5 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Market Research Project

Starting a market research project can feel straightforward.

You have something you want to understand, so you write some questions and start asking people.

But a little planning at the beginning can make a huge difference to the quality of the research you get at the end.

Before launching a survey, arranging interviews or inviting people to a focus group, here are five questions worth asking.

1. What Are We Actually Trying to Find Out?

This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly easy to start research without a clear objective.

"We want to understand our customers better" is a good starting point, but it's still quite broad.

What do you actually need to know?

Perhaps you want to understand why satisfaction has fallen. Maybe you're considering changing a service and want to know how customers might respond. Or perhaps you want to understand the experiences of a particular group.

The clearer the objective, the easier it becomes to design useful research.

Try finishing this sentence:

"At the end of this research, we need to understand..."

If you can answer that clearly, you're off to a good start.

2. Who Do We Need to Hear From?

Once you know what you want to learn, think about whose opinions you need.

It won't always be everyone.

If you're reviewing a particular service, you may only need to speak to people who have recently used it.

You might also need to hear from different groups within your audience.

For example, are younger customers having the same experience as older customers? Do people in different locations have different priorities? Are you hearing from people who don't normally respond to surveys?

Getting the right mix of participants is just as important as getting a large number of responses.

3. What's the Best Way to Reach Them?

Not every research project needs a survey.

Online surveys are useful when you want to gather information from a large number of people, but other methods can be better when you need more detail.

Telephone interviews allow you to explore someone's experience in greater depth.

Focus groups are useful for discussing ideas and hearing different perspectives.

Sometimes a combination of methods works best.

The method should be chosen around the research question and the people you're trying to reach, rather than simply using whatever you've used before.

4. What Will We Do With the Findings?

This is one of the most important questions to ask before starting.

Imagine you discover that customers are unhappy with part of your service.

What happens next?

Who will review the findings? Who can make changes? What decisions could the research influence?

Thinking about this beforehand helps you focus the research on information you can actually use.

It can also prevent surveys becoming filled with "interesting" questions that don't lead anywhere.

If you don't know what you'd do with the answer, consider whether you need to ask the question at all.

5. How Will We Know If Things Have Improved?

Research doesn't have to end when the report is delivered.

If the findings lead to changes, think about how you'll measure whether those changes have worked.

That might mean repeating some questions six or twelve months later, monitoring satisfaction scores or carrying out follow-up interviews.

Comparing results over time can help you understand whether improvements are having the intended effect.

It also turns research into an ongoing process rather than a one-off exercise.

A Little Planning Goes a Long Way

Good market research starts long before the first person answers a question.

Being clear about what you want to learn, who you need to hear from and how you'll use the findings makes it much more likely that the research will produce something genuinely useful.

It can also save time and money by making sure you're collecting the right information from the beginning.

At Viewpoint Research, we help organisations plan and deliver research from start to finish. Whether you need customer surveys, telephone interviews, focus groups or a combination of methods, we can help you choose an approach that answers the questions that matter.