Ever wondered how brands get ahead of their competitors and command vast sections of the market? They probably start by doing business market research.
This involves collecting data from your industry, competitors, and audience, with the aim of conquering the market.
From defining your objectives to choosing the right research methods, there’s a lot to work on if you’re to master the market. However, tools like CisionOne can help cut through the numbers and support business strategies from Day One and long into the future.
Use this guide to understand market research for businesses, the methods available, and the outcomes you can expect to achieve.
In This Guide:
What Is Business Market Research?
Why Is Market Research Important for Businesses?
Categories of Business Market Research
Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research Methods
How to Conduct Market Research for Your Business
Competitive Analysis in Market Research
Start Market Research for Your Business Today
What Is Business Market Research?
The aim of business market research is to gather insights that inform your business decisions. Brands do this by gathering and analyzing data about their market – including your customers, competitors, and industry trends.
By using market research tools, it’s possible to condense huge quantities of market research data into stats and reports, which then feed into your business strategy.
At its core, this research helps answer critical questions about demand (do people want what you offer?), market size (how big is the opportunity?), and the competitive landscape (who else is vying for your customers?).
Why Is Market Research Important for Businesses?
Businesses need to conduct market research because it significantly reduces risk and increases the chances of success.
No business wants to develop a product or service only to discover there’s no demand for it. Market research reveals gaps in industries that businesses can move into.
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen famously estimated that around 95% of new products fail, often because companies introduce solutions without a real market need. That claim was made back in the 1990s and things have come a long way since then. The emergence of market research tools like CisionOne make launching a new product or service less risky.
In fact, not only do businesses reduce risk, but they also increase their chances of thriving in a new market or industry. Why? Because they’ve got market research data guiding every step of the journey.
Categories of Business Market Research
Market research falls into four broad categories: primary research and secondary research, as well as qualitative and quantitative research.
Understanding these four types of market research will help you plan your business activities effectively.
Primary Research
This is research you conduct yourself (or hire someone to do) to gather new, first-hand data.
Primary research involves going directly to the source – typically your potential customers or existing customers – to collect information.
Common primary research methods include:
Surveys
Interviews (by phone or in-person)
Focus groups (guided group discussions)
Direct product testing
The big advantage of primary research is that it’s tailored to your specific research questions and target market, yielding insights unique to your business.
>> Learn more about primary research methods in our ultimate guide
Secondary Research
This is research based on existing data that has already been collected and published by someone else.
Instead of gathering new data directly, you use secondary sources such as reports, studies, databases, and articles to gather business insights. You can quickly find general facts like industry size, demographic stats, or economic trends.
The trade-off is that secondary data may not be perfectly tailored to your niche or target audience, and it might be dated or aggregated. However, it’s often an efficient starting point.
Examples of secondary research sources include:
Government websites
Agency websites and databases
Academic journals
Trade association publications
News articles
Existing market research data
Social listening
The great thing about secondary research is it’s usually cheaper to obtain than primary research.
Quantitative Research
This approach focuses on numbers and statistics – measuring variables and quantifying data to find patterns.
Quantitative research methods produce data that can be counted or expressed in numbers, which allows for easier comparison and analysis at scale.
You can use both primary and secondary sources to generate quantitative data, such as:
Large-scale surveys with close-ended questions like multiple choice or ratings
Online polls
Analyzing numerical data from databases
This type of research is excellent for answering “how many, how much, how often” types of questions.
>> Discover these quantitative market research examples
Qualitative Research
This approach is about exploring ideas and understanding why people think or behave a certain way.
Qualitative research deals with non-numerical insights – it captures opinions, motivations, and feelings in depth.
Again, you can use primary and secondary sources to generate qualitative data, like:
One-on-one interviews with open-ended questions
Open-ended survey questions
Focus groups
Qualitative research is especially useful in the early or exploratory research phase when you’re not sure what questions to ask yet – it can surface unexpected issues or pain points.
In practice, effective market research is a combination of primary, secondary, qualitative, and quantitative data.
You might start with secondary research to get a high-level view of the market and identify gaps, then conduct primary research to dive deeper into specific questions for your business.
Qualitative research provides the story and context, while quantitative research provides the scale and frequency.
Together, they help you see the full picture.
How to Conduct Market Research for Your Business
When you’re ready to conduct market research, it helps to take a structured, step-by-step approach.
Every business is unique but most can work through the same shared process and use the same tools to correctly conduct research. Here’s how to do it in seven steps:
1. Define Your Objectives and Problem Statement
Begin by clearly identifying the purpose of your research. What business decisions are you trying to inform? Pinpoint the core business questions or challenges you need answers to.
2. Identify Your Target Market
Next, be specific about whom you may need to research. Determine your target market or audience that’s most relevant to your question.
For instance, are you targeting potential customers for a future product or current users of your service? Define the key characteristics of these people, such as age range, location, gender, income level, interests, or any other demographic information and traits that matter for your product.
You can use market research software such as CisionOne to collect initial audience insights and identify who you’ll need to speak to during your full research phase.
3. Choose the Right Research Methods
With your objectives and audience in mind, determine the most effective methods for collecting data. Choosing the right methods requires you to consider two core factors:
How these methods inform your business strategy
Whether you have the resources to conduct them
First, consider various research methods and the data you’ll get from them.
You’ll need to assess your team’s capabilities and capacity to execute research.
If you require statistically reliable data from a large sample – for example, to quantify market size or measure customer satisfaction levels – a quantitative survey might be appropriate.
If you need deeper insight into motivations or to test a concept in depth, qualitative methods like interviews or focus groups are valuable.
Often, a combination is ideal: you could start qualitatively to explore issues, then use a survey to measure how widespread those findings are.
Next, think about how you’ll execute your research. If you plan to conduct focus groups and one-to-one interviews, what tools and budget do you need to achieve it? If you’re planning to mine social media data, what software is out there?
Linking business objectives to the practicalities of delivering the research is crucial. You can also conduct competitive analysis, which we’ll explain more about later in this guide.
4. Gather and Collect the Data
Once you’ve established your research methods, it’s time to act.
This could mean launching a survey, conducting interviews or focus group sessions, or pulling data from databases and reports.
When doing primary research with people, aim for a sample size that balances quality and quantity – enough people to see patterns, but while still getting detailed feedback.
How to Stay Organized
During this phase, it’s important to stay organized – keep records of responses, recordings/transcripts of qualitative sessions, and note the source for any secondary information you record.
By the end of this step, you should have a pile of raw data: survey spreadsheets, interview notes, focus group transcripts, or datasets from external sources.
Use a tool like CisionOne to house all your data, as this is the foundation for the next (and perhaps most crucial) step.
5. Analyze the Research Findings
Next, you need to turn your raw data into research findings and meaningful insights. Businesses in 2025 have access to huge amounts of data, from their own sales figures and customer profiles to social listening data and industry reports.
This is where a tool like CisionOne helps, as you can begin to decipher all your data in one place.
For quantitative data, analysis may involve calculating statistics – for example, what percentage of respondents expressed interest in your new product, or what’s the average satisfaction score on a scale of 1-10.
For qualitative data, analysis involves reading through transcripts or notes and identifying common themes or surprising remarks. Use software to identify patterns, such as multiple interviewees mentioning the same pain point or a particular feature that everyone loves.
Summarize key findings, such as who your potential customers are, how the market environment looks (trends, competitors, etc.), and where your business can improve.
From here, you can begin to apply your insights into your business strategy.
6. Apply the Insights to Your Business Strategy
Applying research insights isn’t always easy. You may have discovered some hard truths during your research and may not know how to immediately address them.
The secret to tackling this issue is to take your time and develop a fresh business strategy using your insights as a guide. Or, be ready to weave your insights into your existing strategy, to improve it and bring it up to date.
Either way, the challenge here is figuring out how to apply your insights.
If the research validates strong demand in your target market, you may proceed with launching your product or service, incorporating tweaks based on the feedback. On the other hand, if you find out the market is saturated with similar options, you might consider differentiating your offering or targeting a niche market instead.
Set New Goals
Additionally, use research to set realistic goals. For example, if you learned your market size is 100,000 people in your niche, that gives you context to forecast sales or market penetration.
Customer feedback and satisfaction data should lead to concrete action as well – if respondents indicated low satisfaction with your customer service, you’d want to address that internally.
Essentially, this step involves translating research findings into practical applications: updating your branding to better align with how consumers perceive value (improving your company's brand message), adjusting your product based on consumer preferences, or even deciding not to proceed with a project that the research deemed too risky.
7. Monitor and Update Regularly
Of course, you can’t simply apply your insights and then walk away from the strategy, assuming everything will work fine. Businesses never stand still – and neither should research.
Treat market research as an ongoing activity rather than a one-off project. Regularly monitor your market and gather new data as conditions change. Stay alert to market saturation or new niches developing.
This continuous research mindset helps you stay ahead of the curve and quickly adjust your business decisions when needed.
You can set alerts within your market research software to track industry trends and changes in audience behaviour, so you don’t have to manually monitor.
As long as you’re not static and are willing to learn on a weekly basis, your business will evolve in tandem with the market.
Competitive Analysis in Market Research
One of the core research methods available to brands is to conduct competitive analysis.
Understanding your competition is vital to finding your place in the market and honing your unique value proposition.
A competitive analysis as part of market research will look at other businesses in your space – both direct competitors (offering similar products to the same audience) and indirect competitors (offering alternatives or satisfying the same customer need in a different way).
It’s part of Step 3 in the above market research plan, because it’s all about choosing the right approach.
When analyzing competitors, consider the following market research activities and factors:
Identify Key Competitors
First, list out who your main competitors are. Not what products or services they offer, and which market segment or customer group they target.
Sometimes it’s obvious (a rival company of similar size in your town or online); other times, you need to research. Use a competitive intelligence tool to help.
Market Share and Presence
Next, investigate the size of each competitor in the market. Who is the market leader, and roughly what market share do they hold?
Use your competitive intelligence tool to assess various metrics, such as share of voice and brand awareness. Then, add other data like publicly available sales figures, number of customers, and even the size of their social media following to get a well-rounded picture.
All this helps you gauge how dominant each player is and what slice of the pie is left for you.
Strengths and Weaknesses
For each competitor, analyze what they do well and where they fall short. Perhaps one company has a very strong brand and customer loyalty, but their product is higher-priced (a potential weakness if customers seek value).
Products, Pricing, and Differentiation
Go into granular detail and compare the features and quality of competitors’ offerings to your own. How do they position their product? What customer needs are they emphasizing?
Also, compare pricing models – are they competing on low price, or are they premium? This is where market research can spark meaningful insights about differentiation.
Target Market Focus
Consider how important your target market is to each competitor. Are they focusing on the same audience you plan to? Do they sell in the same location, or to the same demographics?
If a competitor heavily courts the same demographic, expect a tougher fight for attention; if not, you might face less direct pressure in that niche.
Marketing and Sales Strategy
Observe how competitors market themselves. What channels do they use (social media, content marketing, TV ads, trade shows)? What’s their messaging? Do they highlight certain brand values or benefits repeatedly?
Also, assess how they distribute and sell – online only, through retailers, etc. This can clue you in on industry norms and effective tactics, as well as areas to differentiate in your own marketing strategy.
Customer Satisfaction and Reputation
Use a reputation monitoring tool like CisionOne to gauge competitors’ reputations. Are their customers happy? You can look at their online ratings, testimonials, social media sentiment, and media coverage.
Combining a few of these aspects of competitive analysis will help build a picture of your market. You’ll develop a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t, and can plan strategically armed with reliable data.
Start Market Research for Your Business Today
Now you know how to conduct market research for your business, it’s time to get started.
Whether you’re a startup founder refining a business idea or a seasoned entrepreneur looking to expand, business market research is a powerful ally in navigating uncertainty.
It provides a factual foundation for understanding your market, from who your customers are and what drives them, to how you stack up against competitors and where new opportunities lie.
If you’re looking to elevate your market research with advanced tools, consider how integrated platforms like Cision can help. CisionOne offers solutions that bring together media monitoring, social listening, and data analysis in one platform, providing timely intelligence about your brand, your industry, and your audience.
With such tools, you can continuously monitor trends and gather data in real time, turning what used to be a daunting, time-consuming process into a strategic advantage.
