Market Research Process: Steps to Gather Actionable Insights

Imagine launching a product you think people want, only to be met with silence on launch day. 

Or perhaps you’ve priced the product/service too high, and now you don’t have enough takers!

Sounds painful, right? But entirely preventable with the right market research process. Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a brilliant idea or a marketer looking to fine-tune your next campaign, market research is the quickest way to eliminate the guesswork. It clarifies your audience, competitors, and opportunities, allowing you to craft effective strategies.

Sit back as we walk you through everything you should know about the market research process!

What Is Market Research?

Market research is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. This data could include information about your target audience, competitors, or general market conditions.

Such analysis helps businesses understand customer needs, identify trends, experiment with ideas, and optimize strategies to achieve the best results. It also safeguards the time, money, and effort that would otherwise be blindly spent trying to help the product take off.

Think of it as your business’s secret intel. Rather than relying on your intuition, you put in the effort to source tangible data. This data highlights market gaps—what people want, how they behave, and how you reach out to them. As a result, these research findings offer clarity that allows you to make strategic decisions for accelerated growth.

Why should businesses conduct market research?

Market research is the sail that helps you navigate the disruptive waves of changing market trends and shifting customer expectations. ✅

Here’s why businesses should conduct market research:

• Understand the target market: You’ll collect data that helps you gain a 360-degree view of your target customers. This deeper understanding spans from their pain points and needs to behaviors and preferences
• Validate ideas before launch: Not every brainstorm translates into a viable product or service. Market research is the sandbox that lets you test your assumptions and champion your big ideas with evidence
• Craft messages that resonate: Having insights from your target market enables you to optimize messaging so that it resonates and converts
• Minimize risks: Whether you’re entering a new market or adjusting pricing strategies, market research findings offer data-backed insights that eliminate the guesswork and minimize risks
• Stay ahead of trends: Market research gives you a sense of evolving customer behaviors, tech shifts, and competitor success formulas. This keeps you a step ahead of the trends affecting the market while you pivot strategies and emerge victorious
• Improve products and services: Target audience and customer feedback allow you to introduce changes to your products and services for greater alignment. You’ll know what works and what needs improvement
• Make confident, data-driven decisions: Make informed decisions backed by solid data. This bolsters your product roadmap, marketing strategy, and sales efforts
• Communicate insights across teams: Tools like market reporting software make market research data accessible to all. Such visibility, paired with data analysis capabilities, puts everyone on the same page and amplifies individual efforts

What’s the Best Market Research Method? Here’s How They Compare

Market research methods can be broadly classified into two types: primary research and secondary research. 

Primary research includes market research techniques like surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observations. The goal is to collect new, firsthand data directly from the research participants. In contrast, secondary research analyzes existing data sources, such as reports, statistics, and publications.

Here’s a table that compares the different types of market research processes, mainly the primary market research techniques:

	Surveys	Interviews	Focus Groups	Observational Research
Definition	Surveys are structured questionnaires distributed to a large group	Interviews are one-on-one guided conversations	Focus groups are guided discussions with a small group of participants	Observational research involves watching users in natural or controlled environments
Primary Goal	Gather quantifiable data & trends	Explore motivations, behaviors, and attitudes	Test reactions, uncover perceptions	Understand actual customer behavior and contrast it with claimed behavior
Target Audience	Broad audience, specific segments	Individual users, stakeholders	Specific demographic segments	Real users or customers
Data Type	Quantitative	Qualitative	Qualitative	Qualitative
Time and Cost	Low to moderate	Time-intensive, costly	Moderate to high	Moderate
Best for	Validating assumptions, measuring satisfaction	Deep insights, complex decision understanding	Testing new concepts or messaging	UX insights, product usage patterns

The Market Research Process: How Businesses Turn Data Into Decisions

Market research isn’t a one-and-done activity. It is a continuous process that offers clarity with each iteration. Whether entering a new market, launching a product, or refining your business strategy, conducting thorough market research ensures you build on real-world insights—not assumptions.

From identifying the right questions to turning raw data into confident decisions, each step of the market research process lays the foundation for sustainable growth. Below, we break down this process into seven actionable steps that guide you from ideation to implementation:

Step 1: Define your research goals

Every successful market research initiative begins with clarity. 

Using tools like , the everything app for work, and with features like Docs, you can centralize your research goals, project briefs, and stakeholder feedback in a single, collaborative document. 

Use comments to gather team input and assign action items directly from the doc, ensuring everyone is aligned. Are you exploring a new customer segment? Measuring brand awareness? Validating a product concept? Pinpointing your “why” helps frame the questions you must answer.

Step 2: Collect data (primary vs. secondary research)

Once you’ve outlined your objectives, the next step is gathering relevant data. This typically involves primary research (original data collected through surveys, interviews, or focus groups) and secondary research (existing sources like market reports or competitor analyses). Primary data will give you specific and original insights, while secondary data will help you understand the bigger picture.

Forms lets you build custom-branded surveys that feed responses directly into your workspace as actionable tasks. You can map form fields to Custom Fields, assign task owners, and set priorities automatically, streamlining data collection and follow-up.

Remember to create your user persona at this stage! This will help you create personalized customer experiences and shape the rest of your research.

The Form Template is your ready-to-use workspace for organizing and automating market research from the ground up. Instead of starting from scratch, you get a pre-built form structure that’s fully customizable—ideal for collecting customer feedback, interview responses, or stakeholder input. 

Each form submission flows into your workspace as a task, with default statuses, Custom Fields, and team assignments. You can tag responses by persona, region, or campaign, and use those insights to track trends, analyze gaps, or launch targeted follow-ups. It’s a practical launchpad for building user personas, validating ideas, and managing research logistics—all in one place.

Step 3: Segment and analyze your audience

Market research is as much about your audience as it is about your competition. So here’s where you’ll probe into your competitors—what they’re doing, how they’re positioned, and where they’re succeeding (or struggling). Such analysis helps you discover whitespace opportunities without going through the trial-and-error process. 

Analyze their messaging, pricing, customer reviews, social presence, tone of voice, and product features to identify market gaps, unmet customer needs, and potential positioning opportunities.

Marketing analytics software simplifies the process by offering side-by-side comparisons and real-time benchmarking.

Use Task Tags to categorize insights like ‘packaging complaints’ or ‘ingredient confusion.’ These tags offer additional details compared to labels. You can segment responses by age, skin type, and region. Combining labels and tags makes it easier to visualize and spot trends.

You can also configure the Dashboards to display the different insight clusters and their frequency.

Step 4: Analyze competitor insights

Competitor analysis helps you contextualize your position in the market and discover gaps you can capitalize on. This involves studying competitor offerings, pricing models, customer sentiment, and marketing strategies.

Once the data starts rolling in, it’s time to make it usable. First, you need to convert unstructured data into its structured counterparts. Convert raw customer feedback, spreadsheets, and charts into usable insights.

Organize your findings around central themes: trends, outliers, repeated concerns, and surprising insights. Use visualization tools to make data analysis easier for all stakeholders involved.

Organize a competitive landscape matrix directly in a Table view, outlining key competitors and their differentiators. Compare features, pricing, packaging, formula types, and customer sentiment. You can also attach screenshots, web links, and social sentiment analysis as subtasks to centralize your research.  

Ask: What do customers love or hate about these brands? Which gaps stand out? This structured comparison helps you surface patterns and opportunities that generic overviews often miss.

Attach relevant screenshots, web links, or social sentiment analysis as subtasks to centralize your research, making it easier to revisit during strategic discussions.

Step 5: Organize and interpret data

Now comes the heavy lifting—turning information into insight. Data without direction is just noise. This step connects the dots between your insights and your next moves.

Turn high-impact insights into concrete action items. Your audience may prefer certain ingredients, a particular content tone, or a unique delivery format. Use these insights to adjust your product roadmap, creative copy, or pricing models.

Don’t underestimate your tech stack—AI marketing tools can help you generate messaging based on customer language.

It’s a clever shortcut to align communications with your audience’s voice, especially if you’re testing new channels or campaigns.

’s List and Board views help you cluster data into categories or insights. Create custom statuses like ‘Validated Insight,’ ‘Needs Review,’ or ‘Unsupported Claim’ to track the strength and relevance of each data point. Use Brain to summarize lengthy interview transcripts or feedback, extract key patterns, and generate draft insights automatically.

Learn about the best practices for using List View in :

Step 6: Present your findings

Great research is only as valuable as your team’s ability to understand and act on it. Summarize key findings, visual trends, and actionable recommendations in a clear and compelling format tailored to your stakeholders.

Dashboards are ideal for this step. Combine charts, task widgets, and tables to build a living report that updates automatically as new data comes in.

If you need a narrative format, compile everything in Docs—embed visualizations, link tasks, and even attach raw data files for reference. If you’ve documented your process well, it becomes a plug-and-play research library for future projects.

Step 7: Make data-driven decisions

With a clear understanding of your research insights, it’s time to move from observation to execution. Use the findings to guide product development, go-to-market strategies, customer outreach, or operational improvements.

Turn insights into initiatives to create an actionable roadmap in . Link research tasks to related goals, set due dates, assign owners, and track progress using Gantt charts or Timeline view. Use Milestones to mark key research phases and ensure your team stays on track.

Using for Market Research

We’ve already seen how supports market research across various stages. But this everyday app for work does more and how.

Enterprise Search lets you instantly find files, messages, and insights across your workspace and integrated apps (like Google Drive, Slack, and Figma), saving hours during research synthesis.

Effective market research requires more than data collection—it demands clarity, collaboration, and strategic execution. brings all this together in a single workspace, making it easier to manage complex research workflows and transform insights into informed decisions.

Align your research outcomes with business strategy using Goals

Market research is only valuable when it’s aligned with business objectives. Goals allow you to set clear, measurable targets—like completing competitor analysis or gathering 1,000 survey responses—and link them to specific tasks or lists. As a result, every research activity contributes to broader business outcomes and provides a clear path from insight to impact.

Bonus? You can collaborate with your product and sales teams in real time as you define the overarching goal.

Track progress across research stages with Milestones

Similarly, Milestones provides a high-level view of progress across key research phases, such as planning, accurate and actionable data collection, analysis, and reporting. 

Set milestones to track progress across research stages, spot delays early, and align your team with deadlines.

Here’s what Juan Casian, CEO at Atrato, thinks of using :

Turn form responses into research tasks with Tasks

Every step in the market research process—from drafting survey questions to analyzing industry trends—is managed within Tasks. You can assign task owners, add due dates, include attachments, and customize fields to track research type, source, or priority.

This task-level structure enforces accountability and transparency across the entire research workflow.

Here’s a quick rundown on the different types of Tasks:

Use Brain to summarize findings and surface insights faster

Turning raw data into meaningful insights often takes time.

Brain is your built-in AI research assistant, which is purpose-built to help you go from raw data to real insights faster. It automatically summarizes interviews, detects recurring themes across large datasets, and generates next-step actions—all within your workspace. Whether you’re organizing survey responses or distilling competitive intel, Brain lets you skip the manual synthesis and focus on higher-level decisions.

For desktop users, Brain Max takes the experience even further. It adds voice-to-text and text-to-speech functionality, so you can dictate research notes, tasks, or ideas hands-free—and listen to AI-generated summaries aloud while you multitask. You also get deeper context awareness: Brain Max can search across your workspace, connected apps, and the web to surface relevant files, insights, or summaries—even those you forgot existed.

Together, Brain and Brain Max bring advanced AI capabilities into your research workflow—so you can think faster, speak your ideas into action, and find anything you need in seconds.

Manage every step of research with the Market Research Template

Simplify your market research projects and business decisions with the Market Research Template

Plus, you get many templates you can easily customize depending on your use case. For example, the Market Research Template by is a plug-and-play workspace that helps you manage every stage of your research project, from goal-setting and data collection to competitive analysis and final reports.

Here’s why you’ll love it:

• Track every research task with built-in statuses and timelines
• Organize insights from surveys, interviews, and competitor research in pre-built lists
• Collaborate with teammates in real-time via comments, Docs, and assignments
• Visualize your findings using pre-integrated Dashboards

Research Like a Pro with !

Market research is your launchpad for success. 

Whether identifying customer needs, testing a new concept, or analyzing competitors, the right research process helps you turn information into impact. And each step of the process brings you closer to developing something your audience truly wants.

Even though the market research process seems overwhelming, makes it easier in several ways. Every feature is designed to turn your research into real, measurable impact. 

Ready to convert market-led insights into action? Sign up for now!

Explore article topics