how to write marketing research report

What is a Marketing Research Report and How to Write It?

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There is nothing more embarrassing for a marketer than to hear a client say “…this doesn’t quite address the business questions that we need to answer.” And unfortunately, this is a rather common occurrence in market research reporting that most marketers would care to admit.

So, why do most market research reports fail to meet client expectations? Well, in most cases, because there is more emphasis on methodology and analytic techniques used to craft the report rather than relying on data visualization, creative story-telling, and outlining actionable direction/steps.

Now, our next big question is, how do you avoid your client’s dreaded deer-in-the-headlights reaction when presenting such a report? This blog post will answer this and much more, as we go through the following:

What Is a Market Research Report?

Why is market research important, differences between primary and secondary market research, types of market research, market research reports advantages and disadvantages, how to do market research, how to prepare a market research report: 5 steps, marketing research report templates, marketing research reports best practices, bring your market research reports a step further with databox.

The purpose of creating a market research report is to make calculated decisions about business ideas. Market research is done to evaluate the feasibility of a new product or service, through research conducted with potential consumers. The information obtained from conducting market research is then documented in a formal report that should contain the following details:

• The characteristics of your ideal customers
• You customers buying habits
• The value your product or service can bring to those customers
• A list of your top competitors

Every business aims to provide the best possible product or service at the lowest cost possible. Simply said, market research is important because it helps you understand your customers and determine whether the product or service that you are about to launch is worth the effort.

Here is an example of a customer complaint that may result in more detailed market research:

Suppose you sell widgets, and you want your widget business to succeed over the long term. Over the years, you have developed many different ways of making widgets. But a couple of years ago, a customer complained that your widgets were made of a cheap kind of foam that fell apart after six months. You didn’t think at the time that this was a major problem, but now you know it.

The customer is someone you really want to keep. So, you decide to research this complaint. You set up a focus group of people who use widgets and ask them what they think about the specific problem. After the conducted survey you’ll get a better picture of customer opinions, so you can either decide to make the changes regarding widget design or just let it go.

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Like most marketers and marketing managers, you want to know how well your efforts are translating into results each month. How much traffic and new contact conversions do you get? How many new contacts do you get from organic sessions? How are your email campaigns performing? How well are your landing pages converting? You might have to scramble to put all of this together in a single report, but now you can have it all at your fingertips in a single Databox dashboard.

Our Marketing Overview Dashboard includes data from Google Analytics 4 and HubSpot Marketing with key performance metrics like:

• Sessions . The number of sessions can tell you how many times people are returning to your website. Obviously, the higher the better.
• New Contacts from Sessions . How well is your campaign driving new contacts and customers?
• Marketing Performance KPIs . Tracking the number of MQLs, SQLs, New Contacts and similar will help you identify how your marketing efforts contribute to sales.
• Email Performance . Measure the success of your email campaigns from HubSpot. Keep an eye on your most important email marketing metrics such as number of sent emails, number of opened emails, open rate, email click-through rate, and more.
• Blog Posts and Landing Pages . How many people have viewed your blog recently? How well are your landing pages performing?

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics and HubSpot Marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring your leads. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your HubSpot and Google Analytics 4 accounts with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Marketing research requires both primary and secondary market research. But what does that mean and what are the main differences?

Primary market research takes in information directly from customers, usually as participants in surveys. Usually, it is consisted of:

• Exploratory Primary Research – This type of research helps to identify possible problem areas, and it’s not focused on discovering specific information about customers. As with any research, exploratory primary research should be conducted carefully. Researchers need to craft an interviewing or surveying plan, and gather enough respondents to ensure reasonable levels of statistical reliability.
• Specific Primary Research – This type of research is one of the best ways to approach a problem because it relies on existing customer data. Specific research provides a deeper, more thorough understanding of the problem and its potential solutions. The greatest advantage of specific research is that it lets you explore a very specific question, and focus on a specific problem or an opportunity.

Secondary market research collects information from other sources such as databases, trend reports, market or government statistics, industry content, etc. We can divide secondary market research into 3 categories:

• Public market data – Public sources range from academic journals and government reports to tax returns and court documents. These sources aren’t always easy to find. Many are available only in print in libraries and archives. You have to look beyond search engines like Google to find public source documents.
• Commercial data – Those are typically created by specialized agencies like Pew, Gartner or Forrester. the research agencies are quite expensive, but they provide a lot of useful information.
• Internal data – Your organization’s databases are gold mines for market research. In the best cases, your salespeople can tell you what they think about customers. Your salespeople are your direct sources of information about the market. Don’t underestimate your internal data.

In general, primary research is more reliable than secondary research, because researchers have to interview people directly. But primary research is expensive and time-consuming. Secondary research can be quicker and less expensive.

There are plenty of ways to conduct marketing research reports. Mostly, the type of research done will depend on your goals. Here are some types of market research often conducted by marketers.

Focus Groups

Product/service use research, observation-based research, buyer persona research, market segmentation research, pricing research, competitive analysis research, customer satisfaction and loyalty research, brand awareness research, campaign research.

An interview is an interactive process of asking and answering questions and observing your respondent’s responses. Interviews are one of the most commonly used tools in market research . An interview allows an organization to observe, in detail, how its consumers interact with its products and services. It also allows an organization to address specific questions.

A focus group is a group of people who get together to discuss a particular topic. A moderator leads the discussion and takes notes. The main benefit of focus groups is that they are quick and easy to conduct. You can gather a group of carefully-selected people, give them a product to try out, and get their feedback within a few hours/days.

Product or service use research helps you obtain useful information about your product or service such as:

• What your current customers do with the product/service
• Which features of the product/service are particularly important to your customers
• What they dislike about the product/service
• What they would change about the product/service

Observation-based research helps you to observe your target audience interacting with your product or service. You will see the interactions and which aspects work well and which could be improved. The main point is to directly experience the feedback from your target audience’s point of view.

Personas are an essential sales tool. By knowing your buyers’ pain points and the challenges they face, you can create better content, target messaging, and campaigns for them. Buyer persona research is based on market research, and it’s built around data that describes your customers’ demographics, behaviors, motivations, and concerns. Sales reporting software can significantly help you develop buyer personas when you gain insights after you collected all information.

Market segmentation research is carried out to better understand existing and potential market segments. The objective is to determine how to target different market segments and how they differ from each other. The three most important steps in writing a market segmentation research report are:

• Defining the problem
• Determining the solution [and]
• Defining the market

Related : 9 Customer Segmentation Tips to Personalize Ecommerce Marketing and Drive More Sales

A price that is too high, or too low, can kill a business. And without good market research, you don’t really know what is a good price for your product. Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy.

In a competitive analysis, you define your “competition” as any other entity that competes with you in your market, whether you’re selling a widget or a piece of real estate. With competitive analysis research, you can find out things like:

• Who your competitors are
• What they’ve done in the past
• What’s working well for them
• Their weaknesses
• How they’re positioned in the market
• How they market themselves
• What they’re doing that you’re not

Related : How to Do an SEO Competitive Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

In today’s marketplace, companies are increasingly focused on customer loyalty. What your customers want is your product, but, more importantly, they want it delivered with a service that exceeds their expectations. Successful companies listen to their customers and respond accordingly. That’s why customer satisfaction and loyalty research is a critical component of that basic equation.

Related : 11 Tactics for Effectively Measuring Your Customer Service ROI

Who you are, what you stand for, what you offer, what you believe in, and what your audience thinks of you is all wrapped up in brand. Brand awareness research tells what your target audience knows about your brand and what’s their experience like.

A campaign research report is a detailed account of how your marketing campaign performed. It includes all the elements that went into creating the campaign: planning, implementation, and measurement.

Here are some of the top advantages and disadvantages of doing market research and crafting market research reports.

• Identify business opportunities – A market research report can be used to analyze potential markets and new products. It can give information about customer needs, preferences, and attitudes. Also, it compare products and services.
• A clear understanding of your customers – A market report gives company’s marketing department an in-depth picture about customers’ needs and wants. This knowledge can be used to improve products, prices, and advertising.
• Mitigates risks – 30% of small businesses fail within the first two years. Why is this so? The answer is that entrepreneurs are risk takers. However, there are risks that could be avoided. A good marketing research will help you identify those risks and allow you to mitigate them.
• Clear data-driven insights – Market research encompasses a wide range of activities, from determining market size and segment to forecasting demand, and from identifying competitors to monitoring pricing. All of these are quantified and measurable which means that gives you a clear path for building unique decisions based on numbers.

Disadvantages

• It’s not cheap – Although market research can be done for as little as $500, large markets like the United States can run into millions of dollars. If a research is done for a specific product, the budget may be even much higher. The budget also depends on the quality of the research. The more expensive it is, the more time the research will take.
• Some insights could be false – For example, if you are conducting a survey, data may be inadequate or inaccurate because respondents can, well, simply be dishonest and lie.

Here are the essential steps you need to take when doing market research:

Define your buyer persona

Identify a persona group to engage, prepare research questions for your market research participants, list your primary competitors, summarize your findings.

The job of a marketing persona is to describe your ideal customer and to tell you what they want, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and what limits them. Finding out these things means you have a better chance of designing your products, services, marketing messages, and brand around real customers. There is no one right way to create a buyer persona, though.

For example, if you’re in an industry focused on education, you could include things like:

• Educational level
• Education background

It’s recommended that you create 3-5 buyer personas for your products, based on your ideal customer.

This should be a representative sample of your target customers so you can better understand their behavior. You want to find people who fit both your target personas and who represent the broader demographic of your market. People who recently made a purchase or purposefully decided not to make one are a good sample to start with.

The questions you use determine the quality of your results. Of course, the quality of your results also depends on the quality of your participants.

Don’t ask questions that imply a yes or no answer. Instead, use open questions. For example, if you are researching customers about yogurt products, you could ask them: „ What have you heard about yogurt ?” or “ What do you think of yogurt ?“.

Avoid questions that use numbers, such as “ How many times a week do you eat yogurt ?”

Avoid questions that suggest a set of mutually exclusive answers, such as “ Do you like yogurt for breakfast, lunch, or dinner ?”

Avoid questions that imply a scale, such as “ Do you like chocolate-flavored yogurt ?”

Market researchers sometimes call one company the top competitor, another middle competitor, and the third one small competitor. However you classify them, you want to identify at least three companies in each category. Now, for each business on your list, list its key characteristics. For example, if your business sells running shoes, a key characteristic might be the product’s quality.

Next, make a list of your small business’s competitive advantages. These include the unique qualities or features of your business that make it the best choice of customers for the products or services it offers. Make a list of these competitive advantages and list them next to the key characteristics you listed for your business.

You have just finished writing your marketing research report. Everything is out there quantified or qualified. You just have to sum it up and focus on the most important details that are going to make a big impact on your decisions. Clear summary leads to a winning strategy!

Related : How to Prepare a Complete Marketing Report: The KPIs, Analysis, & Action Plan You Need

Here’s how to prepare a market research report in 5 simple steps:

Step 1: Cluster the data

Step 2: prepare an outline, step 3: mention the research methods, step 4: include visuals with narrative explanations, step 5: conclude the report with recommendations.

Your first step is to cluster all the available information into a manageable set. Clustering is the process of grouping information together in a way that emphasizes commonalities and minimizes differences. So, in market research, this will help to organize all the information you have about a product, service, or target market and identify your focus areas.

A marketing research report should be written so that other people can understand it:

• Include background information at the beginning to explain who your audience is and what problem you are trying to solve for them.
• In the body of the report, include a description of the methodology – Explain to the reader how your research was done, what was involved, and why you selected the methodology you used.
• Also in the body of the report, include the results of your market research. These may be quantitative or qualitative, but either way they should answer the questions you posed at the beginning.
• Include the executive summary – A summary of the entire report.

The market research methodology section includes details on the type of research, sample size, any limitations of the studies, research design, sample selection, data collection procedures, and statistical analyses used.

Visuals are an essential part of the presentation. Even the best-written text can be difficult to understand. Charts and graphs are easier to understand than text alone, and they help the reader see how the numbers fit the bigger picture.

But visuals are not the whole story. They are only one part of the presentation. Visuals are a cue for the reader. The narrative gives the story, not just the numbers.

Recommendations tend to follow logically from conclusions and are a response to a certain problem. The recommendation should always be relevant to the research rationale, that is, the recommendation should be based on the results of the research reported in the body of the report.

Now, let’s take a look at some dashboard reporting templates you could use to enhance your market research:

• Semrush (Position Tracking) Report

Brand Awareness Report

Sales pipeline performance report, customer success overview report, stripe (mrr & churn) report, semrush (position tracking) report template.

This free SEMRush dashboard template will help you monitor how your website’s search visibility on search engines evolves on a monthly basis. This dashboard contains all of the information you need to make changes and improve the ranking results of your business in Google Search.

This Brand Awareness Report will help you to get a sense of your brand awareness performance in Google Analytics, Google Organic Search, and Facebook. Use this dashboard to track brand awareness the same way you track other marketing campaigns.

Are your sales and marketing funnel healthy and growing? How is your sales and marketing funnel performing? What are the key conversion rates between your lifecycle stages? With a pipeline performance dashboard , you’ll get all of the answers quickly.

This Customer Success Overview Dashboard allows you to analyze how your customer service team’s responsiveness impacts your business. Use this dashboard to assess the correlation between your customer service performance and churn rate. 

This Stripe dashboard tracks your churn rate and MRR growth in real-time and shows you which customers (and how many of them) you have at any given point in time. All you have to do to get started is to connect your Stripe account.

As we said earlier, there are no strict rules when it comes to writing marketing research reports. On the other hand, you must find your focus if you want to write a report that will make a difference. Here are some best practices you should keep in mind when writing a research report.

• Objectives – The objective of a market research report is to define the problems, identify key issues, and suggest recommendations for further research. If you answer them successfully, you’re on the right way.
• Don’t worry about the format – Be creative. The report could be in a form of a PowerPoint presentation, Excel sheet, interactive dashboard or even a video. Use the format that best fits your audience, but make sure to make it easy to read.
• Include an executive summary, scorecard , or a dashboard – This is really important because time is money, and most people don’t have time to waste. So, how to put everything important in a short role? Address all of the objectives and put them in a graphic dashboard or scorecard. Also, you can write an executive summary template (heart of the report) that can be easily updated and read by managers or CEOs.
• Use storytelling –  A good story always makes a great point because it’s so memorable. Your research report results can double the effect with a catchy story.
• Keep it short – It’s not a secret that we are reading so little in the digital era. Use a lot of white space and bullet points. Too much text on a page means less focus for the reader.
• Be organized – Maintain the order of information. It’s important for the reader to navigate through the report easily. If they want to find some details or specific information it would be great to divide all sections with appropriate references.
• Methodological information – Methodological details could be boring. Include only the most important details that the reader needs to know to understand the big picture.
• Use images (or other visualizations) whenever you can – A good picture speaks for 1.000 words! If you can communicate the point visually, don’t hesitate to do it. It would be a lot easier for those who don’t like a lot of text to understand your results. But don’t push them where you can’t.
• Create readable graphs – The crown of marketing research reports is a comprehensive graph. Make sure to design precise and attractive graphs that will power up and round your story.
• Use the Appendix  – You can include all secondary information such as methodological details and other miscellaneous data in the Appendix at the end of the report.

Market research reports are all about presenting your data in an easy-to-understand way and making calculated decisions about business ideas. But this is something easier said than done.

When busy stakeholders and executives grab a report, they need something that will give them an idea of the results – the big picture that addresses company wide-business goals.

Can a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF report meet those expectations? Most likely not. But a dashboard can.

Keep in mind that even with the best market analysis in the world, your market research report won’t be actionable if you don’t present the data efficiently and in a way that everyone understands what the next steps are. Databox is your key ally in the matter.

Databox dashboards are designed to help you present your market research data with clarity – from identifying what is influencing your business, and understanding where your brand is situated in the market, to gauging the temperature of your niche or industry before a new product/service launch.

Present your research results with efficient, interactive dashboards now by signing up for a free trial .

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What is a Marketing Research Report and How to Write It

In essence, a market research report is a document that reveals the characteristics of your ideal customers, their buying habits, the value your product or service can bring to them, and the list of your top competitors.

The marketing research report paints a picture of what kinds of new products or services may be the most profitable in today’s highly competitive landscape. For products or services already available, a marketing research report can provide detailed insights as to whether they are meeting their consumers’ needs and expectations. It helps understand the reasons why consumers buy a particular product by studying consumer behavior, including how economic, cultural, societal, and personal factors influence that behavior.

Furthermore, the purpose of writing a marketing research report is to make calculated decisions about business ideas – whether they’re worth pursuing or not. This requires one primary skill which is observing the pattern which is hidden in the User Generated Content (UGC) written in different tones and perspectives on the social web.

Simply put, writing a market research report is a vital part of planning business activities and serves as a neat way to assimilate all the information about your target market and prospective customers.

Now, there are two key varieties of marketing research report formats – primary and secondary.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Let’s take a look at the main recipes of how to make a market research report in detail:

Primary Research

This method of marketing research involves gathering firsthand information about your market and prospective clients. You study your customers directly by conducting:

• Interviews (either by telephone or face-to-face)
• Surveys and polls (online or by email)
• Questionnaires (online or by email)
• Focus groups discussions with a sample of potential customers and getting their direct feedback

Some crucial questions that you need to ask your prospective customers in your primary research are:

• What are the factors that motivate you to purchase this product or service?
• What do you like or dislike about this type of product or service already available on the market?
• Are there any areas you’d like to suggest for improvement?
• What according to you is the appropriate price for this product or service?

Primary research also involves analyzing competitors’ strategies, so you can find gaps and weaknesses that you can turn into your strengths.

Secondary Research

The second method of writing a marketing research report is all about analyzing the data that has already been published and using the available information on the web. That is, secondary research is done from reliable reports and statistics found on the websites of other organizations or authority blogs in your industry.

Sources can be:

• Public: This includes all the free sources like social media and forums, Google Trends, YouGov, and government sources such as the United States Census Bureau.
• Commercial: This includes industry insights compiled by research agencies like Pew, Gartner, Forrester, and so on. Typically, these are paid.
• Internal: This is the historical market data your organization already has in-house, such as the Net Promoter Score, customer churn rate, and so on.

Secondary data can help you identify competitors, establish benchmarks, and determine target customer segments or demographics – people who live a certain lifestyle, their income and buying patterns, age group, location, etc.

Market Research Reports Advantages and Disadvantages

Before we discuss how to write a marketing research report, let’s quickly take a look at market research report benefits and also some of the limitations in marketing research reports.

Advantages of Market Research Report

Here are the top reasons why you should invest in creating a market research report.

1. Gives a Better Understanding of Your Customers

The answers to questions like who will buy your product, what are the customers’ pain points, what motivates their buying behavior, and so on will be effectively answered with a market research report. Essentially, it will help you map out the full profile of your ideal customer and consequently, allow you to create tailored products and marketing campaigns.

2. Helps Spot Business Opportunities

As already mentioned, market research will give you insights about your competitors’ strategies, so you can find gaps in their offerings that you can turn into your product’s strengths. You may also find other business opportunities such as potential partnerships with brands that sell complementary products, or an opportunity to better upsell or cross-sell your products. For example, a keyword research report from a SaaS SEO agency provides an opportunity to acquire organic search ranking by creating in-depth, high-converting, and funnel-oriented content.

3. Minimizes Risks

Starting or running a business is synonymous with risk. In fact, nearly half of all small businesses with employees don’t survive for more than five years. Conducting proper market research frequently will allow you to stay on top of trends, and not waste your efforts and resources in things that would likely be fruitless.

For instance, before you launch a new product, conducting market research gives you a much better idea of the demand for your product. Or if an existing product is seeing a big drop in sales, market research helps you determine the root cause of the issue.

4. Facilitates Data-Driven Decision Making

When it comes to business decisions – data over guesswork, always. So, based on your market research results, you can make more informed decisions regarding the pricing, distribution channels, and marketing budget of your products.

Disadvantages of Market Research Report

As with anything, there are a couple of downsides to conducting marketing research as well.

1. Could Be an Expensive Activity

Conducting a comprehensive, in-depth research is usually a costly activity in terms of both time and money. To research the right audience with the right questions requires you to invest a lot of time. If you wish to use data by commercial market research agencies or get help from one such agency in conducting primary research, be prepared to spend a substantial amount.

2. Insights Gathered Could Be Inadequate or Even Inaccurate

Another problem often faced in marketing research is a lack of respondents. While you can figure out who is your target audience, getting them to fill out surveys and questionnaires can indeed be challenging. Plus, you’re using data you collected for drawing conclusions, which may be unreliable.

For example, by the time you act on the data you collected, it may have become outdated. This translates into poor decision making and the whole process may become counterproductive.

How to Prepare Market Research Report

Now, here are some concrete steps and guidelines for writing a marketing research report.

Step 1: Cluster the Data

First off, compile all the relevant data you’ve accumulated from your primary and/or secondary research efforts. Survey results, interview answers, statistics from third-party sources – bring it all together and then analyze the information to sketch out the profile of your target market.

Step 2: Prepare an Outline

Next, create a skeleton of the report so that you understand what information will go where. An outline with sections and subsections will help you structure your marketing research report properly. A typical report includes an introduction, background and methodology, executive summary, results, and a conclusion with links to all references.

With an outline in front of you, start by writing the front matter of your report – an introduction that provides a brief overview of your business and the reason you conducted the market research. Include a summary of the market research process and the results you have analyzed. For instance, you might have been gauging the feasibility of a new product, so summarize that your market research report is for a new product launch.

Step 3: Mention the Research Methods

An important next step is to clearly mention the methods used to conduct the research. That is, if you conducted polls, specify the number of polls, the percentage of responses, the types of people or businesses targeted, and the questions included in the poll. Tag all the resources for demographic information, such as census data.

Step 4: Include Visuals With Narrative Explanation

Visuals such as charts and graphs are an important part of any research paper. They make sure that the findings are easy to comprehend.

So, create tables, graphs, and/or charts illustrating the results of the research. Accompany it with a narrative explanation of the visual data. Highlight the inferences you made based on this data.

Step 5: Conclude the Report With Recommendations

Finally, conclude your report with a section that lists actionable recommendations based on the research results to facilitate decision making. For example, all the numbers may point to the conclusion that your customers desire a particular feature that no other product on the market is currently offering. In this case, it is clear that it’s a good idea to invest your resources in providing that feature and gain a competitive edge.

At the very end of the report, include reference links to all the sources and an appendix for supplementary materials and further reading.

Marketing Research Report Templates

Before you go, check out some templates and samples you can use to better understand the marketing research report structure, and maybe even use them to kickstart your report instead of preparing one from scratch.

• Market Research Report for New Product Launch
• Market Research Report for Restaurant (competitor analysis)
• Social Media Market Research Report

Writing a marketing research report is a tried-and-true way to gain a solid understanding of your target audience and competitors while enabling you to make more informed decisions and minimize investment risks. Sure, it may take considerable time, effort, and even money to conduct thorough research and prepare a report, but when done well, the ROI of it all is well worth it.

Shahid Abbasi is a Senior SEO and Content Marketing Analyst at Growfusely, a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.

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How To Present Your Market Research Results And Reports In An Efficient Way

Table of Contents

1) What Is A Market Research Report?

2) Market Research Reports Examples

3) Why Do You Need Market Research Reports

4) How To Make A Market Research Report?

5) Types Of Market Research Reports

6) Challenges & Mistakes Market Research Reports

Market research analyses are the go-to solution for many professionals, and for good reason: they save time, offer fresh insights, and provide clarity on your business. In turn, market research reports will help you to refine and polish your strategy. Plus, a well-crafted report will give your work more credibility while adding weight to any marketing recommendations you offer a client or executive.

But, while this is the case, today’s business world still lacks a way to present market-based research results efficiently. The static, antiquated nature of PowerPoint makes it a bad choice for presenting research discoveries, yet it is still widely used to present results. 

Fortunately, things are moving in the right direction. There are online data visualization tools that make it easy and fast to build powerful market research dashboards. They come in handy to manage the outcomes, but also the most important aspect of any analysis: the presentation of said outcomes, without which it becomes hard to make accurate, sound decisions. 

Here, we consider the benefits of conducting research analyses while looking at how to write and present market research reports, exploring their value, and, ultimately, getting the very most from your research results by using professional market research software .

Let’s get started.

What Is a Market Research Report?

A market research report is an online reporting tool used to analyze the public perception or viability of a company, product, or service. These reports contain valuable and digestible information like customer survey responses and social, economic, and geographical insights.

On a typical market research results example, you can interact with valuable trends and gain insight into consumer behavior and visualizations that will empower you to conduct effective competitor analysis. Rather than adding streams of tenuous data to a static spreadsheet, a full market research report template brings the outcomes of market-driven research to life, giving users a data analysis tool to create actionable strategies from a range of consumer-driven insights.

With digital market analysis reports, you can make your business more intelligent more efficient, and, ultimately, meet the needs of your target audience head-on. This, in turn, will accelerate your commercial success significantly.

Your Chance: Want to test a market research reporting software? Explore our 14-day free trial & benefit from interactive research reports!

How To Present Your Results: 4 Essential Market Research Report Templates

When it comes to sharing rafts of invaluable information, research dashboards are invaluable.

Any market analysis report example worth its salt will allow everyone to get a firm grip on their results and discoveries on a single page with ease. These dynamic online dashboards also boast interactive features that empower the user to drill down deep into specific pockets of information while changing demographic parameters, including gender, age, and region, filtering the results swiftly to focus on the most relevant insights for the task at hand.

These four market research report examples are different but equally essential and cover key elements required for market survey report success. You can also modify each and use it as a client dashboard .

While there are numerous types of dashboards that you can choose from to adjust and optimize your results, we have selected the top 3 that will tell you more about the story behind them. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Market Research Report: Brand Analysis

Our first example shares the results of a brand study. To do so, a survey has been performed on a sample of 1333 people, information that we can see in detail on the left side of the board, summarizing the gender, age groups, and geolocation.

**click to enlarge**

At the dashboard's center, we can see the market-driven research discoveries concerning first brand awareness with and without help, as well as themes and celebrity suggestions, to know which image the audience associates with the brand.

Such dashboards are extremely convenient to share the most important information in a snapshot. Besides being interactive (but it cannot be seen on an image), it is even easier to filter the results according to certain criteria without producing dozens of PowerPoint slides. For instance, I could easily filter the report by choosing only the female answers, only the people aged between 25 and 34, or only the 25-34 males if that is my target audience.

Primary KPIs:

a) Unaided Brand Awareness

The first market research KPI in this most powerful report example comes in the form of unaided brand awareness. Presented in a logical line-style chart, this particular market study report sample KPI is invaluable, as it will give you a clear-cut insight into how people affiliate your brand within their niche.

As you can see from our example, based on a specific survey question, you can see how your brand stacks up against your competitors regarding awareness. Based on these outcomes, you can formulate strategies to help you stand out more in your sector and, ultimately, expand your audience.

b) Aided Brand Awareness

This market survey report sample KPI focuses on aided brand awareness. A visualization that offers a great deal of insight into which brands come to mind in certain niches or categories, here, you will find out which campaigns and messaging your target consumers are paying attention to and engaging with.

By gaining access to this level of insight, you can conduct effective competitor research and gain valuable inspiration for your products, promotional campaigns, and marketing messages.

c) Brand image

When it comes to research reporting, understanding how others perceive your brand is one of the most golden pieces of information you could acquire. If you know how people feel about your brand image, you can take informed and very specific actions that will enhance the way people view and interact with your business.

By asking a focused question, this visual of KPIs will give you a definitive idea of whether respondents agree, disagree, or are undecided on particular descriptions or perceptions related to your brand image. If you’re looking to present yourself and your message in a certain way (reliable, charming, spirited, etc.), you can see how you stack up against the competition and find out if you need to tweak your imagery or tone of voice - invaluable information for any modern business.

d) Celebrity analysis

This indicator is a powerful part of our research KPI dashboard on top, as it will give you a direct insight into the celebrities, influencers, or public figures that your most valued consumers consider when thinking about (or interacting with) your brand.

Displayed in a digestible bar chart-style format, this useful metric will not only give you a solid idea of how your brand messaging is perceived by consumers (depending on the type of celebrity they associate with your brand) but also guide you on which celebrities or influencers you should contact.

By working with the right influencers in your niche, you will boost the impact and reach of your marketing campaigns significantly, improving your commercial awareness in the process. And this is the KPI that will make it happen.

2. Market Research Results On Customer Satisfaction

Here, we have some of the most important data a company should care about: their already-existing customers and their perception of their relationship with the brand. It is crucial when we know that it is five times more expensive to acquire a new consumer than to retain one.

This is why tracking metrics like the customer effort score or the net promoter score (how likely consumers are to recommend your products and services) is essential, especially over time. You need to improve these scores to have happy customers who will always have a much bigger impact on their friends and relatives than any of your amazing ad campaigns. Looking at other satisfaction indicators like the quality, pricing, and design, or the service they received is also a best practice: you want a global view of your performance regarding customer satisfaction metrics .

Such research results reports are a great tool for managers who do not have much time and hence need to use them effectively. Thanks to these dashboards, they can control data for long-running projects anytime.

Primary KPIs :

a) Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Another pivotal part of any informative research presentation is your NPS score, which will tell you how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to their peers.

Centered on overall customer satisfaction, your NPS Score can cover the functions and output of many departments, including marketing, sales, and customer service, but also serve as a building block for a call center dashboard . When you’re considering how to present your research effectively, this balanced KPI offers a masterclass. It’s logical, it has a cohesive color scheme, and it offers access to vital information at a swift glance. With an NPS Score, customers are split into three categories: promoters (those scoring your service 9 or 10), passives (those scoring your service 7 or 8), and detractors (those scoring your service 0 to 6). The aim of the game is to gain more promoters. By gaining an accurate snapshot of your NPS Score, you can create intelligent strategies that will boost your results over time.

b) Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The next in our examples of market research reports KPIs comes in the form of the CSAT. The vast majority of consumers that have a bad experience will not return. Honing in on your CSAT is essential if you want to keep your audience happy and encourage long-term consumer loyalty.

This magnificent, full report KPI will show how satisfied customers are with specific elements of your products or services. Getting to grips with these scores will allow you to pinpoint very specific issues while capitalizing on your existing strengths. As a result, you can take measures to improve your CSAT score while sharing positive testimonials on your social media platforms and website to build trust.

c) Customer Effort Score (CES)

When it comes to presenting research findings, keeping track of your CES Score is essential. The CES Score KPI will give you instant access to information on how easy or difficult your audience can interact with or discover your company based on a simple scale of one to ten.

By getting a clear-cut gauge of how your customers find engagement with your brand, you can iron out any weaknesses in your user experience (UX) offerings while spotting any friction, bottlenecks, or misleading messaging. In doing so, you can boost your CES score, satisfy your audience, and boost your bottom line.

3. Market Research Results On Product Innovation

This final market-driven research example report focuses on the product itself and its innovation. It is a useful report for future product development and market potential, as well as pricing decisions.

Using the same sample of surveyed people as for the first market-focused analytical report , they answer questions about their potential usage and purchase of the said product. It is good primary feedback on how the market would receive the new product you would launch. Then comes the willingness to pay, which helps set a price range that will not be too cheap to be trusted nor too expensive for what it is. That will be the main information for your pricing strategy.

a) Usage Intention

The first of our product innovation KPI-based examples comes in the form of usage intention. When you’re considering how to write a market research report, including metrics centered on consumer intent is critical.

This simple yet effective visualization will allow you to understand not only how users see your product but also whether they prefer previous models or competitor versions . While you shouldn’t base all of your product-based research on this KPI, it is very valuable, and you should use it to your advantage frequently.

b) Purchase Intention

Another aspect to consider when looking at how to present market research data is your audience’s willingness or motivation to purchase your product. Offering percentage-based information, this effective KPI provides a wealth of at-a-glance information to help you make accurate forecasts centered on your product and service offerings.

Analyzing this information regularly will give you the confidence and direction to develop strategies that will steer you to a more prosperous future, meeting the ever-changing needs of your audience on an ongoing basis.

c) Willingness To Pay (WPS)

Our final market research example KPI is based on how willing customers are to pay for a particular service or product based on a specific set of parameters. This dynamic visualization, represented in an easy-to-follow pie chart, will allow you to realign the value of your product (USPs, functions, etc.) while setting price points that are most likely to result in conversions. This is a market research presentation template that every modern organization should use to its advantage.

4. Market Research Report On Customer Demographics 

This particular example of market research report, generated with a modern dashboard creator , is a powerful tool, as it displays a cohesive mix of key demographic information in one intuitive space.

By breaking down these deep pockets of consumer-centric information, you can gain the power to develop more impactful customer communications while personalizing every aspect of your target audience’s journey across every channel or touchpoint. As a result, you can transform theoretical insights into actionable strategies that will result in significant commercial growth. 

Every section of this responsive marketing research report works in unison to build a profile of your core audience in a way that will guide your company’s consumer-facing strategies with confidence. With in-depth visuals based on gender, education level, and tech adoption, you have everything you need to speak directly to your audience at your fingertips.

Let’s look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) of this invaluable market research report example in more detail.

a) Customer By Gender

This KPI is highly visual and offers a clear-cut representation of your company’s gender share over time. By gaining access to this vital information, you can deliver a more personalized experience to specific audience segments while ensuring your messaging is fair, engaging, and inclusive.

b) Customers by education level

The next market analysis report template is a KPI that provides a logical breakdown of your customers’ level of education. By using this as a demographic marker, you can refine your products to suit the needs of your audience while crafting your content in a way that truly resonates with different customer groups.

c) Customers by technology adoption

Particularly valuable if you’re a company that sells tech goods or services, this linear KPI will show you where your customers are in terms of technological know-how or usage. By getting to grips with this information over time, you can develop your products or services in a way that offers direct value to your consumers while making your launches or promotions as successful as possible.

d) Customer age groups

By understanding your customers’ age distribution in detail, you can gain a deep understanding of their preferences. And that’s exactly what this market research report sample KPI does. Presented in a bar chart format, this KPI will give you a full breakdown of your customers’ age ranges, allowing you to build detailed buyer personas and segment your audience effectively.

Why Do You Need Market Research Reports?

As the adage goes, “Look before you leap“ – which is exactly what a research report is here for. As the headlights of a car, they will show you the pitfalls and fast lanes on your road to success: likes and dislikes of a specific market segment in a certain geographical area, their expectations, and readiness. Among other things, a research report will let you:

• Get a holistic view of the market : learn more about the target market and understand the various factors involved in the buying decisions. A broader view of the market lets you benchmark other companies you do not focus on. This, in turn, will empower you to gather the industry data that counts most. This brings us to our next point.
• Curate industry information with momentum: Whether you’re looking to rebrand, improve on an existing service, or launch a new product, time is of the essence. By working with the best market research reports created with modern BI reporting tools , you can visualize your discoveries and data, formatting them in a way that not only unearths hidden insights but also tells a story - a narrative that will gain a deeper level of understanding into your niche or industry. The features and functionality of a market analysis report will help you grasp the information that is most valuable to your organization, pushing you ahead of the pack in the process.
• Validate internal research: Doing the internal analysis is one thing, but double-checking with a third party also greatly helps avoid getting blinded by your own data.
• Use actionable data and make informed decisions: Once you understand consumer behavior as well as the market, your competitors, and the issues that will affect the industry in the future, you are better armed to position your brand. Combining all of it with the quantitative data collected will allow you to more successful product development. To learn more about different methods, we suggest you read our guide on data analysis techniques .
• Strategic planning: When you want to map out big-picture organizational goals, launch a new product development, plan a geographic market expansion, or even a merger and acquisition – all of this strategic thinking needs solid foundations to fulfill the variety of challenges that come along.
• Consistency across the board: Collecting, presenting, and analyzing your results in a way that’s smarter, more interactive, and more cohesive will ensure your customer communications, marketing campaigns, user journey, and offerings meet your audience’s needs consistently across the board. The result? Faster growth, increased customer loyalty, and more profit.
• Better communication: The right market research analysis template (or templates) will empower everyone in the company with access to valuable information - the kind that is relevant and comprehensible. When everyone is moving to the beat of the same drum, they will collaborate more effectively and, ultimately, push the venture forward thanks to powerful online data analysis techniques.
• Centralization: Building on the last point, using a powerful market research report template in the form of a business intelligence dashboard will make presenting your findings to external stakeholders and clients far more effective, as you can showcase a wealth of metrics, information, insights, and invaluable feedback from one centralized, highly visual interactive screen. 
• Brand reputation: In the digital age, brand reputation is everything. By making vital improvements in all of the key areas above, you will meet your customers’ needs head-on with consistency while finding innovative ways to stand out from your competitors. These are the key ingredients of long-term success.

How To Present Market Research Analysis Results?

Here we look at how you should present your research reports, considering the steps it takes to connect with the outcomes you need to succeed:

• Collect your data 

As with any reporting process, you first and foremost need to collect the data you’ll use to conduct your studies. Businesses conduct research studies to analyze their brand awareness, identity, and influence in the market. For product development and pricing decisions, among many others. That said, there are many ways to collect information for a market research report. Among some of the most popular ones, we find: 

• Surveys: Probably the most common way to collect research data, surveys can come in the form of open or closed questions that can be answered anonymously. They are the cheapest and fastest way to collect insights about your customers and business. 
• Interviews : These are face-to-face discussions that allow the researcher to analyze responses as well as the body language of the interviewees. This method is often used to define buyer personas by analyzing the subject's budget, job title, lifestyle, wants, and needs, among other things. 
• Focus groups : This method involves a group of people discussing a topic with a mediator. It is often used to evaluate a new product or new feature or to answer a specific question that the researcher might have. 
• Observation-based research : In this type of research, the researcher or business sits back and watches customers interact with the product without any instructions or help. It allows us to identify pain points as well as strong features. 
• Market segmentation : This study allows you to identify and analyze potential market segments to target. Businesses use it to expand into new markets and audiences. 

These are just a few of the many ways in which you can gather your information. The important point is to keep the research objective as straightforward as possible. Supporting yourself with professional BI solutions to clean, manage, and present your insights is probably the smartest choice.

2. Hone in on your research:

When looking at how to source consumer research in a presentation, you should focus on two areas: primary and secondary research. Primary research comes from your internal data, monitoring existing organizational practices, the effectiveness of sales, and the tools used for communication, for instance. Primary research also assesses market competition by evaluating the company plans of the competitors. Secondary research focuses on existing data collected by a third party, information used to perform benchmarking and market analysis. Such metrics help in deciding which market segments are the ones the company should focus its efforts on or where the brand is standing in the minds of consumers. Before you start the reporting process, you should set your goals, segmenting your research into primary and secondary segments to get to grips with the kind of information you need to work with to achieve effective results.

3. Segment your customers:

To give your market research efforts more context, you should segment your customers into different groups according to the preferences outlined in the survey or feedback results or by examining behavioral or demographic data.

If you segment your customers, you can tailor your market research and analysis reports to display only the information, charts, or graphics that will provide actionable insights into their wants, needs, or industry-based pain points. 

• Identify your stakeholders:

Once you’ve drilled down into your results and segmented your consumer groups, it’s important to consider the key stakeholders within the organization that will benefit from your information the most. 

By looking at both internal and external stakeholders, you will give your results a path to effective presentation, gaining the tools to understand which areas of feedback or data are most valuable, as well as most redundant. As a consequence, you will ensure your results are concise and meet the exact information needs of every stakeholder involved in the process.

• Set your KPIs:

First, remember that your reports should be concise and accurate - straight to the point without omitting any essential information. Work to ensure your insights are clean and organized, with participants grouped into relevant categories (demographics, profession, industry, education, etc.). Once you’ve organized your research, set your goals, and cleaned your data, you should set your KPIs to ensure your report is populated with the right visualizations to get the job done. Explore our full library of interactive KPI examples for inspiration.

• Include competitor’s analysis 

Whether you are doing product innovation research, customer demographics, pricing, or any other, including some level of insights about competitors in your reports is always recommended as it can help your business or client better understand where they stand in the market. That being said, competitor analysis is not as easy as picking a list of companies in the same industry and listing them. Your main competitor can be just a company's division in an entirely different industry. For example, Apple Music competes with Spotify even though Apple is a technology company. Therefore, it is important to carefully analyze competitors from a general but detailed level. 

Providing this kind of information in your reports can also help you find areas that competitors are not exploiting or that are weaker and use them to your advantage to become a market leader. 

• Produce your summary:

To complement your previous efforts, writing an executive summary of one or two pages that will explain the general idea of the report is advisable. Then come the usual body parts:

• An introduction providing background information, target audience, and objectives;
• The qualitative research describes the participants in the research and why they are relevant to the business;
• The survey research outlines the questions asked and answered;
• A summary of the insights and metrics used to draw the conclusions, the research methods chosen, and why;
• A presentation of the findings based on your research and an in-depth explanation of these conclusions.
• Use a mix of visualizations:

When presenting your results and discoveries, you should aim to use a balanced mix of text, graphs, charts, and interactive visualizations.

Using your summary as a guide, you should decide which type of visualization will present each specific piece of market research data most effectively (often, the easier to understand and more accessible, the better).

Doing so will allow you to create a story that will put your research information into a living, breathing context, providing a level of insight you need to transform industry, competitor, or consumer info or feedback into actionable strategies and initiatives.

• Be careful not to mislead 

Expanding on the point above, using a mix of visuals can prove highly valuable in presenting your results in an engaging and understandable way. That being said, when not used correctly, graphs and charts can also become misleading. This is a popular practice in the media, news, and politics, where designers tweak the visuals to manipulate the masses into believing a certain conclusion. This is a very unethical practice that can also happen by mistake when you don’t pick the right chart or are not using it in the correct way. Therefore, it is important to outline the message you are trying to convey and pick the chart type that will best suit those needs. 

Additionally, you should also be careful with the data you choose to display, as it can also become misleading. This can happen if you, for example, cherry-pick data, which means only showing insights that prove a conclusion instead of the bigger picture. Or confusing correlation with causation, which means assuming that because two events happened simultaneously, one caused the other. 

Being aware of these practices is of utmost importance as objectivity is crucial when it comes to dealing with data analytics, especially if you are presenting results to clients. Our guides on misleading statistics and misleading data visualizations can help you learn more about this important topic. 

• Use professional dashboards:

To optimize your market research discoveries, you must work with a dynamic business dashboard . Not only are modern dashboards presentable and customizable, but they will offer you past, predictive, and real-time insights that are accurate, interactive, and yield long-lasting results.

All market research reports companies or businesses gathering industry or consumer-based information will benefit from professional dashboards, as they offer a highly powerful means of presenting your data in a way everyone can understand. And when that happens, everyone wins.

Did you know? The interactive nature of modern dashboards like datapine also offers the ability to quickly filter specific pockets of information with ease, offering swift access to invaluable insights.

• Prioritize interactivity 

The times when reports were static are long gone. Today, to extract the maximum value out of your research data, you need to be able to explore the information and answer any critical questions that arise during the presentation of results. To do so, modern reporting tools provide multiple interactivity features to help you bring your research results to life. 

For instance, a drill-down filter lets you go into lower levels of hierarchical data without generating another graph. For example, imagine you surveyed customers from 10 different countries. In your report, you have a chart displaying the number of customers by country, but you want to analyze a specific country in detail. A drill down filter would enable you to click on a specific country and display data by city on that same chart. Even better, a global filter would allow you to filter the entire report to show only results for that specific country. 

Through the use of interactive filters, such as the one we just mentioned, you’ll not only make the presentation of results more efficient and profound, but you’ll also avoid generating pages-long reports to display static results. All your information will be displayed in a single interactive page that can be filtered and explored upon need.  

• Customize the reports 

This is a tip that is valuable for any kind of research report, especially when it comes to agencies that are reporting to external clients. Customizing the report to match your client’s colors, logo, font, and overall branding will help them grasp the data better, thanks to a familiar environment. This is an invaluable tip as often your audience will not feel comfortable dealing with data and might find it hard to understand or intimidating. Therefore, providing a familiar look that is also interactive and easier to understand will keep them engaged and collaborative throughout the process. 

Plus, customizing the overall appearance of the report will also make your agency look more professional, adding extra value to your service. 

• Know your design essentials 

When you’re presenting your market research reports sample to internal or external stakeholders, having a firm grasp on fundamental design principles will make your metrics and insights far more persuasive and compelling.

By arranging your metrics in a balanced and logical format, you can guide users toward key pockets of information exactly when needed. In turn, this will improve decision-making and navigation, making your reports as impactful as possible.

For essential tips, read our 23 dashboard design principles & best practices to enhance your analytics process.

• Think of security and privacy 

Cyberattacks are increasing at a concerning pace, making security a huge priority for organizations of all sizes today. The costs of having your sensitive information leaked are not only financial but also reputational, as customers might not trust you again if their data ends up in the wrong hands. Given that market research analysis is often performed by agencies that handle data from clients, security and privacy should be a top priority.  

To ensure the required security and privacy, it is necessary to invest in the right tools to present your research results. For instance, tools such as datapine offer enterprise-level security protocols that ensure your information is encrypted and protected at all times. Plus, the tool also offers additional security features, such as being able to share your reports through a password-protected URL or to set viewer rights to ensure only the right people can access and manipulate the data. 

• Keep on improving & evolving

Each time you gather or gain new marketing research reports or market research analysis report intel, you should aim to refine your existing dashboards to reflect the ever-changing landscape around you.

If you update your reports and dashboards according to the new research you conduct and new insights you connect with, you will squeeze maximum value from your metrics, enjoying consistent development in the process.

Types of Market Research Reports: Primary & Secondary Research

With so many market research examples and such little time, knowing how to best present your insights under pressure can prove tricky.

To squeeze every last drop of value from your market research efforts and empower everyone with access to the right information, you should arrange your information into two main groups: primary research and secondary research.

A. Primary research

Primary research is based on acquiring direct or first-hand information related to your industry or sector and the customers linked to it.

Exploratory primary research is an initial form of information collection where your team might set out to identify potential issues, opportunities, and pain points related to your business or industry. This type of research is usually carried out in the form of general surveys or open-ended consumer Q&As, which nowadays are often performed online rather than offline . 

Specific primary research is definitive, with information gathered based on the issues, information, opportunities, or pain points your business has already uncovered. When doing this kind of research, you can drill down into a specific segment of your customers and seek answers to the opportunities, issues, or pain points in question.

When you’re conducting primary research to feed into your market research reporting efforts, it’s important to find reliable information sources. The most effective primary research sources include:

• Consumer-based statistical data
• Social media content
• Polls and Q&A
• Trend-based insights
• Competitor research
• First-hand interviews

B. Secondary research

Secondary research refers to every strand of relevant data or public records you have to gain a deeper insight into your market and target consumers. These sources include trend reports, market stats, industry-centric content, and sales insights you have at your disposal.  Secondary research is an effective way of gathering valuable intelligence about your competitors. 

You can gather very precise, insightful secondary market research insights from:

• Public records and resources like Census data, governmental reports, or labor stats
• Commercial resources like Gartner, Statista, or Forrester
• Articles, documentaries, and interview transcripts

Another essential branch of both primary and secondary research is internal intelligence. When it comes to efficient market research reporting examples that will benefit your organization, looking inward is a powerful move. 

Existing sales, demographic, or marketing performance insights will lead you to valuable conclusions. Curating internal information will ensure your market research discoveries are well-rounded while helping you connect with the information that will ultimately give you a panoramic view of your target market. 

By understanding both types of research and how they can offer value to your business, you can carefully choose the right informational sources, gather a wide range of intelligence related to your specific niche, and, ultimately, choose the right market research report sample for your specific needs.

If you tailor your market research report format to the type of research you conduct, you will present your visualizations in a way that provides the right people with the right insights, rather than throwing bundles of facts and figures on the wall, hoping that some of them stick.

Taking ample time to explore a range of primary and secondary sources will give your discoveries genuine context. By doing so, you will have a wealth of actionable consumer and competitor insights at your disposal at every stage of your organization’s development (a priceless weapon in an increasingly competitive digital age). 

Dynamic market research is the cornerstone of business development, and a dashboard builder is the vessel that brings these all-important insights to life. Once you get into that mindset, you will ensure that your research results always deliver maximum value.

Common Challenges & Mistakes Of Market Research Reporting & Analysis

We’ve explored different types of market research analysis examples and considered how to conduct effective research. Now, it’s time to look at the key mistakes of market research reporting.  Let’s start with the mistakes.

The mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes that stunt the success of a company’s market research efforts is strategy. Without taking the time to gather an adequate mix of insights from various sources and define your key aims or goals, your processes will become disjointed. You will also suffer from a severe lack of organizational vision.

For your market research-centric strategy to work, everyone within the company must be on the same page. Your core aims and objectives must align throughout the business, and everyone must be clear on their specific role. If you try to craft a collaborative strategy and decide on your informational sources from the very start of your journey, your strategy will deliver true growth and intelligence.

• Measurement

Another classic market research mistake is measurement – or, more accurately, a lack of precise measurement. When embarking on market intelligence gathering processes, many companies fail to select the right KPIs and set the correct benchmarks for the task at hand. Without clearly defined goals, many organizations end up with a market analysis report format that offers little or no value in terms of decision-making or market insights.

To drive growth with your market research efforts, you must set clearly defined KPIs that align with your specific goals, aims, and desired outcomes.

• Competition

A common mistake among many new or scaling companies is failing to explore and examine the competition. This will leave you with gaping informational blindspots. To truly benefit from market research, you must gather valuable nuggets of information from every key source available. Rather than solely looking at your consumers and the wider market (which is incredibly important), you should take the time to see what approach your direct competitors have adopted while getting to grips with the content and communications.

One of the most effective ways of doing so (and avoiding such a monumental market research mistake) is by signing up for your competitors’ mailing lists, downloading their apps, and examining their social media content. This will give you inspiration for your own efforts while allowing you to exploit any gaps in the market that your competitors are failing to fill.

The challenges

• Informational quality

We may have an almost infinite wealth of informational insights at our fingertips, but when it comes to market research, knowing which information to trust can prove an uphill struggle.

When working with metrics, many companies risk connecting with inaccurate insights or leading to a fruitless informational rabbit hole, wasting valuable time and resources in the process. To avoid such a mishap, working with a trusted modern market research and analysis sample is the only way forward.

• Senior buy-in

Another pressing market research challenge that stunts organizational growth is the simple case of senior buy-in. While almost every senior decision-maker knows that market research is an essential component of a successful commercial strategy, many are reluctant to invest an ample amount of time or money in the pursuit.

The best way to overcome such a challenge is by building a case that defines exactly how your market research strategies will offer a healthy ROI to every key aspect of the organization, from marketing and sales to customer experience (CX) and beyond.

• Response rates

Low interview, focus group, or poll response rates can have a serious impact on the success and value of your market research strategy. Even with adequate senior buy-in, you can’t always guarantee that you will get enough responses from early-round interviews or poll requests. If you don’t, your market research discoveries run the risk of being shallow or offering little in the way of actionable insight.

To overcome this common challenge, you can improve the incentive you offer your market research prospects while networking across various platforms to discover new contact opportunities. Changing the tone of voice of your ads or emails will also help boost your consumer or client response rates.

Bringing Your Reports a Step Further

Even if it is still widespread for market-style research results presentation, using PowerPoint at this stage is a hassle and presents many downsides and complications. When busy managers or short-on-time top executives grab a report, they want a quick overview that gives them an idea of the results and the big picture that addresses the objectives: they need a dashboard. This can be applied to all areas of a business that need fast and interactive data visualizations to support their decision-making.

We all know that a picture conveys more information than simple text or figures, so managing to bring it all together on an actionable dashboard will convey your message more efficiently. Besides, market research dashboards have the incredible advantage of always being up-to-date since they work with real-time insights: the synchronization/updating nightmare of dozens of PowerPoint slides doesn’t exist for you anymore. This is particularly helpful for tracking studies performed over time that recurrently need their data to be updated with more recent ones.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, companies must identify and grab new opportunities as they arise while staying away from threats and adapting quickly. In order to always be a step further and make the right decisions, it is critical to perform market research studies to get the information needed and make important decisions with confidence.

We’ve asked the question, “What is a market research report?”, and examined the dynamics of a modern market research report example, and one thing’s for sure: a visual market research report is the best way to understand your customer and thus increase their satisfaction by meeting their expectations head-on. 

From looking at a sample of a market research report, it’s also clear that modern dashboards help you see what is influencing your business with clarity, understand where your brand is situated in the market, and gauge the temperature of your niche or industry before a product or service launch. Once all the studies are done, you must present them efficiently to ensure everyone in the business can make the right decisions that result in real progress. Market research reports are your key allies in the matter.

To start presenting your results with efficient, interactive, dynamic research reports and win on tomorrow’s commercial battlefield, try our dashboard reporting software and test every feature with our 14-day free trial !

Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.

MARKET RESEARCH KIT

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

Updated: 02/21/24

Published: 02/21/24

Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.

Enter: Market Research.

Whether you're new to market research or not, I created this guide to help you conduct a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is market research?

Primary vs. secondary research, types of market research, how to do market research, market research report template, market research examples.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value effectively.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry. But if you ask me, it's hardly a crystal ball that marketers can rely on for insights on their customers.

Market researchers investigate several areas of the market, and it can take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the business landscape.

However, researching just one of those areas can make you more intuitive to who your buyers are and how to deliver value that no other business is offering them right now.

How? Consider these two things:

• Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It‘s very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition’s immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge.
• Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand.

The market research services market is growing rapidly, which signifies a strong interest in market research as we enter 2024. The market is expected to grow from roughly $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 .

Free Market Research Kit

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.

As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.

By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into the following:

• Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
• Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
• What's trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
• Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
• What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience
• Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
• Whether there‘s demand for the business initiatives you’re investing in
• Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
• Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.

As a result, you can make better business decisions.

To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get , consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.

Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.

That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.

It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.

Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:

• Exploratory Primary Research: This kind of primary market research normally takes place as a first step — before any specific research has been performed — and may involve open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of people.
• Specific Primary Research: This type of research often follows exploratory research. In specific research, you take a smaller or more precise segment of your audience and ask questions aimed at solving a suspected problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).

Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors . The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:

• Public Sources: These sources are your first and most-accessible layer of material when conducting secondary market research. They're often free to find and review — like government statistics (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau ).
• Commercial Sources: These sources often come in the form of pay-to-access market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew , Gartner , or Forrester .
• Internal Sources: This is the market data your organization already has like average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data that can help you draw conclusions on buyer needs.
• Focus Groups
• Product/ Service Use Research
• Observation-Based Research
• Buyer Persona Research
• Market Segmentation Research
• Pricing Research
• Competitive Analysis Research
• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
• Brand Awareness Research
• Campaign Research

1. Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.

3. Product/Service Use Research

Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.

4. Observation-Based Research

Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX , and which aspects of it could be improved.

5. Buyer Persona Research

Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.

6. Market Segmentation Research

Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.

7. Pricing Research

Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy . It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.

8. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition .

9. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs , rewards, remarkable customer service).

10. Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.

11. Campaign Research

Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.

• Define your buyer persona.
• Identify a persona group to engage.
• Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
• List your primary competitors.
• Summarize your findings.

1. Define your buyer persona.

You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.

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.

Use a free tool to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

Don't forget to share this post!

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5 Things to Remember When Writing a Market Research Report

Filed Under: Best Practices , Market Research , Reporting , Tools & Techniques , Quantitative Research

Lynne Bartos

Vice President and Marketing Content Strategist, Marketing

There is nothing more embarrassing for a researcher than to hear a client say “…this doesn’t really address the business questions that we set out to answer.” This is more common an occurrence in research reporting than most of us would care to admit. But unfortunately, much report writing these days falls short of expectations for those on the client side. This is likely due to more emphasis on methodology or analytic technique at the expense of clear graphics, creative story-telling and actionable direction.

What often happens during the report-writing process is that market researchers have their direct research client in mind. They neglect the fact that their direct contact must present these findings to the ultimate stakeholder in the process — someone in senior management or the head of marketing who does not function in the research realm.

We need to take conscious steps to break out of our little bubble to avoid some of the lingo that is prevalent in research circles. You know what I mean if you’ve ever found yourself presenting your findings to marketing folks. While peppering them with terms such as “mean,” “monadic,” “DK/NS,” “latent class,” and the like, you suddenly notice the deer-in-the-headlights reaction. Worse yet, your audience’s eyes glaze over completely. These terms are foreign to many marketers and, frankly, most of them couldn’t care less about such things. They simply want a viable solution to the particular business need they set out to address.

So, when writing a research report for my clients it helps me to keep a few things in mind….

Speak to Marketers in Their Language

Focus on what marketers care most about — getting customers, keeping customers, and increasing their share of the customer’s wallet. So tell them what is meaningful to them….

• How to position their brand
• How best to price it
• Who their best prospects are and how to reach them
• What message should they be communicating
• Who are their most loyal and valuable customers
• How do they keep them loyal to their service or brand

Net, net — put some Marketing-Speak into your report, and leave out the Research-speak.

Tell a good story

A good report tells a good story. So, how do you tell a compelling story? Start by getting organized!

• Develop an analytic plan that focuses on business issues and objectives — the questions that need to be answered.
• Outline how the questions will be.
• Once the data is in, all team members should know how the data relates to those question, and they can craft the best story together.

Remember, every page in the report should contribute to the story! If something doesn’t contour well with your story, stick it in the Appendix. How many hundred-page reports have you been subjected to where the charts are all in the same order as the questionnaire? Where is the story?

It’s also important to stick closely to your analytic plan when crafting your story. The analytic plan is what helps to keep everyone focused on why the research was conducted in the first place.

Insightful Headlines and Bullets

What I also find helpful in getting my arms around the story is to write effective bullets and headlines for the data presented. Too many people think an insight is reiterating the numbers that are in the charts. Remember, anyone can read the numbers on a chart – our job, as researchers, is to pull the deeper insights from seemingly obvious data.

Be Creative and Have a Llittle Fun

Creativity also comes into play! Package the story in a creative way. No one wants to see rows and rows of data. Make the report visually appealing so you don’t intimidate those who are going to be using the findings to help drive strategy. Avoid too much text and too many numbers.

And, don’t be afraid to insert some humor here and there. It reminds your clients that you are human and helps to lighten the tone and keep things relaxed.

Get to the Heart of It

And finally, probably the hardest part of the report process for any researcher is to get straight to the heart of it… what is the story – conclusions, implications, and recommendations. Go to the next step to tell them what the data MEANS, and what they might consider doing to maximize their investment.

And there is nothing sweeter to a market researcher’s ears than to hear a client voice saying, “Thanks, this really addresses the business questions that we set out to answer!”

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Writing a market research report is a tough skill to master. Read our 5 top tips to get you started for writing a successful market research report.

While data collection and results analysis can be highly in-depth and time-consuming processes to complete, they still only mark the beginning of your market research project. The next step is writing a market research report, which is a tough skill to master. The report must effectively communicate your research findings such as consumer trends, market trends, and competitor behaviour surrounding your target audience .

A market research report is a summary of research findings and insights uncovered during the data collection and analysis processes. Research reports usually contain information about a company’s competition, industry trends/opportunities, and recommendations for next steps based on the research questions being addressed.

A good research report helps guide decision-making and highlight market opportunities. You should be clear and concise but also detailed and comprehensive, keeping in mind that stakeholders must be able to interpret your findings with ease. This is no easy task, which is why we have listed our 5 top tips to get you started for writing a successful market research report.

Use language stakeholders can understand

Your market research report will be presented to many stakeholders, not all of which will have a strong understanding of market research terms, so it is important that you write in clear, simple language.

Do not assume stakeholders will understand without explanation, for example, all diagrams should be clearly labelled and accurately describe what they are displaying. It is helpful to imagine you are writing the research report for a reader who has no prior knowledge on the topic to ensure you are explaining your findings comprehensively.

Report on insights through storytelling

Writing a seamless research report is not only easier to read but also ensures you have covered all necessary elements. Work chronologically to unpack your research — What is it about? What did you discover? What should you do next? Your research report should build upon your “story” the further it reads and further support your final recommendations .

Share insights through visual reporting

Visual elements such as diagrams and charts deliver numerical information more clearly than writing. They also help to break up text and keep the reader engaged with the research report and can be easily referenced during presentations. Similarly, images and icons can be used to draw attention to certain findings and make formatting more presentable.

Turn data into actionable insights

Data is meaningless to stakeholders unless it is interpreted and presented with a set of actions or “next steps”. Your goal is to explain how the data you have collected can drive smart business decisions and why these decisions are the best course of action. Outline step-by-step connections to ensure all readers can clearly understand the relationship between data and action.

Avoid vague reporting

It is important to keep your research report brief, including only the most substantial points you want to communicate. All reporting must be supplemented with firm evidence and written in an assertive tone to convey certainty of your findings. Keep recommendations clear and concise, without straying too far from your main points — writing that goes off on tangents can distract from your main points.

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How to Write a Marketing Report

Last Updated: March 21, 2024 References

This article was co-authored by Michelle Arbeau . Michelle Arbeau is a Numerologist & Life Strategist, and the CEO of Authentic You Media and Eleven Eleven Productions. She’s based in West Hollywood, California. With over 20 years of experience, she specializes in numerology, mediumship, and business advice. In 2015, Best Businesses named her the Best of West Hollywood Celebrity Numerologist, and she’s been hailed as the #1 Numerologist in the World and the #1 Celebrity Numerologist. There are 10 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 303,543 times.

Your business may spend a large amount of time and money on marketing. A smart business owner needs to assess how well their marketing plans are working. Specifically, your marketing efforts should get the attention of prospects. Eventually, a percentage of those prospects should become clients. You can perform market research to ask your clients about the effectiveness of your marketing message. Companies summarize the results of their research in a marketing report. Use the results of the report to make improvements in your business.

Evaluating Your Marketing Efforts

• Market research is the process of evaluating how well your marketing efforts are working. Specifically, does your marketing get the attention and interest of prospects? Are you converting enough of those prospects into clients?

• The more specific you can be about the identity of your customer, the better you can address their needs. Ask yourself, "Who am I targeting with this product?" and "What do they want?"
• Look at your current customers. What's the average age? Gender? Education level? Personality? Lifestyle? Hobby? Occupation? Marriage status? Values? [3] X Research source
• It is also important to know where your customers are coming from. Sources include search engines, social media, backlinks, referral traffic, and subscriber lists.

• For example, based on customer surveys and your industry knowledge, you uncover a customer problem. In this case, customers are losing time working or studying when their cell phone dies. If they forget their charger, they may lose hours of productivity.

• For example, to solve the problem of dying cell phones, you create a phone charger built into a backpack. Your customers use backpacks to store computers and other work or school items. As a result, the worker or student can always charge their phone.

• Over time, more customers buy your backpack and like using the built-in phone charger. These clients also believe that your product is different and better than competing products. You are building brand equity with your customers. To find out more about brand equity, see how to build brand equity.

• You continually add blog posts, articles and other content to your website. Adding content drives traffic to your site. Your content also keeps a percentage of your audience coming back for new content.
• Your site offers an opt-in button for readers to subscribe to additional content that is emailed to them. This group gets a weekly email from you with new content links.
• You have an attractive home page that includes a picture of someone using your backpack phone charger. The site allows the user to easily navigate to your content page and to web pages with product information.
• You provide an e-commerce option for customers. Clients can buy your product online and receive their backpack in just 2-3 business days.
• This should also include information about the sales channels used, like online, bricks & mortar, types of retailers, etc. Analyze how well your product is doing in each of these channels.

• Note your market share compared to competitors and market share trends. Are you gaining market share, losing it, or holding your own?
• For more on market share, see how to calculate market share.
• Keeping a close eye on your ROI is essential in order to stay abreast of how much you’re spending on marketing versus your return on that investment. Comparing what you’re spending on marketing versus your return on that investment is paramount to a good report.

• Your report should include such items as definition of the market size, competitors and their marketing size, as well as estimates of market share.
• You can use the market report to make changes to your marketing process. These changes can help you get more business from the time and money you spend on marketing.

Writing Your Executive Summary

• The summary should include specific, numeric details from the rest of your report. These details should be condensed into bullet points and made prominent on the report. [8] X Research source

• For example, if your backpack charging company had plans to expand into purse chargers or another similar product line, include these plans in your summary.
• This should also include the sales channels being used by your business, as well as competitors and their sales channels. Are you different? Why? If not, do you have a competitive advantage that can be exploited in your marketing and sales efforts?

• For example, you could be examining how well advertisements for your backpack are reaching college students, as they would be a likely audience for your product. If your ads are primarily reaching adults, who don't generally carry backpacks, this would be an issue to raise in your evaluation.

• For example, if only 1 in 20 of your site's visitors actually buy one of your backpacks, you may want to reconsider the design of your websites, the ease of purchase, or the price of your product.

Completing Your Marketing Report

• You should also consider the fact that other competitors will arise if you are successful. Significant returns attract more competition, so if you don't have direct competitors now, rest assured that you will in the future. Have a plan in place to sustain your competitive advantage in spite of new entrants to the market.
• For example, perhaps you perceive that college students may be carrying backpacks less often as they switch to an all-digital education. You could remark on how this will hurt your business and explain how you will respond to it.

• To get the most out of your focus group, carefully plan the exact series of questions you want to ask. Your marketing report should include the questions you ask and why those questions are important to you.
• In your survey or focus group, ask people how they first heard about your product. If you’re the backpack company, you might determine that most customers find you when they read a blog post or article that is posted to your site.
• Document the results of both your surveys and your focus groups. Your report should provide both questions and responses. Give the reader the percentage of each type of response. For example, maybe 40% of respondents first learned about the backpack company by finding a blog post or article that was posted on the website.
• Your qualitative research (survey and focus group questions) may be 5 to 10 pages of your report. The responses to those questions will also be 5 to 10 pages of material.

• Evaluate the extent to which your customers view your product as different and better than the competition. If they don’t see a difference, dig into their responses and find out why.
• Say, for example, that most clients see you backpack and built-in phone charger as about the same as a competitor’s product. In fact, your phone charger includes a reinforced case that makes your charger much more durable.
• Decide on some conclusions. You conclude, for example, that your website needs to emphasize that your phone charger case is much more durable than the competition.
• You decide to make changes to your website and your other marketing communication pieces. After a period of time, you can assess these changes to see how they have impacted your market share. Perform more market research to evaluate the impact of your changes.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217345
• ↑ http://articles.bplans.com/how-to-write-a-market-analysis/
• ↑ https://www.inc.com/guides/2010/06/defining-your-target-markets.html
• ↑ http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelskok/2013/06/14/4-steps-to-building-a-compelling-value-proposition/
• ↑ http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/competitive_advantage.asp
• ↑ https://www.shopify.com/blog/13444793-how-to-evaluate-market-demand-for-your-new-product-idea
• ↑ http://www.marketingmo.com/strategic-planning/how-to-write-an-executive-summary/
• ↑ https://www.ironistic.com/good-marketing-report/
• ↑ http://www.tdbank.com/small_business/workshops/IdentifyYourTargetMarket/texttarget_market.htm
• ↑ https://neilpatel.com/blog/10-ways-to-make-customers-fall-in-love-with-your-business/

About This Article

To write a marketing report, start by creating a 1-2 page executive summary that provides a description of the company’s goals. Next, detail the objective of your research and evaluate how well the company is reaching their intended audience. Then, include figures that represent how many visitors to your website purchased the company's product. Additionally, report on the returns the company is getting from its marketing dollars so you can tell if the money was well-spent. To learn more from our Business co-author, like how to use the marketing report to make improvements, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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From Data to Insights: How to Write a Marketing Report That Converts

Whether you work as an in-house marketing manager or within an agency, you probably have to report your work to someone. Unfortunately, just doing great work with your marketing strategy is not good enough unless you can convince others about the progress and value of your marketing campaigns.

Nov 16 2022 ● 10 min read

Table of Contents

What is a marketing report, types of marketing reports, what to include in a marketing report, goals and executive summary, detailed analytics, website metrics, conversions and sales data, explanations of metrics, numbers, and marketing activities, creating a marketing report: a step-by-step process, determine the data sources, collect the data and add it to the report, create the report design, send out the report at your desired intervals, common challenges when creating marketing reports, #1 scalability, #2 flexibility, build a marketing report in whatagraph, pick a template from our library, start from a blank page.

For a long while, writing marketing reports was something considered tedious and time-consuming but thanks to modern tools and reporting systems, you can create marketing reports within minutes instead of hours.

Today, we’ll show you how to write a marketing report, no matter what type of platform or marketing campaign you are working on.

A marketing report is a document that shows the progress of an ongoing marketing campaign to interested parties — clients, managers, and leaders of different departments. A marketing report contains marketing KPIs and metrics that show the progress of your marketing efforts and how they affect the bottom line.

Depending on the person who is the target audience for the report, marketing reports will have different levels of detail. However, all marketing reports have one thing in common — showing what was done, how it was done, and what the results are.

There are plenty of reasons to create and send marketing reports to your clients or managers, but here are some of the most important ones:

• Goal setting
• Progress tracking
• More efficient communication
• Increased accountability
• More transparency for the client on where their marketing budget is being spent

In the old days, you’d send a marketing report using an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint file, or something similar. Nowadays, you can send marketing reports using marketing reporting software such as Whatagraph.

Depending on the platforms, the marketing plan, and the stakeholders reading the report, there are different types of reports that you can create.

Web analytics report

This is a more general type of web analytics report where you show the website performance, including website traffic, landing page performance, number of leads, organic search results, and more.

Search engine optimization is important for any online business, and you can report on it with this type of report, with KPIs such as organic traffic, inbound leads, non-branded search traffic, and more.

Social media marketing report

Whether you run Facebook Ads, Instagram, or TikTok Ads, a social media marketing report is a superb way to show clients what’s happening with their ads or organic performance.

PPC marketing is a favorite for many marketers because of how accurate it is and how well you can predict the ROI. Being precise with your metrics (click-through rate or CTR, cost per click, and others) is crucial for this type of report.

Here is an example from our PPC report template :

This way we can quickly compare the cost per conversion for every paid channel, as well as their share in total traffic.

Cross-channel marketing report

If you want to report on different types of marketing, such as email marketing, SEO, and others, you can do it in a single marketing analytics report . Just list the different platforms and key performance indicators, and you’re good to go.

Here’s an example of a cross-channel analytics report template :

Before you start doing the actual writing, you need to carefully consider who is going to read your report. Depending on the seniority of the person and their knowledge of marketing, the report can have a completely different structure and contents.

At the same time, consider the frequency at which your reports go out. The more frequently you send them, the more details you can cover. For example, a weekly report can cover a wider range of metrics compared to a high-level report you send out per month or let alone an annual marketing report .

With this in mind, make sure that your company’s marketing report includes:

The overall marketing goals should be the first element to include in your marketing report. Whether it’s to increase conversions, lower your cost per acquisition, or something else, you should report on how well your overall marketing department initiatives are contributing to reaching your client’s goals.

Note that a goal is not the same as an individual KPI. For example, lowering ad spend would be a goal while your average CPC is a KPI. If you’re wondering what type of goals to include in your specific report, using a marketing report template is a good idea.

The executive summary is a quick overview at the beginning of your marketing report. If anyone wants high-level marketing insights, this is where they can find them.

Once goals are out of the way, you can include detailed analytics for a specific marketing channel. For example, for SEO/content marketing, you would include:

• Organic traffic,
• Branded/non-branded traffic,
• Average keyword position,
• Keyword movements,
• Conversion rate from organic traffic,
• And many others.

Choosing the metrics that matter is essential, so only list the marketing data that impacts the overall goal. You can display this information in the form of numbers, graphs, bar charts, or similar visualizations.

A client’s website is the most important frontier for their marketing activities, so make sure to cover the most important website metrics and KPIs in your marketing report. Examples include:

• Page views,
• Bounce rate,
• Conversion rate,
• Average time on page,
• Average session duration,
• Traffic sources,
• And others.

Your typical Google Analytics 4 report has all of these and more, so it’s a good idea to link your Google Analytics 4 account to your favorite marketing reporting tool to get this data automatically.

Views, likes, and shares are great for market research, but they don’t pay the bills. A portion of your marketing report should be focused on the metrics that have an impact on the client’s revenue. These include:

• Cost per acquisition,
• The average revenue per user,
• Cost per click,
• Average deal size,
• Return on ad spend,
• The overall return on investment,
• And others, depending on the marketing channel that you’re using.

For company leaders, this is probably the most important portion of each report, so it’s worth your time to make it accurate, actionable, and pretty.

We recently ran research to find out what agency clients think about the reports they get. It turns out that many clients lack explanations of what the numbers in their reports mean. For example, you can include:

• A comparison of what a metric means against industry benchmarks. A 5% conversion rate for a website may sound poor to a layman, but in reality, it’s an excellent result.
• An explanation of what has been done in a specific channel. Let’s say you drove 30% more organic traffic in a quarter — explain how this was achieved with your marketing process.
• Explanation of the next steps. Whether the KPIs are looking good or bad, you can elaborate on them and explain what happens next.

Now you have a good idea of what a report is and what you should include in it, so let’s create one.

Depending on the type of campaigns you’re running and the goals you have for your clients, you’re going to use different platforms. For example, you could be using:

• Google Analytics 4,
• Google Search Console,
• Facebook Ads,
• LinkedIn Ads,
• TikTok Ads,
• Or something completely different.

First, determine which of these you’re using, and then you can collect the data from the dashboards in these tools. Doing this manually will take a lot of time and work, so it’s better to use a reporting tool like Whatagraph instead.

Let’s say you need to report on a Facebook Ads campaign that you ran, with several different ad sets, each with its own creatives and results. Copying these manually to your report can be time-consuming, especially if you must repeat it weekly or even more often.

Instead, use a tool like Whatagraph. Connect your data sources once to your report, and every time a new report is created, the data gets refreshed. You no longer need to spend hours digging through dashboards — just connect your platforms once, and the data gets filled and updated automatically in the future.

Things get even more complicated if you do a cross-channel analytics report, e.g. combining Google Ads with SEO performance data. Whatagraph lets you connect all of this in one place instead of going through different platforms. This makes it easy to create an advertising report and over a hundred other report examples.

Depending on the medium you want to use, you’ll create a different design for your reports. You could create one in PowerPoint or Excel, but this is not the year 2002, so why bother? There are also tools like Looker Studio (previously known as Google Data Studio), but they don’t allow for a lot of creativity in your design.

Instead, use Whatagraph to create a beautiful report in minutes. You can grab a report template (we have 100+ of them) and your report gets filled out with stunning…

• Bar charts,
• Single-value widgets.
• And much more.

You don’t have to bother with the details because the report templates have everything you need.

Once you start creating your report, you change all the details you want, such as the widgets, their placement, the colors of the design elements, and logos (yours and your client's). And for that fully custom feel, you can white-label the report and remove the Whatagraph branding.

Some clients want to get the data from your marketing team weekly. Others want to see it on a monthly basis . You need to ensure that whatever this interval is, you send the reports out on time and with the most accurate marketing metrics.

No need to worry, as Whatagraph lets you schedule your reports. Once you connect the data sources, the data is updated in real time. So, just set your intervals, and each digital marketing report will be delivered on autopilot.

Marketing reporting is essential, yet, large organizations often face difficulties when managing and consolidating their marketing data.

For companies, it’s the vast volume of data and the necessity to integrate data from multiple sources, while for agencies, the main challenge is custom reporting to a large number of clients with specific requirements.

Let’s take the example of Rekom Group , a nightlife industry leader with a presence across four countries and over 200 venues.

This company struggled to track all the assets divided by brand names and custom styles and ultimately bring it all together for both executive- and department-level analytics.

The main concerns were:

Solution: all-in-one data platform

Whatagraph was a natural match for Rekom due to the scalable nature of its reporting infrastructure.

Whether it’s hundreds of venues across multiple countries or multiple branches within one country, Whatagraph makes it easy to connect all marketing data from multiple channels in one report or dashboard.

Here, you can see all Rekom sources and well which channels are connected for each venue. Folders represent different countries, but Whatagraph allows you to create a custom folder structure depending on your business organization.

The success of marketing campaigns largely depends on data quality, which translates to having the right metrics in front of the right people.

Marketers spend a considerable time creating tailored reports for different clients, only to find that they can’t reuse the same report.

On the other hand, agencies that serve clients from similar industries regularly create similar reports which they need to edit one by one.

33social Digital Marketing is an example of a digital marketing agency that faced the same challenges.

At one point, this digital marketing agency from Charlotte, North Carolina, required functions that Looker Studio (Google Data Studio back then) couldn’t deliver.

As the agency grew, it needed flexibility to integrate and compare paid social media campaigns and Google campaigns.

Solution: native integrations and custom API

With Whatagraph, they can easily build insightful reports to compare their lead-gen channels. Such a level of flexibility was possible thanks to Whatagraph’s direct channel integration feature.

Whatagraph has native integrations to connect data from more than 45 marketing platforms, from social media and paid ads to email campaigns and CRMs.

If that’s not enough, users can connect any channel they have using a custom API, Google Sheets, or Google BigQuery.

Through a powerful API, data is pulled into Whatagraph clean, processed, and ready for reporting.

33social drives lead generation with multiple social media.

Apart from creating cross-channel reports with side-by-side metrics comparison, 33social is now also able to bulk edit reports. This feature comes in handy for an agency that focuses on clients within the same industry — in the case of 33social — home services and franchise companies.

Whatagraph gives you two ways to start a marketing report — from a template or from a blank page. Each path is easy to follow and intuitive, whether you have previous experience or not.

It doesn’t get any easier than this. Just grab a marketing report template , add your client’s marketing channels, and schedule sending at the arranged interval.

• Log in to Whatagraph,
• Click on the Create new button in the upper right corner,
• Select Create from template .

Once in the template library, use the drop-down menus to filter the templates into categories to find the one you need more easily.

Can’t find a template that fits your use case? Create one for yourself with ease! All you have to do is connect your accounts and drag and drop widgets on the blank report page.

• Go to Create new button in the upper right corner,
• Select Blank .

Now you can choose the channels and drag and drop the widgets you need. Customize each widget with custom metrics, filters, and separate data sources. You can also change the color and branding for each report you create and save it as a template.

But beware!

Creating new reports with Whatagraph is really addictive!

But don’t worry — even with the basic pricing plan you can create an unlimited number of reports and dashboards !

Why don’t you try and create one yourself?

Request a free trial of Whatagraph today and get ready to blow your client or manager away.

Writing a marketing report used to be a chore, but not anymore. It doesn’t matter what you’re reporting on or how many reports you need to send out, you can now do it in a matter of minutes.

Ready to create your first automated marketing report?

If you want a second opinion, check out the 10 Marketing Reporting Tools article and compare the best report builders in 2023.

Published on Nov 16 2022

Mile is the head of content at Whatagraph in charge of all content and communications for Whatagraph’s marketing data platform. A marketing heavy with almost a decade of SaaS industry experience, Mile has managed multiple content marketing teams without losing an ounce of his writing passion. The author behind some of the most-read pieces on our blog.

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9.2: Elements of a market research report

The market research report marks the culmination of the project, but it also marks the beginning of the recommendations’ implementation and action phase. Having established the decision problem, chosen a research method, identified a target population sample, collected and analyzed data accurately, and, hopefully, produced sound findings, the next step is to prepare the report and possibly present it to a group of decision makers. Usually, this involves writing a report and, occasionally, creating a slide show based on the report.

The six fundamental components of a research report are as follows:

• Title Page: This section provides an overview of the report, including its purpose, who requested it, when and how it was conducted.
• Table of Contents: This section lists all of the major sections of the report along with any graphs or charts, along with the page numbers where they are located.
• Executive Summary: This section provides a brief summary of all the details in the report, suitable for both executives and nonexecutives who may not have the time to read the entire document.
• Methodology and Limitations: The methodology section of the report explains the technical details of how the research was designed and conducted. The section explains, for example, how the data was collected and by whom, the size of the sample, how it was chosen, and whom or what it consisted of (e.g., the number of women versus men or children versus adults). It also includes information about the statistical techniques used to analyze the data. Every study has errors—sampling errors, interviewer errors, and so forth. The methodology section should explain these details, so decision makers can consider their overall impact. The margin of error is the overall tendency of the study to be off kilter—that is, how far it could have gone wrong in either direction. Remember how newscasters present polls before an election? They always say, “This candidate is ahead 48 to 44 percent, plus or minus 2 percent.” That “plus or minus” is the margin of error. The larger the margin of error is, the less likely the results of the study are accurate. The margin of error needs to be included in the methodology section.
• Findings: If there is additional research or secondary data that supports the study’s conclusions, it can be included in the findings section to help demonstrate that the study accomplished its goals. The findings section is an expanded, more detailed version of the executive summary that provides additional information about the statistics that the research uncovered and that support the study’s conclusions.
• Recommendations. The recommendations section should include a description of the course of action you believe should be followed in light of the research’s findings as well as the project’s objectives. Examples

Staff members have the most knowledge about the organization or business, so they will know what should and should not be included in the final research report and presentation. When preparing the report, it is important to keep the readership in mind. Avoid using technical jargon that decision makers and other readers will not understand; if you must use technical terms, explain them. Additionally, proofread the document to catch any typos or grammatical errors; ask a couple of people to proofread behind you to catch any mistakes you might have missed. Lastly, since many research reports are presented using slideshows, avoid trying to include every detail of the report on the slides. People attending the presentation will not have the time to go through the lengthy and boring material, and even if they do, it is unlikely that they will be paying attention to the presenter.

During or after the presentation, attendees can review the longer, paper version of the report so they can read the details at a convenient time, if they choose to. Instead of including all the information from the study on the slides, condense each section of the report down to key points and add some “talking points” only the presenter will see.

Albrecht, M. G., Green, M., & Hoffman, L. (2023).  Principles of Marketing . OpenStax, Rice University. CC BY 4.0

Author removed at request of original publisher. (2022). Principles of Marketing – H5P Edition . BC Campus Open Education. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Introduction to Market Research Copyright © by Julie Fossitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Blog Marketing 15+ Marketing Report Examples with Templates

15+ Marketing Report Examples with Templates

Written by: Jennifer Gaskin Dec 12, 2023

If you’re a modern marketer, you probably live and die by your company’s KPIs, and you can probably talk in detail from memory about your monthly traffic. But communicating that information to others isn’t always so easy, which is why your team needs a stable of marketing report templates.

Learn more about what a marketing report template is, why you need one and why you’re missing the boat if you’re not including engaging visuals in your marketing reports. And when inspiration strikes, use Venngage’s report maker and marketing report templates to create a professional, informative marketing report for your company or agency.

Click to jump ahead:

What is a marketing report, what is the content of a marketing report, marketing report examples for informed decisions, what is the use of a marketing report, how do i write a marketing report, what makes a good marketing report.

A marketing report is a document that analyzes the performance of your marketing strategy or the success of marketing campaigns, and/or makes recommendations regarding potential future campaigns.

A marketing report presents an analysis of all the data gathered from a particular marketing strategy or campaign, measured against a predetermined set of goals and key performance indicators (KPI). From there, you can understand what works and what doesn’t, and learn about ways you can improve future marketing efforts.

It can be a one-pager like this one, which focuses on a company’s website traffic across different devices:

But it can also contain multiple pages, like this marketing report that analyzes the performance of marketing efforts in Q3 as well as next steps for Q4:

As we’ll explore later, there are many types of marketing reports, but most often, these reports include marketing metrics like traffic and engagement rates.

Like many other types of reports companies generate, the content of a marketing report typically extends to facts and data.

In this case, though, the facts and data are most often related to the marketing efforts a company is undertaking. They differ from, say, financial reports, which will typically focus on metrics like sales, expenditures and revenue.

And just as a financial report can be used to gauge the fiscal health of a company, a marketing report can be used to better understand the state of a firm’s marketing efforts and how they’re measured against KPIs, like in the example below:

The most common types of content in a marketing report include:

• Projected outcomes
• Campaign results
• Impressions
• User analysis
• Recommendations

Of course, depending on the type of the report (which we’ll talk about in a second), the content can vary. Here’s an example of a quarterly marketing report that focuses on product sales and strategy:

Marketing reports have a wide range of uses, from keeping tabs on campaigns in nearly real-time to making recommendations about budget and strategy to better understanding users. The best use of a marketing report for your company will depend on what you’re hoping to get out of it.

Here are some good questions to ask before deciding what type of marketing report to use:

• What marketing data do we collect?
• How often do we collect it?
• Who makes our marketing decisions?
• What types of information will inform them best?
• How much time do we have to review reports?

Generally, you can divide marketing reports into two broad types: data-driven and text-driven.

While both types should, of course, have both data and text, the difference is that in data-driven marketing reports, the numbers are the star. Conversely, with text-driven marketing reports, the purpose is analysis or recommendations.

Let’s look a bit closer at the differences:

Data-driven marketing reports

Digital marketing report.

In our internet age, digital marketing accounts for the lion’s share of the average company’s marketing spending. In fact, in 2021, one report found that digital marketing comprised 58 percent of marketing budgets — and it’s expected to grow by another 15 percent in 2022.

This template, based on our analysis of Hubspot data , is an excellent entry point for how your company can better visualize all types of information for your digital marketing report.

We partnered with HubSpot to create this report, containing up-to-date data on marketing trends and insights you all need to know for 2022. Want to see the full report? Download it for free here .

Social media marketing report

For most companies, social media is one of their most important ways to reach consumers. Social media reports can cover broad areas or specific campaign results — or they can do both.

This social media marketing report presents the performance of three different social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) for a marketing campaign called “Make Someone Smile”:

If you want some more inspiration, here’s another social media report template for the same campaign. This particular one focuses on the planning phase of the campaign, as it talks about the objectives, the target audience, as well as the actual strategy:

You can certainly use both templates to plan and report on the performance of your social media marketing campaigns!

Monthly marketing report

Marketing isn’t a one-time, set-it-and-forget-it prospect, so having several templates on hand that can help your company track metrics in close to real-time is important.

Consider using a monthly marketing report template like this one, which is ideal for companies that need to get better insight into their user base.

Email marketing report

Email continues to be a critical channel for marketers, and email marketing reports are a necessity for modern teams. Given the plethora of metrics related to email marketing , it’s even more important for these types of marketing reports to be straightforward and simple to understand.

Weekly marketing report

While this template was created for a sales team, it’s perfectly applicable on the marketing side of operations as well. Using this type of template for your marketing team is an excellent way to make sure your colleagues (and executives) take note of important metrics as they occur.

SEO marketing report

Search engine optimization is one of the services most commonly offered by marketing agencies, teams and departments, so being able to chart things like organic traffic and engagement with charts like those in this report is crucial.

Did you know we did a survey about the role of visuals in content marketing? Check out the results of the survey here.

Marketing KPIs report

As they say in sports, stats don’t lie, and marketing teams often live and die by KPIs. Use a template like this to visualize how your campaigns are going on various channels and how well you are engaging with users.

Marketing statistics

In addition to keeping tabs on how successful your company is in marketing itself on a weekly or monthly basis, the concept of marketing itself can be the subject of a marketing report, such as in this example, which shares a series of marketing statistics.

Text-driven marketing reports

Marketing research report.

When your marketing report doesn’t need to focus on rapidly changing metrics, consider a template like this one that will allow you to dig into the WHY of your numbers, telling data-driven stories that can help your company’s decision-makers chart the best course for the company.

Learn more about using data to tell a story about your brand .

Marketing analytics report

Marketing analytics reports can be in-depth, as the previous example, or they can be short and sweet, sharing a few key metrics but focusing largely on taking the reader through the information with well-placed analysis.

Marketing strategies report

Whether you’re a consultant or an internal worker, marketing strategies reports can help you explain why you think a certain strategy or tactic is best. Use this template to sell your services or sell your higher-ups on a bigger budget or emergence into a new channel.

Marketing agency report

Marketing agency reports can also help your company establish its thought leadership in your space. Take a page from this template and forecast trends in your field or make a policy recommendation by creating a whitepaper.

Team marketing report

Use this project status template as a team marketing report to keep your department on track. Particularly if your marketing team is remote, ensuring everyone is working toward the same goal on the correct pace is critical. If you’re launching a new campaign, a template like this can help everyone visualize what’s to come.

Some marketing reports will be almost entirely data, meaning you won’t have to write much at all. Others can be very heavy on text, including analysis and recommendations.

A good rule of thumb, though, even if your marketing report does rely heavily on data is to make sure that each chart or table is clearly explained with a small header, usually above the chart. Here’s an example of how that looks:

Depending on its purpose, you could also provide more analysis or key takeaways within the body of your marketing report:

The easiest way would be to choose the type of marketing reports you want to create, pick a template of that type and edit using the existing content! If you want to make your marketing report reflect your brand, you can add your brand colors and logos using Autobrand:

And apply all branding elements to the report using My Brand Kit :

Regardless of whether it’s data-driven or text-driven, a good marketing report should tell you something you didn’t already know. In the context of a company or marketing team, that means providing insight about your marketing campaigns.

For example, if you’re creating a marketing report for your colleagues, they may already know that a certain social media channel is your most successful, so simply reporting those numbers may not do much good. A truly useful marketing report will help them make mental connections. That could mean showing that the previously mentioned channel has had a certain number of weeks of growth or decline, or some other useful insight.

Wisely using visuals can help in this effort. That’s because the human brain processes things like charts and graphs more quickly and more effectively than text.

This marketing report about user demographics, for example, can give readers information in the blink of an eye that they would need to read paragraphs of content to understand.

And even if they understood it intellectually, visualizing data can make information more memorable, and in the context of a fast-paced marketing department, making information sticky is critical. Related: 20 Professional Report Cover Page Examples & Templates [100% Customizable]

In summary: Marketing reports can tell you where your company sits in the minds of consumers — and where you need to go.

There’s no shortage of marketing data generated by the average company over the course of a day. In fact, in the time it’s taken you to read this post, your KPIs have probably changed a little bit. Harness the power of data visualization and analysis to enable better decision-making in your company.

You can easily create a marketing report using Venngage’s easy-to-edit templates . It’s free to get started.

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How to Write a Market Research Analysis Report

Estimated Reading Time : 5 mins

How well do you know your market? The answer can have a huge impact on your business success.

However, even doing market research has value only if you analyze and report on findings so that they can drive decisions and prompt action. Otherwise, you’re wasting resources. So to make sure you’re making the most of your market research, you might want to follow these best practices for writing a market research analysis report that will have momentum. With tips like these, you can reap the benefits of your efforts to understand market trends and buyer behaviors.

So, what exactly is a market research analysis report? In short, it is a summary of new insights and takeaways from market research. A market research analysis report should clarify the business market and help you better understand your audience. It refines your perspective based on qualitative or quantitative data to avoid your business making decisions based on “gut feeling” and “instinct” alone.

Essential elements of a market research report

Presenting a spreadsheet or making a slide deck visualizing the findings from market research is common. Many tools online make it easy to create market research dashboards, too. However, the market research analysis report digs deeper into the results to explore the “why” behind all those bar graphs and pie charts.

The analytical report uses data from the market research to glean important information and presents it in easily digestible ways. The report writer examines the customer survey responses, as well as social, economic, and geographical data, in order to learn more about:

• Brand awareness
• Brand identity
• Brand influence
• Customer satisfaction
• Product development
• Pricing decisions
• Potential product changes
• Customer intent
• Customer likes and dislikes
• Market readiness

A typical market research report begins with a summary, then is followed by a more detailed introduction. After describing the participants and outlining the methodology of the market research, a mix of text, graphs, and charts summarizes the findings. Finally, you’ll discuss the conclusions drawn, explain the justifications for those conclusions, and make recommendations.

To gain a deeper understanding of how effective market research can transform a business, consider exploring business growth case studies that highlight successful strategies and the impactful role of comprehensive analysis.

The market research analysis becomes a valuable tool for making your business more efficient, driving innovation, meeting the target audience’s needs, and accelerating commercial success.

Best practices for writing a market research analysis report

There are many ways to approach writing your report. However, these best practices can help you to focus the information you provide and encourage broader integration of the market research results.

Tell a story

Sure, a good bar graph can say a lot. But a story that gives your reader a deeper understanding of the findings is important, too. In market research analysis, your role is to unearth the hidden insights and trends to help shape business action.

The best approach to your storytelling is to go back to the goals of the market research. What did you aim to accomplish? Let those objectives provide an outline for your approach to sharing outcomes with your audience.

Synthesize your results

As the writers over at DataPine note, “Any market analysis report example worth its salt will allow everyone to get a firm grip on their results and discoveries on a single page, with ease.”

As the writer of a research report, it’s your job to focus in on the most relevant information for your reader. Make it easier to digest with an executive summary at the front. Also, use headers and bulleted lists to allow busy readers to quickly scan for the information they need when they want it.

Provide a global view

This may seem contradictory to the previous advice, but your analysis needs to consider several indicators in conjunction before making any broad statements. For customer satisfaction, for instance, you would want to analyze response data related to quality, pricing, design, and service to get the big picture.

Identify key stakeholders

You’ve worked hard to make an effective and concise report of results. Now you need to present the reporting to the right people. Consider who will benefit most from the information you’ve gathered. Also, look for people who can provide valuable feedback , as that can help shape your next market research effort.

Simplify your visuals

Just as you want your text to be easy to read and understand, you should ensure the visuals are easily comprehensible, too. Consistency can help . For example:

• Use the same scale on all graphs
• Maintain the same color palate throughout
• Include the exact question asked with the images
• Communicate the base size for each graph or table

Take advantage of appendices

In sharing market research results, you don’t want to distract readers from the important findings. Still, there may be more data or details that can be shared. You might also want to provide tables for every survey question or provide all the questions asked. You could also use the appendix to collect discussion guides and data collection forms.

This is not an opportunity to just dump everything else you couldn’t include in the body of the report at the end of the document. Rather, you can collate added information that relates to the main themes you discuss in the body of the report.

Edit your report carefully

Make sure you review your report before sharing it. Try to take an objective eye to your writing. Ask yourself:

• Is this making sense to the reader?
• Have I provided evidence to support my points?
• Did I organize the text and visuals in a logical way?
• Have I left any important questions unaddressed?
• Could I say anything more simply?
• Are there any grammar or mechanical mistakes?

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Home • Knowledge hub • How to write a market research report for a new product launch

How to write a market research report for a new product launch

When launching a new product to market, it’s imperative to be prepared with relevant information. You need a deep understanding of your market, how your products will benefit that market, the potential challenges you might run into, and much more.

This is why it’s so important to write an in-depth, professional, and relevant market research report. Not only to gather and display all the right information but also so that you can share that information clearly and easily with people within and outside your organization. This is important for a wide range of different reasons.

In this article, we’ll look at why market research reports for product launches are so important and show you how to do it as effectively as possible.

Why market research reports are important

Conducting a detailed and relevant market research report before you launch your new product is a good idea for all kinds of reasons. Here are some of the main ones:

• Get buy-in from senior decision-makers . When launching any product, you’ll always want the full support of the top decision-makers at your organization. This can be a tricky thing to acquire, especially if your team is relatively unproven. A detailed and informative market research report can be the deciding factor in winning their support, convincing them that your product is well-placed to succeed, and making it much easier to achieve your goals.
• Learn more about your customers and target audience . One of the main reasons to conduct market research is to understand your prospective customers in more detail. The work you do to compile a report will give you a clear and detailed understanding of what your customers want, what they already like, where they conduct their own research, and much more. This will arm you with the insights and knowledge you need to launch your product confidently and successfully.

Discover ideas for new products and how to improve existing ones . When you research your target market, you’ll likely stumble upon inspiration for new products in addition to the one you’re planning to launch. The feedback you get from your research will also be laced with ideas for improving and tweaking existing products

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How to write a market research report effectively

In the rest of this guide, we’ll show you what you need to do to ensure your market research report is as detailed, relevant, and valuable as it possibly can be. Let’s start with the type of information you need to include.

What you need to include:

Buyer personas.

This is a crucial part of getting to know your customers and the different groups they fall into. You should start by researching your target market members as much as possible through a range of channels — interviews, social media research, email surveys, and more. Then, divide them into demographics and create a detailed persona to represent each one.

This is an incredibly valuable step because it allows you to break down your market and make broad predictions about each group’s preferences, pain points, habits, and desires. If done right, this helps you target your future marketing much more accurately and effectively.

Understand your competitors

Getting to know your competitors is a key element of market research. It allows you to understand what you will be up against when launching your product and what segments of your market might be easier or more difficult to sway from their loyalty to your competitors.

Your research report should contain detailed information about each of your competitors and what they offer. What do their products lack that yours can provide? Why do your customers go to them? How dominant are they in your market? What kind of loyalty do they command? What are some of the keys to their success? All this will help you understand what you’re up against and strengthen your chances of success.

Who did you talk to?

Much of your market research will involve talking to various people and groups of people in situations like focus groups, interviews, and surveys. It’s important to document this side of your research carefully and include it in your market research report. Be sure to break down the people you spoke to into demographics and be as specific as possible — try to align this with your buyer personas.

This will help you understand what different demographics want, identify any areas you may have missed, and see any opportunities for segmentation or expansion, as well as providing clear visibility into your research process and allowing you to justify your findings and decisions to other company members carefully.

Clearly show what will happen next — how will you use your findings? 

When you present your market research report to decision-makers in your organization, their primary concern will be what you want to do with it. Research is only valuable if it has a practical application, which should be a key element of your report.

It’s best to be specific — create plans and roadmaps for campaigns, build strategies, and include timelines and carefully researched cost estimates. If you can present a clear and viable plan for your product launch, it will be much easier to gain the support and buy-in of the higher-ups in your company. Be ready to defend and justify these plans.

Primary vs Secondary Market Research

There are two main types of research you’ll need to do when preparing your market research report: primary and secondary. Here is the difference:

• Primary research . This refers to the first-hand information you have gathered during your research — straight from the primary source. Examples include interviews with individuals, focus groups, surveys, and information from sales teams. It helps add a human touch to your research, incorporating real people’s distinct voices and opinions.
• Secondary research. This is data that your company didn’t personally collect but is available in the form of things like public records, trend reports, and market statistics. While it lacks the specific human element of primary research, it’s a great way to gain valuable overall insights about your target market without having to conduct huge research projects yourself.

Convincing company decision-makers with your market research report

One of the most essential functions of a market research report is to convince your company’s key stakeholders that you are prepared for a product launch and have everything in place to begin the process successfully.

When creating your report, you should always have this goal in mind. Here are some ways to do that:

• Always clearly tie your research for business outcomes. For every conclusion your report reaches, explain what this means for the business and what concrete actions you will take as a result.
• Use as many stats and as much hard data as possible. Clearly express this data in the form of graphs and other visual aids. Show where your data came from, how you collected it, and how your findings will impact your product launch.
• Consider using Porter’s 5 Forces Model . This business model is aimed at understanding and explaining the fundamental market forces at work in any given industry. It can be illuminating to tie your research into this model.

A well-researched and detailed market research report is an essential part of a successful product launch strategy. It allows you to clearly understand your market, formulate concrete plans and strategies, and gain the support of your organization’s decision-makers.

Without one, you’ll be plunged into the dark, facing the monumentally challenging task of launching a product without the support of extensive research and data. To find out more about how Kadence can help you prepare a market research report and launch your product with confidence, contact us .

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We’ve been working with Kadence on a couple of strategic projects, which influenced our product roadmap roll-out within the region. Their work has been exceptional in providing me the insights that I need. Senior Marketing Executive Arla Foods

Kadence’s reports give us the insight, conclusion and recommended execution needed to give us a different perspective, which provided us with an opportunity to relook at our go to market strategy in a different direction which we are now reaping the benefits from. Sales & Marketing Bridgestone

Kadence helped us not only conduct a thorough and insightful piece of research, its interpretation of the data provided many useful and unexpected good-news stories that we were able to use in our communications and interactions with government bodies. General Manager PR -Internal Communications & Government Affairs Mitsubishi

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10 examples of great marketing research reports from 2022

Find inspiration for your next marketing survey report. See how industry-leading brands design, develop, + promote proprietary data reports.

By Katherine Boyarsky • Dec 28, 2022

B2B SaaS brands, and any other business that has a vested interest in helping their customers succeed, need the latest benchmark data to do so. And according to Google’s Helpful Content Update guidelines , “people-first content” should be created for a specific intended audience, and include the latest information. 

Today, brands are taking proprietary research, data analysis, and industry trends report creation into their own hands. Why? It gives them the ability to tailor the research to help their audience, and creates a steady flow of traffic, which improves brand awareness.  

Looking for content marketing support for your brand? We can help. Let’s Talk

The even more recent Google Helpful Content Update on the E-A-T content marketing strategy adds an extra “E” for experience, making it the E-E-A-T strategy now. That means that people who have firsthand experience with the topic they’re writing about will be prioritized. This is where I explain that I am the CMO of a creative content marketing agency ( CXD Studio ) that helps create or reports like the annual HubSpot State of Marketing Trends report, among others. Our team has been doing the content strategy, copywriting, data analysis, design, data visualization, and promotion for marketing research reports for almost a decade, and our reports have reached millions of readers. 

Here are the basics on how to produce an industry trends report campaign and inspirational reports from 2022. 

Reminder — creating any sized research report takes significant time, effort, expertise, and resources. Don’t try to take it on yourself, and plan enough time for each phase in the production process. There will be delays — build those into your timelines. 

Who creates marketing industry trends reports? 

Marketing research reports typically fall under the responsibility of the content marketing team within the marketing department. However, they might be owned by demand generation, sales enablement, a research/analytics team, or outsourced to a specialized agency or freelancer. Here’s who typically leads and executes marketing research campaigns:

• Market research companies
• Creative agencies
• Advertising agencies
• Freelancers
• In-house content teams

Types of marketing research reports brands can create

• Industry trends reports
• Benchmark reports
• Brand awareness surveys
• Analyses of product data
• Executive/decision-maker surveys
• User experience reports

10 examples of great industry trends reports from B2B brands from 2022

Use these marketing research report examples to spark your creativity from outline, to promotion, to format.

• HubSpot’s State of Marketing Trends Report
• Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work Report
• ConvertKit’s State of the Creator Economy Report
• DoorDash’s Restaurant Online Ordering Trends Report
• TINT’s State of User-Generated Content 2022 Report
• Spotify’s Culture Next Report
• HubSpot’s Building Winning Regional Marketing Teams Report
• Semrush’s State of Content Marketing Report
• Chicory’s Annual Recipe Usage Report
• Lightcast’s Workers Wanted Worldwide Report

How do you create an industry trends research report? 

Let’s break down the marketing research report process.

Phase 1: Background research, marketing strategy, and survey design

Identify your target audience, the goals of the report, and your survey questions. Try to ask a minimum of 10-20 questions, and don’t ask too many or you’ll fatigue your respondents. If you’ll be pulling product data, map out the questions that you want to answer from the data. 

Phase 2: Survey administration and data collection

Use a platform like Pollfish or Survey Monkey Audience to collect responses from a certain demographic, or collect data from your own audience using a basic survey tool. Alternatively, some companies choose to pull product data to learn about their audience.

Phase 3: Data analysis and key themes

Examine the data using pivot tables or more advanced statistical modeling programs. Look for statistically significant themes and patterns, and analyze them in the context of the past few years. 

Phase 4: Report outline and copywriting

Include key themes as chapters, and plan for calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout where it makes sense to include them. Pull out actionable tips for your audience so they can make the most out of the data. Use your brand’s copywriting guidelines to match the right tone for the audience.

Phase 5: Data visualization and report design

Design the charts, statistics, and data visualizations using your brand identity, and create shareable images for social media. Design the report as a web page or downloadable PDF using brand fonts, colors, imagery, iconography, and overall style.

Phase 6: Promotion and distribution

Plan for a launch blog post with key findings, emails to your audience, social media posts, paid advertising, and individual posts from your team, employees, or influencers. If you work with a PR team or individual freelancer, get them involved early, and have them share the key findings when they’re finalized. Source quotes from experts on the early side, too.

Phase 7: Campaign analysis

Analyze the performance of the campaign after the first week, month, and then a year or two out. Large-scale campaigns like annual or bi-annual reports can have a long tail, so measure influenced contacts, net new contacts, and influenced revenue after a bit of time.

Marketing survey promotion ideas

• Share interesting stats and data points using data visualizations on social media, using both organic posts and paid ads. Try static and animated ads and compare the results.
• Create a compelling landing page with key insights from the report and a preview of what’s inside.
• Incorporate leadership insights from partners or thought leaders with similar audiences, then ask them to promote the report when it comes out.
• Partner with similar brands and pool your resources, then promote to all of your audiences.

Need help creating an industry trends report, from start to finish? Let’s chat.

We’ve got a small but experienced team that handles project management, survey design and data acquisition, data analysis, copywriting, content strategy, data visualization, design, and promotional assets. And we work quickly, as a seamless extension of your team. Let’s talk through your marketing research report creation needs . 

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7 steps to write a market research report, 5+ market research report templates, 1. market research report template, 2. market research report template, 3. sample market research report, 4. market research report template, 5. market research report sample, 6. market research report template, report templates, how to write a market research report [5+ templates to download].

Three months down 2019 and you still think your marketing strategy can do better. Just like any other company, you’re hoping that this year would be your year. Performing a market research will help you learn more about your target market before spending effort and valuable time in planning and building strategies that you’re not sure will work. Getting the results or information documented in a report would then pave the way to a tangible marketing plan .

Step 1: Think Of Your Reader

Step 2: gather data, step 3: write the front matter, step 4: include methods used, step 5: create relevant visuals, step 6: write your recommendations, step 7: close with a call to action.

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Construction market research 2023, marketing consumer insight template, product launch checklist template, product pricing template, market research plan template, market research white paper template, market research flowchart template, restaurant market research survey template, market research report template, cost analysis of restaurant market research method template.

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• Market Research

The 5 steps of the market research process

Steps of the market research process.

• Define the problem you’re trying to solve
• Design your research process
• Use software to collect data
• Convert data into an insightful report
• Take action based on your findings

Market research is a valuable tool that can help businesses better understand their prospects and customers. Regardless of industry or business size, these insights can be useful for determining the future direction of an organization.

Whether you’re considering launching a new product or service, targeting a new market segment, or entering a new geographic area, market research can guide your organization in making the right decisions and mitigating potential risk.

Follow a strategic market research process like the one below to ensure you get relevant data you can learn from.

1. Define the problem you’re trying to solve

The first step in the market research process is to clearly identify the problem you’re trying to solve or the opportunity you’re considering. “The market is segmented into different parts, and from that a target audience is fixed,” says Daniela Sawyer, the founder of FindPeopleFast , a SaaS platform. “The organization then creates a team to oversee the data collection.”

It’s also important to ask yourself what the objective of the market research is and what you want to get from it. For example, do you want to understand why your company is losing market share? Are you considering launching a new product line and wondering how your target audience will react to it? Consider the causes of the problems your organization is experiencing so you can focus the questions in that area.

By defining the results you want to achieve with your market research, you can more effectively determine the questions you need to ask and the way you need to ask them. For exploratory research — which is an effective way to garner answers to a specific problem — you may decide to conduct focus groups or in-depth interviews with key stakeholders.

If you want to know more details about a market segment (a form of descriptive research), surveys and personal interviews are most effective. To understand cause and effect relationships, a form of causal research is necessary, such as estimation and analysis.

2. Design your research process

Collecting data is the most important aspect of market research, notes Sawyer. It can help determine critical aspects of the business, such as product demand, brand value, and customer viewpoints.

Once you know what problem you’re trying to solve, the next step in the market research process is to develop the market research framework you plan to follow. To do that, you’ll need to determine whether you’re going to use primary research (data you collect yourself) or secondary research (data that a third party has collected) or a combination of the two.

The market research plan not only outlines how you’ll conduct the research but also how you’ll analyze the data once you’ve gathered it. Your market research plan should include the following information:

• The main problem you’re trying to solve
• A clear definition of the information you’re trying to gather
• The method(s) you’ll use to gather data, such as surveys, feedback questionnaires, and user tests (Sawyer notes that effective ways to gather data also include direct interviews with the target audience.)
• The questions you’ll ask in the market research process
• The sample size of your market research or how many people you’ll include in your research
• Who on your team will conduct the market research or whether you’ll outsource it to another organization
• Who will analyze the data you collect and develop reports from the information you’ve gathered
• Who will review the reports and act on the market research
• The schedule for the entire market research process

Outlining these pieces ensures that the market research process runs smoothly — and that there’s a plan of action once you’ve gathered the data. Many organizations conduct market research but neglect to follow through. If you don’t analyze the findings and plan to address what you’ve discovered, the exercise of data collection will be useless.

3. Use software to collect data

To put your plan in place — especially if you’re conducting primary research — it’s vital to have the right software for the job.

For an end user, providing information should be easy. If your software isn’t user-friendly, you may not have many participants in your research, as they may get frustrated and stop answering questions.

From an organizational perspective, you should avoid using software that requires a lot of setup and configuration time. “Collecting accurate data is the biggest challenge,” says Sawyer. “It’s a very time- and effort-consuming process.” Often, organizations can’t keep up with data collection unless they have a tool that makes the process easy.

Jotform is the ideal tool for automating data collection because it’s easy to use, both from the business and consumer perspective.

Marketing teams can use the hundreds of available templates to quickly develop surveys and questionnaires. Each template is easily customizable, so you can tailor form fields to address the problem you’re trying to solve. Examples of templates include demographic surveys , questionnaire sheets, user experience surveys , and much more.

4. Convert data into an insightful report

Once you’ve gathered the data with easy-to-use software, it’s time to learn from it. The analysis process is critical to the market research process, as it helps organizations better understand their prospects and customers.

When conducting analyses, look for trends within the data — but be sure to leave any assumptions you had behind. It’s important to avoid applying your biases to the data you’ve collected. Write up a formal report that outlines the process you used and the findings you’ve gleaned so you can share it with the relevant stakeholders.

Jotform Report Builder is an effective tool for converting the data you’ve collected into beautiful visual reports. Whether your research involves polls , feedback forms , or prospect questionnaires , you can turn them into visual insights within seconds. Using attractive charts and graphs will make it easier to glean insights from your market research, so you’ll be better equipped to make solid business decisions.

The reports are easy to share with others using a link, or you can convert them to secure PDFs. And in just a few clicks, you can customize your market research reports with your own branding.

5. Take action based on your findings

“Market research determines the demand for any product in any particular region,” says Sawyer. “It also helps show the best way and time to launch a product.”

Unfortunately, many organizations never reach this last step of the market research process. Either they’re not able to analyze the data properly, or they simply don’t communicate their findings to decision-makers within the company.

Regardless, this is one of the most important steps because it leads to action. How will your organization apply the findings to shape the future of the business?

Keep in mind that the market shifts continuously, so the data you’ve gathered is valid only for a short period of time. If you wait too long to put your insights into action, they may no longer be relevant or helpful.

Always relate your findings to the original problem or opportunity you identified in the first step of this process. For example, if you wanted to know how prospects would feel about a price increase, consider whether you’ll increase your prices based on the data you’ve collected and if so, by how much. Will you increase them all at once or stagger the increases slowly over the course of a few weeks?

The market research process can help businesses illuminate opportunities, mitigate risks, and resolve problems before they become larger issues. Now that you know what the process looks like, you can get started right away to lead your organization in the right direction.

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Your Face is Data — and Scammers Are Using it for Fraud. Here are 5 Tips When Using Identity Verification In today's crowded identity verification market, selecting the most suitable option can be daunting. There are simply too many solutions to be considered and tested out. This article highlights the key criteria to pay close attention to when deciding.

By Ihar Kliashchou Edited by Micah Zimmerman May 9, 2024

Key Takeaways

• By considering indicators such as customer feedback and ROI, companies can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their IDV solution.
• It's also important to regularly monitor these indicators and make adjustments as needed to optimize the solution's performance.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Historically, many organizations deployed identity verification (IDV) procedures to meet regulatory requirements in their particular niche. However, its applications are now more varied, including processes that have already become routine for many of us: secure customer onboarding, remote hiring facilitation, online transaction safety on marketplaces and gig economy platforms and fraud detection.

This diversity of tasks complicates choosing IDV solutions , challenging the one-size-fits-all approach across different industries. Despite this, certain key considerations can guide the evaluation process beyond the usual factors like industry and company size.

What to look at first?

1. Does the solution cover all of the essential steps of the IDV procedure?

Most of the IDV solutions on the market include document and biometric verification steps, which represent the core of identity verification. The document verification step includes document capture, document assessment and data extraction for further verification. The biometric part typically includes selfie capture and face matching.

Can you measure the effectiveness of document and biometric checks? Absolutely! For instance, you can use the retake score — the need to redo the verification process, which arises when the initial attempt falls short of clarity or fails to satisfy established criteria — to evaluate the document and/or selfie capture modules.

However, there is a catch. Despite many vendors making similar claims, it's critical to consider the sampling used to measure these scores as they relate to software performance. For example, a developer may claim they have a 100% OCR accuracy — perfect effectiveness of Optical Character Recognition technology to accurately read and convert text from identification documents into digital form. High accuracy is crucial for capturing data correctly and minimizing errors throughout the verification process. But how do you know if this figure is not based solely on cases involving a specific single document type, such as German passports or Louisiana driver's licenses? If you work only with documents issued in those geographies, you will be fine. But will the same accuracy apply to documents from the United Arab Emirates, for instance?

Qualitative indicators also need to be taken into account. Advanced IDV software must properly validate all security features. In practice, it should handle all types of Machine Readable Zone ( MRZ ) codes (lines of encoded data typically found at the bottom of passports and identity documents, designed for easy scanning and processing by machines), recognize and extract data (including photos) from different barcodes and other parts of the document. Additionally, it should be able to scan the NFC chip containing the user's identity details and send the information to a secure server managed by the entity conducting the identity verification, ensuring the identity is valid and secure. This two-step process helps prevent fraud .

The comprehensiveness and accuracy of the document template database are also super important, as it is used for identifying the large variety of existing identity documents, including passports, driver's licenses and residence permits.

Related: The 'Mother of All Breaches' Just Happened — Here's the Security Implications for Businesses

2. Does the solution recognize modern types of fraud?

AI-enabled attacks like deepfakes are a growing threat that organizations can no longer ignore. Regula's global survey shows that approximately 80% of companies worldwide think that various types of deepfake fraud are a real threat. These are artificially generated images, videos or audio that highly realistically mimic real people.

A recent instance involved the Hong Kong branch of a multinational company, which lost $25 million after a scammer used deepfake technology to impersonate the firm's chief financial officer (CFO) during a group video conference call, instructed staff to transfer funds.

Not surprisingly, businesses and governments perceive the identity fraud detection capabilities of an IDV solution to be one of the most crucial selection criteria.

It is imperative to understand how the vendor confronts the deepfake threat by asking precise questions about the relevant features. For instance, inquire about the software's capability to detect various types of presentation attacks — when a fraudster presents fake, altered or otherwise manipulated biometric samples (like facial images, video or voice recordings) to deceive and gain access through a biometric security system — and the mechanisms it employs to unveil them.

You may also want to assess how the solution tackles the particular types of identity fraud employing deepfakes. Fraudsters may display a fake photo or video of a "live" person on a secondary device at the selfie stage. For proper identification, the software should be able to detect static face images, electronic devices, video replays and video injections.

Related: Facial Recognition Technology Is Streamlining Check-in Processes — and Raising Privacy Concerns

3. Does the vendor's development strategy reflect current changes in the market?

Businesses' demands, end users' expectations and industry standards are changing. With the emergence of new ID formats like digital identities and mobile driver's licenses, vendors have to consider these verification scenarios when bringing their solutions to the market.

For this reason, flexibility and technological competence have become crucial criteria when assessing IDV developers. For instance, mono solutions that only verify domestic documents seem out-of-date in the era of global migration, digital nomadism, remote customer onboarding and online transactions. With physical document fraud still prevalent, robust IDV systems must include a complete set of authenticity checks, like document liveness — a verification method used to ensure a document is original and not forged or altered, typically checked through real-time presentation or authenticity features.

The vendor's product development roadmap is the right starting point to gain the required insight. The roadmap visualizes the vendor's strategic plan, showing the details of upcoming improvements and features that will roll out soon.

Related: Deepfakes Are on the Rise — Will They Change How Businesses Verify Their Users?

4. Are your customers fully satisfied with the IDV flow?

A customer-centric approach is now at the core of many business processes, including identity verification. A better customer experience (CX) is both a driver and success determiner for many organizations implementing IDV solutions. Regula's survey finds that customer satisfaction improvements were the main reason for 29% of companies deploying such solutions. Additionally, 55% of business representatives named improved CX as the top success indicator for IDV.

Usually, it's up to you to decide how to smoothly embed the IDV solution into your current processes. However, interoperability, cross-platforming and customization features are the sole responsibility of the developer. As a quick rule of thumb, cross-platform solutions that perform well on websites and in mobile apps enable you to set up a seamless IDV flow that enhances customer satisfaction.

Automation is also a cornerstone of a customer-centric approach. Both clients and employees will appreciate it if they can skip routine parts of the IDV process like data entry or document type detection.

For instance, Skylegs, an aviation management platform, reports positive client feedback after it implemented IDV software for aircraft operators. With data entry automation, the operators can now process passports and ID cards more easily, faster and more accurately.

5. Does the solution enhance ROI for your IDV investment?

Evaluate an IDV solution as a strategic investment that impacts numerous outcomes. As an example, the Canadian travel solution Sherpa cut annual operational costs by 15% after IDV automation.

Identity verification is more than simply authenticating documents and individuals; in most instances, multiple adjacent use cases exist in any given company. A solid all-in-one IDV solution can help businesses reduce security risks, comply with KYC requirements and increase customer satisfaction.

The completeness of a given solution often implies broad coverage of diverse IDV use cases. The solution must be versatile enough to cover many industries, from regulated ones like Aviation, Gambling and Banking, to more unconstrained businesses like eLearning or eCommerce.

By favoring single-vendor solutions, covering all aspects of IDV from biometrics to document verification, you get comprehensive and easy-to-maintain software as a bonus. First, all the updates will be applied universally, instead of piecemeal. Second, you will be protected against asynchronous updating, in which one of the modules loses interoperability with all the other systems because of mistiming by one of the developers.

A bonus piece of advice: The dataset matters

IDV vendors usually offer a demo or trial period to test the waters. You can try out various solutions and assess how their products accomplish your tasks. Some businesses test out solutions using the vendor's datasets. This approach may seem a bit biased, which is why the number and variety of specimens available for testing, as well as the level of detail in the verification results, are also important criteria to consider.

However, many organizations prefer "real data" involving physical IDs volunteered by employees from a focus group. To make the most out of this experience, you need to prepare your dataset properly.

First, it should match your company's demands. If you deal with identity documents issued in the UK only, you can simply scan and verify the passports of your British volunteers during the test. But the results will be inadequate if identity documents from other countries like Germany, UAE and Italy also flow into your systems.

Second, your dataset should be complete to provide statistically valid metrics. As mentioned above, to obtain accurate measurements for all four scenarios, you would need an equal number of passports from British, German, UAE and Italian individuals.

In conclusion

Measuring the success of an IDV solution helps businesses ensure they are achieving their desired outcomes. By considering indicators such as customer feedback and ROI, companies can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their IDV solution. It's also important to regularly monitor these indicators and make adjustments as needed to optimize the solution's performance.

Entrepreneur Leadership Network® Contributor

Chief Technology Officer at Regula

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