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100+ Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

Expert Writer

Dwayne Charrington shares insights on creating effective surveys, improving navigation, and using A/B testing for smarter decisions. Additionally, he focuses on optimizing mobile experiences and champions privacy-by-design, ensuring users feel satisfied, secure, and valued.

100+ Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

Asking the right market research questions can help you understand your target customers and map their behavior and preferences.

But what does it actually mean?

Let’s look at a sample from a market research survey report for mapping brand awareness:

From this simple Q&A report, you can:

Visualize the proportions of demographic segments among your audience.
Measure how your brand is performing in comparison to others.
Pick the top preferred brand among the customers, explore what makes it stand out, and apply the same techniques to your brand.
See how your target market perceives brand advertisements and promotional efforts.

Now imagine if this type of data set is available for different aspects of your business – product development, marketing campaigns, optimization plans, and more.

That’s what market research does for you.

With the evolution of customer interaction points and constantly changing market trends, more and more businesses are fueling efforts to do in-depth market research, as evidenced by the steady increase in the revenue of the market research industry worldwide.

research questions that you can ask potential customers

Market research can help you develop essential business strategies and maintain a competitive advantage over other brands to increase conversions and customer base.

And it all starts with asking the right questions to the right audience.

That’s why we have created this collection of 100+ market research questions to ask your target market. Each question aims to uncover a specific attribute about your customers. You can use a combination of these customer research survey questions, interviews, and othe marketing questionnaires for customers.

We have also added key tips to help you write your own effective market analysis questions if the needed.

100+ Great Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

The main challenge while designing and conducting research is – “What questions should I ask in my customer research survey?

That’s why we have a carefully curated list of market research questions to help you get started.

To Explore New Product Opportunities

What was your first reaction to the product?
Would you purchase this product if it were available today?
What feature would you like to see on the website/product?
Which feature do you think will help improve the product experience for you?
Of these four options, what’s the next thing you think we should build?
What’s the one feature we can add that would make our product indispensable for you?
Would implementing [this feature] increase the usability of the [product name]?
Please let us know how we can further improve this feature.
What problem would you like to solve with our product?

To Collect Feedback on Existing Products

Have you heard of [product name or category] before?
How would you feel if [product name] was no longer available?
How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use [Product/feature name?]
How often do you use [product name]?
How long have you been using [product name] for?
When was the last time you used [product name]?
Please rate the following product features according to their importance to you.
According to you, In which area is this product/service lacking the most? Specify below.
How does the product run after the update?
Rate our product based on the following aspects:
Have you faced any problems with the product? Specify below.
What feature did you expect but not find?
How are you planning to use [product or service]?
How satisfied are you with the product?

To Segment the Target Market

Please specify your age.

Please specify your gender.
Select your highest level of education.
What is your current occupation?
What is your monthly household income?
What is your current marital status?

What is the name of your company?
Where is your company’s headquarters located?
Please specify the number of employees that work in your company.
What is your job title?
In which location do you work?
Which activity do you prefer in your free time?
Which other physical activities do you take part in?
Where is your dream holiday destination?
Please rate the following as per their priority in your life – Family, work, and social life?
Are you happy with your current work-life balance?
Do you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist?
How often do you give to charity?
How do you travel to work?
How do you do your Holiday shopping?

To Conduct a Competition Analysis

Which product/service would you consider as an alternative to ours?
Rate our competitor based on the following:
Have you seen any website/product/app with a similar feature?
How would you compare our products to our competitors?
Why did you choose to use our [product] over other options?
Compared to our competitors, is our product quality better, worse, or about the same?
Which other options did you consider before choosing [product name]?
Please list the top three things that persuaded you to use us rather than a competitor.
According to you, which brand best fits each of the following traits.

To Gauge Brand Awareness

[Your brand name] Have you heard of the brand before?
How do you feel about this brand?
How did you hear about us?
Describe [brand name] in one sentence.
If yes, please tell us what you like the most about [your brand name]?
If no, please specify the reason.
How likely are you to purchase a product from this company again?
If yes, where have you seen or heard about our brand recently? (Select all that apply)
Do you currently use the product of this brand?
Have you purchased from this brand before?
Of all the brands offering similar products, which do you feel is the best brand?
Please specify what makes it the best brand for you in the category.
Which of the following products have you tried? (Select all that apply)
On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you recommend this brand to a friend or colleague?

To Map Customers’ Preferences

Have you ever boycotted a brand? If so, which brand and why?
What influences your purchase decision more – price or quality of the item?
How many hours do you spend on social media like Facebook, Instagram, etc.?
How do you do your monthly grocery shopping – online or through outlets?
How do you search for the products you want to buy?
Rate the factors that affect your buying decision for [product].
What persuaded you to purchase from us?
How likely are you to purchase a product from us again?
Please rate the following aspects of our product based on their importance to you.
What is the most important value our product offers to you?
Which of the following features do you use least?
How well does the product meet your needs?

To Map Customers’ Reservations

Is there anything preventing you from purchasing at this point?
What’s preventing you from starting a trial?
Do you have any questions before you complete your purchase?
What is the main reason you’re canceling your account?
What are your main reasons for leaving?
What was your biggest fear or concern about purchasing from us?
What is the problem that the product/service helped to solve for you?
What problems did you encounter while using our [product]?
How easy did we make it to solve your problem?
What is your greatest concern about [product]?
Have you started using other similar products? If yes, what made you choose that product?

To Perform Pricing Analysis

Would you purchase the product at [price]
According to you, what should be the ideal price of the [product name]?
Is our product pricing clear?
According to you, what is the ideal price range for the product?

To Collect Feedback on Website Copy

Please rate the website based on the following aspects:
How well does the website meet your needs?
Was the information easy to find?
Was the information clearly presented?
What other information should we provide on our website?
How can we make the site easier to use?
What could we do to make this site more useful?
Is there anything on this site that doesn’t work the way you expected it to?
How easy was it to find the information you were looking for?
Have feedback or an idea? Leave it here!
Help us make the product better. Please leave your feedback.

To Assess Website/Product Usability

Are you satisfied with the website layout?
What features do you think are missing on our website?
What features do you not like on our website?
Was our website navigation simple and user-friendly?
How much time did it take to find what you were looking for on our website?
Was it easy to find the products you are looking for?
Was the payment process convenient?

To Uncover Market Trends and Industry Insights

Did you purchase our product out of peer influence or individual preference?
How do you form your opinion about our product?
Do you follow trends of the product, or do you prefer to go with what you know?
Do discounts or incentives impact your decision-making process?

Market Research Survey Templates

One of the easiest ways to conduct market research is to use survey templates. They can help you save time and effort in creating your own market research surveys.

There are many types of market research survey templates available, depending on your objectives and target audience. Some of the most popular ones are:

Demographic Templates: These templates help you segment your customers based on their location. It can help you tailor your marketing strategies and offers to different customer groups.

Consumer Behavior Templates: These templates help you keep your pulse on your target market.

Industry Insights Templates: These templates help you get detailed information about your target industry and business.

Case Study:

Check out how AWA Digital increased revenue per customer for Avis by understanding the market and promoting add-on products.

Read Full Story Here

Breakdown of Different Market Research Questions

The answer choices in a market research survey question can significantly impact the quality and reliability of the response data you collect from the audience.

Some answer types help categorize the audience, while others measure their satisfaction or agreement.

So, before listing the customer research survey questions to ask your target audience, let’s understand their types:

Multiple Choice

A multiple-choice question type lets users select more than one answer from the given options. These questions are great for collecting multiple data sets using the same question and gauging people’s preferences, opinions, and suggestions .

Single Choice

In a single-choice question, the respondent can select only one answer from the given options. This question type is great for:

Segregating the users.
Prioritizing product updates based on user consensus.
Disqualifying irrelevant respondents by placing the question at the start of your customer research survey.

Matrix Match

A matrix matching grid can combine multiple market research questions into one to make the survey shorter . There is only one condition – the individual questions should have the same response anchors as shown in the image below:

The questions are arranged in rows while the answer options occupy the grid columns.

Ranking Question

A ranking question can help map customers’ preferences and set priorities for product development . This question type asks the respondent to arrange the given options in their decreasing/increasing preference.

Dichotomous

A dichotomous question poses a simple yes or no scenario to the respondent. These question types can help disqualify irrelevant people from the survey and categorize the users into two groups .

Likert Scale

Likert scale market research questions can help you measure the extent of respondents’ agreement/disagreement with the given statement . The answer options are arranged from positive to negative sentiments or vice-versa, with the neutral option in the middle.

There are two types of Likert scales: 5-point and 7-point .

Open-ended market questions let you explore the respondents’ minds without adding any restrictions to the answer . This question type is followed by a blank space for the respondent to add a free-text response.

You can add an open-ended question as a follow-up after the first question to explore the reasons for the customer’s previous answer. It also lets you collect more in-depth information about their issues, pain points, and delights.

Tools like Qualaroo offer tons of different question types for your surveys. Just pick the question and match its answer option type from the drop-down. To make it more effective, you can add branching to the survey.

How to Write Your Marketing Research Questions

It’s imperative to have a dedicated repository of market research questions for your surveys. But nothing’s better than crafting your questions.

For this, you need to sit with your team and discuss what information you require from the customers. It lets you analyze and document how much data you already have in your system, which can help set the market research scope.

We have listed some questions you need to ask yourself before asking market research questions to your potential customers or target market:

Audience Segmentation Questions

Audience segmentation questions help to size up your target market and provide a granular view of the audience . Not all customers are equal, and audience segmentation makes it possible to focus on each group individually to address their issues, fears, and expectations.

Here’s what you need to know before you start writing customer research survey questions to understand your audience:

Do we understand the demographics of the new market we are trying to target? (Age, location, ethnicity, education, company, annual income, etc.)
What are the locations that drive the most customers to our business? How are these locations different from others?
What are the interests, preferences, and fears of people from our new target market? Have we addressed these situations for our current customer base?
What are the psychographics attributes of the current customers and potential market? Are we targeting these in our campaigns?
What are the most popular engagement channels for our customers? Which channels drive the most traffic to our website?
Do we have enough data to perform value segmentation to separate high-value customers from low-value customers?
How often do these high-value customers make a purchase?

Product-Based Market Research Questions

Product-based market research questions can produce precious insights to channel into your product development and optimization strategies . You can see how changing technology affects customers’ behavior, what new features they want to see in your product, and how they perceive your products and services over the competition.

Start by gathering information about the following:

How does our product compare to the competition based on the features?
What products do our competitors offer?
What new features do customers want to see in our products? Do we have a product roadmap to deliver these updates?
What unique solutions do our products offer? What is the value proposition that reflects this offering?
Does our product incorporate the latest technological advancements?
What channels do we use to collect product feedback from our users?
What are customers’ preferences while choosing our products over competitors?

Pricing Market Research Questions

Pricing analysis can help you make your product more affordable to different customer segments while maintaining the desired gross margin. It also lets you restructure the pricing tiers to provide features depending on the customers’ requirements and company size .

Watch: (1/5) Supercharge Your Revenue With Data-Driven Pricing

Your sales and marketing team can help you hone in on the market research questions to ask your customers for running pricing analysis:

Do the customers ever complain about the difficulty in finding the pricing information?
What is the pricing structure of our competitors for the same products? What features do they include for a specific price?
How do customers find our pricing when compared to the competitors?
Do our products provide value for money to the customers? Does the sales pitch reflect this point?
Can we restructure the pricing, and how will it affect the revenue?
Are there any customer segments that have high-value potential but find the current pricing unaffordable? What are the plans for such customers?
Are we in a situation to offer a basic free plan to encourage customers to try our product before upgrading?
What promotions can we run to attract more customers?
Should we target customers based on income, company size, or type of solution to set our product prices?

Brand Reputation Market Research Questions

A brand reputation questionnaire for marketing research gives you information on how well your target market knows about your brand. You can uncover previously unidentified channels to increase brand awareness and find potential customers to promote your brand .

Start by gauging what customers are saying about your brand:

Which channels receive mentions of our brand? Are these posts positive or negative?
Do we have a system in place to analyze and monitor these reviews and posts?
What are the reviews of our brand on different sites? What is the overall impression of our brand in the market?
How are we currently addressing the negative reviews and complaints? What do our customers think about the handling process?
What is the impression of our brand in our target market?
What brand awareness campaigns are our competitors running?
Is our brand among the top choices of our target customers?

Advertisement & Campaign-Based Questions

These customer research survey questions let you assess the effectiveness of your current value propositions and campaigns . You can channel the customer insights into your advertising strategies to design targeted campaigns for different customer segments to reduce the overall acquisition cost and increase conversions.

Ask the following questions to collect information about the different marketing campaigns that are performing:

What are the best modes to run the advertisement campaigns to reach our target audience?
What is the estimated lifetime value of customers acquired from current campaigns? Is it higher or lower than the acquisition costs?
Which campaigns bring the most ROI and why?
How well do our advertisements present our value proposition to the customers? Do they address customers’ fears and expectations to attract them?
Are we running A/B tests to improve our online campaigns? How are we gathering data to build the A/B test hypotheses – surveys, heatmaps, eye tracking, etc.?
What advertisement campaigns do our competitors run?

7 Question Types to Use in Market Research Surveys

We mentioned earlier that market research questions provide important data for different operations like product development, marketing campaigns, sales pipeline and more.

But to what extent?

Let’s break it down to individual processes and understand how insights from customer research surveys can impact them:

To Know Your Target Market

Understanding your target audience is the fundamental aspect of market research, be it a new target market or existing customers. If you know what marketing research survey questions to ask your target market, you can identify different customer types’ unique traits and preferences.

The data can help you segment the users based on demographic, psychographic, geographic, and other attributes. These include their behavior, purchase preferences, age, location, habits, delights, frustrations, and more.

You can then create various customer personas and fuel your sales strategies to maximize ROI.

Case study – How Avis increased its revenue per customer

Avis, a leading car rental company, was looking to enhance customer experience by offering useful car add-ons like navigation systems, child seats, insurance, etc., to customers with their booking. So, it reached out to AWA Digital to find a way to promote these products and increase their sales.

AWA digital implemented customer research campaigns using targeted surveys to determine which add-ons were popular among the customers and why.

Using these insights, the team added an interstitial pop-up just before the booking page to show relevant add-ons to the customers.

This simple update dramatically increased the sales of add-on items and helped Avis generate more revenue per customer.

Read the entire case study here .

To Plan the Product Roadmap

A product roadmap is a visual representation of the current status of your product and planned updates over time. It shows a high-level summary of planned activities and priorities for different teams to take the product to the next level. Understanding different types of summary can help you create more effective and concise roadmaps that clearly communicate your vision and strategy.

Steve Jobs famously said – “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”

And market research helps to align your product strategies with the customer demand. Using targeted marketing survey questions, you can gauge what new features or functionality customers want to see in your products.

It helps to plan product development strategies based on customers’ consensus to prioritize the ideas that can have the most impact on customers and replace intuition-based approaches with data-backed decisions.

Customers’ demands change with market trends and technological advancements. That’s why your product map also needs to evolve constantly with time to reflect these changes in your product development cycle.

By designing targeted market research questions to ask the customers, you can uncover their expectations to deliver optimal product solutions.

That’s what our next case study demonstrates.

Case study – How customer research drives Twilio’s operations

Twilio, a cloud communications platform places customer discovery and research at the core of their product development strategies. It helps its teams to anticipate customer needs in a constantly changing market.

Lack of time and budget are the two biggest challenges that the company faces in its product development cycle. So, the team uses targeted market research questionnaires for a product to understand the challenges the customers face today and the ones they will face tomorrow.

With an abundance of ideas and no time to test them all, the feedback data from surveys is used to prioritize the hypotheses to run the tests. It makes the process more efficient and effective in producing positive results.

This data-backed approach is used across 18 different teams at Twilio to release new functionality every week and deliver optimal solutions to the clients.

Read the complete case study here .

To Reduce Acquisition Costs

Your customer base consists of multiple customer segments with different preferences and purchase potential. That’s why you cannot sell to everyone and need to find the right audience for your products.

If an acquired customer doesn’t bring in more revenue than it costs to acquire them, it will increase your acquisition costs over time.

We don’t want that, do we?

For example, let’s say you are targeting the entire market population using the same campaign. If your acquisition cost per customer is $300 and you acquire 20 customers from one campaign, you need to make more than $6000 to register profits.

The difficulty is you don’t know about these customers’ purchase behavior and capacity, so you cannot be sure if you will reach your goals. It adds unnecessary risks to your marketing ventures.

But, if you were targeting a specific segment with high income, regular shopping habits, or proven history of brand loyalty, You can obtain better results.

Now, the question is –

How will you separate these potential long-term customers from one-time buyers and high-value targets from other segments?

One way to do this is by building customer personas using the data from the market research survey questions. A buyer persona defines different attributes of a particular customer segment so you can hone in on the right audience to funnel your marketing efforts.

Here’s what a typical persona includes:

Target regions
Target demographic (age, marital status, gender)
Ideal psychographics (hobbies, social channels, activities they indulge in, goals)
Preferred interaction channels
Favorite brands and products
Total revenue till date
Estimated lifetime value

Once you have a clearer picture of different customers, you can find high-value prospects with the potential to be long-term customers looking for product solutions that your business offers.

You can then design the correct pitch using the market research data to bring in these customers and control the overall acquisition costs.

For example:

Plugin the demographic and psychographic data into CRM software like BIGContacts or Salesforce to convert high-value targets.
Use your CRM to create segmented lists of prospects based on estimated value, location, current status, and more. Then target these groups individually with personalized value propositions to increase conversion rates.
Identify their preferred mode of communication and technographic inclinations to find the right opportunities to pitch your product offering at the precise moment.

Even if acquiring and retaining such customers costs more, their overall revenue can balance the acquisition costs to deliver higher profits.

To Design Targeted Marketing Campaigns

By knowing how your target audience behaves and interacts with your business, you can find the exact opportunities to target them with personalized campaigns.

You can use mail campaigns to target website users with app-exclusive offers to encourage them to download your app and improve app adoption.
Add in-app broadcast messages about upcoming offers, exclusive membership benefits, and other incentives for new users to push them towards the end of the funnel.
Create multiple landing pages to target different customer types.
Design location-based ad campaigns with personalized value propositions based on audience preferences and problems at each location.

Case Study – How Canon’s campaigns generated 700% ROI

AWA digital was tasked by Canon, one of the biggest electronics companies worldwide, to assess and increase the demand for their products in different geographies. So, the AWA team conducted customer research using target market survey questions and discovered the following attributes about customers’ purchase behavior and reservations:

In some regions, people were reluctant to spend money on a Canon camera as they weren’t sure if Canon was an authoritative brand.
In other regions, authority was not as important to the users.

Using these insights, AWA optimized the ads campaigns’ messaging for different locations to include what consumers deemed important purchase factors.

The results?

With in-depth customer feedback, Canon generated an overall ROI of 700% in all regions using personalized campaigns to target the audience.

To Improve Brand Awareness

Whether you are into soft drinks or not, You probably would have heard of Coca-Cola’s 2011 Share-A-Coke ad. This single campaign put the Coke brand back on the map and reversed the 10-year steady decline in sales in the US.

Coke understood what motivates their customers and delivered a product offering that appealed to the masses to increase its brand equity- the excitement to get a Coca-Cola bottle with their name on it.

How did they do it?

In 2011, Coca-Cola rolled out its share-a-coke campaign in Australia. The company debranded the traditional Coke logo from the bottle and replaced it with the phrase “Share a Coke with” followed by a name.

The campaign used the list of the country’s most popular names (nicknames). The purpose was to make people go out and find the Coke bottle with their name on it and share it with their friends. The campaign was subsequently rolled out in 80 countries.

How did it impact Coca-Cola as a brand:

In Australia, it’s estimated that the campaign increased Coke’s share by 4% and increased consumption among young adults by 7%.
#ShareACoke became the top trending hashtag on Twitter globally and received over 1 billion impressions.
In the USA, the campaign increased Coke’s market share by over 2% and brought 11% more sales compared to the previous year.

It’s not limited to big brands only.

Understanding the customers and placing your product’s value offering along with their habits, lifestyle, and behavior can help you extend your brand’s reach.

Today, there are multiple touchpoints to connect with your customers and map their journey to uncover their issues, motivations, and fears to address in your campaigns.

Monitor brand mentions on social media and engage with the users to cultivate an online community and promote your brand.
Reach out to satisfied customers and turn them into your brand ambassadors.
Use targeted ad campaigns that connect people’s emotions and general behavior to imprint your brand’s image in their minds.

Quick Tips for Writing Awesome Market Research Survey Questions

With the inter-team research complete, you are ready to write your own market research questions to ask your target audience. Keep these general dos and don’ts in mind to ensure that the market survey fulfills the purpose without affecting the data quality or response rate.

Use Mutually Exclusive Response Options

If you are using response anchors with specific ranges like age group or income, check that the options do not overlap . Otherwise, it will produce an irregular data set.

Please specify your age:

In the above example, the respondent lying on either extremity of the given age ranges may get confused on which option to choose. For example, a 28-year-old respondent can choose from both second or third options.

Plus, two different respondents of the same age may select different options, which will skew your demographic data.

You can avoid this confusion by creating mutually exclusive groups as shown below:

Always Add A “Not Applicable” Or “Rather Not Say” Option

Since market research questions extract personal information, some respondents may not want to share such details with you. These include questions about age, income, gender, hobbies, social activities, and more.

Forcing such questions on the customers without allowing them to skip can irate them and lead to survey abandonment .

That’s why you can also use Qualaroo’s skip and branching logic to create smart surveys that only ask relevant questions to your respondents based on their previous answers.

Calculate the Required Sample Size

Sample size plays a vital role in your market research questions to determine the reliability of your response data.

If the response volume is low, the results may not be conclusive to point towards customers’ consensus. On the other hand, a larger sample size than required means a waste of the company’s valuable resources and time.

That’s why it’s important to calculate the required sample size to estimate the number of responses you need for your market research survey questions.

You can use any survey sample size calculator available online to get started. Just fill in the required details to get the required sample size.

For example, to reach a statistical significance of 99%, you need at least 3145 responses to your market research questionnaire.

Consider Adding Incentives

Studies show that incentivized customer research surveys or questionnaires fetch higher response rates than general surveys.

The incentives encourage customers to invest their time in a survey and get something in return.

It means creating a gated questionnaire for market research can help you reach the required sample size quickly . The incentive can be a simple discount code, free shipping coupon, free ebook, or other freebies.

However, there is a possibility that irrelevant respondents may fill out the survey randomly just to get to the offer, which may skew the results. You can use screening questions to filter out unsuitable respondents.

Avoid Double-Barreled Market Research Questions

A double-barreled question poses two questions into one. The problem with such questions is that the respondent may have opposing views about the two statements in the questions. It makes it harder for them to choose one answer from the options .

“Please rate the [product name] on a scale of 1-10 based on overall quality and price?”

Here, the respondent may find the product quality appreciable while thinking it to be overpriced at the same time. In such a case, they may skip the question or select any option randomly.

You can easily sidestep this hurdle by breaking your double-barreled market research question into two to make it less confusing for the respondents.

Importance of Market Research

We mentioned earlier that market research questions provide important data for different operations like product development, marketing campaigns, sales pipeline, and more.

Understanding your target audience is the fundamental aspect of market research, be it a new target market or existing customers. If you know what customer research survey questions to ask your target market, you can identify different customer types’ unique traits and preferences.

AWA Digital implemented research campaigns using targeted customer research surveys to determine which add-ons were popular among the customers and why.

Case study – How customer research drives Twilio’s operations

Twilio, a cloud communications platform, places customer discovery and research at the core of its product development strategies. It helps its teams to anticipate customer needs in a constantly changing market.

With an abundance of ideas and no time to test them all, the feedback data from customer research surveys is used to prioritize the hypotheses to run the tests. It makes the process more efficient and effective in producing positive results.

AWA Digital was tasked by Canon, one of the biggest electronics companies worldwide, to assess and increase the demand for their products in different geographies. So, the AWA team conducted a customer research survey using target market questions and discovered the following attributes about customers’ purchase behavior and reservations:

In other regions, authority was not so important to the users.

Whether you are into soft drinks or not, you probably would have heard of Coca-Cola’s 2011 Share-A-Coke ad. This single campaign put the Coke brand back on the map and reversed the 10-year steady decline in sales in the US.

Coke understood what motivates its customers and delivered a product offering that appealed to the masses to increase its brand equity- the excitement to get a Coca-Cola bottle with its name on it.

In Australia, it’s estimated that the campaign increased Coke’s share by 4% and consumption among young adults by 7%.

It’s not limited to big brands only.

Market Research: A Key to Your Business’ Success

Market research is a vital process for any business wanting to understand its customers and market better. By asking the right questions and using the right tools like Qualaroo, you can gain valuable insights that can help you improve your products or services, enhance your customer experiences, and grow your business.

In this blog, we have shared some of the best market research questions to ask your customers, as well as some of the best customer research survey templates to find market trends and industry insights. We hope that this blog has helped you learn more about market research and how to conduct it effectively.

About the author

Dwayne Charrington

Dwayne Charrington is an expert writer in customer feedback management, UX design, and user research. He helps businesses understand user intent and enhance the customer experience. Dwayne covers feedback management, lead generation, survey accessibility, and the impact of AI and VR on user interaction. He shares insights on creating effective surveys, improving navigation, and using A/B testing for smarter decisions. Additionally, he focuses on optimizing mobile experiences and champions privacy-by-design, ensuring users feel satisfied, secure, and valued.

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Discover your competitors' strengths and leverage them to achieve your own success

Asking the right market research questions at the right time can pay dividends. You wouldn’t buy a house without first researching the neighborhood – and it’s unlikely you’d take a job without doing your homework on your prospective employer. So why should starting a business be any different?

Whichever way you look at it, asking the right market research questions makes sense as a first step.

The five parts of market research: definition, methods, steps & tips, examples and importance & benefits.

Do you want to gain a foothold in the market? Get to grips with the competition? Start thinking like your target audience? Introduce a new product or mobile app?

Whatever your goal, market research will help you understand all aspects of your industry, brand, potential customers, and rivals – good market questions can make a world of difference.

Below, we’ll walk you through 99 questions to ask for market research to succeed in the digital world. We started out as a research intelligence tool , so we know our stuff when it comes to defining a market, mapping key players, marketing strategies , and understanding trends , and target audiences.

So read on for all the questions your market research strategy needs – and how Similarweb can help you answer them.

How to choose market research questions

The market research questions you pick will depend on where your business is in its lifecycle. As we’ll get to in a moment, there are a lot of market research questions – so how exactly do you choose?

Pre-start-up – If you’ve not launched a business yet, and are just cultivating an idea – you’ll want to start with some formal market research first. Then, ask more general market research questions, and some targeted at start-ups. This will help you determine if there’s a financially viable market, whether it has blockbuster prospects, or is better off left in the cutting room.

Early start-up – If you’ve just started out, you’ll want to reach out to your target market with survey questions to help you tailor your products and services to them.

Established – If you’ve been around a little longer – and already have a few current customers – you’ll want to learn more about how you can keep improving your customer experience.

Finally, you can look at questions to ask for market research that focus on competitor analysis. These aren’t limited to any particular stage of your business’s journey. After all, getting clued up on the competitive landscape is always handy – whether you’ve just entered the market or are one of its most established players.

A business person conducting market research, analyzing graphs and evaluating data.

99 market research questions: discover, define, drill down

There’s no need to limit yourself! The best types of market research should – and do – include general questions and those addressing both existing and prospective customers. Indeed, an intelligent approach to market research should cover demographic questions all the way to those that’ll help you plan a product launch , drill down into your target market , and get the jump on your competitors.

Read on to see the best examples of market research questions in action!

Generic market research questions

These questions are most useful at the planning stage. They can apply to all businesses at any stage because markets shift, along with consumer behaviors , needs, and demands.

General market research is the process of figuring out how rich the soil is and whether the conditions are optimal to allow your business’s roots to take hold.

Some general market research questions you should be asking include:

1. How large is my product’s total addressable market (TAM)? 2. Will this market hold firm, or will it grow or decrease with time? 3. Are there already similar products or services out there? 4. If so, who’s offering them? (see the competitor analysis questions below for more) 5. Who are my buyer personas ? 6. What pain points does my product address? 7. How much market share is available for my business to take? 8. What external factors might affect the health and viability of my chosen market? 9. Which website demographics will I target? 10. Will I market my product internationally or target a specific geographical location or a single location (if so, why?) 11. Do I need to consider a website alone, or should I invest in a mobile app? (use mobile app intelligence to help to figure this one out) 12. Which suppliers or manufacturers operate in the space, and are they reputable? 13. Which marketing channels will I prioritize, and which affiliates or advertisers could I look to in order to expand my reach?

Market research questions for start-ups

Regardless of your sector, there are key things you need to establish before setting up a business. Read on to discover the fifteen market research questions all start-ups need to ask.

14. What is the total addressable market (tam), serviceable available market (sam), and share of market (som)? 15. What are the latest (and predicted) trends impacting your market? 16. Do you know who your direct and indirect competitors are?

Read through questions 71-99 for examples of market research questions to help you with this.

17. What’s your USP in the market? What’s the value-add that’ll make you stand out? 18. What do your competitors charge, and will you charge the same, more, or less?

You’ll also need to consider pricing models. For instance, pay-monthly, annual subscription, or other?

19. Do you know how much people are willing to pay for a product/service like yours? 20. Can you trial your product or service with a beta group before launch to get feedback and/or testimonials? 21. What are the most effective marketing channels for businesses like yours? 22. How active are your customers and competitors on social media? 23. How will you onboard/welcome new customers? 24. Do rivals offer new customer or loyalty discounts? 25. What kind of customer support will you offer? Look at your rival’s offerings and decide whether you want to stick with the same or do better. 26. Are potential customers driven by price, product, or service? 27. Are your competitors or market impacted by seasonal trends ? 28. What opening hours and service level agreements (SLAs) will you advertise on your site?

Market research questions for a new product

Whether established, pre-launch or newly set up, you may need to ask specific market research questions for a new product launch. Whether you simply want to test the water with an idea or concept or go a little deeper to get clearer insights, these questions will help.

29. Is there a specific pain point your product will address? (if you have already identified an ideal customer, what kinds of things do they struggle with?) 30. Is there a demand for your product in the market? 31. Are there any opportunities to partner with other companies to get referrals for your product? 32. How do you plan to market and launch your product? 33. Will you release a minimum viable product (MVP) to market first?

If you release an MVP or offer a free trial to a select group of people, you’ll need to follow this up with a survey or specific questions to get feedback around usage, benefits, and improvements. A few examples of market research questions like these could include:

34. Which feature of the product did you use the most? 35. What improvements would you like to see? 36. How much would you be willing to pay for this product? 37. Was the product easy to use? 38. Was there anything you experienced during the trial that may deter you from using our product in the future? 39. How often did you use the product? 40. Would you recommend this product to someone else? If yes, why? If no, why?

Market research questions for your target audience

Once you’re sure there’s a viable market for your business, it’s time to drill down into that market – your audience and website demographics .

The six aspects of audience demographics: education level, hobbies or interests, financial situation, profession, age, and gender.

To begin, you’ll want to ask your respondents a few demographic questions to understand the basics. These might include:

41. How old are you? 42. Which gender do you identify as (if any)? 43. What’s your level of education? 44. What’s your profession? 45. What’s your household size? 46. What is your household income? 47. Which ethnic/cultural group do you identify with? 48. Where do you live? 49. Do you have any dependents? 50. What are your hobbies?

These questions provide a top-level understanding of your target audience . So, you can then utilize psychographic segmentation to dig a little deeper. These inquiries are designed to draw out your customers’ attitudes, lifestyles, likes, dislikes, motivations, and beliefs – particularly if they relate to your product or service.

The goal? To match your business with its ideal customer . Examples of these types of market research questions include:

51. Do you actively seek out new experiences or prefer to stick with what you know? 52. What do you most enjoy doing in your free time? 53. What was the last big-ticket item you purchased? 54. Have you ever boycotted a brand? If so, which brand – and why? 55. Which matters more when you make a purchase – price or quality? 56. Would you rather have more time or money? 57. How do you like to make purchases – do you prefer apps or web-based services? 58. How do you prefer to seek customer support? 59. What’s your main source of information?

For a more detailed deep dive into the above, see our guide on the what and why of market segmentation – and how to become a pro at it!

The definition of market segmentation is “the process of dividing a broad target market into smaller, more specifically defined groups.

Market research questions for your customers

So, you’ve established the market for your product, nailed your target audience, and now… you’ve got customers! Congrats – that’s a surefire sign that you’re on the right track.

But simply having new customers isn’t enough. To be truly successful, you’ll need to maintain engagement , foster loyalty to your product, and keep your customers coming back for more – in other words, build your brand.

Fortunately, this is where market research can help. By asking your existing customers a few questions, you can find out what you’re doing well, what you could be doing better, and – crucially – what your brand means to them. With this knowledge, you can do more of what your customers love, and identify key areas for improvement.

Here are some of the market research questions you can ask your customers to get useful feedback:

60. How did you first hear about our brand? 61. What made you choose us? 62. How long have you been a customer? 63. How would you rate your most recent experience with us? 64. Did we answer all your questions and requests for support? 65. Would you use us again? 66. How likely are you to recommend us to a friend? 67. What do you wish our product could do? 68. Do you believe our product is priced fairly? 69. What’s the maximum you’d pay for this kind of product? 70. What do you like most about our product?

Explore our complete guide to audience development for more tips, tricks, and strategies around this type of customer analysis.

Market research questions for competitor analysis

Death, taxes, and… competition .

Yep – no matter how original or innovative your idea is, pretty soon, there’ll be hordes of wannabes targeting the same space with similar products, and guess who they’ll be targetting? Your customers.

So how do you keep your friends close and your competition even closer?

Well, a SWOT analysis is a good place to start. It involves swotting up on your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It’s a heady mix of evaluating your business and the external factors that could affect it. So it’s naturally a great place to get your competitor analysis and benchmarking off the mark.

The definition of SWOT is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

You could also begin by asking yourself the following market research questions:

71. Who are our main competitors? 72. What are they doing that we’re not? 73. What’s our unique value proposition? 74. How much web traffic do our competitors receive? 75. Do they have a mobile app? If so, is it on iOS or android? How many monthly or daily active users do they have? 76. What’s their bounce rate ? 77. Which keywords and search terms do they target? 78. Which marketing channels do they prioritize, and how frequently do they advertise? 79. How do the backlink profiles of our competitors compare to our own? 80. Are our competitors seen as more authoritative in the space? 81. What kind of content do our competitors produce? 82. How do our competitors attract customers? 83. What are the unique selling points of our competitors? 84. What do our competitors charge? 85. What social media channels do our competitors use? 86. What kind of discounts and promotions do our competitors run? 87. Which sources and affiliates drive traffic to our competitors’ sites? 88. How does our business model compare to those of our rivals?

Remember, your customers are a potential goldmine of information about your competitors . Reach out to your client base with the following market research questions:

89. Who do you seek advice from when shopping for this kind of product? 90. Are you loyal to a particular brand in the space? 91. If so, what do you love most about this brand? 92. Is there anything that this brand could do better? 93. How did you find the last product you bought in the industry? 94. Is there anything you see our competitors doing that you’d like us to do? 95. What’s most likely to make you buy a product from another brand? 98. Can you tell us the top three things that made you choose us over a competitor? 99. What one thing matters most to you when deciding between brands that offer the same product?

You may also consider including some open-ended questions so you can hear from your loyal customers in their own words. Market research surveys are a great way to uncover and collect this type of data.

If you’re unsure where to start, learn about the seven types of competitor analysis frameworks – and how to use them to get your strategy off the ground.

Similarweb Competitor Analysis Frameworks

Whether you're B2B or B2C, get started with our free and easy to use template

How to answer these questions with Similarweb

Now that you’re armed with the 99 research questions you need to succeed in your market research endeavors, how do you answer them?

Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence is a great place to start. With these tools (which you can try for free) you can effortlessly do market sizing, gauge your audience’s loyalty and engagement rate , uncover mobile app intelligence for your market, improve your site’s retention rates, and more.

Similarweb platform shows the traffic and engagement metrics with its cutting-edge data.

In the same vein, Similarweb can also help you conduct that all-important competitor analysis . You can build a picture of which rival sites your customers frequent and form a data-driven understanding of why.

With Similarweb Digital Research Intelligence, you get an entire suite of market research and analysis tools at your fingertips. You can monitor your industry in real time via a personalized dashboard with on-demand access to industry, company, and consumer trends. With a broad view across web and mobile app intelligence, you can clearly understand the digital landscape that matters to you ( and your customers ) most.

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Check out what Similarweb can do for you today, and start tackling those big questions now!

Level up your market research

Get the data you need to adapt to market changes and industry trends.

What is market research?

Market research assesses the viability of a product or service by reaching out to its target market. It can include primary research – such as interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires – and secondary research , like articles and white papers.

What is the best way to ask market research questions to customers?

Because they’re quick to set up, relatively low-cost, and easy to use, market research surveys are a great tool to use if you want to ask a group of people market research questions.

What’s the difference between qualitative and quantitative market research?

While qualitative data is typically mined through close observation with participants – such as in focus groups or face-to-face interviews – quantitative processes tend to involve larger-scale data grabbing. This could use forms, surveys, polls, or questionnaires to collect opinions en masse, often via emails or social media.

Qualitative data captures people’s thoughts and feelings – the prevailing sentiment around a product or service. Its quantitative counterpart, however, is more concerned with the cold, hard facts. That could be traffic metrics, engagement levels, bounce rates: anything that paints a data-driven picture!

by Liz March

Digital Research Specialist

Liz March has 15 years of experience in content creation. She enjoys the outdoors, F1, and reading, and is pursuing a BSc in Environmental Science.

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20 Market Research Questions To Ask In Your Customer Survey

The primary reason you conduct any customer survey with market research questions is to make effective decisions that grow your business by selling more to both existing customers, as well as by acquiring new customers by increasing the effectiveness of your product/service to suit their needs better. But when you take even a closer look, we’re making these decisions because the main objective is to become the obvious choice for that ideal customer. For that to happen and to reach market research goals, you need to ask:

What are Market Research Questions?

Market research questions is a questionnaire that is answered by customers or potential consumers, to understand their perception and opinion on a given subject, typically pertaining to product or service feasibility, understanding consumer needs and interests, and pricing concepts.

LEARN ABOUT: Dealership Marketing Strategies & Tips

For example: A customer survey on market research of an existing product line that focuses on the usefulness of specific features in a product line. Based on the feedback received from this survey, a business can now decide which features to invest and enhance/improve, and which features to relatively defocus/discontinue. This market research , therefore, enables a business to efficiently allocate resources based on real, data-oriented insights from their own customers.

LEARN ABOUT: Test Market Demand

A similar set of market research questions can also be sent to potential consumers of a product, to understand market absorption capability.

LEARN ABOUT: Consumer Surveys

What Market Research Questions should I ask in my Customer Survey?

Who is our ideal customer? These are typically demographic market research questions such as gender survey questions , education level, income level or location. You can expand these questions to find out your customer’s occupation or if your ideal customer is a parent, pet owner. Don’t skimp on demographics or psychographics . If anything, get really creative with them. You might consider conducting a survey with nothing but profiling questions that include where your customers shop, or where they prefer to eat. It’s critical to know as much as possible about your ideal customer so that you can begin focusing your marketing decisions around their preferences.
What do they struggle with? Another root set of data that market researchers are searching for within their ideal customer is “what they struggle with.” What are the 5 to 7 frustrations that they are dealing with when it comes to interacting with our product or service? Suppose you are a golf accessories company and you ask your ideal customer what frustrates them about their golfing experience. In that case, you might get responses such as “expensive golf clubs getting wet during a rainstorm.” If you get enough of those responses, you may consider developing a golf accessory that protects golf clubs in the rain.
What does your ideal customer really WANT? No matter how you phrase the market research questions (and there are countless creative formats) all we really want to know is what our customer will actually purchase as a solution. What is it that they WANT? Of course, they’re NOT going to say that they want something that doesn’t exist yet — in the 1960’s the average person would NOT have known that they wanted a microwave. They wanted hot food fast. One good way to get at these wants is to give your respondents some examples of product offerings and combinations and see how they rate them.
What sets you apart from your competition? Competitive analysis and bench-marking are critical if you want to increase the profitability of your product and build your brand. An effective way to measure or identify differentiators or competitive advantage is to ask Customer Satisfaction questions . The key to asking these market research questions is getting the attributes right. For example “How important is it that your tires have a run-flat safety feature?” instead of asking “How important is it that your car has tires.”For example, A survey can be conducted by either Apple or Samsung to find out how satisfied are the customers with their products and what are the other features that the consumer prefers from the competitive brand. Using such data a company can incorporate features based on the demand and can also benchmark their features that the customers prefer. A Apple vs Samsung Survey Questions template can help to achieve the data required to compare their products with the competition and strategize accordingly .
What benefits do your customers perceive? Because we all choose and purchase based on emotion — it’s important to understand specifically what emotional benefits our customers receive from our products and services. The more we connect with our customers on an emotional level and provide that benefit — the more likely they are to choose us. This is an ideal place to use matrix questions that rate the degree to which customers agree or disagree with a variety of “benefit” statements. Here is an example “I can count on Service X to pull me out of a bind.”
Who is currently buying from us? A very important research metric to track is the “who” is currently buying a product or a service from you. Deriving a pattern from the current purchasing population, helps you target and market to a similar potential demographic. This also is an ideal place to use demographic questions extensively but it also helps if other factors like geographical metrics are tracked. You don’t want to be ignoring your existing customer base and also be smart and agile in attracting new business to your brand.
Why are other people not buying from us? While it is imperative to know who is your potential customer or map your existing customer base, you need to find out who is not buying from you. This information is essential to understand if there are shortcomings in a product or service and at what milestone customers drop out of the purchasing process . This also helps to identify the way your business is conducted, if additional training is required to make a sale or if your product or service lacks in quality. Understanding why people are not buying from you also helps monitor if there is something fundamentally wrong with what you are offering to the masses.
Who can buy from us in the future? It is a known fact that is about 10x more expensive to create a new customer rather than to maintain the one you currently have. That, however, is no reason not to aim for new business. It is therefore important to have a clear picture of your potential future business. Targeting potential customers, is a mix of customer demographics that have purchased from you in the past and a mix of demographics you advertise and market to. It is therefore important to have a well-rounded product or solution. For example, since your barbecue sauces and rubs are famous and widely used in the midwest does not mean they cannot be bought in the southern states.
Why do people buy from you? What value or need does it fulfill? Customers only buy from you because of a perceived value . This value is either what you depict to potential customers or repeat customers have been privy to the value of your product or service. Customers also make a purchase because of the trust they have either in the product or service or the brand or sometimes even certain individuals. It is therefore important that you understand the value of your brand and stick to the morals and ethics of delivering high quality to ensure that the perceived and actual brand quotient is very high. The other reason why customers purchase from you is if their need is fulfilled by what you have on offer. This could either be a direct or an indirect need.
What would make you a perfect brand? No brand can be perfect! But you can surely be close to perfect. What this means is everything about your product or service is easy to use, intuitive, is value for money, scalable and ancillary support is impeccable. All of this is obviously immaterial if the product does not solve a real problem or make life easier for the customer. Having a very high customer oriented focus gives your brand a positive ring and becomes increasingly the go-to brand. You can use a simple Net Promoter Score question to understand how referrable is your brand and who are the promoters and detractors of your brand.
What single aspect about your brand makes it stand out and makes clients trust you? People buy from you or transact with you mostly when there is a high trust factor. Very rarely is the purchasing decision purely based on need or ease of access. To identify and build on that one factor that makes you a preferred buying choice over your competitors is very important. You can map preferred aspects of your brand to age, sex, geographical location , financial limitations etc. because each of those factors can appeal to your brand differently. It is important that you identify and fortify those aspects of your business. Your brand can also be preferred because of other factors like personnel, customer service , ethos and perception amongst peers, consumers and the society alike. Abercrombie & Fitch was a respected brand but lost a lot of market share and goodwill due to CEO’s words in one isolated incident. It takes lots of work and time to build trust but takes none to lose all of it!
What is the best way to communicate with the kind of people you are trying to reach out to? What’s caused the downfall for a lot of brands is the inability to reach out to target customers despite their product or service being impeccable. Not knowing how to reach your target audience or potential customer makes all your hardwork go down the drain. For example, if a new life saving drug is making its way to the market, but medical professionals and doctors don’t know about it or how to administer it and its benefits, about 20 years of work goes down the drain. You need to identify the right channels and avenues to reach out to the people that will consume your product or service.
What do customers make of your product and/or service line? There are a few brands that have one product or service and that rakes in the customers and money for them because of the nature of the product or service. But most brands aren’t this way! They would need to branch out into multiple products or services or very often, a mix of both. It is, therefore important to understand the value of your products and/or services. It is imperative to know if they solve a problem a customer has or make life easier for the customer or any other such reason. This helps in consolidating the customer base.
What improvements could be made to your products or services to have a wider reach? A product or a service has never achieved the maximum number of customers it can get. There always is someone who could use your product or service; maybe not in the form that it currently is but there is scope to scale. This makes it so much more important to collect periodic feedback on what additions your current customer base would like to see in your brand and what can bring in new customers from your competitors. Chipping away at deadwood features and making increased usability tweaks increases the adoption and use of your product and service. For example, a retail store wants to promote the use of its self-service checkout systems. However, a lot of customers still are not opting for the system. There can be many reasons to why the customer is choosing not to use the system, like complex operation, no readability, or even slow speed of the system. To understand the reason, a Usability survey for self-service checkouts can be conducted. This will enable the store to gather first-hand information from the customers and make improvements in the system accordingly.

Learn More: User Interface Survey Template

What is the right price to charge? Pricing a product or service is one of the most important aspects of your business. Pricing right can decide the revenue, brand perception, profitability and adoption of the product or service. Pricing too slow has a negative connotation and may increase in bringing in lower revenue. Pricing high gives the feeling of being elite and then the profitability and revenue hinge on the factors of per unit adoption rather than a very high adoption. Pricing just right is a myth – what someone finds cheap, someone else could find expensive. Where someone finds your product or service value for money, others may find it exorbitant. Hence, it is important to collect extensive feedback from your existing and potential customers about what they think is an ideal price to play. It is also important to conduct due diligence on competitors to map how they price versus the service and product features they provide. These factors will help you come close to an “ideal price” to charge.
What is the vision for the brand? A vision for a brand dictates the level the brand aspires to be and wants to scale up to be. Apple is now a preferred phone because the vision was to be an experience, not a device. The device is the means to ensuring that vision. They wanted to make the ecosystem so robust that any device you use, that familiarity and ease of use is standardized but also stonewall easy. Despite being expensive and facing ridicule during early days due to the ecosystem being different, they are now a one trillion behemoth, more than the GDP of some countries, due to having a vision for the brand.
What is the way to ensure you reach that vision? A vision is easy to have but tough to follow through on. This is because your vision may see many roadblocks and may not be the current flavor of the market, but it is the right thing to stick with it. Innovate in your product and service lines by taking into consideration what your customers want and need and items they themselves don’t know that they need. Despite enduring hardships, if you stick to your vision, it is easier to use that as a launchpad for being an immaculate and preferred brand.
What should the brand branch out into to avoid stagnation or imitation? While launching a product or service, it’s essential to understand where your competitors stand on the same product type or service line. How soon can they catch up to you and imitate your service or product? On the other hand, stagnation brings the ultimate demise of a brand, product, or service line. With little innovation and competitors saturating the market by imitating your product or service line, you’ll soon see your customer base dwindle. To ensure your customers don’t drop out, the key question to ask is, “What next?”. The best way to innovate or bundle your product or service is to understand what your customers struggle with and what value they are looking for. For example, Sony is known for its PlayStations, but competitors like Xbox don’t take long to catch up to their new products. How Sony does manage to stay ahead of the market is by constantly branching into new products and services.
What bundled service or product you can offer in conjunction with yours? Good partnerships are hard to come by, strategic ones are even harder. This question tackles two of your problems, how to offer something new to your customers and how to reduce competitors in market. Your bundled service or product though has to make sense to the use, should complement your brand and cannot be an operational and logistical nightmare for your brand which then makes it counter-productive. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram to consolidate on social images and short content rich video, is a strategic initiative to increase customer base as well as reduce competition at the same time. The key to building strong brand partnerships is to ensure your vision and product values align. Summing up, offering a bundled service or product in partnership will not only retain the existing customer base but also attract and increase new customers.

No matter why you are conducting a survey, you’ll find these 20 research questions at the core of “WHY” you want to know. Remember, your respondents will read or spend time with absolutely ANYTHING as long as they are at the center. Be sure to keep these 20 questions in mind when creating your survey and everyone involved will save time, aggravation and money. You can use single ease questions . A single-ease question is a straightforward query that elicits a concise and uncomplicated response.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

Beyond these 20 market research questions, here are 350+ Market Research Templates for you to use completely free!

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63 Insightful Market Research Questions to Ask in 2023

Better understand your target customer with these must-ask questions.

Understanding your target market, and how they respond to your product, is the key to successful promotional campaigns. Even if you feel like you understand your market perfectly, markets do change over time. Your customers’ opinions, needs, and wants will change along with current trends in society, politics, pop culture, and other influences. Asking the right market research questions can help you stay on top of your changing market.

The market research questions below will help you understand your market’s most pressing concerns , along with potential pain points.

Market research questions to understand customer demographics and psychology

Aside from basic demographic questions, like age, gender, income, and location, you can create a more specific customer profile. Ask these questions to get to know your customers better:

How do you primarily spend your time?
In which industry do you work?
What kind of hobbies do you regularly participate in?
What are your main interests?
If money or time were not an issue, what do you prefer to spend money on?
What draws you to one brand over another?
How do you choose between brands and products?
Who makes the primary purchasing decisions in your household?
How many people do you shop for on a regular basis?
What’s your preferred method of shopping? Why?
What makes you decide to avoid a brand in the future?
How do you feel about available products in [your product category]?
How often do you shop for [your product category]?
How much do you spend on [product category] on a monthly basis?
How do you use [product type] in your everyday life?

Market research questions for new products

If you’re gathering information to create or launch new products, these questions can provide valuable insight:

What do you look for when purchasing [new product or service]?
What is the most important feature for a [product type]?
How does [product type] make your life easier?
How often do you use [product type]?
Describe how you use [product type].
How much would you prefer to spend on a similar product or service?
What features would encourage you to pay more for a product or service?
Are there any features in [similar product or service] that you wouldn’t use?
Do you feel [competing products] are priced fairly?
What would convince you to try a new product or service in this category?

Market research questions for pain points

Understanding how your customers are responding to your current offerings, whether product, service, advertising, or customer service, can help you understand where your business can improve. Ask these questions to learn more:

When was the last time you purchased from [company]?
Describe your experience with your last purchase.
Where did we succeed in meeting your expectations?
Where did we fail in meeting your expectations?
What would make your experience with [product] better?
Are there any features you don’t use?
What would your ideal product or service include?
Have you ever talked to our customer service team?
Describe your reason for needing customer service assistance.
Describe your experience with our customer service team.
Was your issue resolved?
How quickly was your issue resolved?
Were you satisfied with the outcome?
What would have made the experience better?
What’s the most difficult part of using our products or services?
Do you use our website? How do you use it?
Have you experienced any problems contacting us for assistance? What were they?
Have you experienced any problems on our website? What were they?

Market research questions for pricing and placement

Understanding how your product pricing and placement compare to those of your competitors can be helpful. Use these questions to refine your pricing and promotional strategies:

How much do you currently pay for [product type]?
Do you think our product is priced fairly?
Have you found [product or service] for less? Did you purchase it? Why or why not?
What is a reasonable price range for [product or service]?
What is the ideal price for [product or service]?
Is [price point] too low or too high for a similar product/service?
Have you seen our products in stores before?
Where have you seen our products mentioned/placed/advertised?
Where would you like to see our products or services mentioned/placed/advertised?

Market research questions for advertising and brand awareness

Advertising, marketing, and branding create an image in your customers’ minds. While brand awareness is its own market research niche, these questions will help you understand how customers perceive your brand and advertising campaigns:

Are you familiar with our brand?
How did you find our brand/company?
Have you ever seen any reviews of our brand/product/company? How did they influence your purchase?
Have you ever seen advertisements for our brand/product/company? How did they influence your opinion of us?
Who do you think our target customer is?
When you think of our brand, how do you feel?
Does our advertising and branding accurately reflect your experience with our company?
What should potential customers know about our products and services?
What do you think our brand/company stands for?
Have you ever followed any of our social media channels? Which ones? How do you feel about our social media presence?

Ask the insightful questions with Voiceform

When it’s time to ask the market research questions that will get you the insight you desire, Voiceform will make the process simple. Our feature-rich, innovative multimedia survey platform empowers companies to get the answers they need. From voice and video functions to AI transcription and analysis , this powerful survey platform can help you create, launch and distribute multiple survey types. Learn more about our products today by scheduling a demonstration.

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68 market research questions to ask (and how to ask them)

Example market research questions, market research questions to ask customers, market research questions for product development, market research questions for brand tracking, pricing survey questions for market research, how to write your own market research questions.

No two market research projects are alike, but happily there are some tried-and-tested questions you can use for inspiration to get the consumer insights you’re looking for.

It’s all about asking questions that are most relevant to the goals of your research. Every so often the best questions are actually quite straightforward, like asking consumers where they do their grocery shopping.

If you’re creating a customer profile, you’ll ask different questions than when you’re running creative testing with your target audience, or getting insights on key consumer trends in your market.

The right market research questions are the ones that will lead you to actionable insights, and give you a competitive advantage in your target market.

Let’s kick this off and get straight into some questions, shall we?

Where do we even begin with this?! There are so many types of research and we’ll get into which questions work for each below, but here are some classic example market research questions to get you started.

These particular questions are good for surveys that you might run when you’re running some essential consumer profiling research.

Which of these products have you purchased in the last 3 months?
Which of the following types of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY< do you buy at least once a month?
Approximately, how much would you say you spend on >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY< per month?
What is stopping you from buying more of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
When was the last time you tried a new >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
Please rank the following on how important or unimportant they are when deciding which >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to buy?
Which of these brands are you aware of?
Which of these brands have you purchased from in the last 3 months?
How do you prefer to shop for >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
Why do you prefer to shop online?
Why do you prefer to shop in-store?
Thinking about the following, how often do you use/listen/watch each of these media?
Where do you go to keep up to date with the news?
Which social media platforms do you use daily?
What mobile phone do you currently own?

Surely you want to talk to your current customers to understand why they buy from you and what they think about your products?

Correct! But your consumer research should definitely not end with current customers!

Here’s why you should think about broadening your research to include other groups and different market research methods :

Current customers: This is a must! Running research to your current customers will help you understand how you can make your product or service better. These are the people who’ve spent their hard-earned cash on your products so they have a unique perspective on what kind of value you offer. In addition, understanding why your existing customer base chose your brand over others can help you create messaging that resonates with people who are still on the fence.
Previous customers: People who used to buy your products but don’t anymore can give you valuable insight into areas you might need to improve. Perhaps your brand perception has shifted making some customers buy elsewhere, or maybe your competitors offer customers better value for money than you currently do. These are the kinds of areas you can learn about by running research to previous customers.
Non-customers: You should also ask people who haven’t bought your products why they haven’t. That way you’ll learn what you need to improve to bring new customers in. You should ideally ask the same kinds of questions, so that you can learn about what product features you need to work on but also things like the messaging you should be putting out there to win people over.

Here are some questions that are perfect for competitive market analysis research. Some of these questions might sound similar to some from our previous section on consumer profiling—that’s because there’s often some crossover between these types of research. Consumer profiling often refers to a more general type of research that covers similar ground to market analysis. If you’re wondering how to calculate market size , questions like these would be a great starting point.

How often do you usually purchase >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
Why do you buy >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
What types of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY< do you buy?
How often do you buy the following types of >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
Where do you buy your >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
Where do you find out about >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
Which of these brands have your purchased in the last 12 months?
How would you feel if you could no longer buy >INSERT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CATEGORY<?
How important or unimportant do you find the following topics? (e.g. sustainability, diversity and inclusion, ethical supply chain)
What could be improved about the products you currently use?

Group of people taking part in market research

By involving consumers in the product development process, you can make sure that your products are designed to meet—and ideally exceed—their needs.

Product market research can be done at several points in the product development process, by asking potential customers in your target market questions about existing products (yours or competitors’), prototypes, or just your own early-stage product ideas.

You can dive into the customer experience, specific product features or simply find out if the product quality matches the value proposition you’re putting out there.

Sometimes you even get a surprising answer to the question: how does our product or service help people?

You might learn from the survey responses that customers are using your product in a different way than you intended, opening you up to new target markets and different product types in the future.

Asking these questions also allows you to get feedback on your designs, so that you can make necessary changes before the product is released. Here’s some inspiration for when you’re conducting product market research.

There are different types of new product development research. A key type is Jobs to be done research. This research digs into the practical reasons people buy products—the jobs they need to get done with a specific product. You use these insights to help you create products that will genuinely help consumers, and that they’ll ultimately want to buy.

How many times have you carried out [INSERT ACTIVITY] in the last 12 months?
How much time would you typically spend on this [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
How important or unimportant is carrying out this [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
How satisfied or unsatisfied do you feel when carrying out this [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
What is the best thing about carrying out [INSERT ACTIVITY]?
How does carrying out [INSERT ACTIVITY] make you feel? Please select all that apply
What particular problems or challenges do you run into while carrying out [INSERT ACTIVITY]?

When you’re cooking up your brand’s next product, you’ll want to go through a concept testing phase. This is where you ask consumers what they think about your idea and find out whether it’s likely to be a success. Here are some of the questions you could ask in your concept testing research.

To what extent do you like or dislike this idea/product? [ATTACH IMAGE]
What do you like about this idea/product?
What do you dislike about this idea/product?
Is easy to use
Sounds tasty
Is good quality
Is Innovative
Is different from others
Purchase this product
Replace the product I currently own with this
What other products this idea/product reminds you of? Please provide as much detail as possible including the product name.
What feature(s), if any, do you feel are missing from this product?
How would you improve this idea/product? Be as descriptive as possible!
What issues do you solve through the use of this product?
When can you see yourself using this product? Please select all that apply.
The price for this product is $25.00 per item. How likely or unlikely would you be to buy this product at this price?

Get inspired with NPD survey templates

Our in-house research experts have created New Product Development (NPD) survey templates to give you the perfect starting point for your product research!

Does the perspective of new customers change over time? How do you compare to other brands, and how do you become the preferred brand in your market and increase that market share?

Brand perception and brand awareness are super important metrics to track. These insights can be used to improve customer experience and satisfaction on a higher level than just product: the relationship you have with your customers.

This research can also help you understand how to reach the holy grail of branding: turning loyal customers into brand ambassadors.

You should also remember to ask marketing research questions about your brand to existing and potential customers.

Existing customers might have a different view after having interacted with your team and products, and you can use that to manage the expectations of your target customers down the line. And potential customers can help you understand what’s holding them back from joining your customer base.

Top tip: it’s completely fine (and super beneficial!) to run brand tracking into your competitors’ brands as well as your own. Replicating research for different brands will give you a tailored benchmark for your category and position.

Here are some key questions to ask in your brand tracking research.

Which of the following, if any, have you purchased in the past 12 months?
Thinking about >INSERT YOUR CATEGORY<, what brands, if any, are you aware of? Please type in all that you can think of.
Which of these brands of facial wipes, if any, are you aware of?
Which of these facial wipe brands, if any, have you ever purchased?
Which of these facial wipe brands, if any, would you consider purchasing in the next 6 months?
e.g. Innovative
Easy to use
Traditional
We’d now like to ask you some specific questions about >INSERT YOUR BRAND<.
When did you last use >INSERT YOUR BRAND<?
What do you like most about >INSERT YOUR BRAND<?
What do you like least about >INSERT YOUR BRAND<?
How likely would you be to recommend >INSERT YOUR BRAND< to a friend, family or colleague?
Why did you give that score? Include as much detail as possible
In newspapers/magazines
On Instagram
On Facebook
On the radio
Through friends/family/colleagues
When did you last use >INSERT MAIN COMPETITOR BRAND<?
How likely would you be to recommend >INSERT MAIN COMPETITOR BRAND< to a friend, family or colleague?

Kick off your brand tracking with templates

Track your brand to spot—and act on!—how your brand’s perception and awareness affects how people buy. Our survey templates give you the ideal starting point!

When it comes to pricing your product, there’s no need to wing it—a pricing survey can give you the insights you need to arrive at the perfect price point.

By asking customers questions about their willingness to pay for your product, you can get a realistic sense of what price point will be most attractive to them and, not unimportant, why.

Top tip: good pricing research can be tough to get right. Asking how much people would theoretically be willing to pay for a product is very different from them actually choosing it in a shop, on a shelf next to competitors’ products, and with a whole load of other economic context that you can’t possibly test for. Price testing is useful, but should sometimes be taken with a pinch of salt.

Here are some questions you could use in your pricing research.

Which of the following product categories have you bought in the last 12 months?
How often do you currently purchase >INSERT YOUR CATEGORY<?
At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it? (Too expensive)
At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you have to give some thought to buying it? (e.g. Expensive)
At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be a bargain—a great buy for the money? (e.g. cheap)
At what price would you consider this >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY< to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good? (Too cheap)
How much do you currently pay for >INSERT PRODUCT CATEGORY<? Please type in below
Thinking about this product, please rank the following aspects based on how much value they add, where 1 = adds the most value 10 = adds the least value.
Thinking about the product category as a whole, please rank the following brands in order of value, where 1 is the most expensive and 10 is the least.

Formulating market research questions can be tricky. On the one hand, you want to be specific enough that you can get tangible, useful answers. But on the other hand, you don’t want to ask questions that are so difficult or unclear that respondents will get frustrated and give up halfway through.

Think about what answers you need and what actions you are hoping to take based on those answers.

We’ll help you get started with a list of steps to take when formulating your own market research questions, and putting them together in a survey that makes sense.

1. Define your research goals and link them to actions you can take

Before you can write great market research questions, you need to know what you want to learn from your research.

What are your goals? What do you want to find out? Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, you can start brainstorming questions that will help you achieve them.

2. Know your target market and the language they use

Who are you conducting market research for? It’s important to know your audience before you start writing questions, as this will help you determine the best way to phrase them.

For example, if you’re conducting market research for a new product aimed at teenagers, you’ll want to use different language than if you were conducting research for a new financial planning service aimed at retirees.

3. Keep it simple, and break things into smaller pieces

Don’t make your questions too complicated. Stick to simple, straightforward questions that can be easily understood by your target audience.

The more complex your questions are, the more likely it is that respondents will get confused and provide inaccurate answers.

If you feel a question is too difficult, see if you can break it up into smaller pieces and add follow-up questions on top.

And don’t ever load two questions into one! This falls into Consumer Research 101, but it’s amazing how often it happens. Instead of ‘What’s your favorite chocolate bar, and why?’ ask two questions: ‘What’s your favorite chocolate bar?’ and ‘Why is this your favorite chocolate bar?’

4. Be super specific

Make sure your questions are specific enough to get the information you need. Vague questions will only lead to vague answers.

For example, instead of asking ‘What do you think of this product?’, ask ‘What did you think of the taste of this product?’ or ‘What did you think of the packaging of this product?’.

5. Avoid leading questions

Leading questions are those that suggest a particular answer or course of action. For example, instead of asking ‘Do you like our new product?’, which suggests that the respondent should like the product, try asking ‘What are your thoughts on this product?

This question is neutral and allows the respondent to answer freely without feeling pressured in any particular direction. It’s also brand-neutral: people answering this question will have no idea who’s asking, and their opinion won’t be biased as a result.

6. Make sure your question is clear

It’s important that your question is clear and concise so that respondents understand exactly what they’re being asked. If there is any ambiguity in your question, respondents may interpret it in different ways and provide inaccurate answers.

Always test your questions on a few people before sending them to a larger group to make sure they understand what they’re being asked.

7. Avoid loaded words

Loaded words are those with positive or negative connotations that could influence the way respondents answer the question. For example, instead of asking ‘Do you love this product?’, which has a positive connotation, try asking ‘What are your thoughts on this product?’

This question is neutral and allows the respondent to answer freely without feeling pressured in any particular direction

8. Make sure the question is answerable

Before you include a question in your market research survey, make sure it’s actually answerable. There’s no point in asking a question if there’s no way for respondents to answer it properly. If a question isn’t answerable, either revise the question or remove it from your survey altogether.

9. Use an appropriate question type

When designing your market research survey, be sure to use an appropriate question type for each question you include. Using the wrong question type can lead to inaccurate or unusable results, so it’s important to choose wisely. Some common question types used in market research surveys include multiple choice, rating scale, and open-ended questions.

10. Pay attention to question order

The order of the questions in your survey can also impact the results you get from your research. In general, it’s best to start with more general questions and then move on to more specific ones later on in the survey. This will help ensure that respondents are properly warmed up and able to provide detailed answers by the time they reach the end of the survey.

Make smart decisions with the reliable insights

To make sure you make smart decisions that have real impact on your business, get consumer insights you can rely on. Here’s our rundown of the top market research tools.

Survey questions for market research are designed to collect information about a target market or audience. They can be used to gather data about consumer preferences, opinions, and behavior. Some common types of market research survey questions include demographic questions, behavioral questions and attitudinal questions.

There are many different types of market research questions that companies can use to gather information about consumer preferences and buying habits. They can be divided into different categories, like a competitive analysis, customer satisfaction or market trends, after which you can make them more specific and turn them into survey questions. These are some of the things your research questions can help you answer: – What is the target market for our product? – Who is our competition? – What do consumers think of our product? – How often do consumers purchase our product? – What is the typical customer profile for our product? – What motivates consumers to purchase our product?

When conducting market research, surveys are an invaluable tool for gathering insights about your target audience. But how do you write a market research questionnaire that will get you the information you need? First, determine the purpose of your survey and who your target respondents are. This will help you to write questions that are relevant and targeted. Next, craft clear and concise questions that can be easily understood. Be sure to avoid ambiguity, leading questions and loaded language. Finally, pilot your survey with a small group of people to make sure that it is effective. With these tips in mind, you can write a market research survey that will help you to gather the crucial insights you need.

Elliot Barnard

Customer Research Lead

Elliot joined Attest in 2019 and has dedicated his career to working with brands carrying out market research. At Attest Elliot takes a leading role in the Customer Research Team, to support customers as they uncover insights and new areas for growth.

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50+ Must-ask questions for your market research surveys

50+ Must-ask questions for your market research surveys

Şeyma Beyazçiçek

Market research is an essential part of finding answers to your questions. For this reason, market research surveys have a big importance. So, market study survey questions, too . These types of questions help you get essential data about the target audience, conduct competitive analysis, get new ones, or protect existing customers .

We have gathered the most essential data to help you gather information on the target market or target customer. In this article, you will find 50+ market research survey questions and examples about customers, products, social media, etc. You need to seriously consider these business survey questions for market research and learn more!

What is a market research survey?

A market research survey is a document that asks demographic questions or any type of market research questions that aim to collect vital customer feedback to make you better in marketing . The critical point of a market research survey is to learn customer experience and make marketing plans according to it.

A report by Statista shows that since 2008 , the market research sector’s global revenue has increased by more than twice, surpassing $81 billion in 2022 . So, the importance of market research is getting more realized, and you need market analysis survey questions. Good survey questions for market research collect data to help you create definite strategies for a better marketing plan.

50+ Market research survey questions you must ask in your surveys

Each company has its own unique priorities and needs. For this reason, companies should choose questions carefully for their survey. 50+ market research survey questions might differ according to the needs and requirements of a company. Nevertheless, we have gathered the most essential and basic ones to make you grow faster.

If you want to access all these privileges we have discussed so far, you need to have a look at these 50+ must-ask questions for your market research surveys:

Customer survey questions for market research questions

The primary reason for selling a product or service is for customers . Finding the target audience for your company is one of the most important parts of your market research survey. For that reason, you need to have a look at these customer survey questions for market research questions:

1. How often do you shop from us?

Once a week
Twice a week
Once a month
Twice a month
Once every two months
Once every three months
Once every six months
Once a year

2. What is your favorite product/service?

3. What is your least favorite product/service?

4. Why do you choose us?

Your reputation for quality products and services
Your competitive pricing
Your commitment to customer service
Your convenient location
Your wide selection of products and services
Your knowledgeable staff
Your experience in the industry
Your commitment to innovation
Your commitment to sustainability

5. Would you recommend us to your friends/family?

6. Since when do you choose us?

Two Years Ago
Three Years Ago

7. Overall, from 1-10, how do you rate us?

An opinion scale question example about satisfaction

Market research questions for a product

A market research question for a product is an excellent helper for companies to understand and collect data about existing. If you want to learn how your customers are satisfied with your exciting product, you only need to ask them these questions. Here are your market research questions for a product:

8. Have you ever heard of this product before?

9. From 1-10, how would you rate this product?

10. Do you believe this product is useful/helpful for you?

11. What is the likelihood of buying this product again?

Very Likely
Very Unlikely

12. What do you like about this product?

It is easy to use
It is cost-effective
It is reliable
It has great customer service
It has a wide range of features

13. What do you dislike about this product?

Functionality

14. Would you recommend this product to your friends or family?

You can replace the word “ product” with the name of your own product.

A question example about purchasing behavior

New product market research survey questions

New product market research survey questions are perfect for your company if you plan for a new product. Imagine that you are about to launch a new product. You can take fewer risks if you ask questions about the new product before launching it. So you might need these market research questionnaire questions for your new product:

15. Have you seen a similar product?

16. How likely are you to use this product for your business activities?

17. What do you think is the best feature of this new product?

18. What do you think is the least favorite feature of this new product?

19. Do you find the price reasonable?

20. Are you excited about this product?

21. Overall, from 1-10, how do you rate this new product?

A question example about later use

Social media survey questions for market research

Social media is an excellent way of collecting helpful data from your customers because, today, nearly everybody has a social media account. You can have insightful data as long as you know which platform to use and how to use it. So, here are your social media survey questions for market research:

22. Which social media platforms do you use? ( you can choose more than 1 )

23. In which social media platforms do you spend time the most?

24. Do you follow us on your social media accounts?

25. What do you think about our company’s social media account?

It's great!
It could use some improvement.
I haven't seen it

26. Do you believe we can use social media effectively?

27. What can we do to improve our social media accounts?

Post regularly
Run contests and giveaways
Use relevant hashtags
Optimize profile information
Respond to comments
Collaborate with influencers

28. Which influencers do you relate to us the most?

A market research survey question example about social media

Market research questions to ask potential customers

As much as trying to hold your existing customers, you should also try to find potential customers and expand your network. Because only in this way you can grow your business. When you have good market research questions to ask potential customers, as given below, you can easily get what you need:

29. Have you ever heard us before?

30. When you think of our brand, what comes to your mind first?

31. Who is our rival for you?

32. What is your minimum budget?

33. What is your maximum budget?

34. Would you consider choosing our product/service?

35. What are your best aspects, you think?

Market research questions for B2B companies

Just like any sector, B2B companies need to do their best to run market research. As for their market research survey, the questions will be different because they need to aim at businesses directly. If you need them, here are your market research questions for B2B companies:

36 . Who is your ideal customer?

37. What really matters to your ideal customer?

38. Do you think you know your customers?

39. How can you know your customers better?

40. What is your customers’ annual income?

41. What do your customers do in their free time?

42. What attracts your customer?

Demographic questions for your market research survey

Demographic questions allow your company to understand your customer’s background better. Also, if you want to understand the certain characteristics of your target audience, demographic questions are the best option for you. Have a look at these demographic questions for your market research survey:

43. What gender do you identify as?

Genderfluid

44. How old are you?

65 or Above

45. What is your marital status?

46. Can you please specify your ethnicity?

African American
Asian American
Hispanic/Latino
Native American
Pacific Islander
White/Caucasian

47. Where are you located?

United States
United Kingdom

48. What is your education level?

High School
Associate's Degree
Bachelor's Degree
Master's Degree
Doctorate Degree

49. What is your annual income?

$0 - $25,000
$25,001 - $50,000
$50,001 - $75,000
$75,001 - $100,000
$100,001 - $150,000
$150,001 - $200,000
$200,001 and above

50. What is your current employment situation?

Employed full-time
Employed part-time
Self-employed
Not looking for work

A market research survey question example about income

How can I create a market research survey?

In order to collect essential data for your market research, if you want to handle it the fastest way, you will need an online form builder. Also, if you want to build your form with lots of options and create just like you wish and want to do all of them for free, there is only one option left: forms.app .

As long as you follow some basic steps, you can easily create your market research survey and here are the steps:

1. Login or create an account

Firstly, you should log in to your existing account if you do not have one; no worries, you can easily and quickly create an account . Also, do not forget that you have the opportunity to log in via Google, Facebook, and Apple accounts.

2. Start from scratch, choose a temple, or generate with AI

You have access to a wide range of options thanks to forms.app . You must begin from scratch if you wish to pick every aspect of your survey. The site offers pre-made market research survey templates if you do not want to spend too much time on it. However, if you stay current with the latest technology, artificial intelligence can create your survey in seconds!

3. Add your market research survey questions

Based on your company’s primary needs and essential requirements, you should choose your market research survey questions very carefully. Each company’s priorities can differ. For that reason, you need to pay attention while adding them.

4. Customize your survey form

In this step, you can easily change and personalize your online survey . To give an example, you can change the size and type of the font, colors, and order of questions, add your brand’s logo, etc.

5. Share your market research survey

In the final step, you can share your survey with your target via many platforms . You can choose the link to be public, limited, or private while sharing. Additionally, you can preview the link to see whether it has any meta titles, descriptions, or images.

How can I write good market research questions?

One can randomly create market research questions for the survey; however, if you want to be one step ahead of your rivals and be good at writing market research questions, you need to follow the points given below:

Consider your company’s needs : You need to have a moment and consider what your company needs the most. What are your priorities or urgent needs? Or what are your urgent deficiencies to be covered? After answering these questions, you can create better questions.
Think like the customer: The key point is listening to your customers and trying to think like them. When you think like them, you can come up with better market research questions and collect more valuable data for your survey.
Be direct: Questions asked directly are definitely better , instead of asking too many indirect questions or long and complex sentences that might be confusing. So, you need to pay attention at this point.
Key points to take away

As we have discussed so far, the importance of market research is undeniable. If you want to increase your market share and be more successful in your sector, there are some key points for your company to take away. You should not ignore these points:

Design of the survey: Do not forget that the more you pay attention to your market research survey design, the more you will seem professional.
Pay attention to the context: Design is an important factor, but context is the exact reason you run a survey. So, you need to be careful with your questions.
Check the result: At the end of the survey, checking and analyzing the results is a key point. If you will not do that, there is no need to share the survey, isn’t it?

Now that you have read so far, you know all the critical points about the issue and where to start. Take action now and start finding your own effective data collection methods for market research !

Şeyma is a content writer at forms.app. She loves art and traveling. She is passionate about reading and writing. Şeyma has expertise in surveys, survey questions, giveaways, statistics, and online forms.

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Product Management

80 Market Research Questions for More Valuable Insights (+tips)

Content Writer

Created on:

April 15, 2024

Updated on:

80 Market Research Questions for More Valuable Insights (+tips)

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There are different types of market research, with 85% of researchers regularly using online surveys as their go-to tool , allowing them to reach broad target audiences in a cost-effective way.

Online surveys can break down geographical barriers and uncover profound customer insights, but only if you come up with the right market research questions.

Your questions shape the data you get, influencing your understanding of customer behavior and key consumer trends.

In this article, you'll find many examples of market research questions organized by categories, followed by tips for creating and analyzing your own market research survey.

80 market research questions to ask for more valuable insights

Demographic questions.

Learning more about your existing customer base can help you identify your ideal customers and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. During the process, you may also discover that you have different customer personas, and you can later segment your audience.

Also, having detailed demographic data allows you to create targeted marketing campaigns that will convert better.

Here are some questions to explore your target audience:

What is your age and gender?
Where do you live?
Do you have a partner or children?
What is your highest level of education?
In what industry do you work?
What is your current job title?
What is your annual income?
What's the category you spend the most money on (e.g., groceries, technology, clothes)?
What's the average amount you spend on _____ (mention a particular category relevant to your industry)?
What websites, newspapers or magazines do you use to stay informed?

Product opportunities

Almost half of the startups fail because they're building products for which there's no real market need . That's why it's essential to do a product opportunity assessment before you invest time and money into building a product that may not have a big enough target market.

The following market research interview questions will help you discover burning issues and problems that your new product or service can solve.

What challenges and problems do you currently face in _____ (name specific area) that you can't find an adequate solution for?
Are there any existing products that you find close to meeting your needs but still fall short in some aspects, and which?
How do you currently cope with the absence of a dedicated solution for that problem?
Hypothetically speaking, what would an ideal solution for that problem look like?
What features would you like this product to include?
Would you purchase this product if it was available today? If not, why?
What is the one feature that would make our product a must-have for you?
Are there any untapped market segments or niches where our product could solve the existing problems?
If you were to brainstorm about a product that anticipates future needs in your industry, what would be its main features?
How would you prioritize the importance of the following features? (you can provide them with a list of features they need to rank from the most important to the least important)

If you've already started developing your product, read this article on how to get feedback for early-stage products and validate your product.

Customer feedback

If you've already launched a product or service, you should ask your existing customers for feedback and suggestions for improvement. This is an essential component of continuous product discovery , which is the best way to increase customer satisfaction by anticipating their needs.

Here are some questions you can use:

How long have you been using our product?
How often do you use our product?
What made you decide to purchase our product?
Describe how you use our product and what problems it solves for you.
Which features of our product do you use the most?
Which features of our product do you use the least or not at all?
What is the best feature of our product in your opinion?
What might be the weakest feature or the biggest area for improvement in our product?
Have you had any issues or problems with our product?
What would you miss the most if our product was no longer available?

Click here to discover 13 proven ways to collect customer feedback . Also, here are some additional questions for your product feedback survey .

Brand awareness

Market research surveys can help you see how existing and potential customers perceive your brand and whether you need to raise brand awareness or adjust your brand image.

Have you heard about our brand before?
How did you hear about us?
What is the first thing that comes to mind when someone mentions our brand?
What emotions or feelings do you associate with our brand?
How would you describe our brand in one sentence?
Are you currently using our products, and how often?
How likely are you to purchase our products again?
Are you aware that we also offer _____? (this can be an excellent opportunity for up-selling)
How often do you see our posts or ads on social media?
You can also calculate the Net Promoter Score by asking your current customers: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?

Pricing analysis

The following market research survey questions will help you explore the balance between product quality, features, and cost and assess the perceived value of your product.

What is more important to you: product quality or price?
In your opinion, what's a fair and reasonable price for a product like this?
What is the price range within which you'd feel comfortable purchasing this product?
What is the maximum amount you'd be willing to spend on this product?
If you think the price is too high, what additional features or improvements would justify the current price of our product?
Are there specific payment options or financing plans that would make you consider purchasing our product?
Do you find our pricing information clear and easy to understand?

Customer preferences

This set of questions will help you learn more about consumer preferences and their purchasing habits so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

What factors are influencing your purchasing decisions the most?
Where do you look for products you want to buy?
Do you prefer offline or online shopping, and why?
Do you read customer reviews, and on which websites?
Are you looking for recommendations from your friends and family?
Do you use social media to follow brand accounts, and which platforms do you use the most?
What is your preferred way to receive information and updates about a brand (e.g., social media, email newsletter, SMS)?
How do you prefer to consume information: through video, audio or reading?

Customer concerns

Understanding why people are not buying from you is essential for adjusting your offer and marketing. This set of questions will help you uncover potential objections you can address on your website.

Is there anything that's preventing you from buying our product?
What would need to happen for you to purchase our product today?
If now is not the right time to buy it, why is that?
Do you have any doubts or questions about our product?
What was your biggest concern before purchasing our product?
What is the main reason for canceling your subscription / not ordering again?
Did you encounter any problems or challenges when using our product?
If there was one thing about our product that would have made your decision-making process faster, what would it be?

Competitive analysis

It's important to research your competitors and learn both about their unique selling points and their weaknesses from users’ perspectives, which can help you discover your own competitive advantage and do a thorough market opportunity analysis.

How are you currently dealing with the problem that our product solves?
Are you already using a product with similar features?
Which products or brands would you consider as an alternative to ours?
Why did you choose our product over other options?
Did you consider any other options?
Does our product miss some features that our competitors' products have?
Are our prices higher, lower or similar to those of other companies?
Which of these products have you tried? (provide a list of your competitors' products)
What is your preferred brand?
If our product was no longer available, what other product would you choose instead?

The following market research questions can be applied to your website, landing page, social media platforms or any other channel you use to share information about your product or service or communicate with your customers.

Was it easy to find information on our website?
Is our website easy to navigate and user-friendly?
Is some information missing on our website?
Is product information clear and transparent?
Do you think we should add any features to our website, and which ones?
What kind of content would you like to see on our blog?
Did you have any difficulties using our website?

Market research questions: Best practices

Here are a few tips to consider when creating your own market research questions:

Define clear objectives: Before starting, you have to be clear on what you want to get out of the market research. Learning more about your potential customers? Identifying your competition? Evaluating a new product idea? Identifying different customer segments?
Use neutral language: If you want to get unbiased results to drive customer-led product growth , use neutral language to avoid leading participants toward a particular response.
Use different types of questions: You should combine multiple-choice questions, Likert scales and open-ended questions, as each of them helps you gather different types of data. While close-ended questions are great for collecting and analyzing large amounts of quantitative data, the open-ended format can be better when creating interview questions for market research as it provides you with deeper customer insights .

Writing questions and conducting market research is just the first step. The second and even more important step is to analyze the data you've gathered so you can uncover insights and patterns.

The best way to do so is through a customer feedback platform like Zeda.io, which provides you with a centralized workspace to collect and manage feedback and analyze data from all customer interaction points in one place.

Our platform helps you transform customer feedback into actionable insights that can help you decide which product to build or how to prioritize product features .

Thanks to advanced AI algorithms, we can help you spot product opportunities by uncovering the features users desire the most.

It can also help you analyze customer feedback to detect issues and frustrations reported by users so that you can enhance customer experience by promptly fixing them.

We can also spot trends in user feedback and calculate a potential revenue impact from adding new features.

We hope you were able to pick some ideas for creating your next customer survey or interview questions for market research.

After conducting research, it's crucial to thoroughly analyze your market research questionnaire using the right user feedback tools .

Zeda.io is an AI-powered tool that transforms raw customer data into actionable insights, helping you better understand your customers and spot emerging trends before competitors.

It helps you take the guesswork out of product discovery and confidently create products your target market will love.

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How do you write a good market research question?

Good market research questions are the ones that are clear, concise, specific and aligned with your goals. To get unbiased data, avoid leading questions and suggesting particular answers to your target audience.

What questions should I ask for market research for a new product?

You should ask target customers about their pain points, struggles, challenges and desires. See how they're currently solving those problems, whether they're using any other similar product and whether some features of that product could be added or improved.

What are the 7 basic questions in market research?

Here are the key market research questions: What problem is our product solving? Who is our target audience? What product features are the most important for them? What influences their purchasing decisions? How much are they willing to pay? What's preventing potential customers from buying our product? Who are our main competitors?

What are the elements of market research?

The main elements of market research are researching your target audience, their needs and problems, doing a competitor analysis and spotting market trends.

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Market Research Questions

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Market research questions: what to ask and how.

9 min read Whether you’re looking for customer feedback, product suggestions or brand perception in the market, the right market research questions can help you get the best insights. Learn how you can use them correctly and where to begin.

What is market research?

Market research (also called marketing research) is the action or activity of gathering information about market needs and preferences. This helps companies understand their target market — how the audience feels and behaves.

For example, this could be an online questionnaire , shared by email, which has a set of questions that ask an audience about their views. For an audience of target customers, your questions may explore their reaction to a new product that can be used as feedback into the design.

Why do market research?

When you have tangible insights on the audience’s needs, you can then take steps to meet those needs and solve problems. This mitigates the risk of an experience gap – which is what your audience expects you deliver versus what you actually deliver.

In doing this work, you can gain:

Improved purchase levels – Sales will improve if your product or service is ticking all the right buttons for your customers.
Improved decision making – You can avoid the risk of losing capital or time by using what your research tells you and acting with insights.
Real connection with your target market – If you’re investing in understanding your target audience, your product and service will more likely to make an impact.
Understand new opportunities – it might be that your research indicates a new area for your product to play within, or you find potential for a new service that wasn’t considered before.

Get started with our free survey maker

Who do you ask your questions to?

Who to target in your market research is crucial to getting the right insights and data back. If you don’t have a firm idea on who your target audiences are, then here are some questions that you can ask before you begin writing your market research questions:

Who is our customer currently and who do we want to attract in the future?
How do they behave with your brand?
What do they say, do and think?
What are their pain points, needs and wants?
Where do they live? What is the size of our market?
Why do they use us? Why do they use other brands?

We’ve put together some questions below (Market research questions for your demographics) if you wanted to reach out to your market for this.

With the answers, you can help you segment your customer market, understand key consumer trends , create customer personas and discover the right way to target them.

Market research goals

Give yourself the right direction to work towards.There are different kinds of market research that can happen, but to choose the right market research questions, figure out your market research goals first.

Set a SMART goal that thinks about what you want to achieve and keeps you on track. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. For example, a good SMART business goal would be to increase website sales for a top product by 10% over a period of 6 months.

You may need to review some strategic business information, like customer personas and historical sales data, which can give you the foundation of knowledge (the ‘baseline’) to grow from. This, combined with your business objectives, will help you form the right SMART targets tailored to your teams.

Types of market research questions

Now that you have your SMART target, you can look at which type of market research questions will help you reach your goal. They can be split into these types:

For demographics
For customers
For product

Market research questions for your demographics

Demographic information about your customers is data about gender, age, ethnicity, annual income, education and marital status. It also gives key information about their shopping habits.

Here are some questions you can ask in your market research survey:

What is your age / gender / ethnicity / marital status?
What is the highest level of education you have achieved?
What is your monthly income range?
What methods of shopping do you use?
What amount do you spend on [product/brand/shopping] each month?
How regular do you shop for [product/brand]?

Learn more about the demographic survey questions that yield valuable insights .

Market research questions for your customer

These questions are aimed at your customer to understand the voice of the customer — the customer marketing landscape is not an one-way dialogue for engaging prospects and your customer’s feedback is needed for the development of your products or services.

How did we do / would you rate us?
Why did you decide to use [product or service]?
How does that fit your needs?
Would you recommend us to your friends?
Would you buy from us again?
What could we do better?
Why did you decide to shop elsewhere?
In your opinion, why should customers choose us?
How would you rate our customer experience?

Learn more about why the voice of the customer matters or try running a customer experience survey.

Market research questions for your product

These questions will help you understand how your customers perceive your product, their reactions to it and whether changes need to be made in the development cycle.

What does our [product or service] do that you like or dislike?
What do you think about [feature or benefit]?
How does the product help you solve your problems?
Which of these features will be the most valuable / useful for you?
Is our product competitive with other similar products out there? How?
How does the product score on [cost / service / ease of use, etc.]?
What changes will customers likely want in the future that technology can provide?

There are also a set of questions you can ask to find out if your product pricing is set at the right mark:

Does the product value justify the price it’s marketed at?
Is the pricing set at the right mark?
How much would you pay for this product?
Is this similar to what competitors are charging?
Do you believe the price is fair?
Do you believe the pricing is right based on the amount of usage you’d get?

Have you tried a pricing and value research survey to see how much your target customers would be willing to pay?

Market research questions for your brand

How does the impact of your products, services and experiences impact your brand’s image? You can find out using these questions:

What do you think about our brand?
Have you seen any reviews about us online? What do they say?
Have you heard about our brand from friends or family? What do they say?
How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend?
Have you read the testimonials on our own channels? Did they have an impact on your decision to purchase? How?
When you think of our brand, what do you think/ feel / want?
How did you hear about us?
Do you feel confident you know what our brand stands for?
Are you aware of our [channel] account?

Learn more about brand perception surveys and how to carry them out successfully.

How to use market research questions in a survey

For the best research questionnaires, tailoring your market research questions to the goal you want will help you focus the direction of the data received.

You can get started now on your own market research questionnaire, using one of our free survey templates, when you sign up to a free Qualtrics account.

Drag-and-drop interface that requires no coding is easy-to-use, and supported by our award-winning support team.

With Qualtrics, you can distribute, and analyse surveys to find customer, employee, brand, product, and marketing research insights.

More than 11,000 brands and 99 of the top 100 business schools use Qualtrics solutions because of the freedom and power it gives them.

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Related resources

Mixed methods research 17 min read, market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, request demo.

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85 Market Research Questions to Understand Your Audience

by Sumant Vasan

Knowing your audience is the secret sauce of any successful business or campaign. But how do you crack the code and really get into the minds of your customers?

To truly understand your target audience, you need to ask the right questions. “85 Insightful Questions to Engage and Understand Your Target Audience” is an ultimate guide that provides you with the right set of questions that not only open doors to genuine insights but also help you create a real connection with your audience.

Whether you’re trying to refine your product, tailor your marketing strategy, or get a clearer picture of who’s on the other side of the screen, these questions are your ticket.

Get ready to dive deep, build trust, and unlock the valuable information within your audience’s answers.

Table of Contents

What are Market Research Questions?

Market research questions are crucial in gathering specific information and insights about a target market or audience. They are designed to analyze market trends and competitors and understand consumer preferences, behaviors, and opinions. You can use Quantitative Research Methods (surveys, polls, etc) or if you have a focus group, you can focus on a more qualitative structure.

Market Research to Collect Valuable Insights

Businesses can use market research questions to improve product creation, marketing, and sales decision-making. It’s important to pick questions that match the goals you have for your market research.

So, let’s get started. Below, you can find the breakdown of relevant categories and suggested questions. Feel free to customize your preference, but the market analysis questions below are a great start.

Consumer Insights:

Understanding your customers’ preferences, pain points, and purchase decisions is crucial. Armed with this knowledge, you can enhance what they like and address what they don’t like.

What drives your decisions when you buy something?
What changes or enhancements would you prefer in our products or services?
Rate your satisfaction level with our customer support.
Would you suggest our products to your friends or family?
What aspects of our product or service do you value the most?
How does our product/service fit into your daily lifestyle or routine?

Startup Questions:

In the world of startups, market research isn’t just helpful, it’s essential to your success. It is the key to validating your business vision, identifying your target audience, and anticipating potential opportunities and challenges. This research-focused feedback is crucial in shaping a product that truly reflects the voice of your audience and meets their needs.

Which attributes do you prioritize when choosing a [product/service]?
Are you open to adopting a novel [product/service] that better caters to your needs?
What would primarily influence you to pick one product over its rivals?
What is your budget for a [product/service] that fulfills your specific needs?
Which channels do you prefer for receiving updates about new [products/services]?
How do you like to purchase [products/services] – online, in a physical store, or via a mobile application?
In what ways do you think technology could further solve your current challenges in [specific industry/problem area]?

If You’re Launching a New Product

When you are getting ready to introduce a new product to the market, it can feel like you’re putting together a puzzle. Conducting market research helps you bring all the pieces together, highlighting potential interest, clarifying desired features, and outlining the characteristics of your target customer base. This strategic approach is a precaution against releasing a product that may not appeal to your audience.

How did you become aware of our latest product?
Based on the details provided, what are your first thoughts about our new product?
How excited are you to try our latest product?
Which features or advantages of our new product did you like the most?
Do you think the price of the new product is reasonable considering its value to you?
Do you have any concerns about the new product?
Would you like to participate in the new product’s test run or beta phase?
If you were to describe our new product in three words, what would they be?

Feedback on Current Product Line:

If you need insight into your current product, make sure you ask the type of questions that really matter. Actionable data is what you’re looking for, not the fluff.

On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate your happiness with our current product?
What difficulties have you had while using our product?
Are there any specific things you would like to see improved in our product?
How does our product stand against competitors in terms of functionality and cost?
If you could change one thing about our product, what would it be and why?

Psychographics To Help With Segmentation:

Using market research questions to split your market into different groups is like being an orchestra conductor. It allows you to adjust your marketing strategies, tailor your products to exactly what different groups want, and connect with each part of your audience in a way that really clicks. It’s all about ensuring each part of your marketing hits the right note with every group you’re trying to reach.

What age bracket do you fall into?
What is your gender identity?
What’s your current place of residence?
What level of education have you completed?
Are you employed, running your own business, studying, or retired?
What hobbies or pastimes do you enjoy?
Which methods of communication do you prefer?
How do you typically make your buying decisions?
What primarily motivates you to buy a particular product/service?
What media outlets do you frequently rely on for news and entertainment?
In what ways do your cultural or local influences affect your purchasing decisions?

Competitor Analysis:

Understanding your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and tactics can provide valuable insights into market share and potential ways to differentiate yourself in the industry. Using survey tools to analyze your competition is similar to conducting intelligence gathering, which enables you to gain strategic insights from the viewpoints of customers and industry experts.

Have you ever used products/services from our rivals?
How would you assess our competitors’ products/services regarding quality?
What do you consider to be the strong points of our competitors’ products/services?
What influences your preference for our products/services over our competitors’?
Are there any particular advantages or features of our competitors’ offerings that you find appealing?
How do our products/services stack up against our competitors regarding overall value?
How probable is it that you would suggest our products/services to others over our competitors’?
What areas do you feel our competitors miss out on, and how could we capitalize on these gaps?

Brand Recognition and Recall:

Assessing brand awareness helps businesses gauge the success of their marketing initiatives and their brand’s visibility in the marketplace. Market research questions on brand awareness can show how well your brand is recognized and perceived.

Were you previously familiar with our brand?
How did you come to know about our brand?
Which products of ours are you aware of?
Have you ever used or bought any of our company’s products?
What do you particularly like about our product?
On a scale from 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to someone you know?
Can you recall any specific marketing or advertising campaign from our brand that left a lasting impression on you?

Price Perception and Expectations:

Determining an effective pricing strategy is crucial for attracting customers and maintaining profitability. Market research questions relating to pricing can provide insight into how customers perceive your prices compared to your competitors and what they value when considering price.

What price range do you find is fair for our product?
How does our pricing stack up against that of our market competitors?
What considerations do you consider when judging a product’s price?
Would you be ready to spend more on extra features or benefits?
How does the perceived quality of our product/service influence your willingness to pay a specific price?

Evaluating New Concepts:

Performing concept testing before fully developing a product allows businesses to test the waters with new ideas, ensuring they align with customer needs and have a viable market before significant resources are invested.

After reading the concept description for our new product/service, how interesting is it?
Which parts of the concept mainly catch your interest or seem appealing?
Based on the concept description, how likely are you to try or buy this new product/service?
What would be your main reason for trying this new product/service over others?
Is there anything lacking in the concept that would make it more appealing or valuable?
Would you suggest any changes or improvements to the concept to make it more appealing?
Based on the concept description, how much would you be ready to pay for this new product/service?
In considering new products/services, how much do you value sustainability and eco-friendliness?

Digital Footprint and Online Interaction:

Everyone is online. No secret there. So it’s clearly important to get insight into how they found you, if they liked the website experience and design if the content matched up to their expectations, etc.

How did you come across our brand or company online?
How often do you encounter our brand or company during your internet browsing?
Have you visited our website, and if so, what was your reason for the visit?
Do you follow our brand or company on social media platforms, and if so, which ones?
What is your impression of our brand or company’s social media presence (e.g., active, engaging, informative)?
Do you find our website and online material (like blogs or articles) user-friendly and informative?
What are your thoughts about the overall online experience with our website (considering aspects like speed, design, and functionality)?
How do you think our online presence compares with that of our competitors?
Are there any specific online platforms or websites where you’d like to see more activity from our brand or company?
What type of online content from our brand would make you more engaged or likely to interact (e.g., tutorials, customer stories, live Q&As)?

Understanding Company Image and Reputation:

Knowing how they view your brand is one of the most impactful lines of questioning. If they don’t trust you or feel the authenticity, you lose them as customers. Ask them, point blank, what do you think about our positioning. Do we come across as worthy of earning your business? Get real here, it matters.

How would you describe your overall view of our company?
In your opinion, what are the strengths of our company?
Based on your current view, how likely are you to recommend our company to others?
Are there particular elements of our company’s reputation that stand out?
What are your thoughts on how our company handles customer feedback and issues?
Have any specific events or experiences significantly shaped your view of our company?
Can you share a particular experience, either positive or negative, that has significantly shaped your perception of our company?
How do you view our company’s commitment to social and environmental responsibilities?

This set of questions is highly flexible, so you can tailor them to fit your market research requirements and your audience’s unique features. With the help of this toolkit, you have all the necessary resources to discover significant insights that can help you advance your business strategies.

How to Make the Most of Your Research Questions

A solid market research process is crucial because it’s the backbone of informed decision-making in your business. It’s like having a roadmap in unknown territory, guiding you to understand your customers, competitors, and the market.

To make the most of it, be clear about what you want to learn, and choose methods and questions that get you those answers. It’s not just about gathering data, but analyzing it to spot trends, understand behaviors, and predict future moves.

Remember, the goal is to convert this knowledge into actionable strategies that boost your business, not just to collect information. So, every step in your market research should be intentional, aiming to provide insights that directly support your business objectives.

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Customer Discovery Questions to Fully Understand Your Market and Product Potential

Sudarshan Somanathan

Head of Content

March 11, 2024

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Say you want to plant a tree. You wouldn’t do it on the first piece of land you come across, would you?

You’d do your research first—find fertile and well-drained soil and prospect a location that ensures optimal sunlight. That’s the only way to ensure your planting efforts bear fruit. 🍎

Similarly, you wouldn’t build a product without researching what customer needs to target. Customer or product discovery exercises are essential if you want your product to bear fruit, i.e., provide value to potential customers and achieve financial and market success.

As a product manager, how you approach your customer discovery interviews can steer you toward the right business decisions. You must ask the right questions to extract information crucial enough for shaping your product.

In this article, we’ll share our go-to customer discovery questions to help create new products or modify existing solutions . You’ll also find tips and tools to help make your discovery process effective and efficient.

What Are Customer Discovery Questions?

Relation between customer and product discovery, common customer discovery methods, 1. questions related to the customer pain points, roles, and everyday tasks, 2. questions related to existing solutions, 3. questions related to the user’s perspective of your product, 4. questions for gaining other valuable insights, when to conduct customer discovery interviews, communication and video conferencing tools, surveys, forms, and questionnaires, social media listening tools , customer relationship management (crm) tools , product and project management tools , clickup crm to stay aligned with customer satisfaction goals, do: prepare and document everything, do: make it a friendly conversation, don’t: be afraid of rejection, don’t: reveal too much during the conversation.

Customer discovery questions are questions you ask customers or clients to discover and understand their needs —particularly those that haven’t been met yet. Each unmet need is referred to as a pain point .

The pain points help product teams verify their assumptions about the market, estimate the profile of early adopters of the product, and focus on when developing something that’s both useful and well-received. 💗

Customer Discovery: Concept and Process

Customer discovery is the process of getting to know your target customers so you can build a product that serves them best, drives engagement, and sells well.

Usually, the process starts with the creation of a user persona depicting a specific demographic group and their relevant functional and psychological needs. Then, you use discovery questions to collect information from actual buyers and refine the persona as you go. In most cases, the data is shared with developer teams working on the product.

The discovery process doesn’t stop with the product launch , though, as customer needs change over time. You have to use analytics tools to collect real-time insights into customer behavior and adapt the product accordingly to retain your customers .

Tip: Use free ClickUp templates to simplify your customer or produce discovery processes. From product strategy to user personal templates , you can find 1,000+ pre-structured documents with built-in data management features to fast-track your workflows.

For example, you can use the ClickUp Customer Contact Form Template to collect and organize responses from market research and surveys in one place.

Customer and product discovery are tightly knit concepts but have distinct aims.

While the point of customer discovery is to understand the unmet needs of your target demographic, product discovery is all about identifying the product that meets those needs . It also zooms in on the how—the methods you should use to develop or modify the product and keep it relevant.

You can gain customer insights in many ways:

Conducting live customer interviews with individuals and focus groups
Distributing feedback forms online to reach a wider audience
Leveraging social listening to monitor online discussions on your product
Via internal discovery : Ask for insights from your sales teams and customer support representatives who interact with customers daily
Through product analytics : Many product management tools include features such as session recordings and heatmaps to help you visualize customer journeys , track usage patterns, and detect problem areas
By analyzing competitors and industry trends : Find out what your main competitors and industry leaders are doing and why. Strive to provide the same (or more) value and devise ways to capitalize on their weaknesses

Expert Customer Discovery Questions to Ask

In the following four sections , we’ll suggest some expert-recommended questions you can ask potential customers (in person or online) to better understand their pain points. You can modify the questions to work for your specific product or demographic.

Ask these open-ended questions to observe how your product can be useful to the customer:

What is your current job and your essential tasks?: The answer to this critical question will guide the conception and development of your product . It reveals the context in which the product will be used most often
What are your major pain points at the moment?: The current struggles of the customer show where existing products fall short. Your product should ideally resolve these specific issues
What are the biggest challenges you encounter when trying to do your job?: Although similar to the previous one, this question can reveal problems that are not apparent right away, helping you create well-rounded solutions

To understand the products you’re competing against, ask the following:

What tools do you currently use to solve problems specific to your job?: With this question, you can identify your biggest competitors. Your goal is to either complement the existing tools or surpass them by providing a more optimal solution
What do you dislike about the solutions you’ve tried?: The answer to this question will pinpoint your competitors’ shortcomings. You’ll know what mistakes to look out for and what opportunistic new features to pay attention to when designing your product

Tip: How do you build a superior product? Use the ClickUp Competitor Tracking Template to keep track of your competitors’ products, features, and pricing.

Once your product is ready for trial runs, use the questions below to gather initial feedback:

How easy is this product to use?: Intuitiveness and accessibility are the first criteria users will judge. If your product isn’t user-friendly, more users will be discouraged from exploring it, regardless of the number or quality of its features
Are there any new features you’d prefer this product to have?: This question reveals any features you may have missed or additional ones you should include
If you could change anything about this product, what would that be?: Ask what features customers or a particular customer segment are looking to tweak, and note down the reason for the inconvenience

Leverage the following to get more detailed feedback on your product:

How likely are you to recommend this product to a coworker or friend?: This question enables you to quantify a user’s satisfaction levels
Did you try any alternative solutions before this product?: Understand what sets your product apart from others and what made the user switch to it. It also reveals an average user’s criteria for evaluating products in that industry
Are there any features that you don’t use?: While your product should be comprehensive, it should also be simple. If a feature doesn’t provide value, you should either revise it or remove it. Be careful, though. Sometimes, the root cause of the problem is not the feature itself but rather its adoption. In that case, just provide more assistance to new product users
Is there anything that could make you stop using the product?: This question is valuable because it pinpoints red flags to look out for. It allows you to detect and address potential problems before they occur

Customer discovery questions should ideally be asked throughout the product development lifecycle . Since the market is dynamic and many unforeseen variables can affect customer preferences, it’s crucial to assess their opinions continuously and initiate product improvement efforts .

In the pre-launch stage , hypothesize about your target customers’ needs—the customer discovery interview questions we discussed before serve to test your hypotheses.

Once you know what to focus on when designing your product, move on to prototyping. Request customer opinion again when you create an early version of the product. This process allows you to understand whether the product solves their problems as well as looks and feels right.

After the launch , the aim of these questions is to provide guidelines for product optimization and customer success . You can:

Fine-tune the features and the user experience
Address current pain points you may have missed before
Tackle usage challenges that came up in the meantime

Proper customer discovery will also facilitate your segmentation process . You’ll be able to understand lucrative user segments to implement a custom pricing strategy or provide more personalized experiences.

If you design and optimize your product with the customers in mind, you’ll ensure continuous product-market fit and customer satisfaction. You’ll also set the stage for effective product marketing and get that word-of-mouth going. 🗣️

Tools for Conducting Customer Discovery

You can make the collection and analysis of customer data more efficient with the right tools, such as:

These tools allow you to get in touch with customers, schedule interviews , and conduct them. Although in-person conversations are preferred for customer interviews, they aren’t always possible, so video conferencing is the next best thing. 📹

If you need to collect large volumes of customer data, you can do so online via survey and questionnaire tools or distribute your questionnaire sheets at industry events.

Social media listening tools allow you to monitor social media channels for mentions of your product or company, gauge public perception, and respond to any praises and concerns quickly.

Bonus: Use ClickUp’s social media templates to streamline your online campaigns. Marketing teams of brands with heavy social media presence will love the ClickUp Social Media Strategy Workflow Template to schedule content and analyze performance metrics.

Social Media Strategy Workflow Template by ClickUp

CRM software serves as a hub where you can store and manage all the customer data you’ve gathered, including:

Contact information
Purchase history
User feedback

Customer discovery is a complex and collective effort. Coordinate all the tasks involved across product and marketing teams using project management software . Such tools help streamline your discovery workflow, keep you on schedule, and help you track progress.

ClickUp: One Tool to Replace Them All

Instead of switching between all these apps and tools, why not use ClickUp ? It’s a free and versatile work solution for project and product managers alike!

ClickUp can assist with product management and customer discovery throughout the product lifecycle—from the initial ideation stage to beyond the launch. 🌸

Use ClickUp Tasks to plan and coordinate work across research and marketing departments. ClickUp also offers several built-in communication tools, such as the Chat view and @mentions , to foster a clear understanding of team workflows.

You can choose between 15+ views to customize your Workspace. For example, use the Board view to plan your discovery efforts across product stages or use the Calendar view to schedule 1-1 customer interviews.

With ClickUp Forms , you can build tailored customer feedback surveys and distribute them across channels in a few clicks. If you don’t want to start from scratch, use one of ClickUp’s numerous questionnaire templates to get started. ClickUp can automatically turn responses into tasks—monitor them in the Table view and keep tabs on in-demand features or common user issues.

ClickUp’s CRM Suite helps you manage customer information, sales pipelines, and orders and maintain stronger client relationships.

For starters, you can organize all your customer data and product strategies with ClickUp Docs . Create and refine customer personas promptly thanks to the platform’s AI assistant — ClickUp Brain . Leverage ready-made prompts to ask the tool to generate:

Ideal user personas
Research studies
User stories
Product discovery questions
Content briefs

You can also brainstorm with the tool and generate product optimization ideas! 💡

Need to visualize user journeys with your team? ClickUp Whiteboards enable you to map out customer journeys on an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop canvas. Use the feature with your team leads to identify bottlenecks and strategize improvements proactively.

You can also set product launch goals and track them on a custom ClickUp Dashboard —use 50+ cards to view all customer and product metrics at a glance.

The best part about ClickUp is that it integrates with 1,000+ tools, including email providers and meeting software, ensuring all your apps are accessible from one place.

Do’s and Don’ts of Customer Discovery

Follow the tips below to make the most of your customer discovery efforts.

Have a clear goal in mind when reaching out to customers to learn as much as possible about them. Craft the question list carefully and stick to it to avoid wasting their time. ⌚

During the conversation, jot down all relevant observations. Organize the knowledge meticulously so you can access it easily later on.

Be amicable when interviewing customers in person. Smile and break the initial tension with some small talk. Although you’re going into it with a specific intention, the conversation cannot feel like an interrogation to the customer. That way, the potential customer will be more willing to open up and offer valuable insights. 🤝

Hearing negative talk about your product idea hurts, but listen intently to the customer’s problems when they complain.

Think of it this way—if your assumptions were off, it’s better to hear the news in the early stages while you still haven’t invested a significant amount of time, money, and effort in the product’s development and marketing campaigns .

Don’t overshare the intent of the interview. For example: Our product managers will use your responses to develop a new app.

Excessive information may make the customer feel burdened and uncomfortable, and they may refuse to share their honest thoughts.

Fast-Track Customer and Product Discovery with ClickUp

Customer discovery is a crucial step in building and optimizing products. When your decision-making is evidence-backed, your product and business are more likely to thrive. 🌟

With tools such as ClickUp, customer discovery can be not only fruitful but also streamlined. Get the free solution today and start unlocking customer insights in no time.

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The Most Insightful Market Research Questions You Can Ask

With great customer expectations in today’s ever-growing digital world, market research has become exceedingly important. It should be at the forefront of every business’s strategy. Even if you feel as though you’ve nailed your target market down to a tee, there will always remain work to be done on the market research front.

That’s because market trends sway, as do the opinions and desires of your customer base. That means when you least expect it, even your most loyal customers will turn to your competitors, sometimes for good. But you can still stay in the know about what your customers want and think by running a sturdy market research plan.

As part of any solid market research endeavor, you’ll need an apt set of questions to help answer the most pressing needs and opinions of your customers. You’ll also need sets of questions that pertain to your needs as well; this is especially crucial to understanding your customers’ minds about your product or service.

Let’s explore four sets of insightful market research questions.

Questions Based on Pain Points

These questions are thematically based on the difficulties customers may have undergone, are currently experiencing, or may run into in the future. In regards to the latter, these types of questions are great in that they are wired to prevent the pain points from occurring in the first place.

Here are some examples of market research questions on customer experience (CX) and customer journey points of friction.

What is the most difficult aspect of [action related to your product]?

What bothers you the most about ?

What issues do you typically run into on our website?

How can we better support your needs when shopping for…?

What frustrates you the most about ?

Questions Based on Goals

Goals-based questions help answer what your customers want, in that they inquire specifically about what it is customers are looking for and what they hope to gain from a product or service. These questions do not necessarily have to zero in a particular product/service — although some of them should. Rather, they can focus on improving specific tasks/actions related to your field. This will not only help you understand how your customers feel about your market but will allow you to innovate more and faster.

Here you’ll find some examples of market research questions on customer goals.

What do you look for in a ?

What do you think can do to improve its usefulness?

What can do to help improve your overall user experience?

What aspects would you like to see in new ?

What do you hope to gain when taking on [problem or goal within a market]?

Questions Based on Pricing

Pricing has always been (and will remain to be) a major part of the buying equation. Even customers in the luxury sector care about prices to some extent. No one wants to be ripped off; even businesses aim to save money. For example, in 2020, 69% of companies are expected to decrease ad spending.

Thus, it is ideal to have reasonably priced goods or services. But you won’t know what is considered a reasonable price until you conduct a questionnaire on your target market. Referring to general internet research alone will not suffice for this.

Here are a few examples of market research questions to ask about pricing.

What is a reasonable price range for ?

Are there any conditions in which you’d be willing to buy at a higher range?

What do you think is the ideal price for ?

How would you rate the prices within [industry, niche, or specific market]?

Is [price point] too high, low, or a fair ask for ?

Questions Based On Psychographic Traits

Psychographic questions help reveal the psychological characteristics within your target market, or your entire pool of respondents. This type of approach to market research questions involves the feelings, interests, and attitudes your customer base holds.

It allows brands to understand their customers at a more intimate level, specifically, their views on any topic. You can tailor these to focus on your product/service or the desired act of making purchases.

Here are a few examples of questions based on psychographic traits.

Which of the following is most important to you?

How do you like to spend your free time?

If you had more time, which of the following would you do?

If you had more time, what would you spend more money on?

How do you favor making purchases?

What interests you?

What draws you to one brand over another in the [niche, industry, space, etc.]?

A Reminder on Market Research Questions

All four of the question types covered in this article are critical to tap into the brains of your current and potential customers. What’s more empowering about these kinds of questions is that they can help you expand your target market and appeal to a much wider audience. They can inform both your marketing strategies, your content, and the innovation of your product/service itself.

But you must remember, these in-depth questions do NOT cover demographics. Instead, these questions are for those who already passed the screening question portion of the survey.

Screening questions, which determine the eligibility of a respondent to partake in a survey, answer demographic questions about the responders. While they are incredibly necessary to understand who your respondents are, they do not necessarily allow you to conclude your customers’ behaviors, needs, and attitudes (although a few of them might).

A strong survey should combine both sets of questions for a comprehensive market research assemblage.

If you’re looking for more great resources on using surveys to meet your business and marketing goals, check out the Pollfish Resource Center, or reach out to our 24/7 customer experience team for guidance and support.

Frequently asked questions

What is market research.

Market research is an important aspect of business strategy that focuses on gathering information about the target market.

How are surveys used in market research?

Surveys can be used to gather first-hand information while conducting market research. Surveys are an example of primary research and are tailored to gather information specific to your business.

What is the purpose of goals-based questions in a market research survey?

Goals-based questions help you understand what your customers want from a certain product or service. This type of question will help you understand your customers’ wants and needs better so you can create or improve a product to meet their needs.

What are psychographic questions?

Psychographic questions help a researcher understand consumers’ feelings, values, interests, and lifestyle choices. Understanding the psychographic traits of an audience can help a company market to them more effectively.

What are screening questions?

Screening questions are conducted before a survey is distributed. They help researchers identify the eligibility of individuals to take part in the survey. Typically, screening questions focus on demographics and the relationship to a company’s products or services.

Do you want to distribute your survey? Pollfish offers you access to millions of targeted consumers to get survey responses from $0.95 per complete. Launch your survey today.

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75+ Market Research Questions for Success

Regarding market research, having the right questions is critical for getting accurate and valuable insights .

These 75 market research questions can help you get started on your next project, giving you an idea of what topics to cover to ensure success.

We’ll review everything you need to know about customer surveys , competitive analysis, product feedback, and more !

What is Market Research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing data to understand customer behavior, market trends, and competitor strategies.

It gives businesses the insights needed to make informed decisions about their products and services.

Market research is important because it helps companies to understand what their customers want and how they can best serve them .

We’ll review the steps to help you start conducting market research and asking the right questions.

Types of Market Research

Several different types of market research questions can be used to gain insights into customer behavior and market trends.

These include the following:

Single choice
Multiple choice
Ranking questions
Likert scale
Dichotomous

75+ Market Research Questions for Success

Single-Choice

These basic questions ask respondents to select one answer from a list of options.

The purpose of a single-choice question is to provide a general overview of customer preferences and needs.

An example of a single-choice question is:

“What is your favorite type of ice cream?”

Multiple-Choice

These questions ask respondents to select multiple answers from a given list of options.

They can be used to gain more detailed insights into customer preferences than single-choice questions.

Ranking Questions

Ranking questions ask respondents to rank a list of options in order of preference.

These types of questions can be used to understand how important certain factors are when making decisions.

An example of a ranking question would be the following:

Please rank the following items from most important to least important when selecting a car:

(D) Fuel Efficiency

Likert Scale

A Likert scale is a type of question that asks respondents to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with a statement.

It can be used to gauge customer sentiment around specific topics and gain insights into how they feel about your products or services.

An example of a Likert scale question is:

“How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend?”

Dichotomous Questions

Dichotomous questions present respondents with two possible answers and ask them to choose one. They are often used to gain quick insights into customer preferences.

An example of a dichotomous question is the following:

Do you prefer online or in-store shopping?

B) In-store

Open-ended questions allow respondents to provide more detailed answers than single-choice, multiple-choice, ranking, and dichotomous questions.

They are helpful in gaining qualitative insights into customer behavior and preferences.

An example of an open-ended question is the following:

“What do you think could be improved about our product?”

By understanding the different types of market research questions, businesses can more effectively gather data to gain insights into customer behavior and make informed decisions. With the proper market research techniques, companies can better understand their customers and identify growth opportunities.

How to Write Questions for Market Research

Writing practical questions for market research is key to getting meaningful and valuable results.

Questions should be clear and concise, avoiding jargon or overly technical language. They should also cover the topics that are most important to the project.

Additionally, it’s important to remember who you’re targeting with your questions. Write them in a way the target audience can easily understand and relate to, which will help ensure they provide accurate responses.

For example, if you are writing questions as a market research agency in the USA, you’ll want to tailor them to the appropriate culture and consumer trends.

Finally, take into account any legal or ethical considerations when writing questions. This is especially important when collecting sensitive personal data or working with vulnerable groups.

We’ll go over how to write the following types of questions:

Feedback Questions

Existing product questions, market segment quesitons, market discovery questions, brand awareness questions, customer reservation questions, pricing analysis questions.

To write feedback questions, start by asking general questions about customer satisfaction. These can include queries about the level of service they received, the quality of products, and whether they would recommend it to others.

You can also ask more specific questions, such as what features customers like or dislike, how easy it is to use a certain product or service, and what changes they would like to see.

To write great existing product questions, you need to know what customers think about your current offerings.

Ask them how satisfied they are with the features and performance of the products or if there is anything that could be improved.

You can also get their opinion on your product’s design, packaging, price point, and customer support.

These questions are designed to gain an understanding of different segments within the market.

Questions can include asking about the following:

Income level
Customers’ age
Primary interests and activities

This information can help businesses identify potential target markets and tailor their products and services accordingly.

Market discovery questions help businesses explore the market and gain insights into customer behavior.

These questions can include asking customers what they currently use their product or service for, their expectations and needs, and what would make them switch to a different offering.

Brand awareness questions can help businesses understand how well their products are known in the market.

Questions can range from asking customers to rate how familiar they are with the brand to what words or phrases come to mind when they think of it.

Boosting brand awareness is important for businesses to reach new customers, so this information can be invaluable.

Customer reservation questions can help businesses identify potential barriers preventing customers from purchasing their products or services.

Questions like the following can be useful in uncovering potential areas for improvement:

“What is holding you back from making a purchase?”
“What would make you more likely to buy?”
“What feature do you wish was available?”

Finally, pricing analysis questions can help businesses determine how much customers are willing to pay for their products and services.

Questions such as the following can help businesses gain valuable insights:

“What is your budget?”
“Would you be willing to pay more for extra features?”
“What other products have you considered in a similar price range?”

By following these tips, you should be able to write effective questions that will provide valuable insights into the market.

75+ Market Research Questions

In addition to the above questions, here are 75 market research questions you can ask your target audience to help inform your business decisions.

How did you learn about our product or service?
What made you decide to purchase our product or service?
How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?
Would you say that the features of our product or service met your expectations?
Did you find it easy to navigate our website and locate the information needed to make your decision?
Did you find any areas of improvement in terms of usability when using our website?
How satisfied are you with the customer support options we provide?
Did the delivery process for our product meet your expectations in terms of speed, accuracy, and overall experience?
If applicable, did the installation process for our product meet your expectations in terms of speed, accuracy, and overall experience?
Are there any other products or services we could offer that would improve your overall experience with us?
What do you think of the quality of our current offerings?
How would you rate the usability of our products/services?
How would you rate the performance of our products/services?
What could we do to make our products/services more appealing to you?
Are there any features that are missing from our products/services?
What do you like most about our products/services?
What could we change to make them better?
Do you think our prices are competitive?
Would you recommend our products/services to someone else?

Market Segment Questions

What age range would you classify yourself in?
Are you married, single, or in a relationship?
What city/town do you currently reside in?
How many hours a day do you typically spend on the internet?
What type of device(s) do you use to access the internet (desktop, laptop, mobile phone)?
On average, how much money do you spend online each month?
What products or services have you purchased online within the last 6 months?
How likely are you to purchase goods or services from an unfamiliar website compared to a familiar website?
How often do you interact with social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter?
Are there any particular features or functions that would make it easier for you to shop online or make purchases?
Do you find yourself comparing prices and product features before making a purchase decision?
Are there any particular brands that stand out to you when shopping for products or services online?
When looking for information about products and services online, what sources do you rely on most (e-commerce websites, review sites, etc.)?
What types of discounts are most enticing to customers when making an online purchase (free shipping offers, bonus items with purchase, coupon codes)?
Do certain payment methods influence your purchasing decisions?
What do you think are the most important features when considering a purchase?
How would you define your personal style and aesthetic preferences?
Are there any new products or services you want to see in the marketplace?
Do certain brand values affect your purchasing decisions (e.g., sustainability, ethical practices, etc.)?
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing companies in your industry?
When researching products or services, what content or information would you like to see from brands?
Are there any particular technologies that you think could improve customer experiences online?
Do current trends in social media affect your views on certain brands and their offerings?
Are there any new products or services that would benefit your lifestyle?
What do you think sets certain brands apart from their competitors?
Are there any particular marketing strategies that you find appealing when considering a purchase?
Which channels do you prefer to use for customer service (live chat, email, phone)?
What is your familiarity with our brand?
Do you recognize our brand name when shopping online or in-store?
Are there any particular elements that stand out to you in the design of our website, logo, products, and services?
How do you feel when interacting with our brand (positive, neutral, negative)?
What do you think our brand stands for?
What words would you use to describe our brand and its offerings?
Do you prefer more traditional or modern marketing techniques/strategies when engaging with our brand?
Which social media platforms do you associate most with our brand?
Are there any particular campaigns that have resonated with you in the past?
What type of content do you expect to see from our brand?
Are there any particular features or services that make our brand stand out from its competitors?
Do certain events or promotions influence your views on our brand?
Do you believe our brand offers competitive pricing compared to other brands?
Do you think our brand is transparent with its customers regarding providing information and responding to inquiries?
Are there any particular resources that could help customers better understand our brand and offerings?
What do you believe our brand should focus on to improve customer experiences?
Do you think our brand adequately addresses customer feedback or suggestions?
Do certain rewards or loyalty programs influence your purchasing decisions when considering our brand?
Do you feel that our brand keeps up with the latest trends in technology and innovation?

Customer Retention Questions

What do you believe are the key factors that make customers commit to our brand?
Do you think our customer service is up to par with competitors in the market?
How likely are you to recommend our products or services to friends and family?
What do you think keeps customers engaged with our brand, both online and in-store?
Are there any particular features or services that you think make our brand stand out from its competitors?
Do certain discounts, promotions, or loyalty programs influence your decision to stay with us?
What do you think is the biggest challenge when retaining customers for our brand?
Are there any new products or services that would make you a more loyal customer?
Are there any particular communications or marketing tactics that could help keep customers engaged with our brand?
Do certain events or milestones influence your commitment to our brand?
What do you think is the most effective way to show appreciation for customers?
Are there any loyalty or rewards programs that have successfully kept customers loyal to our brand?
Do you think our customer service team is responsive and attentive when addressing customer needs and inquiries?
Are there any particular features or services that could improve your overall experience with our brand?
Do you feel our prices are reasonable compared to other products and services in the market?
Are there any specific features or services that add value to our offerings?
What do you think is the best way to differentiate ourselves from competitors regarding pricing?
Are there any particular discounts or promotions that could influence customers to purchase from us?
Do you think our pricing strategy is transparent and easy for customers to understand?
Do certain market events or trends influence customer decisions when choosing our brand over competitors?
What do you believe are the biggest challenges when it comes to setting prices for our products or services?
Do you think our price points are competitive enough to draw customer interest?
Are there any particular features or services that could be offered at a lower cost than competitors?
Do you think certain rewards or loyalty programs influence customer decisions when comparing brand prices?
Are there any discounts, promotions, or offers that have successfully driven sales?
What is the most effective way to communicate pricing information to customers?
Are there any particular resources or tools that could be used to analyze and adjust our prices as needed?

Market Research Wrap Up

These 75 market research questions provide a great starting point for any business looking to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and market trends.

By using this as a guide, you can ensure that your surveys are comprehensive and effective in helping you make informed decisions about your products and services. Good luck!

Do you have any questions of your own to add? Let us know in the comments below!

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90+ Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

Market Research Specialist

Emma David, a seasoned market research professional, specializes in employee engagement, survey administration, and data management. Her expertise in leveraging data for informed decisions has positively impacted several brands, enhancing their market position.

Market research questions can help you capture the best insights when you are up for launching a new product or a feature. Sending out such surveys about market needs and preferences enables companies to understand how their target market feels and behaves.

But why market research surveys ?

Because market trends change with the change in opinions and preferences of your customer base. Even your most loyal customers will turn to other brands unexpectedly. For this reason, a marketing questionnaire can help you find out what your customers want and think.

However, the key to success is deciding which questions to ask.

In this blog, we have gathered a list of 90+ market research questions that you can use for conducting in-depth market research surveys.

Continue reading to find out.

What are Market Research Questions?

Market research questions are questions that businesses send out to their existing and potential customers to understand their perception and opinion on a given subject.

But how does it actually help?

Market survey questions help businesses collect precise information about the market, audiences, and competitors. This helps businesses validate the market demand and profitability of their product/feature before diving into the development process.

Also, such structured questions have limited answering options, which makes it easier to apply formulas and patterns to accurately analyze the gathered data .

For example, via market research questions, you may collect easy-to-segment data mentioned below:

Job title
Type of industry the respondent works in
Education level
How did they get to know about you?
What are you planning to buy from the [brand name]?
What products do you like to buy from a [competitor name]?
Why do you buy from the [brand name]?

Therefore, with the collected data, brands can serve their customers better and make their upcoming products/features stand out from the competition.

Watch more: How To Create Survey Using ProProfs Survey Maker

Market Research Questions (categories with questions)

Before you start creating a perfect market research questionnaire , you must consider a few crucial parameters. Start by asking yourself:

What is the size of your target market?
Who are your target customers?
What are the primary issues that your customers face?
How can your product or service help solve the issue for your customers?
Does your product perfectly fit into the current market?
What’s the volume of potential customers?
Have you set a good customer persona to understand your ideal target customers?
What are the key consumer trends?
How do you identify new target segments? And, how are these new segments different from the existing ones?
Who are your direct competitors? What are their strategies for attracting customers?
How do you generate leads ?

Therefore, to position yourself as an expert before launching a new product/service, it’s crucial to have in-depth knowledge about your customers, the industry, the market trends, and your competitors .

Once you are done with it, you can start curating marketing research questions that can help your business idea to thrive.

Market Research Questions for New Product Launch

Launching a successful product or a service demands extensive research and market testing. You can include the following product survey questions:

1. How did you hear about [brand name]? 2. What made you choose us? 3. What features do you like most about our existing product or service? 4. What feature would you like to see in the website/product? 5. Is our product or service convenient to use? 6. Which feature do you think will help improve the existing product experience for you? 7. Among these four options, what’s the next thing you think we should launch? 8. What’s the one feature we can add that would make our product more valuable for you? 9. Would the implementation of [feature name] increase the usability of the [product name]? 10. Are you aware that we offer [product/service name]? 11. Did we answer all your questions or solve your problem? 12. How long have you used [product name]? 13. How often do you use [product name]? 14. Did we help you get started using our product or service? 15. For your next purchase, how likely are you to purchase from our brand?

Very likely
Somewhat likely
Very unlikely

16. Compared to other products in the market, would you say that our product is:

Much better
Somewhat better
Almost the same
Don’t know or never used

17. Will you use or purchase our product again?

Might or might not
Probably will not
Definitely, will not

18. Are you willing to refer our product/service to your friends, family, or colleagues about us? 19. Why have you decided to leave us? 20. On a scale of 1-10, how will you rate your experience with us? 21. In your opinion, how can we further improve this product/feature?

Market Research Questions for Potential Customers

These market research questions will help you create an accurate buyer persona by understanding your target customers. The basic things you need to ask are:

Profession/Job
Household income
Household size

22. What are your hobbies and interests? 23. How old are you? 24. What is your monthly income range? 25. What is your current marital status? 26. What is the name of your company? 27. Where is your company’s headquarters located? 28. Please specify the number of employees that work in your company. 29. What is your job title? 30. In which location do you work? 31. What type of activities do you prefer in your free time? 32. Do you take part in physical activities? 33. Where is your dream holiday destination? 34. How would you rate the following according to their priority in your life – family, work, and social life? 35. Are you happy with your current work-life balance? 36. How would you describe yourself: An optimist or a pessimist? 37. How often do you give to charity? 38. How do you commute to work? 39. How do you do your holiday shopping? 40. How much do you spend on shopping every year? 41. What are the common challenges you face regularly? 42. What are your main goals in life? 43. What products do you consider the most important to solve your business problems? 44. Where do you usually search for new products? 45. How much do you usually spend when purchasing (product category)? 46. How likely are you to buy [product name]?

Market Research Questions to Collect Feedback on Existing Product(s)

For product-based organizations, collecting customer feedback is a key to steering their products towards success. For this reason, selecting the right set of market research questions you ask your existing customers is important.

market research questionnaire for a product

47. Have you heard of [product name] before? 48. What specific problems does our product solve for you? 49. How would you feel if [product name] was no longer available? 50. How would you rate our product delivery? 51. Do you face any challenges while using our product? 52. How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use [product/feature name]? 53. How often do you use [product name]? 54. How long have you been using [product name] for? 55. When was the last time you used [product name]? 56. How would you rate our customer experience? 57. What do you think about our product pricing? 58. In your opinion, in which area is this product/service lacking the most? 59. How does the product perform after the update? 60. Have you faced any problems with the product? Specify below. 61. What feature did you expect but not find in [product name]? 62. On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with the product?

Watch more: How To Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey

Market Research Questions for Competitive Analysis

Asking specific competitive analysis questions can help you dig deeper into market share and internal information about your counterparts. You can ask the following questions:

63. How would you feel if you couldn’t use our product anymore? 64. Have you considered other solutions/alternatives? 65. Which other options have you considered before choosing our product? 66. What made you choose our brand rather than a competitor? 67. What do we do better than other company’s products? 68. Which product would you use if our product is no longer available? 69. What are the first three brands in this product category that come to your mind? 70. In your opinion, how can our product stand out from the competition? 71. Please share your overall opinion of our brand? 72. Please share any additional comments or feedback? 73. Have you seen any other product with a similar feature? 74. In what aspects do you compare our products to our competitors? 75. Compared to the other available options, is our product quality better, worse, or about the same? 76. Please list the top three things that helped you choose us rather than a competitor.

Market Research Questions For Concept Testing

Before the final launch, a concept testing survey helps businesses to evaluate product development by collecting feedback from customer segments that make up their target market. This testing helps them avoid mistakes and tailor their products according to the customers’ needs.

You can include the following marketing survey questions to get accurate feedback from the respondents:

77. How would this new feature help you solve your problem? 78. What is your least favorite part of the feature and why? 79. What do you consider before deciding on a version of the product? 80. How do you feel about this new feature? 81. What really excites you about this new feature? 82. Do you think this new feature can extremely help in improving the existing product, and why? 83. Have you seen something similar to this product feature elsewhere? 84. How does this new feature improve your overall experience? 85. Do you think this new feature is appropriate for [product name], and why? 86. How much would you wish to pay for this product? 87. Which of our products appeals most strongly to you, and why? 88. How could this product make a difference in your daily life? 89. Describe why you think this product is innovative? 90. Describe why you think this product is not so innovative? 91. What development stage do you think the product currently is in?

Tips to Create Effective Market Research Surveys

Step 1: choose the best survey software.

With various survey tools available on the market, choosing the right one could be tricky. You just go for a survey maker tool that helps you create, customize and share different types of surveys such as pop-up, scored, NPS, sidebar across email, social media, websites, etc.

The tool should also support multiple question types, and you should be able to measure survey performance and evaluate feedback with built-in intelligent analytics.

Step 2: Choose the Right Survey Questions

Before creating a survey, you should have clarity regarding your end goal based on qualitative and quantitative research . For example, if you are looking for simple yes-no answers, you can choose close-ended questions, whereas if you are looking for comprehensive answers, then you may want to consider open-ended questions .

Or, if you are looking for quick-to-sort feedback that can help you identify trends easily, then multiple-choice, Yes/No, and Likert scale questions work well.

Read More: Survey Question: 250+Examples, Types & Best Practices

Step 3: Ask Questions That Match Your Survey Goals

Before you start creating a survey , think of what information you want to collect from customers. The data you need should directly relate to the problem you want to solve for your business.

For example, you should send out questions related to a new feature before launching it to gather customer insights about your concept.

Whereas, demographic questions are best if you want to know who your potential customers are. Such questions help you gain basic information about the customers, such as their age, place of residence, occupation, income level, and more.

Step 4: Share Surveys at a Suitable Time

Timing is the most essential aspect when it comes to surveys. Wrong timing can reduce the chances of collecting feedback from your target audience . On the other hand, when the timing is right, you can collect actionable feedback about their experiences.

For example, the ideal time to send the survey is just after a customer interacts with your business. Just because the interaction is fresh, they will be able to provide the most genuine and fresh feedback.

Also, the brands can send the survey a few days after the purchase. This will offer the customers some time to use your product and let you genuinely know how happy or unhappy they are, what’s bothering them, and what you can do to improve.

Effectively Capture Market Insights With Market Research Questions

When executed well, market research can save a lot of time and effort in collecting valuable feedback. Whether you’re starting a business, launching a new product/feature, or improving your existing processes, market research questions can fetch you the answers you need to create dynamic strategies.

Ask the right questions to the right audience at the right time and you’ll surely get useful results. However, it’s important to tailor questions to specific contexts. For instance, if you are conducting product market research, you should ask questions that would provide useful information on product feasibility in the current market.

And for a seamless process, you can create a market research questionnaire with powerful tools like ProProfs Survey Maker and Qualaroo and easily share it with your target audience in various forms.

About the author

Emma David is a seasoned market research professional with 8+ years of experience. Having kick-started her journey in research, she has developed rich expertise in employee engagement, survey creation and administration, and data management. Emma believes in the power of data to shape business performance positively. She continues to help brands and businesses make strategic decisions and improve their market standing through her understanding of research methodologies.

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Market Research Questions: What to Ask for Better Insights

This blog explores the different types and formatting options for market research questions, and how asking the right questions leads to better insights.

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Jan 29, 2024

quantilope is the Consumer Intelligence Platform for all end-to-end research needs

You see the value in market research and have support from your stakeholders to get started on some projects, but when you sit down to draft your questionnaire, you don’t quite know where to start. Sound relatable? If so, read on to learn some key market research questions to ask for actionable customer feedback.

Types of market research questions to ask

Market research questions for different research goals, how to use market research questions in a survey, why ask market research questions.

Market research questions help us get to the core of consumer behavior - such as why consumers act the way they do and how they go about their buyers’ journey. Market research surveys are a means of answering these questions, so brands can optimize their offerings (be it products or services) according to customer needs. Without asking your customer base what they want or need, you’re left making assumptions that may or may not hit the mark - which can lead to a waste of valuable time and budget.

Back to Table of Contents

Some of the most basic examples of market research questions are those related to demographics (who consumers are), yet these are some of the most foundational questions a survey can ask to make other insights more powerful. Beyond demographic traits, psychographics (what consumers are like - attitudes, aspirations, etc.) and behavioral questions (how consumers act) also paint a detailed picture of a target market. Below we'll cover some types and examples of market research questions that can help make better business decisions.

Demographic questions

Where do you live?

How old are you?

What is your gender?

What is your current marital status?

What is the highest level of education you have completed?

What is your current employment status?
What's your household's annual income?

Psychographic questions

What interests you?

How do you like to spend your free time?

What are your goals for the year?

What are your top three priorities in life?
How comfortable are you with trying new things?
What are your views on social issues like climate change, inequality, or political polarization?
How important is it for you to be seen as successful by others?

Behavioral questions

How often do you grocery shop?

Do you prefer to shop in-store or online?

On which days of the week are you most likely to watch television (and subsequently see advertising)?

How much money do you usually spend on X products?

Which retail brands do you buy from and why?

Think about a time you recommended a product or service to someone else. What made you so enthusiastic about it?
Have you ever participated in a brand's loyalty program or rewards system? If yes, what did you like about it?

The type of questions you’ll want to ask in your market research survey will depend on your research goals. Are you trying to get to know your existing customers? Are you looking to engage with potential customers? Are you hoping to conduct a competitive analysis for your brand? A survey could be crafted around any or all of these objectives to fully explore each topic.

Once you determine the goal of your research, you can begin drafting your questionnaire using some of the question types above. Beyond capturing basic demographic questions among every survey respondent, below are a few examples of psychographic and behavioral question types:

For existing customers:

For brands who already have a solid customer base and want to get to know them better to improve customer retention, ask things like:

Why did you start using our [product or service]?

Would you buy from us again?

Would you recommend us to your family and friends?

Are there similar products that you use for different reasons?

What, if anything, would you improve about or product or service?

For potential customers:

If you’re looking to gather information about new customers you don’t already reach, get to know them through in-depth market research survey questions:

What factors influence your purchasing decision when shopping for a new [product or service type]?

Which of the following products [or services] are most appealing to you?

Where do you typically shop for [product or service]?

When will you be in the market for a new [product or service]?

How much do you typically spend on a new [product or service]?

For products:

Surveys are a great tool to test reactions and perceptions of your product before you finalize it for launch. Below are some examples of market research questions for a new product to develop a final offering that fits what customers want:

What are the most/least important elements of a [product type]?

Which scents/flavors do you find most pleasant in our existing product line? Which ones do you hope to see in the future?

What pain points are you looking for a product/service to solve?

How does this product compare to others on the market?

For pricing:

Once you have settled on a product, you’ll need to determine the pricing for it. You can’t just set any price you want and expect consumers to pay it. The best way to go about pricing decisions is to actually survey your target customers to see what they’d be willing to spend:

Do you think the product is priced fairly?

What do you think is the ideal price for our [product or service]?

Are there any conditions in which you’d pay a higher price for our [product or service]?

What price is so high that you’d not even consider buying our [product or service]? (i.e. price sensitivity ).

For branding:

Lastly, a brand might have its target audience figured out, with a solid product that’s appropriately priced, but it needs to be marketed and branded . Ask questions like:

Are you familiar with our brand? (i.e. brand awareness)

Describe your customer experience so far with our brand.

How would you rate your customer satisfaction with our brand?

How likely are you to recommend our brand to family and friends?

For more on branding, consider a brand health tracker that can capture category entry points and the mental availability of brands:

When designing a market research survey, careful consideration should be given to both the formatting of the questions and their overall structure. Getting these aspects right can significantly improve the quality and depth of the actual insights you gather - empowering you to make better business decisions. Below we'll explore various question formatting options, including open-ended and closed-ended questions, as well as tips to create a logical flow throughout your questionnaire.

Question formatting options

Once you’ve determined the question content you’d like to ask in your survey, there are multiple ways you can go about actually programming each one. Below are some common question formats, and when to use each one:

Multi-select: Use when you want a respondent to select as many items as apply to them from a list.

Rating scale/matrix: Use when you want respondents to provide a numeric rating on a single item (scale) or a list of items (matrix); (i.e. 1-5 likeness toward each, 1-5 level of satisfaction with each, etc.)

Open-ended questions : Use when you want respondents to provide written feedback to a question (i.e. ‘tell me about your latest shopping experience in-store’, or ‘what do you love about this product/service?;)

How to structure your questions for better insights

Good questions that are thoughtfully structured will guide respondents through your survey smoothly, minimize confusion, encourage complete responses, and ultimately, yield high-quality results to tailor marketing strategies, product development, and customer service initiatives. Starting with broad inquiries and gradually narrowing the focus enhances respondents' survey experience and enables you to identify patterns and correlations within the data. Below are some tips to keep in mind when structuring your market research survey.

1. Start with a goal

The first step is to set a clear goal for your market research questionnaire. That goal could be to understand your buyer persona, learn how to maintain loyal customers, improve your website’s user experience, increase market share, or launch a new product.

2. Review what you already know

Conducting market research should aim to only answer questions that you don’t already have the answers to from previously-collected customer insights. Start by reviewing your own market research findings from past studies to see if you can answer any current questions. You can also look into customer reviews (if available), social media comments, and other external sources to see what people are saying about your brand.

3. Don’t make assumptions

Don’t ever assume you know something about a consumer without data to support it. For example, you may think that all customers use your product/service year-round when really, they’re only using it in the winter. You need to collect data to support any business decisions you’re making. That’s the only way to ensure you’re making good use of your time and budget, and that customer needs are met appropriately.

quantilope’s Insights Automation Platform makes a brand, product, or customer survey as simple as a drag & drop of questions. The platform is equipped with a number of automated survey tools (piping, pre-programmed survey templates , etc.) along with a suite of thirteen automated, advanced methods (i.e. market segmentation, key driver analysis, a/b testing, and many more). With results available in real-time, quantilope users begin diving into customer feedback instantly, with final results ready in a matter of days.

Ready to collect data for your own market research study? Get in touch below:

Get in touch to start building better insights!

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How to ask the right market research questions to ask potential customers.

Home » How to ask the right market research questions to ask potential customers

Customer insights questions form the cornerstone of effective market research. Understanding how to frame these questions is essential for uncovering valuable information from potential customers. By asking the right questions, businesses can gain vital knowledge about customer pain points, desires, and behaviors, thereby enabling informed decisions that drive success.

In this section, we will explore various strategies for crafting effective customer insights questions. We will clarify the types of questions that yield actionable data, focusing on the who, how, and why to enhance your research efforts. Developing a thorough grasp of these insights will empower businesses to better navigate their market landscape and cater to their customers' needs effectively.

Customer Insights Questions: The Importance in Market Research

Customer insights questions play a pivotal role in market research, guiding businesses to understand their audience better. Crafting the right questions enables you to uncover valuable insights about customer pain points and preferences. When exploring the motivations behind customer behavior, these questions can reveal trends that drive purchasing decisions, ensuring that your offerings align with consumer needs.

Moreover, focused customer insights questions help pinpoint specific challenges and risks in the market. By asking targeted questions about their experiences and expectations, businesses can access a wealth of information that informs product development and marketing strategies. Getting to the core of what customers truly want allows companies to tailor their solutions effectively, enhancing overall satisfaction and loyalty. This understanding not only increases the chances of successful product launches but also fosters a deeper connection with the customer base.

Defining Customer Insights Questions

Customer Insights Questions play a crucial role in guiding your market research efforts. By identifying what potential customers think and feel, organizations can create more effective products and services. Start with open-ended inquiries that encourage detailed responses. For instance, asking about specific pain points or desires can help uncover underlying motivations and barriers to purchase.

To define effective Customer Insights Questions, consider these key components:

Context : Frame your questions within real-life scenarios relevant to your target audience. This approach encourages them to share meaningful experiences.
Specificity : Avoid vague questions; instead, aim for clarity. Asking what features they value most in a product can yield actionable insights.
Exploration : Open the floor for discussion. Questions like, "What challenges do you face with current solutions?" invite deeper dialogue and reveal critical insights.

By strategically crafting your Customer Insights Questions, you can gather valuable information that drives smarter business decisions.

The Role of Customer Insights in Business Success

Customer insights play a pivotal role in achieving business success, guiding companies to make strategic decisions that resonate with their target audience. By understanding customer preferences, behaviors, and pain points, businesses can adapt their products and services to better meet market demands. This ongoing dialogue with customers ensures that the company remains relevant and responsive, ultimately fostering loyalty and satisfaction.

To extract meaningful customer insights, asking the right questions is essential. Start by inquiring about customer experiences and expectations, which can reveal opportunities for improvement. Understanding price sensitivity is crucial; questions about pricing perceptions can inform competitive strategies. Further, delving into customer journeys can provide clarity on touchpoints that significantly impact customer satisfaction. Establishing these insights helps navigate the complexities of market demand, ensuring that businesses not only survive but thrive in competitive environments.

How to Formulate Effective Customer Insights Questions

Formulating effective customer insights questions is essential for gathering meaningful market research data. Start by focusing on open-ended questions that encourage detailed responses. For instance, rather than asking "Do you like our product?" try asking "What features do you find most beneficial?" This approach allows participants to share their thoughts freely, providing richer insights.

Consider the context of your questions. Tailoring inquiries to specific customer segments can yield more relevant information. Additionally, it’s important to prioritize clarity in your wording to avoid any misinterpretation. By employing these strategies, you can ensure your customer insights questions are thoughtfully constructed and directed, ultimately leading to more actionable data.

Identifying Your Research Goals

Identifying your research goals is a crucial step in conducting effective market research. Start by determining what you aim to learn from potential customers. Clear objectives will guide your questions, ensuring they yield meaningful customer insights. For instance, you might want to understand customer pain points, preferences, or purchasing behaviors.

To streamline this process, consider these essential elements:

Define Your Purpose: What specific information do you need to drive your business decisions?
Know Your Audience: Who are your potential customers, and what demographics are relevant?
Create Targeted Questions: Formulate questions that directly address your research goals.
Set Evaluation Criteria: Decide how you will assess the effectiveness of your answers against your goals.
Iterate and Adapt: Be open to refining your approach based on initial findings and insights.

By focusing on these areas, you can craft customer insights questions that align with your overarching research goals, leading to actionable outcomes.

Crafting Open-Ended vs. Closed-Ended Questions

When crafting Customer Insights Questions, understanding the difference between open-ended and closed-ended questions is crucial. Open-ended questions encourage respondents to express their thoughts and feelings freely, offering richer, more qualitative data. For example, asking, "What challenges do you face with our product?" allows customers to elaborate, providing detailed insights that can inform product improvements.

In contrast, closed-ended questions limit responses and are easier to analyze quantitatively. A question like, "How satisfied are you with our product? (Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neutral, Unsatisfied, Very unsatisfied)" gives you clear, actionable data but lacks the depth found in open responses. To achieve a well-rounded understanding of customer sentiments, it’s advisable to blend both question types. This approach helps balance the need for qualitative narratives with quantitative clarity, thereby enhancing your overall market research strategy.

Key Types of Customer Insights Questions for Potential Customers

Understanding key types of customer insights questions is essential for gaining valuable feedback from potential customers. These questions can illuminate customer needs, preferences, and pain points. Engage with open-ended inquiries that invite detailed responses, such as, "What challenges do you face in your current solution?" This encourages potential customers to share insights that can guide product development.

Additionally, incorporating closed-ended questions can provide quantifiable data. For instance, asking, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our service?" allows for easy analysis. Furthermore, you'd benefit from demographic questions to better segment your audience and tailor your offerings. A thoughtful combination of these questioning strategies leads to enriched customer insights, fostering a deeper understanding of your market. Balancing open and closed questions will empower you to gather comprehensive data essential for informed decision-making.

Demographic and Psychographic Questions

Understanding your target audience requires in-depth demographic and psychographic questions. Demographic questions gather factual data such as age, gender, income, and education level. These statistics offer a baseline understanding of your potential customers, helping you segment them into distinct groups. Knowing these demographics allows businesses to customize their marketing strategies effectively.

Psychographic questions, on the other hand, delve into the interests, values, and lifestyles of potential customers. This information uncovers motivations and preferences that numbers alone cannot reveal. By integrating demographic and psychographic insights, you gain a holistic view of your audience. Crafting effective Customer Insights Questions in this dual category not only refines your messaging but also enhances the relevance of your offerings. Together, these questions pave the way for a deeper connection with your audience and more effective market strategies.

Gathering Relevant Demographic Information

Gathering relevant demographic information is crucial for understanding potential customers. This information provides context for your customer insights questions, allowing you to tailor your inquiries more effectively. Start by determining which demographics matter most for your products or services—age, income, education, and location are a few key indicators. This data can shape not only your questioning approach but also your marketing strategies.

To gather pertinent demographic information, consider employing several methods. First, surveys can be a straightforward way to collect targeted data directly from your audience. Second, utilizing existing sources like census data can provide a broader understanding of population characteristics in your target market. Third, engaging with social media analytics tools can reveal specific audience behaviors and preferences. Each method offers unique insights, helping ground your market research in accurate, relevant demographic information. This foundation enriches the customer insights you gather and enhances your overall strategy.

Understanding Customer Lifestyles and Preferences

Understanding customer lifestyles and preferences is crucial for gathering meaningful customer insights. By delving into how customers live and what they value, businesses can tailor their services or products to better meet their needs. When crafting customer insights questions, it’s essential to inquire about daily routines, social behaviors, and values that drive purchasing decisions. Understanding these aspects helps create a comprehensive profile of the target audience.

To explore customer preferences, consider asking questions that cover various dimensions. Start with demographics , such as age and income, to grasp who your customers are. Then, delve into psychographics , asking about interests and values that shape their choices. Finally, focus on purchase behavior , inquiring about their buying patterns and motivations. By strategically structuring these questions, businesses can obtain valuable insights that inform decision-making and foster customer loyalty.

Behavioral and Satisfaction Questions

Behavioral and satisfaction questions are vital in deriving customer insights for market research. These types of questions help uncover not just what customers think but also how they act and feel about your products or services. To gather these insights effectively, focus on understanding patterns in customer behavior and their overall satisfaction levels.

Start by asking open-ended behavioral questions. For instance, inquire about how customers use your product daily or what their typical decision-making process looks like. Next, satisfaction questions can gauge the effectiveness of your offerings. Questions like "What feature do you find most valuable?" or "How likely are you to recommend us to others?" provide quantitative and qualitative data to analyze. Both sets of questions offer a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences, paving the way for improved products and services. Remember, the better you understand your customers, the more you can build long-lasting relationships.

Exploring Customer Purchasing Behavior

Understanding customer purchasing behavior is critical for successful market research. To delve deeper, ask customer insights questions that uncover motivations and preferences. These questions should focus on aspects like factors influencing decisions, frequency of purchases, and the criteria used to choose a product or service. By gaining insights into customer thoughts, businesses can effectively tailor their offerings.

Equipped with this understanding, organizations can prioritize the features and benefits that resonate most with their target audience. Furthermore, analyzing customer feedback can shed light on any pain points during the buying process. Engaging in meaningful conversations with potential customers yields valuable insights that guide product development and marketing strategies. Ultimately, understanding purchasing behavior helps create a customer-centric approach essential for driving growth.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Experience

Measuring customer satisfaction and experience is a crucial aspect of understanding market dynamics. An effective approach to derive meaningful insights involves asking the right Customer Insights Questions. These questions provide businesses with clarity on customer expectations and experiences. By focusing on specific aspects such as product satisfaction, service quality, and overall experience, organizations can gather valuable feedback.

To achieve this, consider the following steps:

Identify Key Metrics : Define what metrics matter most to your business, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
Craft Relevant Questions : Formulate questions that directly relate to these metrics, ensuring they are straightforward and engaging.
Analyze Results : After collecting data, evaluate the responses to discern patterns and trends that reveal customer sentiments.
Implement Changes : Use the insights gained to enhance products or services, thereby improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By taking these steps, businesses can truly understand their customers and enhance their overall experience.

Conclusion: Leveraging Customer Insights Questions for Business Growth

Understanding customer insights questions is essential for driving business growth. These questions help you capture critical feedback and identify customer needs, preferences, and perceptions. By asking the right questions, businesses can better align their products and services with market demand, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

When utilized effectively, customer insights questions can uncover opportunities for improvement and innovation. This approach not only assists in refining business strategies but also fosters meaningful relationships with clients. By prioritizing the voice of the customer, organizations can adapt and thrive in competitive environments, ensuring sustainable growth for the future.

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15 Money-Making Market Research Questions to Ask Your Audience

What Market Research Questions Should You Ask Your Audience?

What’s the hardest part about _____?
Can you tell me about _____?
How does ____ make you feel?
Tell me more about that
What have you thought about doing to solve ____?
What have you already tried?
How well did ____ solve your problem?
When you were getting started with _____, what were you thinking about?
Where do you go to find information about _____?
What surprised you about ______?
If you could change something about _____, what would you change?
What’s your favorite part of ______?
How well does _____ solve your problem?
What else can we do to help?
Now that you’ve solved ______ , what’s next?

Market research question type one: Looking for information

Example market research questions that help uncover pain points, market research question type two: examining how your audience behaves in your market.

What have people already tried to address their pain points?
Where do they look to find more information about dealing with their problems?
How satisfied or dissatisfied have they been with what they’ve tried? Why?

Example market research questions that help you understand behavior

Market research question type three: studying customer satisfaction.

Is your product what they were expecting, or not? Maybe it’s time to adjust your marketing.
Does your product solve their problem? If not, maybe it’s time to adjust what you offer.
Do they have questions your product doesn’t answer? Maybe you can add to your product, or develop other cross-sells and up-sells you can offer to the same audience.

Example market research questions that assess customer satisfaction

Conclusion: how to use insights from market research questions.

Increase conversion rates through powerful copywriting
Clearly define your value proposition
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65 Best Sales Questions to Determine Your Customer's Needs

Published: April 01, 2024

Thoughtful, well-structured, strategic sales questions and needs analysis questions are central to any sales professional's ability to provide value to prospects.

salesperson asking sales questions to determine her customer needs

We‘re in the age of the empowered buyer, and potential customers are as complex as they’ve ever been. They're busy, well-informed, and often reluctant to share information — with a diverse array of wants, needs, interests, and buying preferences.

Whether you're new to sales and looking for a go-to list of sales qualification questions or a manager looking to test new questions with your team, this list of great sales questions to ask customers will help you identify your prospects' core needs.

Table of Contents

Sales Questions to Ask Customers

Strategic questions to ask customers, needs analysis questions about goals, needs analysis questions about weaknesses, needs analysis questions about buying processes, questions to ask customers about your product, questions to ask customers to close the deal.

Here are some of the most critical questions salespeople should ask their prospects.

“Do we need to include any other decision-makers in our conversation?”
“If timeline or budget were not constraints, what would your ideal solution look like?”
“Why is this a priority for you now?”
“What challenges do you think will come up as you try to purchase the product?”
“Are you currently using another solution? If so, why are you switching?”
“Has your team tried to use a similar product? If so, how did it go?”
“How can I make this process as easy as possible?”
“What’s your approximate budget for this project?”
“What other tools do you use in your day-to-day?”
“What challenges have you experienced in the past year related to [product-related goal]?”

Asking the right questions is crucial when speaking with a prospect for the first or second time. As a salesperson, your job is to discover their core needs quickly and succinctly. The questions above will uncover needs — while also helping you figure out whether this customer is the right fit for your product.

After you get your customer’s answers, you can customize your sales presentations and pitches to their specific circumstances.

Next, we‘re going to cover some key strategic questions from real sales leaders. Let’s take a look.

According to Magee Clegg , CEO of Cleartail Marketing , “This question does two things incredibly well — it helps prospects articulate their short-term goals, giving you insights into their immediate needs, and it positions your services as a solution within the context of their strategic planning. It’s a question that naturally leads to a deeper dialogue about how your offerings align with their objectives.”

2. “What does the ideal outcome look like for you with this project or service?”

This question is essentially a bit more of a focused play on the sixth question on this list. Clegg says that this question "allows the prospect to envision the future success that your service can bring them. It turns the conversation into a more positive, forward-thinking one, where the prospect isn‘t just focused on what’s wrong now but on the potential for improvement and growth. “This question has helped me transform sales conversations at Cleartail Marketing into collaborative strategy sessions, where the prospect sees us as a partner in achieving their vision, rather than just another vendor.”

3. “What outcome would make this investment worth it for you?”

This question is another way to phrase the previous one with a bit more of a product-specific, value-oriented edge. Bayu Prihandito , Founder of Life Architekture , suggests you ask it because it helps with “Understanding your prospect's definition of success helps align your offer with their expectations. It clarifies their goals and sets the stage for how your product or service can meet them.”

4. “Why did you consider our services/products just now?”

Prihandito recommends asking this question because it can help you “find out the 'why' behind their interest, understanding the urgency and any immediate motivations for them to look for solutions.”

5. “Can you describe a challenge you're facing that you hope we can address?”

Prihandito says salespeople should ask this question because “[being] able to directly pinpoint specific problems allows you to understand where your offering will fit best into their current situation.”

6. “How does solving this challenge fit into your big picture?”

Prihandito suggests asking this question because “linking your prospect's immediate need to bigger goals gives you an understanding of their values and long-term plans. Then, you can align your solution within a larger context, which will increase its perceived value.”

7. “What barriers do you face in your attempt to scale your business?”

According to Baidhurya Mani , Founder of SellCoursesOnline , “Scaling the business is often the number-one reason business leaders integrate technology into their operations. When you can pinpoint what their barriers to scaling are, then you can also determine what solutions to offer them in this scenario. Whatever challenge is preventing them from growing their business, that is your prospect's premium priority at the moment, and that is the number-one need they need you to meet.”

8. “How does your current solution fall short?”

Casey Jones , Founder of CJ&CO , says asking this question can help you identify key gaps in your prospect‘s operations. According to him, this question helps you "[dig] for dissatisfaction — this is where you’ll find the gap your product or service can fill."

9. “What's the impact of not addressing [your key] challenges?”

Jones also suggests asking this question because it allows you to “[emphasize] urgency. It makes the cost of inaction real, often a powerful motivator to move forward.”

10. “Can you walk me through your decision-making process?”

Jones says that this question “unpicks the power structure, timelines. We understand the 'how'—crucial to tailor the pitch.”

11. “What barriers do you face in your attempt to scale your business?”

12. “which potential deal-breakers would keep us from working together”.

Johannes Larsson , Founder and CEO of JohannesLarsson.com , “This will allow your prospect to voice any concerns or reservations they might have about the product or service. By addressing these upfront, you can demonstrate your commitment to understanding and resolving issues, which builds trust and rapport with the prospect. This question will also help you gather valuable insights into the prospect's priorities and non-negotiables so you can tailor your approach accordingly.”

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Needs Analysis Questions

What is your boss or team hoping to accomplish in the next year?
What do you perceive as your team’s greatest strength? Weakness?
From your perspective, what do you perceive your needs to be? How important are they?
Which resource could you use more of?
What are your buying criteria and success criteria?
What do you like best about your current system? What would you like to see changed?
Would you rather cut costs, save money, or increase productivity?

13. “What are your short-term goals? Long-term goals?”

According to Uka Tomikis , CEO of Messente , asking this question is important because “[understanding] a prospect's goals enables you to align your solution with their objectives and demonstrate how you can contribute to their success. This indicates your interest in their business success rather than just completing a transaction.”

14. “What's been preventing you from reaching these goals?”

Tomikis says that asking this question is crucial because “[identifying] hurdles allows you to directly address how your product or service will overcome these limitations. It also helps to prioritize which demands are most urgent.”

15. “How are you currently addressing these challenges?”

Tomikas recommends asking this question because “knowing a prospect's current solutions lets you differentiate yours by emphasizing new features or benefits that fill gaps in their current strategy.”

16. “What does the ideal solution look like to you?”

Tomikas asserts that asking this question “lets you grasp the prospect's expectations and tailor your pitch accordingly. It highlights their top features or outcomes, allowing you to focus on the most important components of your service.”

17. “What criteria will you use to evaluate solutions?”

Tomikas recommends asking this question because “[understanding] your prospect's evaluation criteria provides insight into what is most important to them, whether it be cost, ease of use, scalability, or support. It enables you to adapt your proposal to fit these criteria.”

18. “Have you ever solved this problem before? What worked and what did not?”

Tomikas recommends you ask this question because “[learning] from previous attempts allows you to understand what not to propose and what might be a better strategy, preventing recurrent failures and building trust by respecting their experience.”

19. “What is your boss or team hoping to accomplish in the next year?”

This is another question that covers a prospect‘s goals — but this one adds an element of specificity that the previous ones don’t, enabling you to really hone in on what the business is hoping to achieve.

Pro-Tip: Be sure to stress that you want to know company leadership‘s or the broader org’s goals here. This question is meant to get prospects thinking beyond themselves. You can ask how your solution will improve their day-to-day later — here, you want them to place your offering in a “bigger picture” context.

20. “What deadlines are you currently up against?”

Add more urgency to the conversation by explicitly asking your customer if they’re up against any deadlines. Once you find out if they have a set date where they must achieve or do something, you can highlight your solution as a tool for getting there more quickly.

Pro-Tip: This question is good for disqualifying prospects. If your prospect is working on a timeline you can't realistically accommodate, you can end the engagement and spare yourself crucial time and resources.

21. "How do your team’s objectives play into your department's strategy?”

This question might seem extraneous, given that we’ve already covered two questions about objectives and goals — but knowing the role of their team in the department’s larger strategy can hint at the needs of the entire department.

For instance, if you’re selling an SEO software solution, you might want to listen for the team’s role in increasing traffic, meaning that the business is intending to grow its organic acquisition. If your software also offers acquisition tools, you can pitch those as well.

A better alternative to “ What are your needs?” , this question will specifically ask for your customer’s perception of their needs, not necessarily their actual needs. After asking a series of needs analysis questions, you’ll likely have a better understanding of your customer’s needs than they do. But it’s important to understand what they perceive their needs to be.

26. “Do you struggle with [common pain point]?”

This is a classic question to uncover your customer’s challenges. It works because it puts a name to the pain point. Your customer might not even know what their pain point is until you mention it outright. Sometimes, they might be used to dealing with the challenge and not even bring it up. By posing this question, you force them to reckon with it.

Pro-Tip: This is a good opportunity to raise pain points that your solution is uniquely positioned to address, but you need to understand your vertical as thoroughly as possible to touch on reasonable, relevant ones. “Common pain points” vary by factors like scale and industry — so don't just throw random examples out for the sake of throwing them out.

27. “Which resource could you use more of?”

Ask this question to not only understand what resources you could offer right then and there — but to see the types of resources your team could create to convert more prospects. You can send this information straight to your marketing department so you can begin to nurture leads with this new resource.

Pro-Tip: Your customer might also respond in general terms: They might need a bigger budget or a bigger team. Use this information to further qualify them or figure out if you could create a better package for them.

Is it by attending a team-wide meeting, and everyone votes on whether to adopt a solution or not? Does it depend on the contract value of the product? If you’re selling a cheaper product, your customer might have a much more speedy process. But if your product is pricier, they might have a different process.

38. “Would you rather cut costs, save money, or increase productivity?”

This is another way to uncover where your customer’s priorities lie. The fun part is that it offers choices in a “Would you rather” format, making it easier to ask and leading to a more conversational or casual answer.

39. “Which product features would lead to a purchasing decision?”

Some product features might not be necessary to your customers, while others might be critical. Whatever your customer mentions here, use that to highlight that exact feature in your product.

40. “If you’ve considered a similar product in the past but didn’t purchase it, why?”

Has your customer come close to making a similar purchase, but pulled back at the last second? This question will give you insight into potential objections you could face as you near a closed deal.

41. “On average, how long does it take for your team to purchase a product?”

Take advantage of this question to find out how long you could potentially be in conversation with this customer.

When you‘re checking in with current clients with the hope of either upselling, cross-selling, or renewing, it’s imperative you ask the right questions.

If you fail to ask tough questions about the good and bad of your product/service, you risk missing warning signs they're unhappy and would consider churning to a competitor.

Don't leave the door open. Close it with these questions:

“On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you with our product?”
“Why did you give us that score?”
“Can you explain the weaknesses or challenges you've found in our product/service so far?”
“What do you love about our product/service?”
“How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?”
“How has adoption and internal use gone in your team?”
“Do you feel you've received outstanding customer service?”
“Are you ready to renew today?” (Only if the first seven questions have had positive answers)
“What can we do to earn your business for another year?”
“Would you be interested in our new add-on Feature X?”

As you near the end of your conversation with a customer, you want to find out, in no uncertain terms, how you can get their business. Use your customer’s background as a guidepost for how you’ll word this question.

If you get the sense your customer doesn’t like being pushed or is on the fence, try to close in a more circumventive way. Here are some options:

“What will it take for us to do business?”
“How soon can we begin?”
“What is my best shot for winning your account?”
(If they’re a returning customer) “What did we do in the last sale that impressed you most?”
"What’s the best time to touch base before you present the product to stakeholders?”

Ask Better Questions to Analyze Your Customer’s Needs

Great sales questions enable you to tailor your messaging to your prospects' goals and show them your solution is the best choice. By asking the right questions, you can further qualify your prospects, close more deals, and increase recurring revenue at your company.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2014 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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The eight smartest questions you can ask a potential customer.

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Converting a potential customer takes more than just rattling off the facts about your product or service. It often requires a personalized approach based on a genuine understanding of the customer's needs.

To gain this understanding, you'll need to ask the right questions during the sales process. Below, the business leaders of Young Entrepreneur Council share the eight most insightful questions you can ask a potential customer as well as how they will help you land that coveted sale.

1. What are your specific needs and goals?

This question allows the sales professional to gain an understanding of the customer's unique requirements and objectives. In addition, the sales professional demonstrates their genuine interest in helping the customer find the best solution for their needs. - Eddie Lou , CodaPet

2. What makes you prefer a certain solution over its alternatives?

The smartest question a sales professional could ask a potential customer is, "What generally makes you prefer a solution over its alternatives"? An answer to this question will give you a clear idea about the expectations of your potential customers, enabling you to tailor your offerings accordingly to secure a sale. - Stephanie Wells , Formidable Forms

3. What outcome would you like to see in the next year or two?

One powerful way to give a salesperson context about the potential customer's situation is to ask them what outcome they would like to see in the next year or two. This will often open up the conversation beyond the specific product or service being sold and help the salesperson understand what additional support or value they might offer down the line as well. - Nathalie Lussier , AccessAlly

4. What are the biggest limitations you’re facing with the product or service you’re currently using?

This question assumes that the prospect is already using something from one of your competitors. If it's a startup or you're introducing a new product, you can modify this to, "What's your biggest challenge around X?"—with X being the issue your product addresses. - Kalin Kassabov , ProTexting

5. What does success look like after you’ve been using our product?

Use this question to guide your customer into visualizing success with the support of your product. Instead of guessing what they want or describing the benefits of your service, allow the customer to tell you exactly how your product can make an impact. - Nanxi Liu , Blaze.tech

6. Is there anything you'd like to change about what we offer?

The smartest question a sales professional could ask a potential customer is, "Is there anything that you'd like to change about what we offer?" This shows that you care about your customers and value their feedback. Plus, no matter how amazing your offer is, there's always something that a customer doesn't want or wants more. So, the answer to the question helps you figure out what that is. - Chris Klosowski , Easy Digital Downloads

7. How does our solution contribute to your top priority?

A powerful question to ask your prospects is, "How does our solution contribute to your top priority?" If it doesn't, then follow up with, "Why is this still important?" These queries uncover your product's relevance to their objectives. By learning if and how your offering aligns with their priorities, you can tailor your pitch effectively and improve conversion. - Devesh Dwivedi , Higher Valuation

8. Can you describe a scenario where our solution would not meet your expectations?

This question builds authenticity and trust while providing the sales professional with valuable insights they can use to understand and address the concerns of customers proactively. Eventually, it helps make a compelling case for the product or service, increasing the professional’s chances of making a sale. - Vikas Agrawal , Infobrandz

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10 Great Sales Discovery Questions to Ask Your Prospects

Quick Takeaways

Sales discovery questions provide an important opportunity for sales reps to gain insight into prospect needs and motivations.
The highest-performing sales reps ask more than a dozen sales discovery questions per call.
Asking about your prospect’s company and role at the beginning of a call can give you important context that helps you steer the conversation successfully.
It’s best practice to focus on your prospect’s problems and challenges first to determine how your solution can address them.
Sales discovery questions should also aim to uncover when a prospect’s problem and the solution may not be a good fit.
Asking about next steps is a crucial part of ensuring a sales deal stays alive after the initial discovery call.

Why do your sales discovery questions matter?

Sales reps gain a better understanding of prospect needs and motivations
Rapport can be built between sales reps and prospects
Prospects feel seen and understood when sales reps ask relevant questions
Opportunities arise for both reps and prospects to fill information gaps

top sales reps ask 12-15 sales discovery questions on average

10 great sales discovery questions to ask your prospects

Tell me about your company., tell me about your role. what does your day-to-day job entail, talk me through the problem you’re trying to solve., how does your company address that problem now, what interested you about our solution, who else on your team is involved in finding your solution, what does an ideal solution look like from your perspective, where is this on your priority list, what potential curveballs might we encounter in the process, what do you see as our best next step.

bar graph showing win rates significantly increase when next steps are discussed

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Survey questions for market research are designed to collect information about a target market or audience. They can be used to gather data about consumer preferences, opinions, and behavior. Some common types of market research survey questions include demographic questions, behavioral questions and attitudinal questions. 2.
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100+ Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

100+ Great Market Research Questions to Ask Your Customers

To Explore New Product Opportunities

To Collect Feedback on Existing Products

To Segment the Target Market

To Conduct a Competition Analysis

To Gauge Brand Awareness

To Map Customers’ Preferences

To Map Customers’ Reservations

To Perform Pricing Analysis

To Collect Feedback on Website Copy

To Assess Website/Product Usability

To Uncover Market Trends and Industry Insights

Market Research Survey Templates

Breakdown of Different Market Research Questions

Multiple Choice

Single Choice

Matrix Match

Ranking Question

Dichotomous

Likert Scale

How to Write Your Marketing Research Questions

Audience Segmentation Questions

Product-Based Market Research Questions

Pricing Market Research Questions

Brand Reputation Market Research Questions

Advertisement & Campaign-Based Questions

7 Question Types to Use in Market Research Surveys

To Know Your Target Market

Case study – How Avis increased its revenue per customer

To Plan the Product Roadmap

Case study – How customer research drives Twilio’s operations

To Reduce Acquisition Costs

To Design Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Case Study – How Canon’s campaigns generated 700% ROI

To Improve Brand Awareness

Quick Tips for Writing Awesome Market Research Survey Questions

Use Mutually Exclusive Response Options

Always Add A “Not Applicable” Or “Rather Not Say” Option

Calculate the Required Sample Size

Consider Adding Incentives

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