Where should you start if you have no budget for market research?

Starting a new project can certainly feel daunting, especially when you don't feel you have the right tools or budget. But there's good news: When you have to be scrappy, there's data all around you.

Step 1: Wrap your head around the problem as best as you can

Whether it's bringing a new product or feature to market or developing a new marketing campaign, I like to start with an unbiased hunt for existing information because it may trigger ideas you wouldn't have if you defined scope too early.

To best wrap your head around a market, audience, or category, start with desktop research. There are often market reports available (e.g., from Mintel and NPD), and though the free versions will have limited information, they're often enough to start painting a picture. Do deep dives on social media to see what the conversation is like. Interview the key stakeholders on your team to unpack institutional knowledge from past launches. Dive into what competitors are doing and how they're marketing their products (e.g., MOAT and Facebook Ad Library should help give you a sense).

Step 2: Synthesize everything you found

Now take that disparate information and look for patterns. Is there something people on social wanted to see from the company that doesn't exist yet? Do the market reports speculate on growth in a certain area? Were you able to get a sense of the main competitive value props? 

If you see something come up with enough frequency, you can start to see it as a more reliable insight to build your GTM strategy off of. 

Step 3: Fine tune your objective to find gaps

Once you feel you have a general landscape, fine tune your objective. Are you introducing a new feature and want to make sure it's something people actually want? Are you trying a new value prop? Are you trying to improve retention on an existing product?

Let's say your goal is reducing churn on an existing product but you don't have a sense of why people are abandoning your product. Reach out to your customer support team for complaints or tickets and look for patterns there.

Step 4: Create more data where you need it

With all that in mind, you've gotten pretty far in your understanding of a market without spending a dime. Now ask yourself what you need to set your work up for success and how you might create that data. Identifying the risks of launching without certain information could give you an opportunity to ask management for increased budget. If not, ask your customer support and legal team if you can reach out to customers and offer to call them for feedback. Run focus groups and brainstorms internally (it's imperfect because it's biased, but it may help you gut check things).

Then go forth and test!

When you have no budget:

If you already have a survey platform in place, conducting interviews and surveys of your own lists (customer & prospect databases) is free! You just need a way to recruit them. For interviews or smaller sample sizes, you may want to go directly through your customer success team who has relationships with your customers. For larger sample sizes, you may want to send a few emails to invite people to take your survey. 

When you have a small budget:

You may not be able to afford a consulting or research agency, but there are a ton of software tools out there that allow you to conduct your own market research on a smaller budget (of course, I'm biased to favor SurveyMonkey.com for quantitative research, and there are great online qual tools too). Many research technology companies provide templates to help people who are newer to research methods, and some even provide pay-as-you go consulting services so you're not locked into a larger engagement.

As your budget scales:

Once you've proven the value of market research at your company and secure more budget, this is when you'll start playing the balancing act of time and resources. You'll need to weigh moving fast using software internally vs comissioning a full-service vendor that may take a few weeks to deliver results. You'll need to be aware of your team's skillset, bandwidth, and business urgency to know when to outsource vs conduct research in-house.

Absolutely! There is a ton of incredibly important data & insights in what you're probably already doing related to your product: 

• Web - Look where people are spending their time, dropping off, what is getting the most clicks
• Ads - Same as above. Target multiple groups with multiple creative, and see what drives the most engagement. 
• Customer Support - Your users are telling you what they need help with. 
• Product Analytics -- Retention & Happy Customers - Identify your most engaged, and happy customers, and do look back analysis. Where did they come from? How are they using your product? What can you learn about their demo and psychographics? 
• Product Analytics -- Churn - Same as above. Identify cohorts of users who are churning, and do a look back analysis. Are there patterns in their behavior, source, demographics, etc between them and what becomes a predictor of churn?

If you're looking for research & insights about your category, not necessarily your own product, I think Google Consumer Surveys can be a very effective but low cost way to get started.

Bonnie, Patti, and I always recommend getting in touch with your target audience/customers by any means necessary!

• One way to get started is to identify who has the best direct line to customers/consumers. Make friends w/ Customer Service team and make sure you’re aligned on best practices when reaching out to and speaking with customers. The people in your organization who can help you are usually in Sales, Social Media, Customer Service, UX, and Market Research.

Pro tip: You can build an informal community by leveraging your known brand ambassadors; create your own lo-fi/informal community to dip into any time!

• Another way is to get comfortable moderating your own research interviews. There’s a lot of information, classes, and certifications available online to help you start building your qualitative research toolkit. If you’re not sure where to start, Bonnie recommends checking out Quirks (an online market research publication with great articles). It’s a great place to go to learn best practices.
• Also, try leveraging your existing tools. Most of us already have access to Zoom and Google forms. Many UX teams also have a subscription to UserTesting and the sales team might already have a subscription to Calendly. Take inventory of what you have and then determine which methodologies you can reasonably commit to.
• Finally, Bonnie recommends Alchemer as a tool that many teams could implement, even with limited resources (And both Patti and I can attest to how great it is and are SO happy with the output of this tool for product marketing research). Alchemer is a great option for small research teams looking to conduct their own online surveys. Bonnie prefers Alchemer to Survey Monkey because it has a greater variety of survey questions (love the text and image heatmaps!) and its reporting dashboards are fast and easy to use. Plus it’s inexpensive and they have the BEST customer support. According to Bonnie, they once sent her congratulatory brownies to her office after they helped her successfully troubleshoot an especially difficult issue.

If you can't secure a budget, it may mean that your research doesn't have sufficient buy-in from stakeholders or leadership. Getting alignment around the core problem/opportunity may be a better use of time than spinning cycles on research.

Here's a quick story about how I conducted a leadership roadshow to secure budget/resourcing for research at ZipRecruiter:

• When I started at ZipRecruiter as the first PMM, I took the approach of "show how incredible your research is & the budget/buy-in will follow" and spent loads of time conducting scrappy research. However, the demands increased, the timelines decreased, and the budget stayed the same.

• At a certain point, I got a sage piece of advice: sell the work before you start executing.

• When I zoomed out to a 30k-foot view, I realized that I couldn't secure a meaningful budget for research because there wasn't leadership alignment around the problem I was trying to solve: improving user churn. 

• So, I changed my approach. I put together a presentation around the incremental revenue we could unlock by improving week one churn by just a few percent and started shopping it across leadership in an ' exec roadshow.' The goal was to get alignment on churn being an opportunity area and spark discussions around levers to improve it.

• Immediately, heads started nodding during the roadshow. During our next planning period, we secured a significant budget to run foundational customer research and partnerships from other core teams (like data science) to improve retention.