How to Do Market Research: A Guide and Template

Before you dive intohowcustomers in your industry make buying decisions, you must first understandwhothey are.

This is where your buyer personas come in handy.Buyer personas— sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

使用免费工具来创建您的整个公司可以用来推销，出售和提供更好服务的买家角色。bob全站app

它们可以帮助您可视化受众，简化您的沟通并告知您的策略。您应该热衷于包括购买者角色的一些关键特征是：

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• 职称）
• 职称
• Family size
• Income
• 主要挑战

The idea is to use your persona as a guideline for how to effectively reach and learn about the real audience members in your industry. Also, you may find that your business lends itself to more than one persona — that's fine! You just need to be thoughtful about each specific persona when you're optimizing and planning your content and campaigns.

To get started with creating your personas, check outthese free templates, as well asthis helpful tool.

确保您充分利用对话的最佳方法是做好准备。您应该始终创建一个讨论指南（无论是针对焦点小组，在线调查还是电话面试），以确保您涵盖所有最重要的问题并明智地使用时间。

(Note: This is not intended to be a script. The discussions should be natural and conversational, so we encourage you to go out of order or probe into certain areas as you see fit.)

哟ur discussion guide should be in an outline format, with a time allotment and open-ended questions for each section.

Wait, all open-ended questions?

是的,这是一个市场研究的黄金法则。哟u never want to "lead the witness" by asking yes and no questions, as that puts you at risk of unintentionally swaying their thoughts by leading with your own hypothesis. Asking open-ended questions also helps you avoid one-word answers (which aren't very helpful for you).

Example Outline of a 30-Minute Survey

Here's a general outline for a 30-minute survey for one B2B buyer. You can use these as talking points for an in-person interview, or as questions posed on a digital form to administer as a survey to your target customers.

背景信息（5分钟）

请买家为您提供一些背景信息（他们的标题，与公司在一起的时间，等等）。bob全站app然后，提出一个有趣/简单的问题来加热事物（第一场音乐会参加，镇上最喜欢的餐厅，上一个假期等）。

请记住，您想以相当特定的方式了解您的买家。您也许可以从联系列表中捕获年龄，位置和职位等基本信息，您只能通过询问才能学习一些个人和专业挑战。

Here are some other key background questions to ask your target audience:

• 描述你的团队结构。
• Tell me about your personal job responsibilities.
• What are the team's goals and how do you measure them?
• What has been your biggest challenge in the past year?

Now, make a transition to acknowledge the specific purchase or interaction they made that led to you including them in the study. The next three买家旅程的阶段will focus specifically on that purchase.

Awareness (5 Minutes)

在这里，您想了解他们首先意识到他们有一个问题需要解决的问题，而无需了解他们是否知道您的品牌。

• Think back to when you first realized you needed a [name the product/service category, but not yours specifically]. What challenges were you facing at the time?
• How did you know that something in this category could help you?
• How familiar were you with different options on the market?

Consideration (10 Minutes)

现在，您想对买方如何以及在哪里研究潜在的解决方案的方式非常具体。计划插入以索取更多详细信息。

• 您为研究潜在解决方案所做的第一件事是什么？这个来源有多帮助？
• 您去哪里找到更多信息？

If they don't come up organically, ask about search engines, websites visited, people consulted, and so on. Probe, as appropriate, with some of the following questions:

• 您是如何找到该来源的？
• 您是如何使用供应商网站的？
• 您在Google上专门搜索了哪些单词？
• 有多帮助？怎么会更好？
• Who provided the most (and least) helpful information? What did that look like?
• Tell me about your experiences with the sales people from each vendor.

决定（10分钟）

• Which of the sources you described above was the most influential in driving your decision?
• What, if any, criteria did you establish to compare the alternatives?
• What vendors made it to the short list and what were the pros/cons of each?
• Who else was involved in the final decision? What role did each of these people play?
• What factors ultimately influenced your final purchasing decision?

关闭

Here, you want to wrap up and understand what could have been better for the buyer.

• Ask them what their ideal buying process would look like. How would it differ from what they experienced?
• Allow time for further questions on their end.
• Don't forget to thank them for their time and confirm their address to send a thank-you note or incentive.

列出您的主要竞争对手 - 请记住，列出竞争并不总是像X公司对公司Y的简单。bob全站app

有时，division公司的公司bob全站app可能会与您的主要产品或服务竞争，即使该公司的品牌可能会在另一个领域付出更多精力。

For example. Apple is known for its laptops and mobile devices but Apple Music competes with Spotify over its music streaming service.

From a content standpoint, you might compete with a blog, YouTube channel, or similar publication for inbound website visitors — even though their products don't overlap with yours at all.

And a toothpaste company might compete with magazines like Health.com or Prevention on certain blog topics related to health and hygiene even though the magazines don't actually sell oral care products.

Identifying Industry Competitors

要确定其产品或服务与您的产品重叠的竞争对手，请确定您追求的行业或行业。使用教育，建筑，媒体和娱乐，食品服务，医疗保健，零售，金融服务，电信和农业等术语开始高级阶段。

The list goes on, but find an industry term that you identify with, and use it to create a list of companies that also belong to this industry. You can build your list the following ways:

• 在G2人群上查看您的行业象限：在某些行业中，这是您在二级市场研究中最好的第一步。G2人群汇总用户评分和社交数据以创建“象限”，您可以看到公司在各自的行业中被绘制为竞争者，领导者，利基市场和高性能者。G2人群专门从事数字内容，IT服务，人力资源，电子商务和相关业务服务。
• Download a market report:Companies like Forrester and Gartner offer both free and gated market forecasts every year on the vendors who are leading their industry. On Forrester's website, for example, you can select "Latest Research" from the navigation bar and browse福雷斯特'slatest material using a variety of criteria to narrow your search. These reports are good assets to save on your computer.
• Search using social media:信不信由你,社交网络造就伟大的排版any directories if you use the search bar correctly. On LinkedIn, for example, select the search bar and enter the name of the industry you're pursuing. Then, under "More," select "Companies" to narrow your results to just the businesses that include this or a similar industry term on their LinkedIn profile.

确定内容竞争对手

Search engines are your best friends in this area of secondary market research. To find the online publications with which you compete, take the overarching industry term you identified in the section above, and come up with a handful of more specific industry terms your company identifies with.

例如，一家餐饮业务通常可能是一家“食品服务”公司，但也认为自己是“活动餐饮”，“蛋糕餐饮”，“烘焙食品”等的供应商。bob全站app

一旦获得此列表，请执行以下操作：

• Google it:Don't underestimate the value in seeing which websites come up when you run a search on Google for the industry terms that describe your company. You might find a mix of product developers, blogs, magazines, and more.
• Compare your search results against your buyer persona:Remember the buyer persona you created during the主要研究stage, earlier in this article? Use it to examine how likely a publication you found through Google could steal website traffic from you. If the content the website publishes seems like the stuff your buyer persona would want to see, it's a potential competitor, and should be added to your list of competitors.

After a series of similar Google searches for the industry terms you identify with, look for repetition in the website domains that have come up.

检查您进行的每个搜索的前两个或三个结果页面。这些网站对它们在您的行业中创建的内容显然受到尊重，当您构建自己的视频，报告，网页和博客文章库时，应仔细观看。