Conducting market research is essential to understanding your target audience and giving your brand a roadmap to success.
Market research covers everything from understanding your industry and competitors to getting to know your customers and potential audience.
Invest in market research tools, and you’ll quickly discover unknown insights that can drive your business forward.
Whether you’re a marketing professional, social media manager, small business owner, or enterprise decision-maker, mastering market research is key to making data-driven decisions and reducing reliance on guesswork.
But how do you stand out from the crowd in 2025? Here are 10 research efforts that marketers are using to get ahead of the game this year and into the future.
Tips to Conduct Market Research:
1. Combine Primary and Secondary Market Research for a Full Picture
2. Define Your Target Audience Clearly
3. Conduct Qualitative Research for Deep Insights
4. Conduct Quantitative Research for Broad, Reliable Data
5. Analyze Consumer Behavior and Preferences
6. Stay on Top of Industry Trends
7. Research Your Competitors Thoroughly
8. Turn Research Findings into Actionable Strategies
9. Leverage Advanced Tools and Technology
10. Make Market Research an Ongoing Practice
>> Discover our guide to doing market research effectively
1. Combine Primary and Secondary Market Research for a Full Picture
Brands struggle to thrive when they use just one research method as the steer for their marketing campaigns and product development. A holistic approach combining primary and secondary methods is the norm.
Primary market research involves gathering first-hand data – through surveys, interviews, or experiments – tailored to your specific questions and target audience.
Secondary market research relies on existing data already collected and published by others (such as industry reports, government statistics, or third-party studies).
Secondary research is typically faster and more cost-effective than primary research, but it wasn’t originally collected to answer your unique questions.
So, you can use secondary research to complement the high-value personal data you obtained through primary research.
>> Read More: 4 Types of Market Research
2. Define Your Target Audience Clearly
Not knowing your target audience is like fishing with your eyes closed: you can throw your hook out there but have no idea what will bite.
In 2025, marketers are being asked to do more with fewer resources. The most efficient way to do this is to understand your audience before you go fishing for conversions.
Begin by creating detailed buyer personas or customer profiles that encompass demographic details (age, gender, location, income, etc.) as well as psychographic factors (interests, values, pain points, buying habits).
Gathering demographic information early helps reveal the opportunities and limitations of reaching potential customers. Use primary research methods and take advantage of existing data (secondary) to refine your audience definition.
Extracting Insights From Data
Use tools like web analytics and social media insights to see who engages with your brand online.
Then, bring your market research data into a single platform and analyze the results. Identify who is in your target market and who is not. Spot which consumer segments are likely to convert and do away with the segments that aren’t.
Analyzing demographic data is a crucial step in this process. By understanding the characteristics and preferences of different consumer groups, you can pinpoint your ideal customers more effectively.
3. Conduct Qualitative Research for Deep Insights
Qualitative research methods are invaluable for uncovering the deeper motivations, emotions, and opinions that drive consumer behavior.
Do it right, and you’ll understand the why behind customer choices.
Common qualitative techniques in market research include focus groups, one-on-one interviews, open-ended survey questions, and observational studies. These approaches allow you to gather non-numerical insights that add context and depth to your market understanding.
Focus groups
Focus groups are particularly effective at generating useful data. They bring together small groups of people from your target market to discuss their feelings and perspectives on a product, service, or idea.
Political parties use focus groups all the time to understand the electorate and get feedback on their policy stances.
A moderator leads a guided conversation with participants, prompting them with questions and hypotheticals.
The group discussion reveals what participants think and how they react to each other’s ideas. This can uncover shared attitudes or diverging opinions that wouldn’t surface in a simple survey.
Interviews
One-on-one conversations (conducted in person, by phone, or via video call) enable you to thoroughly probe individual customer experiences.
Interviews give respondents the freedom to speak in their own words, often yielding candid feedback and stories that spark new ideas.
Emails and Questionnaires
Now, you may not have time for one-on-one sessions or focus groups or be able to afford an agency to conduct them for you. But you can still extract qualitative data from your audience.
Emailing surveys and questionnaires to your mailing list is a great place to start. Collect email addresses from those who buy your product or use your service, and ask them questions at a future point.
You could ask them to describe their shopping experience, give feedback on customer service, or encourage them to express their views on something aligned with your brand.
For example, a charity might ask its mailing list contacts for their view on where to allocate resources next year. The qualitative responses gathered will give the charity direction and provide an understanding of what its audience wants to prioritize.
To get the most from qualitative research, ensure your questions are open-ended and unbiased, listen actively, and look for themes or patterns in the responses.
Modern technology has also expanded what’s possible: online focus groups and video interviews are now common, while almost everyone has access to their emails via their phone, allowing you to reach participants anywhere.
4. Conduct Quantitative Research for Broad, Reliable Data
Quantitative research is all about numbers and measurable facts, which you need for confident decision-making.
Quantitative data offers breadth by gathering information from larger samples so you can identify patterns, percentages, and statistically significant trends.
Ask Questions, Get Answers
The most common tool for primary quantitative research are surveys (especially online surveys), but it also encompasses methods like polls, questionnaires, and experiments.
Effectively, you need to ask questions to get data. Surveys are the workhorse of primary quantitative research. Thanks to digital platforms, it’s easier than ever to deploy surveys to hundreds or thousands of respondents to quantify things like customer satisfaction, feature preferences, or buying habits.
Surveys typically use structured questions – for example, multiple-choice, rating scales, or yes/no – so that responses can be tallied and analyzed with statistical techniques.
When designing a survey, it’s critical to ask clear, unambiguous questions and provide answer options that capture the range of possible views.
Be mindful of sample size and representativeness – your survey data is only as good as the pool of respondents.
Also, consider mixing in a few open-ended questions to capture any qualitative feedback participants might volunteer, which can complement the quantitative results.
Collect Existing Data
You can also go down the secondary research route and analyze existing datasets like sales figures, web analytics, industry statistics, etc.
Website traffic patterns reveal which content topics draw the most interest. You can also mine social media analytics, search trends, and public datasets (like census or economic data) to learn more about your target market and audience.
Examine sales data to find seasonal demand swings and see if there’s a correlation with your market activity.
Quantitative research often provides the what rather than the qualitative why. One tells you how many conversions you achieved, and the other explains the reason for your success.
With proper analysis, numbers reveal trends and correlations that inform strategic decisions. Ideally, you should triangulate quantitative findings with qualitative learnings; together, they validate each other.
>> Read More: Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Data in PR
5. Analyze Consumer Behavior and Preferences
Consumers will tell you a lot of things when you interview them – but there’s also a lot more beneath the surface they may be unwilling to reveal.
Thankfully, market research software enables brands to analyze and understand consumer behavior, even when the consumer hasn’t expressed their views on something.
Analyzing consumer behavior can reveal why certain marketing strategies work and help you anticipate how customers might respond to changes. This involves looking at both what consumers say and what they do.
Dig Into the Data
Start by examining the data you’ve gathered on customer preferences and actions. Survey results might show, for instance, that a significant segment of consumers prioritizes eco-friendly products or that price is the biggest deciding factor for a certain group.
Likewise, qualitative feedback from interviews or focus groups could reveal common pain points or desires (e.g., “I wish this app were easier to use on mobile” or “I prefer brands that engage with social causes”). These insights allow you to align your product development and messaging with customer values.
Assess Behavior
Analyze behavioral metrics in addition to direct feedback. How are customers actually interacting with your brand or product?
Look at metrics like website click paths, time spent on certain pages or features, cart abandonment rates, and repeat purchase rates.
These behaviors provide clues to what customers find useful or frustrating.
Social Listening
You can also analyze social media to understand customer values and behavior. Use software to track social media activity and assess how your target audience interacts with specific themes, content, ideas, or anything else.
You may discover undetected trends within your target audience that only emerge when conducting sentiment analysis on their social media comments.
Social listening and monitoring online forums for mentions of your brand (or even just discussions in your industry) can surface valuable nuggets about consumer sentiment and emerging trends.
Ultimately, analyzing consumer behavior means combining data and empathy. You interpret the numbers and feedback to build a narrative of the customer’s journey.
The better you understand these nuances, the more effectively you can tweak your product, service, or marketing approach to fit the customer’s needs.
6. Stay on Top of Industry Trends
Trends aren’t just something seen on TikTok; they encompass our entire lives. From how people talk to what they buy, where they socialize, and who they socialize with, the world is always trending somewhere.
Trends come and go, and brands work hard to stay across them. The thing is, you can’t jump on every trend. There are too many of them, and you need to stay authentic.
The key to mastering industry trends is to research what’s hot and what’s not before deciding your next steps.
How to Track Trends
There are several ways to research industry trends. Follow industry news sources, trade publications, and analysts’ reports relevant to your field. Set up media alerts with CisionOne to track trending topics across the media landscape. Pay attention to consumer trend reports and economic indicators that might signal shifts in buying power or behavior.
Then, use a competitive intelligence tool to run competitor analysis on other brands in your industry to see what they’re doing. Adopt social listening to understand the latest audience-focused trends online.
Pull all your data into one place and build a picture of your target market. Establish industry and audience trends, and see where your brand sits amongst the two.
The key is to avoid operating in a vacuum. Use research to constantly scan the environment for changes.
Companies that stay informed about trends can anticipate changes and innovate proactively to stay ahead of the competition.
7. Research Your Competitors Thoroughly
Competitive intelligence is highly sought after in 2025 as brands seek to gain an edge over their industry rivals.
You can analyze your competitors’ offerings, messaging, and strategies to get context for your own positioning and spot market gaps you might exploit.
Thankfully, it’s never been easier to assess other brands and benchmark against them.
Use Software to Help
A tool like CisionOne gives brands access to vast data sets and audience stats, so it’s easy to build a picture of your competitors.
Start by identifying your direct rivals (businesses offering similar products or services to the same target audience) as well as any indirect competitors (those meeting the same customer need in a different way).
Then, conduct a thorough audit of their brand. Review their websites, product literature, pricing, marketing campaigns, and customer reviews. Sign up for their newsletters or follow their social media to see how they communicate with the market. If they’re a public company, read their press releases or financial reports for clues about their strategy and performance.
Then, dive into audience data. What do people say about your competitors online? Use sentiment analysis to understand the negative, positive, and neutral feelings towards them and you. In doing so, you’ll discover your brand’s public perception.
Analyze Your Data
Once you have all your data, look for areas where a competitor excels (strengths you may need to match) and areas where they underperform (weaknesses you can capitalize on).
Conducting this kind of competitive analysis can yield rich insights: by examining competitors’ strategies and product offerings, you can glean an understanding of overall industry trends and customer preferences.
From a marketing perspective, pay attention to competitors’ tactics and how your target market perceives them. Has a product launch gone well, and if so, why? Did they handle a PR crisis effectively?
Stand Out From the Crowd
Remember that competitor research isn’t about copying what others do; it’s about learning from the landscape to inform your unique strategy. The goal is to position your business in a way that plays to your strengths and addresses unmet needs in the market.
Continuously keep tabs on competitors over time – markets evolve, and a company that was not a threat a year ago could pivot into your space tomorrow.
8. Turn Research Findings Into Actionable Strategies
Data and insights are only as valuable as what you do with them. After collecting a wealth of information from primary research, secondary sources, and analysis, the next step is to translate those research findings into actionable marketing strategies.
It’s time to let your research drive decisions.
Connect Analysis to Business Goals
Start by synthesizing the key takeaways from your research. What patterns emerge? What problems or opportunities were identified?
Prioritize findings by their potential impact on your business goals.
If your research reveals a new competitor is appealing to a segment of customers you’ve missed, then you need to assess how that could harm your brand.
Perhaps customer feedback indicates dissatisfaction with an aspect of your service. In this instance, customers could start leaving you for rival brands and voicing their dissatisfaction with yours.
Create a Plan of Action
Each insight should be linked to a concrete action or decision. It’s time to address the negatives and capitalize on the positives.
Involve your team when formulating strategy changes and ensure the insights are clearly communicated. Use data to back up proposals for new campaigns or product updates – this helps get buy-in from stakeholders by showing that recommendations are evidence-based.
The aim is to shift from instinctual or gut-feel decisions to data-driven strategies.
Remember to incorporate your research findings into your marketing plan or strategy documents. If your annual marketing strategy doesn’t already have a section informed by recent market research, add one.
Finally, remember to measure the outcomes of any strategy changes and feed those results back into your research cycle. Market research is iterative: use it to set a strategy, implement and measure results, and then research again to see if the needle moved.
9. Leverage Advanced Tools and Technology
The proliferation of digital marketing platforms and AI-powered analytics means brands now have access to unimaginable levels of data, while it’s never been easier to communicate with audiences.
Embracing these tools can make your research process more efficient, more insightful, and easier to manage – a crucial advantage, especially for busy marketing teams or small businesses with limited time.
Tools for Primary Research
Start by using specialized research and analytics platforms for primary research. Online survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms streamline the gathering of quantitative data and include built-in analytics to help interpret results.
For qualitative insights, there are user interview platforms and social listening tools that can automatically categorize sentiments from open-ended responses or social media mentions.
Tools for Secondary Research
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems and web analytics dashboards (like Google Analytics) provide a wealth of behavioral data you can segment and analyze without manually crunching numbers.
This secondary research complements your primary data to build a bigger picture of your target market and audience.
Use of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are becoming game-changers in market research. AI can help identify patterns in large datasets, perform predictive analysis, and even engage in conversational surveys or customer service chats to collect feedback.
When it comes to pulling everything together, consider integrated platforms that centralize different aspects of research and marketing intelligence.
CisionOne is an all-in-one communications and media intelligence platform that combines media monitoring, data analysis (Insights), and outreach capabilities.
You can integrate monitoring, analytics, and outreach with advanced AI technology, glean actionable insights, and connect with audiences more effectively.
10. Make Market Research an Ongoing Practice
The final (and perhaps most important) tip is to treat market research as a continuous process, not a one-time project.
Markets evolve rapidly, and the insights you gathered last year – or even last quarter – can become outdated as new trends emerge and consumer attitudes shift.
By conducting market research on a regular basis, you ensure that you’re always working with current information and can adjust your strategies proactively.
Establish Good Working Practices
It’s not always easy to check in and stay on top of your own market research. Sometimes, marketing teams are working so hard on existing projects that they fail to look up and see what’s changed within their industry.
The solution is to build good working practices for your marketing team and ensure you use the software daily. Simple things like setting market trend alerts and brand notifications keep you in the loop, even when your mind is on other tasks.
Keep a real-time dashboard for key metrics like customer satisfaction scores or brand sentiment that you review monthly. The goal is to continuously feed fresh insights into your decision-making process.
Think of market research as part of your business’s ongoing rhythm. It’s these habits that will, over time, become second nature.
Shift Toward a Data-Driven Brand
Market research is crucial throughout the entire lifecycle of a product or service – not just at launch. Early research data helps validate that you have product-market fit, while ongoing research helps you maintain that fit as conditions change.
The key to all this is data. When everyone, from executives to front-line marketers, is used to seeing and discussing research findings as they plan campaigns or product updates, it leads to more objective, evidence-backed strategies.
It also makes it easier to measure the impact of those strategies because you’ll have a baseline and ongoing data to compare against.
By committing to continuous market research, you set up an early warning system and a wellspring of fresh ideas to inform every aspect of your marketing and business development.
Time to Transform Insights Into Impact
You might not need all 10 market research tips we’ve detailed above, but we bet you’ll find at least some useful. Remember, market research aims to help guide your decisions with data-driven insights and reach your overall business goals.
Market research is the bedrock of effective marketing. It aligns a brand with its audience, establishes the right place to sit in the industry, and writes the roadmap for future success.
Embracing a data-driven, research-informed approach is no longer optional; it’s a necessity for staying competitive. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone.
Tools like CisionOne’s integrated platform can help simplify and strengthen each step of the process – from gathering media insights to managing outreach.
If you’re ready to take your market research and marketing results to the next level, consider tapping into Cision’s expertise and technology. Our platform, CisionOne, is designed to provide the outreach, monitoring, and insights you need to turn information into action.
To learn more about how CisionOne can support your business, request a demo today and see first-hand how better insights lead to better marketing outcomes.
