This article discusses about marketing research. The thing which I will discuss is about the steps to perform marketing research. I'll explain best practices for conducting this research.

Steps to carry out marketing research:

1. Defining the problem.

As a project manager, you must be able to define the problem, and from here you will set the goal of this research. The point that must be considered in this step is : you should be able to narrow the scope of the problem, do not make it too broad. If the purpose of this research is clear, then you will easily carry out the activity in the next step.

Examples of research objectives are:

a. Only to gather preliminary information about an issue as the output for other marketing activities.

b. This is often done, to understand the marketing issues such as: marketing situation, the potential market for a product, consumer attitudes toward products, and others. 

c. To test the hypothesis, or to assess whether the marketing strategy worth continuing or not.

Once again, you should clearly formulate the problem and marketing research purposes. Different purposes, it will be different approaches in marketing research.

2. Formulate a plan and collect data.

 In this stage you should formulate the most efficient plan to move on and gather the necessary information. You have to know the cost of research plans, data sources and other research approaches before continuing.  

There are two types of data sources that you can take, you can acquire one or both. The first is the secondary data, namely the already existing data from both internal and external so that you only collect the data that already exists. The second is the primary data, ie data that you must get in order to process them into useful information. Primary data is divided into two general categories: qualitative which is obtained from interviews or focus groups, and quantitative which is derived from observation or surveys.

It should be noted in this step that you must evaluate precisely the above data and you need to make sure that the data is accurate, relevant, and up to date.

3. Analyze information

This stage is the core marketing research activities. You have to process and analyze the collected data to isolate information and important findings. The majority of the activities which you are doing are do the tabulation of results , calculate the average and the measure data with other statistical methods.

Things you should remember is that you must check the data (eg questionnaire data) for accuracy and completeness then provide the code for the computer analysis, so the analysis can be performed easily and precisely.

4. Interpret the research result.

 After conducting in-depth analysis of the data, you must conduct the next activity, called the interpretation of research results.

The deeper you collect accurate data, the more precise you interpre the research. In this stage, you have done the studies and conclusions, summarize the law of cause and effect, and others.

5. Writing and submission of final report.

 After doing the interpretation, you have to draw a final conclusion and convey to the management or decision-makers. You should be able to convert the conclusion of a long sentence into numbers, pictures, flow charts, graph/chart. This makes decision-makers can easily read the report and take appropriate resolutions.

Above are the steps to perform marketing research. A best practice can be the same in an companies or it could be different in other companies. Steps to conduct research on a particular company could be much longer stages, or it could be shorter. In essence, what I’ve described above is the best practice for marketing research in general.