Product Management
80 Market Research Questions for More Valuable Insights (+tips)
Content Writer
Athira V S
Created on:
April 15, 2024
Updated on:
April 15, 2024
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?
Messaging
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.
Conclusion
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.
Sign up today, and let's uncover burning issues and market gaps together.
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FAQs
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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