The idea of conducting or collecting market research can feel daunting. Scary even. You might be worried about whether your audience will respond to your questions, if they will be annoyed by the outreach or frustrated with a lengthy survey. You may be worried about your ability to collect the right data, to organize and make sense of it all.

A formal and comprehensive market research process can be lengthy and time consuming, and might require you to partner with an outside firm. While that can certainly be worth the effort when it comes to your long-term goals, there are some simpler ways to learn solid intel about your audience that you can use in the meantime to make decisions about strategy. Market research in disguise, if you will.

Three simple strategies include:

1. Audience engagement content 
2. Social listening
3. Secret shopping 

What is Market Research?

Qualtrics, a leading market research/data collection software company defines the term this way: “Market research is the action or activity of gathering information about market needs and preferences.” 

In other words, it’s the ways in which you learn more about your audience or prospective audience, the environment you are in and your perceived value in that environment. 

Good market research typically focuses on three components:

1. The customers (current and prospective)
2. The company (or product/service)
3. The competitors

Your understanding of audience motivations, challenges, barriers and preferences, and how you stack up against the competition, can impact decision-making across your organization — from marketing strategy to customer service to product/service development and more. 

(Check out qualtrics’ full guide to developing a market research strategy.)

How Can Market Research Impact Marketing Strategy?

For marketers or business owners looking to expand their customer base, market research can be incredibly helpful in shaping brand messaging, advertising campaigns and marketing tactics. 

Market research can help you:

1. Create an audience segmentation strategy
2. Evaluate your brand’s look and tone of voice
3. Sharpen messages around brand value/differentiators
4. Determine budgets across digital marketing platforms
5. Explore test campaigns for new audiences

Three Simple Market Research Strategies 

There are many different types of market research. From interviews to focus groups, secondary sources like research institutes and more. Since we’re focused on keeping things simple, though, let’s focus on three easy to implement strategies that can help us gain insight.

1. Audience engagement content

Market research area #1: customers

If your brand or company already has an active social media presence or email database, you can use these platforms to create content that invites the audience to engage with you and share more about their motivations, challenges or preferences. For instance, you could post an Instagram poll asking your followers to vote on a new product color; promote a self-guided Cosmo-esque quiz to match your customers to specific services; or offer a filtering tool that helps them indicate preferred shopping modes, etc. While not a formal survey, these engagement opportunities do the dual work of providing entertainment for your audience while also collecting data for you. 

2. Social listening

Market research area #2: The company (product/service)

Customers are not always going to give you honest feedback about your product or their perception of their company. Typically, you’ll hear from the superfans and the super-detractors (even on most surveys). But you know who they will share their honest opinion with? Their friends and community members. This is where social listening comes in. Techtarget defines social listening as the “process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the internet.” To do this well, you likely will need to adopt a social listening tool or software service, but it’s well worth it. A social listening tool can aggregate the data across many platforms and show you what is being said about your brand. Then, you or someone you hire, can analyze the data to help present an objective view of your brand. This can help identify trends, opportunities to push a certain product or message harder (or move away from one) or even flag a budding crisis.

3. Secret shopping

Market research area #3: The competitors

Secret or mystery shopping is a tried and true approach to learning about the market and what the competition is up to. But there’s a reason we still do it. Stepping into the shoes of the customer and learn what it’s like to buy from or work with your competitor can help you better understand what is driving consumers to the “other guy,” how to differentiate your message, and what you do/don’t like about the industry you’re in as a whole…(opportunity to disrupt maybe?).

Sign up for their emails, their mail campaigns. Go into their store fronts. Take their customer journey. You can even do it in disguise. 🙂