Your Marketing Research Plan

A marketing research plan always needs to be part of your overall business plan.

For example, without good market research it will be difficult for you to know how your customers feel about your service and your products (until it's too late and they stop buying).

Your marketing research plan will help you gather information about your markets and help you complete a market segmentation and focus on target marketing. Research can also help you with decision making, such as whether or not to grow your business, or add new products or services. Research is also useful when you're planning on how to provide good customer service, and when recruiting employees and hiring additional sales people will have a positive impact, and much more.

Market research is more science than it is art, there are many books written on this subject.

This marketing research plan is a very high level view of how to do market research.

It is important to do it right because you will likely make decisions based on the research. There are marketing research firms who can help you with this research but it is important that you first understand how market research is done.

9 Steps to Your Marketing Research Plan

1. Before you start doing marketing research, you must define what it is you want researched (your management question or problem). Include in your definition a description of the market or audience; your relationship with that market - are you currently operating in the market or are you trying to enter it; do you have mail lists, phone lists, contact information; your management question or questions; your estimated budget - time and money and resources.
2. Then define the research question or problem statement (some researchers use descriptive hypothesis statements - there are other types of hypotheses too).

   Make sure the question is specific enough to conduct research (you don't want to frame a broad question to which you will get broad answers - not so helpful in your decision making process). The most important part of all market research is asking the question or proposing the hypothesis correctly.

• A descriptive hypothesis example: In Seattle, the December seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is 3.4 per cent of the labor force.
• A research question example: What is the December unemployment rate in Seattle?

A descriptive hypothesis can be proved true or false. A research question discovers the answer. A good hypothesis or question must be testable and it must state the variables (e.g. above Seattle, January, unemployment rate). The above research question might have been proposed by a retail store owner looking to hire additional staff for the Christmas season. (This is a very simple research proposal but effective for keeping the examples simplified and easy to understand).

3. Develop a market research proposal. This would include defining your research design strategy, such as purpose and scope, time period, environment and type. It might even include your plans for survey development and launch.
4. Design the research study. For example, you could use secondary data (in the above Seattle unemployment question, you could go to the government's website to check historical labor statistics); market surveys, experimentation, sampling, case studies, focus groups, and more.

   Both qualitative and quantitative methods need to be used in market research study.

• If you choose a marketing research survey, some questions to consider:

• By mail, by email, on your website, by-phone or in-person?
• Do you want to collect the data over a period of time: contacting your survey group weekly, monthly, annually for updates? Or is it a one-time survey?
• Are your questions going to be open-ended or scaled (a ranking system)?
• How will you measure validity, reliability and accuracy?
• If doing in-person or by-phone interviews, do the interviewers need training?
• How large should the sample size be (in terms of representing the overall market)?

• You can see how technically challenging and time consuming this might be.

5. Once you've designed your market research proposal, you need to to define the resource allocation and budget for the plan. Your approval, or go-ahead, needs to consider the value of the research and your expected outcome. Spending a lot of time and money on a small decision is wasteful and not effective.
6. Do a test of your market research proposal design. For example, have several people do the survey you've designed. After they've completed it, ask them if they fully understood every question. Find out if there was any misunderstanding or confusion and adjust your design if necessary
7. Proceed with the data collection within the defined time period and sample.
8. Analyze and interpret the data. Look for patterns. Develop summaries. Apply statistical analysis techniques.
9. Report the results. And make recommendations based on the results.

Once the marketing research plan is completed and the results are reported, you and your management team must make decisions.

If you are not going to act on the outcome, don't do the research! Commit to acting on the outcome before you start the process. If you don't believe the outcome, then have a different look at the data or invest the time to do the research from a different perspective, and move forward.

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