Market research surveys
Use surveys for effective market research
Keeping up with fast-paced, ever-changing market trends is key for any successful business. Listening to your customers and reacting to emerging consumer demands will help you stay ahead of your competitors. Using surveys in your market research allows you to collect insights throughout the product or market lifecycle.
Explore prospective and existing customers’ needs and motivations, positive and negative feelings about your products or branding, and the effectiveness and reach of your promotional efforts.
Online surveys offer you a fast and easy way to conduct targeted market research that will provide you with the information you need to deliver the best product or service to the right audience.
What can you measure using market research surveys?
Market
Whether looking to launch a new business, move into a new market, or grow your presence in an existing market, whatever your goals you’ll need a degree of certainty about the market you’re focusing on.
Audience
Consumer research can help you find the right audience for your products or services, identify key influences on buying behaviour, or understand the motivations, attitudes and interests of your target market.
Product
By helping to validate the direction you are taking or alert you to any improvements you need to make, a product survey can ensure you are better able to meet your current and future customers’ expectations.
Brand
Given the influence branding can have on consumer decisions, and their ability to differentiate between and recall competing products and services, it’s vital to know how your own brand is perceived.
Promotion
Getting the messaging right in your advertising, ensuring in-store promotions attract customers, or improving recall are challenges that research can help inform.
Anything else
If you have a market research survey requirement that isn’t covered here, why not speak to our friendly team? We are confident our survey software can work for you.
Run better research end to end
Create market research surveys fast
Use 130+ templates, logic and question types.
Distribute surveys online and offline
Email, SMS, QR code, web link or live panel.
Analyse responses with AI
AI surfaces themes, sentiment and segments fast.
Start with market research templates
Reporting the results of your market research survey
View data in real time
Get results as soon as responses arrive. Seeing how opinion is forming as the data comes in means you can make decisions and adapt without waiting for a survey to close.
Analyse results simply
Export data into multiple formats and apply filters, cross-tabs and charts to your results. Quickly identify what's working, where opinion differs and what needs to change.
Share findings easily
Download and print responses at the click of a button, or transfer results via a password-protected link. Getting findings to the people who need them takes seconds.
Frequently asked questions
Market research surveys help you stay in step with what your customers want and where your market is heading. The main reasons businesses run them regularly include:
- Understanding the needs of existing customers
- Recognising prospective new customers
- Identifying and entering new markets
- Measuring brand awareness
- Driving improvements to products and pricing
The number one reason for businesses to conduct market research is to keep up to date with what customers want. With SmartSurvey’s advanced software, you can reach your target audience anytime, anywhere. By sending survey invitations via email and SMS, sharing them on social media and embedding them directly into your website, you can gather relevant data and identify opportunities as they happen.
Over 90% of customers never complain, they just leave and never come back. By surveying your customers you will build the knowledge needed to identify unhappy customers, remedy the problems and reduce customer churn. For example, scheduling an automated survey invitation to be sent upon completion of delivery allows you to take a personal approach to customer service which will encourage increased customer retention rates.
There are several types of market research surveys you can run depending on what you want to find out.
Target market and consumer analysis surveys help you understand the people who buy your products. Product feedback surveys tell you what customers like, dislike and want more of. Concept testing validates a new product or service before launch. Marketing surveys show whether your advertising is landing with the right people. Marketplace analysis helps you understand what your target market wants before you move.
You can create any of these from scratch or start from a ready-made template. Export results to Excel, Word, CSV or PDF, run text analysis on open-ended responses and use cross-tabulation to understand the different segments in your market.
Market research survey design tips:
- Have a clear objective of what you want to achieve
- Do not ask questions about non-essential information
- Focus on two or three topics that will have the greatest impact on business goals
- Identify areas that require richer feedback and ask more detailed questions
- Critically review your questionnaire to make sure you receive actionable results
Data collected through market research should aid business decisions. Questionnaire design is an art and something that requires practice. When designing online surveys, remember to keep in mind the objectives and who the target audience is. It is good practice to put the questions in a meaningful order and keep the survey to a reasonable length, don’t ask questions unless the data will be directly used to implement changes.
Yes. SmartSurvey gives you access to a live audience panel of more than 20 million screened respondents across over 70 countries. You can target any demographic, from broad consumer groups to hard-to-find niches, and start collecting responses without a contact list. This is particularly useful for brand tracking, concept testing or entering a market where you have no existing customer base to survey.
SmartSurvey includes a full set of analysis tools built into the platform. AI sentiment analysis tells you how respondents feel, while AI thematic analysis groups open-text comments into themes automatically. Cross-tabulation and filtering let you compare responses by segment, region or demographic. You can also export to SPSS for advanced statistical modelling, or connect to Power BI for custom reporting.
SmartSurvey’s market research surveys sit within the same platform as our SmartCX customer experience solution. The insights you gather from brand, product and audience research can feed directly into the feedback programmes you use to track customer satisfaction and loyalty day to day. Rather than running separate tools for market research and CX measurement, you can collect, analyse and act on both in one place. If you want a more complete view of your customers, combining periodic market research with ongoing CX tracking is a practical next step.
Yes. SmartSurvey supports surveys in any language, including right-to-left scripts. AI translation renders open-text responses back into a single language automatically, so you can read and analyse international feedback in one view rather than managing separate data sets for each market.
SmartSurvey gives you everything you need to run rigorous market research without agency timelines or enterprise price tags. Build surveys using 130+ question types, advanced logic and professional templates. Distribute them across every channel, from email and SMS to QR codes, website embeds and social media, or reach new audiences through our live respondent panel. Analyse results with AI-powered tools and built-in cross-tabulation, then share findings through branded reports or live dashboards. Start for free or book a demo to see it on your own research.
Yes. Embed surveys into your website or app, connect to Salesforce or HubSpot to pull in contact data, and push results into Power BI for advanced reporting. We also offer API and webhook access for custom integrations across 290+ platforms, including Zapier, Microsoft Teams and Google Analytics.
Yes. SmartSurvey is ISO 27001 certified and Cyber Essentials Plus accredited. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, hosted in UK data centres, and we are fully GDPR compliant. We also meet the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit requirements.
Yes. You can sign up for a free trial and get started straight away, with no credit card required. If you’d prefer a guided walkthrough on your own research use case, book a demo and we'll set you up from there.
Pricing depends on the plan and the features you need. You can review all options on our pricing page. A free plan is available, with paid plans starting from a low monthly fee. For larger teams or specific research requirements, book a demo to discuss what works for you.
Build your market research survey
