You know you should be doing some B2B market research, but you’re not sure where to start. Or, you were disappointed by the impact of your last market research project and you want to improve your process to get more impactful outcomes.
Look no further! We’ll walk you through the 6 main B2B market research steps and show you how ScoreApp guides you through each one.
Step 1: Define research goals and audience
B2B market research isn’t just something you do for the sake of it. You need to clarify why you’re doing it, what you want to know, and what you’re going to do with the information before you start. You also need to know who to ask.
Every B2B business invests in market research for their own specific reasons, all grounded in their overall business strategy. Common B2B market research goals include identifying:
- How your current customers use your product/services
- Other pain points they need to fix
- The benefits of using your product: Do they save time, hassle, or money?
- What new products or features customers want
- How much they’d be prepared to pay for those new features or products
- How different customer segments use your product differently: In different industries, or geographical locations
- What they think about your brand and product in relation to your competitors
You can ask your audience anything about your brand, product/service, competitors, customer service, and future product development. So you need to focus on:
- What you want to know right now
- Who you’re going to ask
Every B2B market research project should be targeted at the right audience segment. This ensures you get the most valuable answers to your carefully chosen questions.
How ScoreApp helps
ScoreApp’s ready-to-go templates are fully customisable, with an unlimited number of questions from a range of different question types. You can assign scores against multiple topics with our category scoring system. So you get automatically segmented responses based on their relevance to your goals.
Step 2: Ask the right questions
Once you’ve figured out the specific goal of your B2B market research project, you need to develop a targeted quiz or survey. Crafting the right questions is the key to getting the most useful data and getting people excited to take part.
Top tips for writing your B2B market research questions:
- Keep it short: There’s no magic ‘right number’ of quiz questions, aim for around 5 – 15 questions maximum, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition (in their inbox.)
- Relevant: Every question must be there for a reason. There’s no time for filler.
- Clear language: If you can’t understand a question, you can’t answer it. Don’t make them work to ‘get it’.
- Mix it up: Use different kinds of questions to maintain participant interest.
- Minimal options: If you’re asking questions with multiple-choice answers, keep the range of options tight.
- Test it: Try out your quiz on a small sample of people first, so you’ve got a chance to refine any wording and clear up any misunderstandings.
It’s not just the words that need to be right – your market research design needs to grab your audiences’ attention and make them want to stay there until they’ve finished. It needs to be easy to use, mobile-friendly, and on-brand – they need to know it’s coming from you.
Whether you’re figuring out which new feature your audience prefers, asking about their daily frustrations that you can help mitigate, or identifying new markets – your survey needs to tick all these boxes.
How ScoreApp helps
ScoreApp helps you create a beautiful, interactive market research quiz that takes participants by the hand and leads them through answering every question.
Not only does ScoreApp make this a quick, easy process, but you can even quantify qualitative data with our scoring logic.
Step 3: Give them something in return
It’s usual to add an incentive to encourage people to participate in your market research, in exchange for their time and thoughts.
B2C businesses often have discounts, first in the queue to buy and exclusive offers for their market research participants. And some variation of these might be a good option for you. For example, offer a ‘first month free’ for your new SaaS subscription service.
But B2B market research often targets C-suite professionals and members of buying teams that, rightly, command a substantial price for their time. What else can you offer your participants? There are loads of different lead magnets available to sweeten your B2B market research deal, like:
- Quiz: Present your market research questions in a quiz format, which gives participants personalised results that they can use straightaway – and is just more fun to do!
- Webinars: Webinars help your audience learn something useful to them, in a familiar format
- White paper: Use your original market research data to produce an industry report that participants get to see before publication
- Video mini-course: A hyper-focused learning experience your audience can take at their own pace
All these different B2B lead magnets have one purpose – make your audience think, ‘That’s interesting, I want that. And all I have to do is answer a few questions? I’m in!’
How ScoreApp helps
You can create, publish, and track the perfect landing page and lead magnet from your ScoreApp account. You don’t need to code anything, invest hours of your time, or hire specialists. All the infrastructure’s there, ready for you to customise for your audiences.
Step 4: Gather and analyse data
To effectively gather audience insights, use a mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods to ensure reliable data. Choose research methodologies that align with your objectives and avoid overloading your audience with too many at once.
Focus on relevant product analytics, conduct targeted 1:1 interviews, and design surveys for broader quantitative insights.
Collecting the right market research metrics from a balanced set of methodologies gives you a deeper understanding of your audience and more confidence in your data-based decisions.
How ScoreApp helps
ScoreApp’s real-time analytics dashboard lets you track responses as they come in. You can also view scores and segment data based on quiz responses, enabling easier identification of emerging patterns in customer needs or preferences.
Step 5: Interpret and validate findings
Now you’ve got all the statistics – you need to make them work!
Market research software like ScoreApp streamlines and automates your process. It organises quantitative responses to highlight averages, outliers, and trends – making it easier to interpret and share insights using stunning visuals.
You also get automated analysis of open-ended, qualitative questions through categorisation based on the original question sets. If you also use 1:1 interviews and focus groups you’ll need to allocate more time to their analysis. But the depth of insight they provide makes the effort worthwhile, especially when you’re asking the right participants.
Your findings will reveal patterns in buyer behaviour, pain points, and areas for improvement – and might even uncover surprising opportunities.
How ScoreApp Helps
ScoreApp doesn’t just automate data collection, it collates insights into visual reports and summaries that make discussion and sharing your research conclusions much easier to present and understand.
Step 6: Apply insights to business strategy
What are you going to do with your data results? What actions do your findings initiate?
Your B2B market research insights can inform business-critical decisions throughout your organisation.
For example, you might use the data for:
- Choosing new features and products to go into development
- Adapting your messaging and marketing campaign strategy
- Smoothing out any bumps in your sales funnel, to give your customers an exceptional experience from their very first click
- Working out if a new market is viable
- Positioning against the rest of the market
If you’re leading the market research, it’s up to you to make sure you make the most of what you find out. You need to secure time with different departments and the C-suite so that everyone benefits from the investment.
How ScoreApp helps
By using ScoreApp’s segmentation and scoring, you can identify high-potential leads and focus on opportunities that align with your findings. This integration makes it easy to connect insights directly to strategic actions, improving the overall research impact.
Not to mention that our visuals make it easier and quicker to share your findings than a multi-page written report.
ScoreApp is your perfect B2B market research partner
Leverage the power of ScoreApp to get granular with your B2B market research insights, at every step of the process. Your audience gets compelling, targeted questions that feel like they’ve been written just for them – as well as valuable lead magnets in exchange for their time and expertise.
And you get reliable insights you can confidently use to make data-based decisions across your organisation.
Get started on your first B2B market research project with ScoreApp today – for free!
