10 Tips for effective market research projects

1. Understand your objectives – involve all the key stakeholders within your organisation to get a very clear idea of what you want to achieve and get buy-in from everybody upfront.
2. Plan, plan, plan – don’t rush the process of implementing a market research project. It takes time. Before you get to the stage of appointing an agency, you need to be 100% sure of what you want.  
3. Get the brief right – this should be well thought out and well written with very clear statements of the objectives, the audience and other important details specific to your project. Make sure that when you are requesting proposals that the project scope is very well defined.
4. Take a step back – consider your brief and question how you will best achieve your goals. Do you require custom market research? Does the information already exist?
5. Existing research – you might have loads of existing research that doesn’t answer the specific brief for a project, however, it can add valuable insight into driving forward your current research project.
6. Choose the right research agency – look at your goals and your industry and that should start to lead you on the path to choosing the right agency. Look for track records and testimonials in the type of research as well as the industry. Also strongly consider the relationship that you want with an agency and that the research company fits with your organisational structure.
7. Consider your budget in relation to the project – if your objectives are very clear and don’t change throughout the project, this shouldn’t be a problem. Stay focused to ensure that you stick to your budgets.
8. Define roles and responsibilities – dependant on the size of the project, clearly define who will be doing what.
9. Questionnaires – this is critical to whether a project will thrive or dive. The questions need to be very aligned with your goals. Within your organisation you might need to be tough – don’t just add questions as someone has decided that they can quickly test another hypothesis. Stay focused.
10. Delivering the results – make sure your presentation on results is engaging and clear. Don’t waffle, just get to the point and perhaps add video to liven up the presentation. Always try and have text files of the audio and video for easy reference.