How to conduct a market research survey: A step-by-step guide

Teams often reach moments where a strategic decision depends on understanding the broader market. A market research survey gives you structured, decision-ready insights by capturing preferences, behaviors, and perceptions beyond your existing customers. The importance of a market survey lies in its ability to highlight patterns and preferences that help teams make confident, evidence-based decisions.

Running an effective market research survey isn’t always straightforward. Challenges show up early: defining a clear research objective, selecting a representative sample, choosing the right market survey method, or writing questions that avoid bias. These choices shape data quality and determine how confidently you can act on the results.

What follows is a practical walkthrough of how marketers, product teams, and researchers think through market research surveys. As you move through each stage, having the right resources at your fingertips can make a significant difference.

SurveyMonkey makes this easier with market research survey templates and SurveyMonkey Audience. With these tools in hand, you’ll be well on your way to managing your own market research survey program, from defining research questions to interpreting results.

Market research is the process of gathering information about a target audience or market to guide product, marketing, and business decisions.

What is a survey in marketing research? It's a research tool businesses use to learn what their customers think, want, and do.

By gathering feedback at scale, surveys reveal trends and patterns that often go unnoticed in one-on-one conversations. Teams across a company benefit from these insights: marketers identify new opportunities, product managers define roadmaps, and researchers track brand perception over time.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the information you can gather with market research surveys:

Surveys are one of several research methods, sitting alongside interviews, focus groups, diary studies, and other qualitative approaches. While interviews and focus groups uncover in-depth stories and underlying motivations, surveys provide a way to quantify how widespread those themes are. Many projects use qualitative research to explore an issue and surveys to measure its prevalence.

Market research surveys can support both primary research—fresh data collected directly from respondents—and secondary research, which analyzes existing studies, reports, or datasets. Many teams lean on secondary sources first to understand what is already known, then run a survey to fill the remaining gaps.

Related reading: Why are surveys important in research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about a target audience or market to guide product, marketing, and business decisions.

What is a survey in marketing research? It's a research tool businesses use to learn what their customers think, want, and do.

By gathering feedback at scale, surveys reveal trends and patterns that often go unnoticed in one-on-one conversations. Teams across a company benefit from these insights: marketers identify new opportunities, product managers define roadmaps, and researchers track brand perception over time.

Here’s a glimpse of some of the information you can gather with market research surveys:

Surveys are one of several research methods, sitting alongside interviews, focus groups, diary studies, and other qualitative approaches. While interviews and focus groups uncover in-depth stories and underlying motivations, surveys provide a way to quantify how widespread those themes are. Many projects use qualitative research to explore an issue and surveys to measure its prevalence.

Market research surveys can support both primary research—fresh data collected directly from respondents—and secondary research, which analyzes existing studies, reports, or datasets. Many teams lean on secondary sources first to understand what is already known, then run a survey to fill the remaining gaps.

Related reading: Why are surveys important in research?

Different types of market research surveys answer different business questions, from testing concepts to evaluating competitors or understanding behavior. Each survey type supports a different research goal, from measuring awareness to testing concepts or understanding behavior.

Competitor research surveys help teams understand how people perceive competing products—what they like, where they struggle, and which features drive choice. This lens becomes especially helpful when evaluating positioning or considering market entry. 

Typical questions on a competitor research survey include purchase frequency questions and open-ended questions such as, “When you think of this product category, which brands come to mind?”

Consumer behavior surveys explore habits, triggers, and routines—when people buy, how they use a product, or what influences their decision. These surveys help marketers refine messaging and help product teams understand typical workflows or pain points. 

Typical questions in a consumer behavior survey are:

Brand awareness surveys measure how people describe a brand and how easily it comes to mind. Early-stage companies sometimes find that awareness sits lower than assumed, which changes how they prioritize channels or messaging. Established brands monitor whether perceptions shift after a campaign or major launch.

Here are some typical questions on a brand personality survey:

Price-testing surveys help teams understand price perceptions and what customers are willing to pay for your product or service. 

Here are three routine questions on a price-testing survey:

Concept testing surveys evaluate reactions to a new idea, feature, ad, or prototype. These surveys help teams evaluate whether a concept is understood, appealing, and aligned with customer needs. Reactions often differ by audience segment, making the sampling strategy particularly important.

Concept testing gauges audience reactions to a new product name, brand logo, website updates, or new product ideas. These projects often serve as a focused market survey of a product, helping teams understand reactions before moving forward.

Planning a survey is one of the most practical ways to learn how to do market research because it forces you to define your questions, audience, and decisions up front. Planning a market research survey defines the problem you’re solving, who you need to reach, and what decisions the results must support.

When the planning is clear, every later choice—who you sample, what you ask, how you send the survey, and how you interpret the responses—has a reason behind it instead of being driven by habit or guesswork.

Here’s a step-by-step checklist to use when planning your market research survey:

Sampling determines who participates in your market research survey and how closely your sample represents the target market. Selecting the right sample means choosing a group of respondents who accurately represent the larger population you want to understand. This choice influences your recruitment methods, screener questions, and any quotas you might set.

Deciding how many responses you need requires balancing confidence in the results and a manageable margin of error. Tools like our sample size calculator and margin of error calculator can guide you in determining how large your sample should be for meaningful analysis across different subgroups.

When you need to reach specific or hard-to-find groups, such as recent buyers of a particular product or professionals in niche fields, tools like SurveyMonkey Audience provide access to respondents who match custom profiles. SurveyMonkey Audience also supports targeted screening and quota management to help create balanced and credible samples.

This approach is especially useful if you’re learning how to do a market survey for a new business, where reaching the right mix of potential customers is essential.

Running a market research survey requires choosing the right distribution method, ensuring quality, and preparing for a smooth fieldwork process. SurveyMonkey offers multiple ways to reach respondents—email, web links, social sharing, or QR codes—each suited to different research goals. It may seem easy, but there are several common mistakes researchers make when running a market research survey.

Timing can influence several factors, from who responds to their mood. Consumer studies may perform better in the evenings or on weekends, while professional audiences often respond more often during the week. 

A short pilot run of the survey can help catch issues early. Send the survey to a small audience group and follow up afterward. Check for confusing questions or issues with the survey. Addressing issues early improves data quality and reduces the risk of errors in your full launch.

Many people take surveys on their phones. Surveys should keep pages short, questions concise, and layouts touch-friendly. SurveyMonkey automatically optimizes surveys for mobile, but reviewing your survey design on a mobile phone before launch ensures it looks and works as intended.

As responses come in, SurveyMonkey Analyze lets you track completion trends, review partial responses, and spot unusual patterns. Unusual patterns may indicate satisficing, straightlining, or other anomalies that can hinder the reliability of your market research survey results.

You can check for inconsistent data, short completion times, and irregular patterns manually or use the SurveyMonkey response quality feature, a paid machine learning feature that automatically flags poor-quality responses.

If surveying specialized or professional populations, SurveyMonkey Audience adds extra layers of quality control through verified profiles and response validations.

For example, if you're looking for under 40, then you would want to target under 40 - don't want this to be after you begin fielding, but rather before. These safeguards help ensure your sample remains aligned with your target criteria.

While some organizations run market research paid surveys, many teams prefer using verified panels and targeted sampling to ensure higher data quality.

Analyzing market research survey data turns response patterns into insights you can use to guide decisions, validate hypotheses, and spot trends. Solid early planning of goals, hypotheses, and success criteria makes this stage easier.

A structured analysis that checks data quality, compares segments, and ties every finding back to your original objective turns raw responses into actionable insights.

This compilation tackles typical hurdles researchers encounter during the process of market research, from survey design and deployment to data analysis and interpretation.

Effective market research surveys take intention and structure. Strong market research is built with intention. It starts with a clear decision, uses questions designed to get reliable answers, and reaches the people whose perspectives matter. When each step is deliberate and connected, the results hold up—and the insights are ready to guide real decisions.

SurveyMonkey supports that workflow at every stage. Templates help teams move from a blank page to a well-constructed instrument. Calculators translate research goals into practical sampling targets. SurveyMonkey Audience provides access to respondents who match your profile, and SurveyMonkey Analyze helps turn response patterns into the findings that shape roadmaps, campaigns, and product ideas.

When your planning, sampling, and analysis align, a market research survey gives you clear insights to guide product, marketing, and business decisions. The right data helps confirm or refine your hypotheses and shows which actions will have the most impact.

Get started free, or explore our market research survey templates to begin shaping your next study.