At the heart of every great marketing strategy is market research. It’s the only way you can truly intimately understand your industry, customers, and competitors. Each execution of market research can be broken into one of the four overarching types of market research. To make it easier to refine your marketing research efforts, we’re informing you about the four types of market research to ensure that your marketing strategies have all the data and information you need, and make them successful. Why is market research important? Market research is vital since it helps to identify your marketing strategy’s strengths and weaknesses. While following your marketing as a business is important, you need to have that analytical understanding of what your customers want, and what your competitors are doing to be successful over time. Market research can help you uncover such quantitative data, and gain a better understanding of your business’ size and scope. Another advantage of market research is the ability to identify competitors in your sector. Most importantly, market research gives insight into your target audience as well. For a better understanding of customer preferences, you need to do market research. 4 different types of market research Primary Research Primary research refers to the data or information about the first party. First-party data or information is all the data and information that you have collected on your own, that you do not quote the work of any other source. Primary-market research examples include: Focus groups Interviews Polls Surveys This type of market research can help with data and information that comes directly from your customers to strengthen your marketing strategy. Secondary Research Secondary research refers to data or information obtained from second parties or third parties. Second- and third-party data are collected from what’s already on the market. The research does not come from you, but other companies or organizations. Subsequent market research examples include: Articles eBooks Infographics Videos White papers This kind of market research can help you get a better understanding of the whole of your business. Qualitative Research Qualitative research refers to gathering data that cannot be measured. Primary or secondary research can be qualitative. To find out how customers feel about your product or service, you can use primary market research methods, such as interviews, polls, and surveys. The purpose of this is to understand how they think. You can ask such open-ended questions as: What made you buy our service? How do you think our service stands up to competitors? What features do you like about our service and why? What areas do you think service could improve and why? This type of market research gives us insight into what customers are thinking about your business or service. Quantitative Research Quantitative research refers to the collection of statistical analytical numbers. Quantitative research can be primary or secondary as is qualitative research. This type of market research is about having your marketing strategy backed up by the figures. The stats are not interpretations which they are empirical proof. Could look like quantitative market research: Alexa Rank Bounce rate Pageviews Share of voice Social media followers Social media engagement Subscribers This data can act as a benchmark for where to spend more time and money in your marketing efforts.