions.
ICP research and definition - Running an analysis to understand who your ideal customer is. This could be based on looking at your existing customers and taking into consideration factors like product/market fit, customer lifetime value, customer satisfaction, sales win rates. etc.
Voice of customer/ customer research - This is truly understanding your customers and key personas, what they care about, their pain points, the buying committee and how they make purchasing decisions. This research is absolutely essential for messaging, campaign strategy, new product launches, sales enablement and overall GTM.
Win/Loss research - You can work with a vendor like Clozd, Goldpan, Primary intelligence to conduct win/loss customer interviews to better understand specific reasons you won or lost deals.
I'm a firm believer that product marketing's role is to be the voice of the product in the market and the voice of the market in the product so while there is no magic bullet to the one most important type of market research, I think the most important thing to do is to talk to your prospects and customers and understand their needs, wants, pain points, preferences, and interests. In order to add value to the product and echo their voice to our x-functional team members, we must know the audience better than anyone else! Starting quoting customers in meetings and citing specific examples / use cases, you will surely have everyone's attention.