Market research tools are a collection of techniques and methods that help businesses gather and analyze data related to their target consumers. It’s about as close as a business can get to mind reading or having a crystal ball. You can learn what your customers need, what draws them in, and even what makes them tick.
These insights are valuable currency in the game of business. With your newfound knowledge, you’ll be able to outsmart your competition, win over your customers, and achieve success like never before. Plus, you show your customers that you care about their opinions and needs—it’s a win-win situation.
One such solution is a market research insights platform, like PureSpectrum, which offers a range of tools for conducting and analyzing market research. Before jumping into what PureSpectrum can do, let’s back up for a moment and take a closer look at the types of market research.
What Are the 4 Types of Market Research?
To gain valuable insights about their audiences, businesses rely on four main types of market research methods, which are essential tools for any business. These include:
- Exploratory Research – This type of research aims to gather general information about a new topic or customer base. An example of this could be a business launching a new product in a foreign market. The business could conduct exploratory research to gather general information about the culture and customs of the target audience.
- Descriptive Research – Descriptive research answers all those “who, what, where, when, and how” questions. The market research industry uses descriptive research to report the characteristics of a particular group or phenomenon. To illustrate, a travel company may use descriptive research to understand the demographics and travel preferences of their customers—where they like to go, what time of year, etc.
- Causal Research – Causal research is where you get into cause-and-effect relationships, or how changes to one variable can affect another. If you’re curious about the relationship between your product and your customers, causal research is the way to go. For example, fast-food chains could conduct causal research to determine how changes to their menu affect customer satisfaction and sales.
- Diagnostic Research – Diagnostic research helps identify the sources of a problem. It’s great for when something’s not working, and you’re not sure why. Imagine a clothing retailer experiencing a sudden decline in sales—diagnostic research would help the retailer get to the bottom of this problem.
For deeper insights in all areas of research, consider using the PureSpectrum Insights Platform. Businesses can quickly collect consumer feedback from real people with PureSpectrum’s agile research tools. This platform offers an end-to-end solution for quantitative consumer insights, easy-to-use analytics, and real-time updated results.
What Is the Best Marketing Research Tool?
When it comes to market research, using a mix of company research tools will provide the most comprehensive understanding of your target audience. Specifically, surveys have consistently proven to be one of the best market research tools for gathering customer insights. They offer a direct line of communication between your business and your customers/prospects, allowing you to gather targeted and relevant data.
According to Statista, surveys are actually the most used form of quantitative market research. This popularity is likely due to the versatility of surveys. Businesses can conduct surveys in multiple formats. With this kind of flexibility, marketing teams can adapt their approach to best suit their target audience and the research question at hand.
However, poorly designed surveys run the inherent risk of introducing bias into research results. For example, respondents may not provide honest or accurate answers due to social desirability bias—meaning they want to present themselves in a positive light. Surveys may also invoke acquiescence bias, which means respondents may agree with everything just to be polite. Therefore it is important to make sure you ask questions in an approachable and encouraging way to ensure stated answers match reality.
Enter PureScore™. PureScore is PureSpectrum’s advanced machine learning algorithm that scores respondents based on their behavior and prevents low-scoring respondents from taking surveys. This technology examines a respondent’s:
- Profile
- Past behavior
- Current behavior
This quality program has prevented low-quality respondents from reaching surveys and has improved the integrity of data collected. With PureSpectrum, businesses can keep using surveys to conduct market research and rest assured that the resulting data is reliable.
But what does conducting a market research survey look like in practice? Let’s dive into a hypothetical scenario and see how a tech startup can use surveys for market research—after all, who doesn’t love a good startup story?
How Do You Conduct Market Research for a Startup?
To conduct market research for a startup, you must identify your target audience, set research goals, design and distribute surveys, analyze the data, and use the results to refine your approach. On top of all that, you have to stay competitive. Simple, right?
We know—not really. That’s why a market research platform like PureSpectrum can be so beneficial offering companies of all sizes and experience to customize their experience. From a full service approach where PureSpectrum does all the work for the startup, to a more hands on approach.Here’s how a hypothetical startup might use PureSpectrum to empower its market research and to accelerate its growth with surveys with surveys:
- Carve Out a Customer Niche – The first step would be to do research to identify who the target market is – this is usually a generalized survey aimed at exploring the industry and consumers within. After the study is completed, analyzing the results to identify the target audience vs prior assumptions on who the target might be is crucial to build the foundational strategy. In this case, their target audience might be remote teams working in tech companies or startups that need a collaborative project management tool. With the PureSpectrum Marketplace Platform, the startup has instant access to a multi-source market research supply from high-quality respondents globally. This technology allows the startup to find the exact sample that matches its ideal customer profile.
- Define Research Goals – Next, the startup defines what they want to achieve with a market research survey. They decide their research objective is to understand their target audience’s needs, pain points, and preferences when it comes to project management tools.
- Create Survey Questions – The startup core team meets to determine the exact questions they want to ask their respondents. Once they’ve landed on a set of questions, the startup members use the PureSpectrum Insights Platform to build the survey. They love the user-friendly interface and the wide range of question types, including multiple-choice, open-ended, rating scales, and many more!
- Distribute the Survey – PureSpectrum offers different options for distributing the startup’s survey, including recruitment from the PureSpectrum Marketplace Platform, and using their own customer list. This approach ensures that the startup is reaching the right people and getting the data it needs to make informed decisions.
- Analyze the Data – The startup team loves that they can monitor survey response data in real-time on the PureSpectrum Insights Platform. The platform also allows them to segment data by various criteria, visualize and explore data using custom visualizations, analyze open-ended responses with advanced text analytics, and generate custom reports quickly and easily.
The best part about the PureSpectrum Marketplace Platform and Insights Platforms is that they are both industry agnostic. So whether you’re running your first tech startup or you’ve been in a brick-and-mortar business for decades, PureSpectrum is for you.
See the whole suite of PureSpectrum solutions in action—schedule a demo today!
About PureSpectrum
PureSpectrum offers a complete end-to-end market research and insights platform, helping insights professionals make decisions more efficiently, and faster than ever before. Awarded MR Supplier of the Year at the 2021 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, PureSpectrum is recognized for industry-leading data quality. PureSpectrum developed the respondent-level scoring system, PureScore™, and believes their continued success stems from their talent density and dedication to simplicity and quality.
In the few years since its inception, PureSpectrum has been named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s Fast 500 since 2020, and ranked for three years in a row on the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative List and the Inc. 5000 lists.