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Marketing Reporting Examples: How to Build and Analyze Marketing Reports

Run marketing reports that better inform your decisions, bolster your marketing resources, and help your organization grow better.

MONTHLY MARKETING REPORTING TEMPLATES

Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Drive Templates to Make Your Monthly Reporting Faster and Easier

Published: 11/03/23

As a marketer, I make crucial daily decisions that can impact the company I work for. Using my best judgment, I track important metrics like traffic, leads, and customers — and I provide a marketing report to back up my decisions.

While the above metrics are crucial to my marketing funnel and flywheel , a marketing report helps me further explore my findings and properly analyze the data to make the best decisions I can for my team and company.

Marketing reports aren‘t just vital for my work, they’re key to any marketer looking to do what‘s right for their organization. In this article, we’ll explore what a marketing report is and how to build one, and we'll spotlight some examples.

Marketing Reporting

Marketing reporting examples, how to create a marketing report, create your marketing report today.

Marketing reporting is the process of gathering and analyzing marketing metrics to inform future marketing decisions, strategies, and performance. Marketing reports uncover meaningful, actionable data that help you draw important conclusions and meet organization-wide goals.

Marketing reports vary depending on what data you’re reviewing and the purpose of each report. They can assess where your traffic and leads are coming from, what content they interacted with, if and when they converted, and how long it took to become a customer.

Take our free, 20-minute HubSpot Academy course on marketing reporting to measure success and optimize your efforts.

To reiterate: Marketing reports inform decisions .

You wouldn’t run a marketing report to review data performance or check on an ongoing goal — for these purposes, you’d glance at your marketing dashboards.

Look at it this way. Compiling a marketing report for knowledge’s sake is synonymous with scheduling a meeting to review a project. Who wants to attend a 30-minute session to review what could've been shared via email? Not me.

The same goes for marketing reporting. Reports should help you decide or come to an important conclusion — similar to how a meeting would help your team deliberate about a project or choose between project resources.

In short, marketing reporting is a precious process if used and crafted correctly.

Marketing Reporting Templates

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There are hundreds of reports that you can run to dig into your marketing efforts. At this point, however, you’re likely asking, “Where should I start?“ and ”What are those basic marketing reports I can run to get more comfortable with all the data I’ve been tracking?”.

We’ve pulled together these five marketing reporting examples to get started.

You will need some marketing software (like HubSpot Marketing Hub) to do this. You should also ensure your software allows you to export the data from your software and manipulate it in Excel using pivot tables and other functions.

This free guide and video will teach you how to create an Excel graph, make pivot tables, and use VLOOKUPS and IF functions.

Since we use HubSpot for our reporting needs, I'll show you how to compile these reports using the Marketing Hub tool. (The data below is sample data only and does not represent actual HubSpot marketing data.)

1. Multi-Touch Revenue Marketing Report

As a marketer, you’re a big part of your company’s growth. But unless you can directly tie your impact to revenue, you’ll be forever underappreciated and under-resourced. Multi-touch revenue attribution connects closed gain to every marketing interaction — from the first page view to the final nurturing email.

That way, marketers get the credit they deserve, and marketing execs make more innovative investments rooted in business value instead of vanity metrics. As a bonus, multi-touch revenue attribution can help you stay aligned with your sales team.

HubSpot customers can create multi-touch attribution reports quickly; HubSpot’s attribution tool is built for real people, not data scientists. (It also connects every customer interaction to revenue automatically.)

Navigate to your dashboard and click Add Report > Attribution Report . Select from the set of pre-baked best-practice templates, or create your own custom report.

How to Analyze Revenue Reporting

To analyze revenue reporting, determine what’s working and double down on it. Look at the revenue results from different channels and see where you most succeeded. Use this information to decide what marketing efforts to invest in moving forward.

For example, if you notice that your Facebook campaigns drove a ton of revenue, run more Facebook campaigns!

Multi-touch attribution reports should be run monthly to understand the broader business impact of your marketing channels. While revenue is necessary, you should dig into some of your other metrics for a more complete picture.

2. Channel-Specific Traffic Marketing Report

Understanding where your traffic comes from will help you make strategic decisions as you invest in different marketing channels. You should invest more resources if you see strong performance from one source.

On the other hand, you can invest in some of the weaker channels to get them on pace with some of your other channels. Whatever you decide, source data will help you figure that out.

HubSpot customers can use the Traffic Analytics report (under Reports > Analytics tools in your navigation) to break down traffic by source.

Want to get an even deeper understanding of your traffic patterns? Break down your traffic by geography. (Example: Which sources bring in the most traffic in Brazil?) You can also examine subsets of your website (like your blog vs. your product pages).

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Templates to Make Your Monthly Reporting Faster and Easier

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Marketing Reporting: The KPIs, Reports, & Dashboard Templates You Need to Get Started

Table of contents

To see what Databox can do for you, including how it helps you track and visualize your performance data in real-time, check out our home page. Click here .

Reporting on marketing performance is a critical skill that any marketer––from leadership to individual contributors––needs in order to convey the value of their work. In fact, according to Databox’s state of business reporting , marketing is the most monitored and reported operation.

Driving traffic and leads is important. But, understanding where they came from, how they engage with your website, and ultimately what led to a conversion or purchase (amongst many other insights) is necessary for building a repeatable and sustainable marketing program.

The challenge? As marketing technology has exploded, digital marketing reporting has gotten more complicated.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about marketing reporting, including:

What is Marketing Reporting?

What is a marketing report.

• The Types of Marketing Reports
• What Should A Marketing Report Include?
• How to Create a Marketing Report?
• Marketing KPIs and Metrics

Marketing Reporting Dashboards and Templates

• Reporting on Output vs. Outcome Metrics
• Bonus: White-Labeled Marketing Reports

Marketing reporting is an exercise that involves regularly sharing updates on key performance indicators (KPIs) , progress toward goals, as well as next steps with your team in order to identify priorities and make adjustments.

Reporting is typically done through regular marketing meetings , most commonly weekly and monthly. A marketing reporting meeting typically involves sharing numerous marketing reports in order to present a comprehensive view of the strategy and how it is performing.

What should be included in your marketing reports? We cover that, and more, below.

Related article: 17 Marketing Report Examples for Sharing Performance With Your Team.

A marketing report is a visual representation, usually presented in a dashboard or slide deck, of your marketing metrics and KPIs and their progress over a specific time period.

One reporting meeting may contain several marketing reports. In fact, it should.

For example, you might present separate marketing reports for your content marketing, paid advertising, and social media efforts. Each report would display marketing KPIs specific to that function.

This will help you uncover meaningful, actionable insights that will help your team identify opportunities and make adjustments.

Below is a marketing dashboard example that helps to communicate current performance, progress toward goals, and month-over-month comparisons to help inform and prioritize next steps.

Types of Marketing Reports

While there are any number of ways you could organize your digital marketing reports, we think it makes the most sense to organize them according to how frequently they would be shared.

There are, of course, situations when you need to create a specific KPI report for a particular purpose.

But, for the most part, here are the most common marketing report types as well as the specific reports you would share during a specified time range.

• Monthly marketing reports
• Weekly marketing reports
• Daily marketing reports
• Annual marketing reports

PRO TIP: How Are Users Engaging on My Site? Which Content Drives the Most Online Activity?

If you want to discover how visitors engage with your website, and which content drives the most engagement and conversions, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics 4 that will get you started:

• Sessions by channel. Which channels are driving the most traffic to your website? 
• Average session duration. How long do visitors spend on your website on average? 
• Pageviews and pageviews by page . Which pages on your website are viewed the most? 
• Total number of users . How many users engaged with your website? 
• Engagement rate . Which percentage of your website visitors have interacted with a piece of content and spent a significant amount of time on the site?
• Sessions conversion rate . How many of your website visitors have completed the desired or expected action(s) and what percentage of them completed the goals you’ve set in Google Analytics 4?

And more…

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring visitor engagement on your website. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

Monthly Marketing Reports

Monthly marketing reports are a management tool used by most marketers and agencies to demonstrate relevant marketing results on a monthly basis. In a monthly marketing report , we usually find metrics focused on web analytics and campaign performance.

Web Analytics Report

A web analytics report displays the data derived from the monitoring of your website performance. In this context of KPIs vs metrics, you will typically encounter the following metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) – online conversions, bounce rates, page views, referral traffic, etc. You can see some examples of web analytics dashboards here.

Digital Marketing Performance Report

A digital marketing performance report provides you with a complete overview of all your paid advertisement campaigns’ performance. It helps you discover the amount you have spent and if you were able to stay within a planned budget while still reaching your pre-set goals. It should also include the CPA metric so that you know how much you spent to get each new customer. You can see some examples of performance dashboards here.

Weekly Marketing Reports

You can view weekly marketing reports as a status check for your goals and campaigns. They are used to generate actionable marketing insights on a medium-term and weekly basis. In the case of weekly marketing reports, the main metrics to watch are traffic and engagements. 

Website Traffic Report

A Website Traffic Report provides you with data on the number of people that have visited your site. Monitoring your website traffic can help you discover where your traffic is coming from and how it’s engaging with your site. You can find this and other useful data in your reports. You can see more examples of SEO dashboards here.

Blog Traffic Report

 A Blog Traffic Report should be a weekly event, as your blog traffic tends to fall after the first week, after the promotions and boosts end. But continual monitoring of the blog traffic via blog traffic reports can show you what is your optimal number of visits over the course of a month, and longer. Check out some examples of content marketing dashboards here.

Social Media Report

A monthly Social Media Engagement Report is a great way to keep track of your growth and improve your social strategy accordingly. Understanding how your content performs through tracking account metrics and insights over time is key to building a successful social media strategy for your business. See examples of social media dashboards here.

Online Advertising Performance 

An Online Advertising Performance Report provides you data on how your online ads are fairing. By analyzing it on a weekly level you will ensure that your ad investments are stable or adjust them timely if they need more optimization to deliver specified targets. See examples of PPC dashboards , including paid ads templates and paid search templates , here.

Daily Marketing Reports

In most cases, daily marketing reports are used for internal company purposes. Their main goal is to spot changes or threats as they appear and react immediately. A daily marketing report should include some of the following:

Average Session Duration Report

Average session duration provides you data regarding user engagement from different sources and how useful your content is for each user. 

SEO Overview Report

SEO Overview, when reported on a daily level, shows you the increase and decrease of your site metrics, which can help you see, on a daily level, what has a positive or negative impact on your SEO efforts. 

Keyword Rankings Report

Keyword Rankings should be reported daily as they fluctuate every single day. If this is something relevant for your company and your clients daily reports are crucial. 

Annual Reports

The Annual Marketing Report is meant to deliver the milestones and KPIs (key performance indicators) that you and your clients need to know. It helps you define the key successes, to evaluate what could be improved, and to communicate all that with your team and your clients.

Marketing CMO Report

A CMO usually reports to the CEO. These reports should represent everything the marketing team has accomplished over a course of a year. Whether they have hit all the set goals and what were the possible shortcomings. It is there to inform the company management of the overall success of the in-house marketing team. See specific examples of executive dashboards here. This can be built using an executive dashboard software .

Marketing KPI Report

With the annual Marketing KPI Report, you can see the performance of your online marketing campaigns and monitor trends over the course of the previous year. 

What Should a Marketing Report Include?

Marketing reporting software provides you with actionable reports and easy-to-read snapshots of your campaigns. What to include in your marketing reports depends on your goals and what you are looking to achieve with your marketing efforts.

But, generally speaking, a good marketing report should cover the following:

• Output Metrics: Output metrics measure your activities. They are direct measurements of the work you’re doing on a daily or weekly basis. Examples would be things like the number of sales calls, number of blog posts published, etc.
• Outcome Metrics: Outcome metrics are typically the metrics that companies obsess over. These metrics are the ones that are shared with stakeholders like bosses, clients, and investors. Metrics like traffic, leads, and sales would be considered “outcome metrics.”
• Quality Metrics: Quality metrics are things like visit-to-signup conversion rates or other metrics that measure the overall quality of an outcome metric like Sessions.
• Progress Toward Goals: No marketing report is complete without a visualization of your progress toward your goals. Are you on or off track? That should be clearly represented so the team can adjust accordingly.
• Comparisons: Are you growing month-over-month? Comparing current performance to last month, quarter, or year is an easy way of measuring progress and growth.

Related article: 34 Marketing Metrics to Include in Every Marketing Report

How Often Should You Share a Marketing Report?

This depends on the type of report and the preset agreement you have with your team or your clients. 

• Monthly reporting allows you to gather enough data to see how changes have affected marketing results while ensuring that underperforming campaigns don’t run for too long. They are ideal for showing your clients the progress you made without overwhelming them. 
• Weekly reporting is great for your team, and you can see the current changes and adjust strategies accordingly.
• Real-time reporting is essential for retail as companies must be able to analyze real-time data to make more informed, accurate decisions. 

Why is Marketing Reporting Important?

Marketing reports are the outcome of your data-driven marketing. Their main purpose is to help interpret all the data you have collected through easily understandable visualizations. Marketing reporting helps you build context around your data and present your efforts and successes to your clients in a manner that will be clear to them. 

Here are just some of the things marketing reporting enables you to do:

1. Track progress towards marketing goals

Regular marketing reporting helps you obtain data that shows how close you are to reaching your pre-set marketing goals. Based on that data, you can make the necessary changes to ensure that all the goals are met in time. 

2. Have a clear view of all the outputs and outcomes

Marketing outputs, in the end, enable marketing outcomes. Marketing Reporting lets you track both and see when and if there is a need for adjustment so that you can reach the desired target. 

3. Identify emerging trends and be able to react to them quickly

Marketing Reporting enables you to keep a close eye on the current and emerging trends and to act on them in real-time. Thus improving your chances of reaching the pre-set marketing goals.

4. Identify the best performing content (and vice versa)

We want to know what works and what doesn’t so that we can replicate successful tactics. By analyzing what was successful through Marketing Reporting, we can build a far more stable marketing strategy for the future. 

5. Better marketing forecasting

When we have the right data, we can make educated predictions regarding some of our desired marketing outcomes. Marketing growth forecasting includes marketing reports that pay special attention to the following – sources of traffic, target audience, click-through rate (CT), conversion rate, number of transactions, the value per transaction, cost per transaction, and return on ad spend. 

How to Create a Marketing Report

An effective marketing report needs to be both accessible and actionable. This means that in addition to the numerical figures themselves, it’s helpful to have a data visualization to go along with each metric in your marketing report.

While most marketing technology tools boast their own analytics, this requires you to log into dozens of separate tools in order to get a comprehensive view of performance.

This is why dashboard software like Databox (Okay, we’re biased. But, it’s free.) are helpful in that they allow you to collate marketing metrics from multiple sources into one place.

To build your marketing report, you first should understand some of the most common sections.

Every report should include Outcome Metrics of some kind. Things like Sessions and Signups.

Then, you should also include drill-down metrics that allow viewers to better understand the performance of a specific metric. For example, instead of simply tracking Sessions, you should include a drill-down metric that measures Sessions by channel source in order to see which channels are paying off.

Next, you should also include a quality metric of some kind––a metric that allows you to measure to overall quality of an outcome metric like Sessions. For Sessions, we’d recommend something like visit-to-conversion rate.

Finally, you should also track Output Metrics that show the activities your team has executed on. This allows you to draw correlation between activities and results. This way, you can ensure that your team is only spending time on high leverage marketing activities.

In the example below, you can see “Total blog posts published” as the Output Metric.

Or, you could even add a visualization that measures the volume of each content type your team has published. This way, you can draw correlation between results and the specific types of content your team publishes.

Which Marketing KPIs and Metrics Should I Report On?

Marketing metrics are specific measurements of the actions or behaviors exhibited on your website. This would include metrics like sessions, bounce rate, average session duration, etc.

Marketing KPIs are an agreed-upon set of metrics that have been determined to be of importance to your company’s goals and overall business. This could also include metrics like sessions, but more commonly KPIs are reserved for Outcome and Output Metrics that have proven to have an impact on a company’s revenue growth.

In short, while all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics at KPIs.

Below, we’ve included some of the more common marketing KPIs and metrics that teams track and report on.

• Web analytics metrics
• Performance metrics

Website traffic metrics

Blog traffic metrics.

• Social media metrics
• Content quality control metrics

Web Analytics Metrics

Simply put Website Analytics Metrics tell you whether your website is getting results for your business. Website Analytics includes the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data. You can then go on and use that website data to determine the success or failure of your pre-set goals and to drive strategy and improve user experience. 

• Sessions – a group of user interactions with your website that takes place within a designated time frame. It underlines usage data and the key to retention and serves to identify the steps a user takes while interacting with your website.
• Visits – the full-time span that a Visitor spends on your website. This metric serves to measure website traffic volume over a time period. 
• Avg. Session Duration – the sum of the duration of each session during the date range you specify divided by the total number of sessions. This metric is a great starting point for better understanding and improving your customer journey.
• Pages per Session – show you how many pieces of content (Web pages) a single visitor or a group of visitors views on your website. A high number means that you offer great content that inspires visitors to stay and continue exploring your website while a low one can mean that either your content is lacking or your website’s design is preventing visitors from navigating around it with ease. 
• Pageviews – the total number of pages viewed. It can provide an indication of how popular a page or post is. Page Views is best used in combination with other metrics for a more definitive insight. 
• Goal Completions – show the number of completed goals. This metric helps you track how successful your marketing efforts are based on the goals to set and complete over the predefined time period. 
• Traffic Sources –  the origin or source of a visit to your website. By tracking Traffic Sources metrics you can determine where most of your traffic is coming from and which sources are driving the least traffic to your website. 
• Bounce Rate –  the number of single-page sessions (bounces) divided by the total number of sessions. It is important to keep the Bounce Rate as low as possible, which can be done by improved page content and design. 

Marketing performance metrics

Marketing performance metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) represent a source of useful data for not just marketing professionals but also the company CEO, sales department, and the senior management team. They can all use marketing KPIs in order to get a clear insight into how marketing activities and spending impact the company’s bottom line. 

This is especially important since more and more marketers are required to show a return on investment (ROI) on their activities. And performance metrics are here to help you understand the extent of how much marketing spending contributes to profits. Monitoring marketing’s progress towards its annual goals

By carefully and accurately establishing marketing performance metrics marketers can help companies achieve customer satisfaction and monitor the progress towards the pre-set goals. 

• CPA by Campaign –  measures the aggregate cost to acquire a single paying customer during a  campaign. It provides you with data regarding how much your new customers are costing you. Based on that data, you can then decide what actions you can take to lower the CPA. 
• CPC by Campaign – the price an advertiser pays a publisher for each click on a link during the duration of a campaign. Tracking this metric is important because the costs can add up quickly, and if you are not careful, you might not see any ROPI from a campaign. 
• Acquisition by Campaign –  the number of acquired new prospects by your campaign. A high Acquisition by Campaign lets you know how successful your campaign has been when it comes to attracting new prospects. 
• Clicks –  the number of times a user clicked on something like your ad. All clicks are counted regardless if they end up at the preset destination. Clicks help you gain insight into how well your ad or page is appealing to people who see it. 
• Impressions – the number of times your content is displayed, regardless of the fact if it was clicked or not. Impressions provide a simple representation of how many people see your ads within a particular channel.

We can define Website Traffic as the number of visitors your site gets in a set timeframe. However. there is a lot more to it. A website traffic metric is viewed as a quantifiable indicator of an aspect of your website’s popularity. There are a lot of different website traffic metrics that you could be tracking , as different metrics tend to answer different questions you might have about the efficiency of your website.

• Users – visitors who have initiated one session with your website or app within a specified period of time. It is important to distinguish between new and returning users. Returning users have a higher conversion rate and new users tend to stay way shorter on your website.
• Pages per Session – the average number of pages viewed by a visitor during a single session. This metric helps you see how compelling your content is to visitors and if it needs significant improvement. 
• % New Sessions – the percentage of first-time visits to your site. It can be viewed as an indirect engagement metric and depending on your goals and business you can decide which course of action you will need to take to steer this in the right direction.
• Top Organic Keywords – the highest-ranked organic keywords used to attract free traffic through search engine optimization. Knowing which Top Organic Keywords to optimize for can significantly improve your SEO efforts.
• Sessions by Source –  the number of sessions displayed by source. This metric can help you see which source drives the most traffic to your website so that you can adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
• Traffic by Channel   – shows you where most of your website traffic comes from. By tracking Traffic by Channel, you will be able to gain insights into what are the most effective methods to acquire visitors.

If you want to know how much traffic your blog is attracting, you need certain sets of data to do the calculations. This is where tracking Blog Traffic Metrics comes in, you could bet measuring just traffic to your blog, and in that case, a blog post with 100,000 visits looks like a dream come true. But what if everyone who visited your post left within 15 seconds of the page loading? That is why more metrics need to be included for you to get more precise data. 

• Traffic by Blog Post – how many visitors is a single blog post attracting. Tracking this metric lets you evaluate which blog posts perform better and attract more visitors. Based on that you can construct a strategy of updating old blog posts so that they bring in more traffic. 
• Time on Page – the average amount of time users spent viewing a specific page or set of pages. It helps you determine which pages are keeping visitors’ attention. This is especially helpful with blog pages as you can see which topics the visitors find insightful and engaging. 
• Signups –  show the number of new visitors that sign up for your blog newsletter or a paid subscription. It can show you which CTAs are effective and it is an important piece of information when it comes to tracking your blog’s conversions. 
• Top Blog Posts by Session   – show you on which blog posts visitors spend the most time during their sessions on your website. This can help you gain insight into where most of your visitors spend their time after they come to your website. 
• Top Blog Posts by Signups – show you which blog posts on your blog are generating the most signups. This can help you gain insight into which blog posts are the most effective when it comes to converting your visitors into subscribers.

Social Media Metrics

According to marketing consultant Mike Sonders , social drives an average of only 2.2% of traffic to the top 50 public SaaS companies. There is no doubt about the importance of social media metrics now more than ever. But it is equally important to know which ones you should be tracking. 

• Likes – the number of “votes” your social media page, post, or ad gets. By tracking specific likes, you can see how well your page, post, or ad is performing. 
• Followers – a follower on social media is a user who chooses to see all of another user’s posts in their content feed. Having a significant number of followers means that you have an established brand presence on social media. 
• Comments – a way for your followers on social media to interact with your brand. They help you interact with your flowers, answer questions, and see how engaging your content is, depending on how much commenting it inspires. 
• Reach – the total number of people who see your content. If you consider that Reach is directly related to the number of unique users that are seeing your content, using Reach to optimize your paid campaigns is a great option. 
• Page Views – the number of times a page’s profile has been viewed by people, including people who are logged into that particular social media platform and the ones who aren’t. This metric helps you see what your audience is interested in and if your page content fares well with social media users. 
• Sessions from Social Media – the number of times users were directed to your website through social media. Tracking the Sessions from Social Media is very important if you want to know whether your social media efforts are leading to website visits. 

Thankfully, you can easily track these metrics daily with the help of this social media dashboard software .

Content Quality Control Metrics

By tracking Content Quality Control Metrics you will be able to see how well your content is performing and contributing to downstream metrics like conversions, opportunities, and sales. Some of the content metrics you should consider tracking are as follows:

• Google Keyword Ranking – the position that your website is listed in Google when someone searches that particular phrase or keyword. A ranking of one to ten means that you are on the first page of google search, 10 to 20 on the second, and so on, as search pages have ten hits. Of course, the goal is to be on the first page in the first three hits. Tracking Keyword Rankings can help you better optimize your pages so that they get pushed to some of the more relevant Google search pages. Even a small update means getting from the second to the first page in Google. 
• Visibility – a metric showing how often your website is found on the Internet. Based on your Visibility metric, which should be as high as possible, you should make adjustments to your content, specifically Keyword Rankings so that it increases in time. 
• Domain Authority – According to MOZ , Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Knowing your site’s DA is very important simply because higher DA sites perform better than lower DA sites. This means that there’s a direct correlation between high DA scores and higher rankings. And we all want high rankings. 
• Goal Competitions – the total number of visitors who have completed all elements defined for a particular goal. If you have adequately configured goals, Google Analytics can provide you with critical information, like the number of conversions and your site or app’s conversion rate.

Building and sharing marketing reporting dashboards is the essence of modern marketing reporting. If you are just starting, using plug-and-play marketing report templates is the best option. Databox has a great selection of Marketing reporting templates for you to choose from, depending on what you want to include in your marketing reporting.

Marketing Automation Dashboard Templates

Ecommerce dashboard templates, crm & sales dashboard templates, project management dashboard templates, analytics dashboard templates, help desk dashboard templates, social media dashboard templates, connectors & development dashboard templates, paid search dashboard templates, paid social dashboard templates, accounting & payments dashboard templates, website marketing & sales dashboard templates, app stores dashboard templates, email marketing dashboard templates, video dashboard templates.

Marketing automation is defined as the process of utilizing technology to streamline marketing efforts and make them more effective. The current Marketing Automation Databox Templates include:

• HubSpot Marketing Dashboard Template
• Google Analytics: Website Engagement Dashboard Template
• CallRail Overview Dashboard Template
• Marketo Email Marketing Dashboard Template

And many more…

Browse all marketing automation dashboards here.

An eCommerce dashboard can be defined as a hub for important business and performance data. It enables you to get a snapshot view of your business and dive into your most important data. Databox offers a wide range of Ecommerce Templates, here are just some that you can get right now:

• Google Analytics (Ecommerce overview) Dashboard Template
• Shopify Dashboard
• eCommerce Full Funnel Dashboard Template
• WooCommerce (shop overview) Dashboard Template
• Shopify + Fb + GA: Online Sales Dashboard Template

And many more…

Browse all ecommerce dashboards here.

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is an important tool to help you turn a lead into a paying customer. A well designed CRM & Sales Dashboard will help you see where every individual lead is within your sales pipeline. The selection of Databox CRM & Sales Templates definitely has what you are looking for.

• HubSpot CRM Dashboard Template
• Stripe (MRR & Churn) Dashboard Template
• Closed Won Totals (Sales Rep View) Dashboard Template
• CallRail Source & Keyword Performance Dashboard Template
• QuickBooks + HubSpot CRM: Financial Performance Dashboard Template

Browse all sales dashboards here.

A simple definition of a project management dashboard is that it is a data Dashboard containing key performance indicators related to specific projects. There is a great selection of Databox Project Management Templates to choose from.

• Harvest: Time report Dashboard Template
• Asana (Team overview) Dashboard Template
• Jira Dashboard Template

Browse all project management dashboards here.

A great Analytics Dashboard needs to contain all your key indicators of acquisition, retention, and referrals in one place. With Analytics Databox Templates you are bound to find the perfect fit. Here are just some of the options:

• Google Analytics 4 (Website traffic) Dashboard Template
• Targeting, Engagement, Revenue Dashboard Template
• YouTube Watch Time Performance Dashboard Template
• Credo’s Marketing KPIs Dashboard Templates

 And many more…

Help Desk Dashboards are a great option in case you are having trouble understanding Help Scout or Drift. Here are just some of the Help Desk Databox Templates:

• Help Scout Mailbox Dashboard Template
• Customer Success Dashboard Template
• HelpScout Docs Report Dashboard Template
• HelpScout for Customer Support Dashboard Template
• HubSpot Service (Tickets Overview) Dashboard Template

Browse all help desk dashboards here.

Social Media Dashboards are a great way to showcase your social media efforts to your team or your clients. They are easy to follow and can track your most relevant metrics. Social Media Databox Templates include some very useful Dashboards that you might be interested in.

• LinkedIn Company pages Dashboard Template
• HubSpot (Social Media Tracking) Dashboard Template
• Instagram Business (account overview) Dashboard Template
• Facebook Pages & Facebook Ads: Engagement Summary Dashboard Template

Connectors & Development Dashboard will help you have a better overview when it comes to how successful you and your team are at hitting sprint targets and responsiveness to user demands. There are several Connectors & Development Databox Templates to choose from.

• Bitbucket Dashboard Template
• GitHub Dashboard Template

Browse all software development dashboards here.

A Paid Search Dashboard is a great way to pull and visualize paid search data so that you can analyze trends and optimize performance. You have a great selection of Paid Search Databox Templates to choose from depending on the data you want to show. 

• AdSense Dashboard Template
• AdMob Dashboard Template
• Microsoft Advertising Overview Dashboard Template
• HubSpot + Google Ads Top of Funnel Dashboard Template

Simply put, Paid Social Dashboard is best used to summarize ad engagement and conversion behavior driven by paid social platforms. Depending on the social platform you are using, there is a whole selection of Paid Social Databox Templates at your disposal. 

• Facebook Ads Purchase & Leads Breakdown Dashboard Template
• LinkedIn Ads: Ads Performance Dashboard Template
• Twitter Ads: Campaign Summary Dashboard Template

Accounting & Payments Dashboards are here to help visualize key accounting KPIs and provide a more comprehensive view of business performance. By doing so they are saving time, offering clarity, and improving your decision-making capabilities. You can check out some of the available Accounting & Payments Databox Templates to see whether they suit your business needs. 

• Stripe Dashboard Template
• Xero Dashboard Template
• Quickbooks: Profit and Loss Overview Dashboard Template
• ProfitWell (Churn Overview) Dashboard Template
• PayPal (Account Overview) Dashboard Template

Browse all financial dashboards here.

Website Marketing & Sales Dashboards help your team react better in real-time. They pull data from various locations and provide you key data that reveals product sales, customer engagement, and more. Depending on your team’s needs you can select from many Website Marketing & Sales Databox Templates.

• Intercom (account overview) Dashboard Template
• Drift Dashboard Template
• Blog Post Performance After SEO Update Dashboard Template
• Google My Business Insights Dashboard Template

An App Store Dashboard is here to enable you to gain insights into your sales trends and easily download data for your organization’s apps to analyze it more efficiently. Here are just some examples of App Stores Databox Templates:

• Play Store Metrics Dashboard Template

Browse all app store dashboards here.

Your Email Dashboard should contain key metrics to demonstrate the performance and ROI of your email campaigns. There are several options to select from when it comes to Email Databox Templates.

• Seventh Sense- Overview Dashboard Template
• Mailchimp Dashboard Template  
• HubSpot Advanced Email Metrics Dashboard Template
• Email Marketing Performance Dashboard Template

Browse all email marketing dashboards here.

Your Video Dashboard should contain all the relevant metrics related to the performance of your videos. Some of the options offered are the following Video Databox Templates:

• Wistia Essentials – Getting Started with Video Dashboard Template
• YouTube Overview Dashboard Template
• Vimeo OTT (video overview) Dashboard Template

Browse all video marketing dashboards here.

Database Dashboard Templates

The main purpose of a Database Dashboard is to combine the use of metrics and KPIs to produce a visually appealing design that is easily interpreted. Here are just some of the Database Databox Templates:

• MySQL Dashboard Template
• Microsoft SQL Server Dashboard Template

Browse all database dashboards here.

SEO & SEM Dashboard Templates

By using SEO & SEM Dashboards, you can easily track your efforts when it comes to SEO, Advertising Campaigns, Revenue, Goal Completions, Locations, Channel Groupings, and numerous other relevant data. SEO & SEM Databox Templates have a lot to offer when it comes to visualizing these particular data sets. 

• SEMrush (Keywords & Audits) Dashboard Template
• MOZ Basics Dashboard Template
• AccuRanker Domain Overview Dashboard Template
• Ahrefs: Project Overview Dashboard Template
• Google Analytics SEO Dashboard Template

Editor’s note: Did you know that any Databox dashboard can be displayed on your smart TV? Broadcast your TV Dashboards for free now.

Reporting On Output vs. Outcome Metrics in Your Marketing Meetings

Marketers tend to judge their performance based on their outputs, but it isn’t possible to have a full picture without calculating the outcomes. On the other hand, tracking only the outcomes means your team lacks visibility into the specific activities that actually drive those outcomes. Understanding business analysis better can be beneficial when it comes to improving your overall business performance.

 But, first, let’s understand the terminology a bit better – 

Outcomes represent what your business wants or needs to achieve. While outputs represent actions or items that contribute to achieving an outcome that you have set. 

Difference between Output and Outcome Metrics

Much like there is a clear difference between outcomes and outputs, there is a distinction between the metrics that we use to measure them. 

Output metrics

Output metrics measure your marketing activities. They are direct measurements of the work you’re doing on a daily or weekly basis. An additional benefit of output metrics is that they let you prioritize your daily activities by keeping you focused on things you can control right now. 

Outcome metrics

When it comes to outcomes metrics, they need to help you collect specific data to get insights into the extent to which expected outcomes, like changes in user behavior or knowledge, have been achieved. Simply put, they measure the impact of your outputs. 

There is a distinction between leading and lagging outcomes. Unlike with outputs where you can control your activities, outcomes often depend on people outside of your organization taking action. We don’t have control over outcomes, but some provide faster feedback than others.

A leading outcome would be a web traffic spike to your website after content sharing, while a lagging one is determining the success of a single blog post.

Finding the right Output and Outcome metrics

To truly determine the impact of your marketing efforts, it is important to look at both output and outcome metrics side by side. Sure, we can say that the ultimate outcome for a business is – growth, while the ultimate output goal is facilitating that growth. But how do we get there? We start by measuring outputs and outcomes.

Measuring outputs vs. outcomes

Measuring outputs is done by activity-based metrics that are easily quantifiable, for example:

• Number of emails sent during an email campaign
• Number of Events Managed in a month
• Number of tweets sent out a day

Measuring outcomes is not as direct, it depends on the desired outcome. By knowing the outcome you want to achieve, you are able to determine the activities that need to be completed and how integral each of these activities is to success. 

Setting goals

Having clear objectives that you want to achieve through your marketing efforts is essential for tracking marketing success. This is why setting goals is relevant to all marketers.  

What are Marketing Goals?

Marketing Goals are defined as a set of specific objectives you describe in your marketing plan. Goals vary depending on your marketing strategy, They can be tasks, quotas, improvements in KPIs, or various other standards based on which you have decided to measure your marketing success. That being said, it is important to note that marketers often opt for the SMART mnemonic when defining key goals. This helps present a far clearer picture of their intended outcome. So what does SMART stand for?

• Specific — Make sure your goals are defined as precisely as possible and set real numbers and real deadlines to hold yourself accountable.
• Measurable — goals that you set need to be both easily trackable and measurable.
• Attainable — Setting realistic goals is essential. Base your goals on the resources currently at your disposal when it comes to budget, team members, and time constraints. Don’t set them too low, you do want to experience growth in time. 
• Relevant — your chosen goals need to be closely related to your entire marketing plan, setting random goals is never helpful.
• Time-Bound — set clear deadlines for achieving your goals. Without set dates, your goals will end up being nothing more than wishful thinking. 

How to Position your Goals to:

• Teammates – setting goals for a team requires you to find a balance between maximizing the individual skill sets of each team member and finding the best way to achieve the desired outcome. Set weekly Marketing Reports for your team so that you can see where you are when it comes to hitting your pre-set targets for each time period.
• Clients – Present your clients with realistic goals and make sure you keep them up to speed with all the development via well-composed Marketing Reports. 
• Management – Presenting goals to Management is best done on a monthly and annual level. You need to keep them informed on your progress and any possible problems. The Marketing Reports need to be clear and concise.

Output goals

An output goal is simply defined by your desired output amount. You set output goals based on your outcome desires and track them through chosen output metrics. 

Outcome goals

Outcome goals are the ones that define which output metrics you are to track. Outcome goals are harder to obtain and they specify a result. So we can treat retention and/or increase revenue as marketing goals, outcome goals need to sound more like – retain 80 percent of our tier one customers resulting in X dollars revenue.

White Label Marketing Reporting

In general, white-label solutions allow companies to rebrand, developed by other companies, then sell them as their own. In this case, we are talking about Marketing Reports. 

What are white-labeled reports?

White Labeled Marketing Reports are reports that let you add your own branding to a report Dashboard created by Databox so that you can present it to your clients. 

Why is white-labeling important? 

White Labeling of Making Reports helps your agency’s branding efforts. Even if you use an external tool to create your reports. Having the option of branding them as your own has a great positive effect on how your clients perceive your company and are great for brand reinforcement.

Most important white-labeling features

When creating your White-Labeled Marketing Reports, it is essential that you ensure that they have the following features:

Incorporating your company’s logo on a Marketing Report is a must. The best location is toward the top of each report in the upper left or right corner. The same location works for Dashboards You can use a watermark in place of the logo as well. To save space and make it more impactful, don’t include your tagline or slogan.

2. Header/Footer

Using the header or footer as additional branding opportunities on your Marketing Reports is a great idea. You can include some of the following information in them – general contact information for your agency, your physical address, main phone number, email address, and website address. Having a white label solution that supports custom headers and footers is a great plus.

Make sure that the colors you choose to match your brand’s. But at the same time that they don’t diminish the visibility of the data presented. 

4. Dashboard Domain

Keep in mind that in case your company provides clients with a unique login to view their white-label reports or dashboard online, branding the Dashboard domain is a huge plus. This will make things a lot easier for your clients as all they need to do is visit a subdomain of your agency website to log in.

5. Email Domain

Since you are the one delivering the report to your clients, in most cases, this is done via email. It is important for better branding of your business that you send the report from an agency-branded account and not a solution-branded account. There is no need for your clients to know which Marketing Reporting tool you are using. 

Stay on Top of Your Marketing Reporting Game

To finish off, we want to provide you with some useful advice on how you can always stay on top of your marketing game. In order not to miss a beat and ensure success one must keep a close eye on each and every part of their marketing process. 

Use Project Management Tools

If you decide not to use project management tools, there is a good chance that you’re wasting a lot of time on the little things and doing more work than necessary. Keeping track of who’s working on what is not easy, and dropping the ball will lead to an inefficient collaboration among team members and teams and spread across email threads and chat software. This usually results in missed deadlines and dissatisfied clients.

Using project management tools make all the above-mentioned problems go away. You get to run a soothe marketing operation with everyone knowing what their tasks are and how they are contributing. Not to mention that it helps define a clear timeline and meet even the strictest of deadlines. 

Set up Notifications/Alerts

You don’t have to check daily when which task is due. By setting up notifications and alerts from anything from team meetings to posting content, you will stay on track and not have delays.

Editor’s note: Did you know that you can get KPI performance alerts right in Slack? Connect your data and start receiving performance insights directly in Slack now.

Organize Marketing Meetings

Weekly marketing team meetings are a great way to inform everyone what is the current state of affairs. You can share RMarketing reports and metrics to demonstrate how far your team is from reaching the set goals and exchange thoughts and ideas. Communication within a team and between different teams is essential for running a successful marketing department. 

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9 Key stages in your marketing research process

You can conduct your own marketing research. Follow these steps, add your own flair, knowledge and creativity, and you’ll have bespoke research to be proud of.

Marketing research is the term used to cover the concept, development, placement and evolution of your product or service, its growing customer base and its branding – starting with brand awareness , and progressing to (everyone hopes) brand equity . Like any research, it needs a robust process to be credible and useful.

Marketing research uses four essential key factors known as the ‘marketing mix’ , or the Four Ps of Marketing :

• Product (goods or service)
• Price ( how much the customer pays )
• Place (where the product is marketed)
• Promotion (such as advertising and PR)

These four factors need to work in harmony for a product or service to be successful in its marketplace.

The marketing research process – an overview

A typical marketing research process is as follows:

• Identify an issue, discuss alternatives and set out research objectives
• Develop a research program
• Choose a sample
• Gather information
• Gather data
• Organize and analyze information and data
• Present findings
• Make research-based decisions
• Take action based on insights

Step 1: Defining the marketing research problem

Defining a problem is the first step in the research process. In many ways, research starts with a problem facing management. This problem needs to be understood, the cause diagnosed, and solutions developed.

However, most management problems are not always easy to research, so they must first be translated into research problems. Once you approach the problem from a research angle, you can find a solution. For example, “sales are not growing” is a management problem, but translated into a research problem, it becomes “ why are sales not growing?” We can look at the expectations and experiences of several groups : potential customers, first-time buyers, and repeat purchasers. We can question whether the lack of sales is due to:

• Poor expectations that lead to a general lack of desire to buy, or
• Poor performance experience and a lack of desire to repurchase.

This, then, is the difference between a management problem and a research problem. Solving management problems focuses on actions: Do we advertise more? Do we change our advertising message? Do we change an under-performing product configuration? And if so, how?

Defining research problems, on the other hand, focus on the whys and hows, providing the insights you need to solve your management problem.

Step 2: Developing a research program: method of inquiry

The scientific method is the standard for investigation. It provides an opportunity for you to use existing knowledge as a starting point, and proceed impartially.

The scientific method includes the following steps:

• Define a problem
• Develop a hypothesis
• Make predictions based on the hypothesis
• Devise a test of the hypothesis
• Conduct the test
• Analyze the results

This terminology is similar to the stages in the research process. However, there are subtle differences in the way the steps are performed:

• the scientific research method is objective and fact-based, using quantitative research and impartial analysis
• the marketing research process can be subjective, using opinion and qualitative research, as well as personal judgment as you collect and analyze data

Step 3: Developing a research program: research method

As well as selecting a method of inquiry (objective or subjective), you must select a research method . There are two primary methodologies that can be used to answer any research question:

• Experimental research : gives you the advantage of controlling extraneous variables and manipulating one or more variables that influence the process being implemented.
• Non-experimental research : allows observation but not intervention – all you do is observe and report on your findings.

Step 4: Developing a research program: research design

Research design is a plan or framework for conducting marketing research and collecting data. It is defined as the specific methods and procedures you use to get the information you need.

There are three core types of marketing research designs: exploratory, descriptive, and causal . A thorough marketing research process incorporates elements of all of them.

Exploratory marketing research

This is a starting point for research. It’s used to reveal facts and opinions about a particular topic, and gain insight into the main points of an issue. Exploratory research is too much of a blunt instrument to base conclusive business decisions on, but it gives the foundation for more targeted study. You can use secondary research materials such as trade publications, books, journals and magazines and primary research using qualitative metrics, that can include open text surveys, interviews and focus groups.

Descriptive marketing research

This helps define the business problem or issue so that companies can make decisions, take action and monitor progress. Descriptive research is naturally quantitative – it needs to be measured and analyzed statistically , using more targeted surveys and questionnaires. You can use it to capture demographic information , evaluate a product or service for market, and monitor a target audience’s opinion and behaviors. Insights from descriptive research can inform conclusions about the market landscape and the product’s place in it.

Causal marketing research

This is useful to explore the cause and effect relationship between two or more variables. Like descriptive research , it uses quantitative methods, but it doesn’t merely report findings; it uses experiments to predict and test theories about a product or market. For example, researchers may change product packaging design or material, and measure what happens to sales as a result.

Step 5: Choose your sample

Your marketing research project will rarely examine an entire population. It’s more practical to use a sample - a smaller but accurate representation of the greater population. To design your sample, you’ll need to answer these questions:

• Which base population is the sample to be selected from? Once you’ve established who your relevant population is (your research design process will have revealed this), you have a base for your sample. This will allow you to make inferences about a larger population.
• What is the method (process) for sample selection? There are two methods of selecting a sample from a population:

1. Probability sampling : This relies on a random sampling of everyone within the larger population.

2. Non-probability sampling : This is based in part on the investigator’s judgment, and often uses convenience samples, or by other sampling methods that do not rely on probability.

• What is your sample size? This important step involves cost and accuracy decisions. Larger samples generally reduce sampling error and increase accuracy, but also increase costs. Find out your perfect sample size with our calculator .

Step 6: Gather data

Your research design will develop as you select techniques to use. There are many channels for collecting data, and it’s helpful to differentiate it into O-data (Operational) and X-data (Experience):

• O-data is your business’s hard numbers like costs, accounting, and sales. It tells you what has happened, but not why.
• X-data gives you insights into the thoughts and emotions of the people involved: employees, customers, brand advocates.

When you combine O-data with X-data, you’ll be able to build a more complete picture about success and failure - you’ll know why. Maybe you’ve seen a drop in sales (O-data) for a particular product. Maybe customer service was lacking, the product was out of stock, or advertisements weren’t impactful or different enough: X-data will reveal the reason why those sales dropped. So, while differentiating these two data sets is important, when they are combined, and work with each other, the insights become powerful.

With mobile technology, it has become easier than ever to collect data. Survey research has come a long way since market researchers conducted face-to-face, postal, or telephone surveys. You can run research through:

• Social media ( polls and listening )

Another way to collect data is by observation. Observing a customer’s or company’s past or present behavior can predict future purchasing decisions. Data collection techniques for predicting past behavior can include market segmentation , customer journey mapping and brand tracking .

Regardless of how you collect data, the process introduces another essential element to your research project: the importance of clear and constant communication .

And of course, to analyze information from survey or observation techniques, you must record your results . Gone are the days of spreadsheets. Feedback from surveys and listening channels can automatically feed into AI-powered analytics engines and produce results, in real-time, on dashboards.

Step 7: Analysis and interpretation

The words ‘ statistical analysis methods ’ aren’t usually guaranteed to set a room alight with excitement, but when you understand what they can do, the problems they can solve and the insights they can uncover, they seem a whole lot more compelling.

Statistical tests and data processing tools can reveal:

• Whether data trends you see are meaningful or are just chance results
• Your results in the context of other information you have
• Whether one thing affecting your business is more significant than others
• What your next research area should be
• Insights that lead to meaningful changes

There are several types of statistical analysis tools used for surveys. You should make sure that the ones you choose:

• Work on any platform - mobile, desktop, tablet etc.
• Integrate with your existing systems
• Are easy to use with user-friendly interfaces, straightforward menus, and automated data analysis
• Incorporate statistical analysis so you don’t just process and present your data, but refine it, and generate insights and predictions.

Here are some of the most common tools:

• Benchmarking : a way of taking outside factors into account so that you can adjust the parameters of your research. It ‘levels the playing field’ – so that your data and results are more meaningful in context. And gives you a more precise understanding of what’s happening.
• Regression analysis : this is used for working out the relationship between two (or more) variables. It is useful for identifying the precise impact of a change in an independent variable.
• T-test is used for comparing two data groups which have different mean values. For example, do women and men have different mean heights?
• Analysis of variance (ANOVA) Similar to the T-test, ANOVA is a way of testing the differences between three or more independent groups to see if they’re statistically significant.
• Cluster analysis : This organizes items into groups, or clusters, based on how closely associated they are.
• Factor analysis: This is a way of condensing many variables into just a few, so that your research data is less unwieldy to work with.
• Conjoint analysis : this will help you understand and predict why people make the choices they do. It asks people to make trade-offs when making decisions, just as they do in the real world, then analyzes the results to give the most popular outcome.
• Crosstab analysis : this is a quantitative market research tool used to analyze ‘categorical data’ - variables that are different and mutually exclusive, such as: ‘men’ and ‘women’, or ‘under 30’ and ‘over 30’.
• Text analysis and sentiment analysis : Analyzing human language and emotions is a rapidly-developing form of data processing, assigning positive, negative or neutral sentiment to customer messages and feedback.

Stats IQ can perform the most complicated statistical tests at the touch of a button using our online survey software , or data from other sources. Learn more about Stats iQ now .

Step 8: The marketing research results

Your marketing research process culminates in the research results. These should provide all the information the stakeholders and decision-makers need to understand the project.

The results will include:

• all your information
• a description of your research process
• the results
• conclusions
• recommended courses of action

They should also be presented in a form, language and graphics that are easy to understand, with a balance between completeness and conciseness, neither leaving important information out or allowing it to get so technical that it overwhelms the readers.

Traditionally, you would prepare two written reports:

• a technical report , discussing the methods, underlying assumptions and the detailed findings of the research project
• a summary report , that summarizes the research process and presents the findings and conclusions simply.

There are now more engaging ways to present your findings than the traditional PowerPoint presentations, graphs, and face-to-face reports:

• Live, interactive dashboards for sharing the most important information, as well as tracking a project in real time.
• Results-reports visualizations – tables or graphs with data visuals on a shareable slide deck
• Online presentation technology, such as Prezi
• Visual storytelling with infographics
• A single-page executive summary with key insights
• A single-page stat sheet with the top-line stats

You can also make these results shareable so that decision-makers have all the information at their fingertips.

Step 9 Turn your insights into action

Insights are one thing, but they’re worth very little unless they inform immediate, positive action. Here are a few examples of how you can do this:

• Stop customers leaving – negative sentiment among VIP customers gets picked up; the customer service team contacts the customers, resolves their issues, and avoids churn .
• Act on important employee concerns – you can set certain topics, such as safety, or diversity and inclusion to trigger an automated notification or Slack message to HR. They can rapidly act to rectify the issue.
• Address product issues – maybe deliveries are late, maybe too many products are faulty. When product feedback gets picked up through Smart Conversations, messages can be triggered to the delivery or product teams to jump on the problems immediately.
• Improve your marketing effectiveness - Understand how your marketing is being received by potential customers, so you can find ways to better meet their needs
• Grow your brand - Understand exactly what consumers are looking for, so you can make sure that you’re meeting their expectations

Free eBook: Quantitative and qualitative research design

Scott Smith

Scott Smith, Ph.D. is a contributor to the Qualtrics blog.

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Learn How to Write a Market Research Report: 10 Steps to Follow for Success

Dec, 2023 - by CMI

A market research report is an integral part of the coursework for many business programs. It explores the understanding of subjective views of customers towards a product or service. Still, many students struggle to create market reports that effectively address the business question. So, how do you avoid the deer-in-the-headlights reaction when presenting a market research report?  

In most cases, marketers fail to create impactful research reports because they don’t know the actionable steps to follow. 10 main steps occur in a typical market research study and reporting process, from problem identification to acting on the result. Read on to get all the information you need to write a top-notch market research report.

What Is a Market Research Report?

A market research report is a document prepared to evaluate the feasibility of a new product or service to potential customers. Companies do market research reports to paint a picture of what products, services, or actions may be the most profitable to pursue. Actionable information is obtained through market research prepared in a formal report that reveals the characteristics of customers, the value of a product or service, buying habits, and a list of top competitors.

Writing a market research report helps businesses make calculated decisions about what ideas to pursue or not. It focuses on studying consumer behavior that influences spending decisions, including cultural, economic, societal, and personal factors. As a result, businesses can assimilate critical information and tips about prospective customers and target markets.

10 Steps to Write a Market Research Report That Accurately Highlights Market Opportunities

Identify the problem and objectives.

In market research, there’s a famous saying that a problem half defined is a problem half solved. So defining the potential problem, causes, or opportunities in the market is a great place to start your marketing research papers. The information will help you narrow down the parameters of the study, such as the business objective and research objectives. Whether you want to test a hypothesis about consumer opinion or how consumers will react to a new pricing model, they all require identifying a solid objective.  

Develop your research strategy

This is a crucial step in preparing a market research report because it will define the quality of data collection and the reliability of results. Choose between primary research or secondary research methods. Also, you will need to decide whether you will utilize quantitative or qualitative research methods. The most effective research strategy depends on your sample size and profile as well as the desired outcomes based on the objectives.

Use the help of writing services

In case you feel inefficient in handling crucial market research writing steps, such as defining the problem, identifying research objectives, or developing a research strategy, get the help you need from a professional. Reputable academic paper writing services, such as CustomWritings, have plenty of certified academic writers with extensive knowledge and experience in custom research paper writing of any complexity. You can get one written from scratch by an expert in a stipulated time to make your work easier.

Prepare an outline and set a deadline

If you can write a market research report yourself, develop an outline with sections and subsections you will cover in your paper. A typical market research report includes the following sections:

• Introduction
• Methodology

Market research reports also come with a fixed due date. So, allocate time for completing each section to ensure you finish the task before the deadline.

Specify the sample

Before you can start collecting data, you need to specify who will participate in the study. Start by defining your population correctly and defining a sampling frame from which you will draw the sample. For example, you can use a customer list, directory, or membership roster to get a good sample. Large samples produce more reliable results, but the more data you have, the costlier and more time-consuming your research will be. Use statistics to define an optimal sample size.

Gather data and information

Next, conduct fieldwork to collect relevant data. If you’re conducting quantitative research, use text, emails, websites, and social media to reach respondents. For qualitative research, primary data collection typically involves interviews or ethnographic research through video surveys. Find ways to record and organize responses from each source. You can complement each type of research with secondary data that relates to your topic.

Technology has made data analysis a breeze for researchers. Students can use programs such as Excel, STATA, and SPSS to organize, clean, analyze, and interpret basic results of their market research. The type of analysis you’ll adopt will depend on your hypothesis. Some good marketing analyses that you can conduct include:

• Market segmentation analysis
• Conjoint analysis
• Price sensitivity analysis
• TURF analysis

Present findings in a written report

It’s time to put your study together in a well-written market research analysis report that you will present to an audience of decision-makers. The goal is to make your findings come alive so that the audience understands your objectives and insights uncovered in the research. While data analysis could be complex, the final report should only point to the concrete actions and results. Ensure your college research report includes a title page, table of contents, executive summary, methodology, findings, and recommendations. In some cases, you can accompany your report with a slide presentation, charts, case summaries, and graphs.  

Cross-check

When you’re done with your market research report, take time to read through all the details to see if you’ve missed anything, have made mistakes, or if it has a good flow. Your first draft is never your final product. University students can get editing help from professional editing services, or online editing tools, or just ask a friend to double-check the report. Edit the report as many times as you want to make it clear and concise.

Act on your findings

Local and international businesses prepare market research reports for many reasons. Maybe they want to enter a new market or launch a new product. With a research report in hand, it’s time to act on the findings and the recommendations. This could involve commissioning the production of a product, setting up a social media framework, or taking actions to monitor customer loyalty. Still, stay alert to changes in trends that might require new research to be launched in the future.

Wrapping Up

When a busy business executive or professor grabs your market research report, they want to see something that will give them an idea of the research design, the results, and the big picture that addresses company goals. Follow the guide provided in this article to prepare a clear and actionable market research report.

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5 Things to Remember When Writing a Market Research Report

Filed Under: Best Practices , Market Research , Reporting , Tools & Techniques , Quantitative Research

Lynne Bartos

Vice President and Marketing Content Strategist, Marketing

There is nothing more embarrassing for a researcher than to hear a client say “…this doesn’t really address the business questions that we set out to answer.” This is more common an occurrence in research reporting than most of us would care to admit. But unfortunately, much report writing these days falls short of expectations for those on the client side. This is likely due to more emphasis on methodology or analytic technique at the expense of clear graphics, creative story-telling and actionable direction.

What often happens during the report-writing process is that market researchers have their direct research client in mind. They neglect the fact that their direct contact must present these findings to the ultimate stakeholder in the process — someone in senior management or the head of marketing who does not function in the research realm.

We need to take conscious steps to break out of our little bubble to avoid some of the lingo that is prevalent in research circles. You know what I mean if you’ve ever found yourself presenting your findings to marketing folks. While peppering them with terms such as “mean,” “monadic,” “DK/NS,” “latent class,” and the like, you suddenly notice the deer-in-the-headlights reaction. Worse yet, your audience’s eyes glaze over completely. These terms are foreign to many marketers and, frankly, most of them couldn’t care less about such things. They simply want a viable solution to the particular business need they set out to address.

So, when writing a research report for my clients it helps me to keep a few things in mind….

Speak to Marketers in Their Language

Focus on what marketers care most about — getting customers, keeping customers, and increasing their share of the customer’s wallet. So tell them what is meaningful to them….

• How to position their brand
• How best to price it
• Who their best prospects are and how to reach them
• What message should they be communicating
• Who are their most loyal and valuable customers
• How do they keep them loyal to their service or brand

Net, net — put some Marketing-Speak into your report, and leave out the Research-speak.

Tell a good story

A good report tells a good story. So, how do you tell a compelling story? Start by getting organized!

• Develop an analytic plan that focuses on business issues and objectives — the questions that need to be answered.
• Outline how the questions will be.
• Once the data is in, all team members should know how the data relates to those question, and they can craft the best story together.

Remember, every page in the report should contribute to the story! If something doesn’t contour well with your story, stick it in the Appendix. How many hundred-page reports have you been subjected to where the charts are all in the same order as the questionnaire? Where is the story?

It’s also important to stick closely to your analytic plan when crafting your story. The analytic plan is what helps to keep everyone focused on why the research was conducted in the first place.

Insightful Headlines and Bullets

What I also find helpful in getting my arms around the story is to write effective bullets and headlines for the data presented. Too many people think an insight is reiterating the numbers that are in the charts. Remember, anyone can read the numbers on a chart – our job, as researchers, is to pull the deeper insights from seemingly obvious data.

Be Creative and Have a Llittle Fun

Creativity also comes into play! Package the story in a creative way. No one wants to see rows and rows of data. Make the report visually appealing so you don’t intimidate those who are going to be using the findings to help drive strategy. Avoid too much text and too many numbers.

And, don’t be afraid to insert some humor here and there. It reminds your clients that you are human and helps to lighten the tone and keep things relaxed.

Get to the Heart of It

And finally, probably the hardest part of the report process for any researcher is to get straight to the heart of it… what is the story – conclusions, implications, and recommendations. Go to the next step to tell them what the data MEANS, and what they might consider doing to maximize their investment.

And there is nothing sweeter to a market researcher’s ears than to hear a client voice saying, “Thanks, this really addresses the business questions that we set out to answer!”

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8 Key Steps of Marketing Research Process: Ultimate Guide

Marketing research is the backbone of successful business strategies, especially in the ever-evolving world of events. This guide dives into the 8 key steps of the marketing research process, giving you a roadmap to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Whether you're new to event planning or a seasoned pro, understanding these steps can help you boost attendance, improve engagement, and maximize your ROI.

We'll break down each step, from defining your problem to evaluating your results, in easy-to-understand terms. You'll learn how to collect meaningful data, analyze it effectively, and turn those insights into action. Plus, we'll show you how to avoid common pitfalls and apply best practices that can save you time and money.

By the end of this guide, you'll have a solid grasp on how to conduct marketing research that can transform your event planning strategy. Ready to level up your event game? Let's dive in!

What is Marketing Research?

Marketing research is the systematic process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting information about a market, product, or service. It's a crucial tool for businesses to make informed decisions, understand their customers better, and stay competitive in the market.

The main purpose of marketing research is to reduce uncertainty in decision-making. It helps companies:

• Identify market opportunities
• Understand customer needs and preferences
• Evaluate the effectiveness of marketing strategies
• Track competitors' activities

By conducting thorough marketing research, businesses can minimize risks and maximize their chances of success. It's particularly valuable for event organizers who need to understand their target audience and create compelling experiences.

For example, an event planner might use marketing research to determine the best date, venue, and content for an upcoming conference. This data-driven approach can significantly boost attendance and participant satisfaction.

To streamline the event planning process, tools like EventX's event registration system can be invaluable. They not only help manage registrations but also provide valuable data for ongoing marketing research.

Learn more about EventX's event registration system

The 8 Key Steps of the Marketing Research Process

Marketing research isn't just about collecting data. It's a structured process that helps businesses make informed decisions. Let's break down the 8 key steps that make up this crucial process.

• Define the Problem or Opportunity: This is where it all starts. You need to clearly identify what you're trying to solve or achieve. For example, you might want to understand why your event attendance is dropping.
• Develop the Research Plan: Here, you decide how you'll gather information. Will you use surveys, interviews, or both? How many people will you include in your study?
• Collect Data: This step involves gathering the information you need. You might use tools like EventX's lead finder to help with this.
• Analyze the Data: Once you have your data, it's time to make sense of it. Look for patterns and insights that answer your initial question.
• Present the Findings: Share what you've learned in a clear, easy-to-understand way. Visual aids can be really helpful here.
• Make Decisions: Use your findings to decide what actions to take. Maybe you need to change your event marketing strategy?
• Implement the Decision: Put your plan into action. This might involve using tools like EventX's event ticketing platform.
• Evaluate the Results: Finally, check if your actions made a difference. Did event attendance improve? If not, you might need to start the process again.

Remember, marketing research is an ongoing process. It helps you stay in tune with your audience and make better business decisions.

1. Define the Problem or Opportunity

Let's kick things off with the first crucial step in marketing research: nailing down the problem or opportunity. It's like setting your GPS before a road trip - you need to know where you're going before you start driving.

Why is this step so important? Simple. If you don't know what you're looking for, you'll waste time and resources chasing the wrong leads. It's like trying to fix a leaky faucet when your real problem is a broken water heater.

So, how do you define your research objectives? Start by asking questions. What's bugging you about your current situation? What do you want to achieve? Be specific. Instead of saying "We want more customers," try "We want to increase event attendance by 25% in the next six months."

Here's a real-world example: imagine you're running a series of tech conferences, but attendance has been dropping. Your research objective might be: "To understand why attendance at our tech conferences has declined by 30% over the past year."

Remember, a well-defined problem is half solved. So take your time with this step - it'll make the rest of your research journey much smoother.

2. Develop the Research Plan

Once you've nailed down your research objectives, it's time to craft your game plan. This step is all about choosing the right research methods and figuring out who you're going to study.

First up, decide whether you're going qualitative or quantitative - or maybe a mix of both. Qualitative research, like focus groups or interviews, gives you deep insights into people's thoughts and feelings. Quantitative research, such as surveys, gives you hard numbers to crunch.

Next, think about your sample size and who you're going to include. You want a group that represents your target audience well. Remember, bigger isn't always better - a well-chosen smaller sample can sometimes give you more accurate results than a larger, poorly selected one.

Don't forget to consider your budget and timeline when planning. These factors can influence your choice of methods and sample size.

To make your research more efficient, consider using tech tools. For example, EventX's lead finder feature can help you identify potential participants for your research, saving you time and effort in the recruitment process.

By the end of this step, you should have a clear plan outlining your research methods, sample, timeline, and budget. This roadmap will guide you through the rest of the process, keeping you focused and on track.

EventX's lead finder feature

3. Collect Relevant Data and Information

Gathering the right data is crucial for your marketing research. You've got two main ways to go about this: primary and secondary data collection.

Primary data is info you collect firsthand. Think surveys, interviews, or focus groups. It's tailored to your specific needs but can be time-consuming and pricey.

Secondary data, on the other hand, is existing info from sources like industry reports or government databases. It's usually cheaper and faster to get, but might not be as specific to your needs.

Remember, the key is to choose methods that align with your research objectives. If you're trying to understand why event attendance is dropping, a mix of surveys and interviews might be your best bet.

Whatever method you choose, make sure your data collection is consistent and unbiased. This will help ensure your results are reliable and actionable.

4. Analyze the Data

Once you've collected your data, it's time to roll up your sleeves and make sense of it all. Data analysis is where the rubber meets the road in marketing research. It's about turning raw numbers and feedback into actionable insights.

Start by organizing your data. Use spreadsheets or specialized software to sort and categorize information. Look for patterns and trends. Are certain responses more common than others? Do you see any surprising correlations?

For quantitative data, basic statistical analysis can be your best friend. Calculate averages, percentages, and standard deviations. These can give you a quick snapshot of your data's story. For qualitative data, content analysis techniques can help you identify themes and sentiments.

Don't shy away from data visualization. Graphs and charts can make complex data easier to understand and present. Tools like Tableau or even Excel can help create compelling visuals.

Remember, the goal isn't just to crunch numbers. It's to answer your research questions and provide insights that can drive decision-making. Always tie your analysis back to your original objectives.

5. Present the Findings

Once you've crunched the numbers, it's time to share your insights. Presenting your findings clearly is crucial for driving action. Start by crafting a concise executive summary that highlights key takeaways. Use visuals like charts and graphs to make complex data easy to understand at a glance.

When creating your presentation, remember your audience. Tailor your language and level of detail to their needs and expertise. For example, C-suite executives might want high-level insights, while marketing teams may need more granular data.

Don't just dump data on your audience. Tell a story with your findings. What trends did you uncover? What do they mean for the business? Use real-world examples to bring your insights to life.

Finally, make your presentation interactive. Encourage questions and discussion. This helps ensure everyone understands the implications of your research.

For event organizers, presenting findings on attendee behavior can be particularly powerful. Understanding what drives attendance can help you optimize future events. Check out EventX's blog on best event registration platforms for ideas on how to gather and present this kind of data effectively.

EventX's blog on best event registration platforms

6. Make Data-Driven Decisions

Once you've got your research findings, it's time to put them to work. Making data-driven decisions means using the insights you've gathered to shape your strategy. But it's not just about blindly following numbers - you need to balance data with your experience and gut feeling.

For example, let's say your research shows that people are skipping your events because they're too long. You might decide to shorten your events or break them into smaller sessions. But you'd also want to consider other factors, like the content quality and networking opportunities, before making drastic changes.

Remember, data should guide your decisions, not dictate them. It's about finding that sweet spot between what the numbers tell you and what you know about your audience and industry.

When making decisions:

• Review your research objectives
• Identify key findings that address these objectives
• Brainstorm potential actions based on these findings
• Evaluate each option considering both data and practical factors
• Choose the most promising strategy to implement

By following this approach, you're more likely to make choices that truly improve your events and boost attendance.

7. Implement the Decision

Once you've made data-driven decisions based on your marketing research, it's time to put them into action. This step is crucial for turning insights into tangible results. Start by creating a detailed action plan that outlines specific steps, responsibilities, and timelines.

For example, if your research shows that potential attendees prefer virtual events, you might decide to shift your focus to online platforms. Your action plan could include:

• Selecting a virtual event platform
• Training your team on new technologies
• Adjusting your marketing strategy to promote virtual events

Assign clear responsibilities to team members and set realistic deadlines for each task. This ensures accountability and keeps the implementation process on track.

Remember, implementation isn't a one-time event. It's an ongoing process that requires monitoring and adjustment. Be prepared to make changes as you go, based on real-world feedback and results.

To streamline your event management process during implementation, consider using an Event ticketing platform like EventX. It can help you manage registrations, ticket sales, and attendee data efficiently, making it easier to implement your research-based decisions.

8. Evaluate the Results

After implementing decisions based on your marketing research, it's crucial to evaluate the results. This step helps you understand the impact of your actions and guides future strategies.

Start by comparing your current metrics to your baseline data. For events, this might include attendance rates, engagement levels, or revenue generated. Use tools like Google Analytics or your event management platform to track these metrics easily.

Don't just look at numbers – gather qualitative feedback too. Send out post-event surveys or conduct focus groups to get deeper insights. This human element can reveal unexpected outcomes or areas for improvement.

Remember, evaluation is an ongoing process. Set up regular check-ins to monitor progress over time. This allows you to make quick adjustments if needed and keeps your strategy agile.

If results don't meet expectations, don't panic. Use this as a learning opportunity. Analyze what went wrong and brainstorm ways to improve for next time.

Lastly, share your findings with your team. Celebrate successes and discuss challenges openly. This fosters a culture of continuous improvement and data-driven decision making.

Common Challenges in the Marketing Research Process

Let's face it: marketing research isn't always smooth sailing. Here are some common hurdles you might encounter:

Budget constraints can be a real pain. Quality research often comes with a hefty price tag, and many businesses struggle to allocate sufficient funds. This can lead to cutting corners or settling for less reliable data.

Time limitations are another biggie. In today's fast-paced market, there's often pressure to get results quickly. But rushing the process can compromise the quality of your findings.

Data quality issues can throw a wrench in the works too. It's not just about quantity – the information you gather needs to be accurate and relevant. Unreliable data can lead to misguided decisions.

How can you tackle these challenges? Consider using cost-effective online survey tools or leveraging existing customer data. Prioritize your research objectives to make the most of limited time. And always double-check your data sources for reliability.

Remember, even with these hurdles, good marketing research is worth the effort. It provides invaluable insights that can give your business a competitive edge.

Best Practices for Effective Marketing Research

To get the most out of your marketing research, it's crucial to follow some best practices. First, stay objective throughout the process. Your personal biases can skew results, so approach each step with an open mind.

Ethical research practices are non-negotiable. Always get consent from participants and protect their privacy. Be transparent about your research goals and how you'll use the data.

Leverage technology to boost efficiency. Use online survey tools, data analysis software, and project management platforms to streamline your work. For example, EventX's event registration system can help collect valuable attendee data efficiently.

Keep your research focused on your objectives. It's easy to get sidetracked by interesting but irrelevant data. Stick to information that directly addresses your research questions.

Lastly, don't forget to validate your findings. Cross-check data from multiple sources and consider getting peer reviews. This helps ensure your conclusions are solid and actionable.

By following these practices, you'll conduct more effective research that leads to better business decisions. Remember, good research is an investment in your company's future success.

Let's wrap this up. We've walked through the 8 key steps of the marketing research process, from defining the problem to evaluating results. These steps aren't just theory – they're practical tools you can use right now to boost your marketing game.

Remember, good marketing research isn't about guesswork. It's about being systematic, thorough, and objective. By following these steps, you're setting yourself up for success, whether you're planning an event or launching a new product.

Don't be intimidated by the process. Start small if you need to, but start somewhere. Maybe begin with a simple survey at your next event. Use the data to make one improvement, then build from there.

The more you practice these steps, the more natural they'll become. And the payoff? Better decisions, more effective marketing, and ultimately, better results for your business or events.

So, what are you waiting for? Take what you've learned here and put it into action. Your next marketing win could be just a research project away.

Additional Resources

Ready to dive deeper into marketing research? Here are some valuable resources to expand your knowledge and skills:

• Books: Check out "Marketing Research" by Naresh K. Malhotra for a comprehensive guide on research methods.
• Online Courses: Platforms like Coursera and edX offer marketing research courses from top universities.
• Industry Reports: Access free reports from sites like Statista or eMarketer for current market trends.
• Webinars: Join live or on-demand webinars from the American Marketing Association for expert insights.
• Tools: Try Google Analytics for web data or SurveyMonkey for easy survey creation.
• Podcasts: Listen to "Marketing Research Radio" for the latest industry discussions.
• Blogs: Follow the Greenbook Blog for cutting-edge research techniques and case studies.

Remember, the key to successful marketing research is staying updated and applying what you learn. 

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A Guide on How to Create a Market Research Report

A market research report provides valuable insights into consumer behaviors, market trends, competitive analysis, and the overall health of specific industries.

This document serves as a roadmap for businesses to strategize effectively, identify new opportunities, and mitigate risks.

In this article, we will walk you through the essential components of a market research report, the steps to create one, and best practices to ensure that your findings are actionable and accurate.

What is a Market Research Report?

A market research report is a comprehensive document that gathers data about market conditions, customer preferences, competition, and other factors affecting an industry or business. It synthesizes primary and secondary research to present an analysis that helps companies make strategic decisions. The report covers various aspects, from demographic data and consumer surveys to industry trends and competitive dynamics.

Types of Market Research Reports

Market research reports can vary based on the objectives and the scope of the study. Here are some common types:

• Consumer Analysis Reports: Focus on customer demographics, preferences, and behavior to tailor products and marketing strategies.
• Competitive Analysis Reports: Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of competitors within the market, offering insights into competitive advantages and potential opportunities.
• Industry Analysis Reports: Provide a broad overview of the industry, including trends, size, and growth forecasts.
• Product Testing Reports: Gather feedback from users about a new or existing product to inform product development and improvement.
• Brand Loyalty Reports: Analyze customer loyalty and satisfaction to help develop strategies to enhance customer retention.

What Does a Market Research Report Include?

A well-rounded market research report generally contains the following elements:

• Executive Summary: A concise overview of key findings and recommendations, allowing readers to quickly understand the report's essence.
• Introduction: Contextualizes the research, including objectives and questions that the report aims to address.
• Methodology: Describes the research methods used to collect data, whether through surveys, interviews, focus groups, or secondary data sources.
• Market Analysis: Detailed analysis of the market, including size, trends, growth patterns, and environmental factors.
• Competitive Landscape: Assessment of key players in the industry, their market share, strategies, and products.
• Customer Insights: Analysis of customer demographics, buying behaviors, preferences, and needs.
• Conclusions and Recommendations: Summarize the insights derived from the research and suggest actionable strategies based on the findings.

How to Create a Market Research Report in 5 Steps

Creating an effective market research report involves a structured approach:

• Define the Purpose: Clearly articulate what you want to achieve with the report. This will guide your research focus and methodology.
• Gather Information: Use both primary and secondary research to collect comprehensive data. Primary research could include surveys and interviews, while secondary research may involve reviewing existing studies, industry reports, and competitive data.
• Analyze Data: Interpret the data to identify patterns, insights, and correlations. Use statistical tools and software for accurate analysis.
• Draft the Report: Organize the findings in a structured format. Start with the executive summary, followed by the introduction, methodology, detailed findings, and conclusions.
• Review and Revise: Ensure the report is clear, accurate, and free from bias. It may be helpful to have peers or stakeholders review the document before finalizing it.

Best Practices for Creating a Market Research Report

To enhance the effectiveness of your market research report, consider these best practices:

• Stay Objective: Maintain impartiality to ensure the report is unbiased and reliable.
• Use Visuals: Incorporate charts, graphs, and infographics to make data easier to understand and more engaging.
• Keep It Concise: Be clear and concise, avoiding overly complex language or excessive detail that may distract from the key insights.
• Segment the Data: Provide segmented analysis to offer more detailed insights into different customer groups or market segments.
• Update Regularly: Market conditions change rapidly, so it’s important to update your reports periodically to keep them relevant.

Create a Market Research Report Using Tome

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With Tome, you can effortlessly craft detailed, insightful presentations that communicate complex data in an understandable and engaging manner.

Start leveraging Tome today to enhance the impact of your market research reports and drive meaningful action.

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What is a Marketing Research Report and How to Write It

In essence, a market research report is a document that reveals the characteristics of your ideal customers, their buying habits, the value your product or service can bring to them, and the list of your top competitors.

The marketing research report paints a picture of what kinds of new products or services may be the most profitable in today’s highly competitive landscape. For products or services already available, a marketing research report can provide detailed insights as to whether they are meeting their consumers’ needs and expectations. It helps understand the reasons why consumers buy a particular product by studying consumer behavior, including how economic, cultural, societal, and personal factors influence that behavior.

Furthermore, the purpose of writing a marketing research report is to make calculated decisions about business ideas – whether they’re worth pursuing or not. This requires one primary skill which is observing the pattern which is hidden in the User Generated Content (UGC) written in different tones and perspectives on the social web.

Simply put, writing a market research report is a vital part of planning business activities and serves as a neat way to assimilate all the information about your target market and prospective customers.

Now, there are two key varieties of marketing research report formats – primary and secondary.

Primary vs. Secondary Market Research

Let’s take a look at the main recipes of how to make a market research report in detail:

Primary Research

This method of marketing research involves gathering firsthand information about your market and prospective clients. You study your customers directly by conducting:

• Interviews (either by telephone or face-to-face)
• Surveys and polls (online or by email)
• Questionnaires (online or by email)
• Focus groups discussions with a sample of potential customers and getting their direct feedback

Some crucial questions that you need to ask your prospective customers in your primary research are:

• What are the factors that motivate you to purchase this product or service?
• What do you like or dislike about this type of product or service already available on the market?
• Are there any areas you’d like to suggest for improvement?
• What according to you is the appropriate price for this product or service?

Primary research also involves analyzing competitors’ strategies, so you can find gaps and weaknesses that you can turn into your strengths.

Secondary Research

The second method of writing a marketing research report is all about analyzing the data that has already been published and using the available information on the web. That is, secondary research is done from reliable reports and statistics found on the websites of other organizations or authority blogs in your industry.

Sources can be:

• Public: This includes all the free sources like social media and forums, Google Trends, YouGov, and government sources such as the United States Census Bureau.
• Commercial: This includes industry insights compiled by research agencies like Pew, Gartner, Forrester, and so on. Typically, these are paid.
• Internal: This is the historical market data your organization already has in-house, such as the Net Promoter Score, customer churn rate, and so on.

Secondary data can help you identify competitors, establish benchmarks, and determine target customer segments or demographics – people who live a certain lifestyle, their income and buying patterns, age group, location, etc.

Market Research Reports Advantages and Disadvantages

Before we discuss how to write a marketing research report, let’s quickly take a look at market research report benefits and also some of the limitations in marketing research reports.

Advantages of Market Research Report

Here are the top reasons why you should invest in creating a market research report.

1. Gives a Better Understanding of Your Customers

The answers to questions like who will buy your product, what are the customers’ pain points, what motivates their buying behavior, and so on will be effectively answered with a market research report. Essentially, it will help you map out the full profile of your ideal customer and consequently, allow you to create tailored products and marketing campaigns.

2. Helps Spot Business Opportunities

As already mentioned, market research will give you insights about your competitors’ strategies, so you can find gaps in their offerings that you can turn into your product’s strengths. You may also find other business opportunities such as potential partnerships with brands that sell complementary products, or an opportunity to better upsell or cross-sell your products. For example, a keyword research report from a SaaS SEO agency provides an opportunity to acquire organic search ranking by creating in-depth, high-converting, and funnel-oriented content.

3. Minimizes Risks

Starting or running a business is synonymous with risk. In fact, nearly half of all small businesses with employees don’t survive for more than five years. Conducting proper market research frequently will allow you to stay on top of trends, and not waste your efforts and resources in things that would likely be fruitless.

For instance, before you launch a new product, conducting market research gives you a much better idea of the demand for your product. Or if an existing product is seeing a big drop in sales, market research helps you determine the root cause of the issue.

4. Facilitates Data-Driven Decision Making

When it comes to business decisions – data over guesswork, always. So, based on your market research results, you can make more informed decisions regarding the pricing, distribution channels, and marketing budget of your products.

Disadvantages of Market Research Report

As with anything, there are a couple of downsides to conducting marketing research as well.

1. Could Be an Expensive Activity

Conducting a comprehensive, in-depth research is usually a costly activity in terms of both time and money. To research the right audience with the right questions requires you to invest a lot of time. If you wish to use data by commercial market research agencies or get help from one such agency in conducting primary research, be prepared to spend a substantial amount.

2. Insights Gathered Could Be Inadequate or Even Inaccurate

Another problem often faced in marketing research is a lack of respondents. While you can figure out who is your target audience, getting them to fill out surveys and questionnaires can indeed be challenging. Plus, you’re using data you collected for drawing conclusions, which may be unreliable.

For example, by the time you act on the data you collected, it may have become outdated. This translates into poor decision making and the whole process may become counterproductive.

How to Prepare Market Research Report

Now, here are some concrete steps and guidelines for writing a marketing research report.

Step 1: Cluster the Data

First off, compile all the relevant data you’ve accumulated from your primary and/or secondary research efforts. Survey results, interview answers, statistics from third-party sources – bring it all together and then analyze the information to sketch out the profile of your target market.

Step 2: Prepare an Outline

Next, create a skeleton of the report so that you understand what information will go where. An outline with sections and subsections will help you structure your marketing research report properly. A typical report includes an introduction, background and methodology, executive summary, results, and a conclusion with links to all references.

With an outline in front of you, start by writing the front matter of your report – an introduction that provides a brief overview of your business and the reason you conducted the market research. Include a summary of the market research process and the results you have analyzed. For instance, you might have been gauging the feasibility of a new product, so summarize that your market research report is for a new product launch.

Step 3: Mention the Research Methods

An important next step is to clearly mention the methods used to conduct the research. That is, if you conducted polls, specify the number of polls, the percentage of responses, the types of people or businesses targeted, and the questions included in the poll. Tag all the resources for demographic information, such as census data.

Step 4: Include Visuals With Narrative Explanation

Visuals such as charts and graphs are an important part of any research paper. They make sure that the findings are easy to comprehend.

So, create tables, graphs, and/or charts illustrating the results of the research. Accompany it with a narrative explanation of the visual data. Highlight the inferences you made based on this data.

Step 5: Conclude the Report With Recommendations

Finally, conclude your report with a section that lists actionable recommendations based on the research results to facilitate decision making. For example, all the numbers may point to the conclusion that your customers desire a particular feature that no other product on the market is currently offering. In this case, it is clear that it’s a good idea to invest your resources in providing that feature and gain a competitive edge.

At the very end of the report, include reference links to all the sources and an appendix for supplementary materials and further reading.

Marketing Research Report Templates

Before you go, check out some templates and samples you can use to better understand the marketing research report structure, and maybe even use them to kickstart your report instead of preparing one from scratch.

• Market Research Report for New Product Launch
• Market Research Report for Restaurant (competitor analysis)
• Social Media Market Research Report

Writing a marketing research report is a tried-and-true way to gain a solid understanding of your target audience and competitors while enabling you to make more informed decisions and minimize investment risks. Sure, it may take considerable time, effort, and even money to conduct thorough research and prepare a report, but when done well, the ROI of it all is well worth it.

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🪞 Marketing Research Unit 13 – Reporting and Presenting Findings

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Breaking Down a Market Research Report Into 10 Pieces

by Justin Eisenhauer

Posted at: 11/22/2021 1:30 PM

The most important piece of any market research study is the report. Why? Because it summarizes all of what your study entailed and discovered. 

The most important piece of any market research study is the report. Why? Because it summarizes all of what your study entailed and discovered. Learn about the most important components to include when reporting market research findings.

At Drive Research , we believe a report should go beyond just spreadsheets, graphs, and statistics.

Through several different report offerings and components, we help you interpret the findings and make decisions in a personalized approach.  

This blog post will detail what components are included in a report and how they can benefit your company.

Report Component 1: Recap Objectives

The very beginning of a report will recap the objectives of the study that were discussed early in the project. This section will recite why the study is being conducted and what methodology was used. 

Albeit a brief presence in a report, the objectives serve as the foundational piece of any study.

Before you review the results, understanding the initial goals of your study will help you put the data into context and answer key questions.

This will also help you stay focused and organized going forward as you enact decisions regarding your product or organization.         

Report Component 2: Key Findings 

The body of the report will guide through the data collected from the study and offer the key findings.

The reporting component can be presented in a variety of ways:

• Question by question: The findings will be written in the same order as the questions in the survey. This style is easy and consistent for all surveys but may or may not be the best depending on the scope and objectives of the study. 
• Theme-based: Suppose you have a survey that covers a variety of topics or wants to measure items against each other (i.e., a logo, slogan, concept). This is where a theme-based layout would be more appropriate. This will save you time from having to sort through all of the questions to find similar results focused around the same or similar ideas. 
• Question by Question Format: [Q17] Two-thirds (67%) of respondents selected green as their favorite color. However, females were more likely to select pink as their favorite color (60%).
• Theme Format: Theme -- Colors | Green was the most popular color selected by respondents (67%).  Pink was the top answer among females (60%).  

Report Component 3: Next Steps

The concluding section of the report provides you with some ideas on what to do next based on the insights and findings. These are simply recommendations we add to give you some direction. 

For clients that conduct market research regularly, they tend to have a solid understanding of what the data says and what actions they need to take.

However, companies new to the market research process need more time comprehending the findings and deciding on what to make of them. 

We recognize that every organization is different. We try to craft practical recommendations that are suited for your products, employees, and company. 

Additional Report Elements to Include

Depending on the design and characteristics of the study, some additional components can be included in a report. These are concise and valuable components that are worth the investment should they fit your study.    

• Cover Page: This is where you provide the reader with the first impression of your report. Use a high-resolution picture or background that looks graphically appealing to make sure your report passes the "eye-test" when it's first opened. Your client paid a lot of money for these results, set the tone with your cover page.
• Table of Contents : This provides structure and organization to your report. The larger the report, the more important this is for the reader, especially if the reader is going to reference specific sections of the report down the road and needs to find it quickly. It comes in handy when the client wants to skip to a specific section as needed.
• Infographic or Dashboard: This may be the most important piece of the report. It forces you to take hundreds of cases of data or hundreds of pages of a report and decipher the findings into a one-page graphical element. An infographic proves your ability to synthesize data and pull out the factors that are most important to the reader in a quick and easy-to-read one-page summary using graphics and metrics.
• Personas: Personas are fictional names and faces we apply to some open-ended responses to help you visualize your target respondent or consumer better. The information that is written seems more personable when read underneath a headshot profile versus in a cell on a spreadsheet.
• Text Analysis: Another way to analyze open-end responses is to conduct a text analysis . A text analysis sorts through all of the responses and highlights the most common words/phrases. It also can determine positive, neutral, or negative sentiment from responses.
• Correlation Analysis : A correlation analysis describes the degree of relationship between each variable. Correlation is defined as the mutual relationship or connection between two or more variables. The higher the correlation coefficient, the stronger the relationship.
• Regression Analysis: Similar to correlation analysis, regression analysis focuses on the statistical relationship between two variables. However, it can measure which independent variables have the greatest impact on a topic of interest or dependent variable.

Contact Drive Research

Every report is different, but most include a version of each component. The following report components accumulate all of the questions we ask our clients as they begin the market research process. 

• What are you looking to gain and how do you plan on conducting market research? (Recap Objectives)
• What should the results tell you? (Key Findings) 
• How to interpret the findings after the study is complete? (Next Steps)

Drive Research is a national marketing research company. We are a full-service agency offering a wide range of market research services . We offer an a la carte approach to our reporting packages including topline and comprehensive options .

Contact us today for a quote!

• Message us on our website
• Email us at [email protected]
• Call us at 888-725-DATA
• Text us at 315-303-2040

Justin Eisenhauer

As a Research Assistant, Justin works directly with all team members on client projects. His intrigue in market research formed during his time at Marist College, where he studied business and entrepreneurship.

Learn more about Justin, here .

Categories: Market Research Analysis

Need help with your project? Get in touch with Drive Research.

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10.2 Steps in the Marketing Research Process

Learning objective.

• Describe the basic steps in the marketing research process and the purpose of each step.

The basic steps used to conduct marketing research are shown in Figure 10.6 “Steps in the Marketing Research Process” . Next, we discuss each step.

Figure 10.6 Steps in the Marketing Research Process

Step 1: Define the Problem (or Opportunity)

There’s a saying in marketing research that a problem half defined is a problem half solved. Defining the “problem” of the research sounds simple, doesn’t it? Suppose your product is tutoring other students in a subject you’re a whiz at. You have been tutoring for a while, and people have begun to realize you’re darned good at it. Then, suddenly, your business drops off. Or it explodes, and you can’t cope with the number of students you’re being asked help. If the business has exploded, should you try to expand your services? Perhaps you should subcontract with some other “whiz” students. You would send them students to be tutored, and they would give you a cut of their pay for each student you referred to them.

Both of these scenarios would be a problem for you, wouldn’t they? They are problems insofar as they cause you headaches. But are they really the problem? Or are they the symptoms of something bigger? For example, maybe your business has dropped off because your school is experiencing financial trouble and has lowered the number of scholarships given to incoming freshmen. Consequently, there are fewer total students on campus who need your services. Conversely, if you’re swamped with people who want you to tutor them, perhaps your school awarded more scholarships than usual, so there are a greater number of students who need your services. Alternately, perhaps you ran an ad in your school’s college newspaper, and that led to the influx of students wanting you to tutor them.

Businesses are in the same boat you are as a tutor. They take a look at symptoms and try to drill down to the potential causes. If you approach a marketing research company with either scenario—either too much or too little business—the firm will seek more information from you such as the following:

• In what semester(s) did your tutoring revenues fall (or rise)?
• In what subject areas did your tutoring revenues fall (or rise)?
• In what sales channels did revenues fall (or rise): Were there fewer (or more) referrals from professors or other students? Did the ad you ran result in fewer (or more) referrals this month than in the past months?
• Among what demographic groups did your revenues fall (or rise)—women or men, people with certain majors, or first-year, second-, third-, or fourth-year students?

The key is to look at all potential causes so as to narrow the parameters of the study to the information you actually need to make a good decision about how to fix your business if revenues have dropped or whether or not to expand it if your revenues have exploded.

The next task for the researcher is to put into writing the research objective. The research objective is the goal(s) the research is supposed to accomplish. The marketing research objective for your tutoring business might read as follows:

To survey college professors who teach 100- and 200-level math courses to determine why the number of students referred for tutoring dropped in the second semester.

This is admittedly a simple example designed to help you understand the basic concept. If you take a marketing research course, you will learn that research objectives get a lot more complicated than this. The following is an example:

“To gather information from a sample representative of the U.S. population among those who are ‘very likely’ to purchase an automobile within the next 6 months, which assesses preferences (measured on a 1–5 scale ranging from ‘very likely to buy’ to ‘not likely at all to buy’) for the model diesel at three different price levels. Such data would serve as input into a forecasting model that would forecast unit sales, by geographic regions of the country, for each combination of the model’s different prices and fuel configurations (Burns & Bush, 2010).”

Now do you understand why defining the problem is complicated and half the battle? Many a marketing research effort is doomed from the start because the problem was improperly defined. Coke’s ill-fated decision to change the formula of Coca-Cola in 1985 is a case in point: Pepsi had been creeping up on Coke in terms of market share over the years as well as running a successful promotional campaign called the “Pepsi Challenge,” in which consumers were encouraged to do a blind taste test to see if they agreed that Pepsi was better. Coke spent four years researching “the problem.” Indeed, people seemed to like the taste of Pepsi better in blind taste tests. Thus, the formula for Coke was changed. But the outcry among the public was so great that the new formula didn’t last long—a matter of months—before the old formula was reinstated. Some marketing experts believe Coke incorrectly defined the problem as “How can we beat Pepsi in taste tests?” instead of “How can we gain market share against Pepsi?” (Burns & Bush, 2010)

New Coke Is It! 1985

(click to see video)

This video documents the Coca-Cola Company’s ill-fated launch of New Coke in 1985.

1985 Pepsi Commercial—“They Changed My Coke”

This video shows how Pepsi tried to capitalize on the blunder.

Step 2: Design the Research

The next step in the marketing research process is to do a research design. The research design is your “plan of attack.” It outlines what data you are going to gather and from whom, how and when you will collect the data, and how you will analyze it once it’s been obtained. Let’s look at the data you’re going to gather first.

There are two basic types of data you can gather. The first is primary data. Primary data is information you collect yourself, using hands-on tools such as interviews or surveys, specifically for the research project you’re conducting. Secondary data is data that has already been collected by someone else, or data you have already collected for another purpose. Collecting primary data is more time consuming, work intensive, and expensive than collecting secondary data. Consequently, you should always try to collect secondary data first to solve your research problem, if you can. A great deal of research on a wide variety of topics already exists. If this research contains the answer to your question, there is no need for you to replicate it. Why reinvent the wheel?

Sources of Secondary Data

Your company’s internal records are a source of secondary data. So are any data you collect as part of your marketing intelligence gathering efforts. You can also purchase syndicated research. Syndicated research is primary data that marketing research firms collect on a regular basis and sell to other companies. J.D. Power & Associates is a provider of syndicated research. The company conducts independent, unbiased surveys of customer satisfaction, product quality, and buyer behavior for various industries. The company is best known for its research in the automobile sector. One of the best-known sellers of syndicated research is the Nielsen Company, which produces the Nielsen ratings. The Nielsen ratings measure the size of television, radio, and newspaper audiences in various markets. You have probably read or heard about TV shows that get the highest (Nielsen) ratings. (Arbitron does the same thing for radio ratings.) Nielsen, along with its main competitor, Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), also sells businesses scanner-based research . Scanner-based research is information collected by scanners at checkout stands in stores. Each week Nielsen and IRI collect information on the millions of purchases made at stores. The companies then compile the information and sell it to firms in various industries that subscribe to their services. The Nielsen Company has also recently teamed up with Facebook to collect marketing research information. Via Facebook, users will see surveys in some of the spaces in which they used to see online ads (Rappeport, Gelles, 2009).

By contrast, MarketResearch.com is an example of a marketing research aggregator. A marketing research aggregator is a marketing research company that doesn’t conduct its own research and sell it. Instead, it buys research reports from other marketing research companies and then sells the reports in their entirety or in pieces to other firms. Check out MarketResearch.com’s Web site. As you will see there are a huge number of studies in every category imaginable that you can buy for relatively small amounts of money.

Figure 10.7

Market research aggregators buy research reports from other marketing research companies and then resell them in part or in whole to other companies so they don’t have to gather primary data.

Source: http://www.marketresearch.com .

Your local library is a good place to gather free secondary data. It has searchable databases as well as handbooks, dictionaries, and books, some of which you can access online. Government agencies also collect and report information on demographics, economic and employment data, health information, and balance-of-trade statistics, among a lot of other information. The U.S. Census Bureau collects census data every ten years to gather information about who lives where. Basic demographic information about sex, age, race, and types of housing in which people live in each U.S. state, metropolitan area, and rural area is gathered so that population shifts can be tracked for various purposes, including determining the number of legislators each state should have in the U.S. House of Representatives. For the U.S. government, this is primary data. For marketing managers it is an important source of secondary data.

The Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan also conducts periodic surveys and publishes information about trends in the United States. One research study the center continually conducts is called the “Changing Lives of American Families” ( http://www.isr.umich.edu/home/news/research-update/2007-01.pdf ). This is important research data for marketing managers monitoring consumer trends in the marketplace. The World Bank and the United Nations are two international organizations that collect a great deal of information. Their Web sites contain many free research studies and data related to global markets. Table 10.1 “Examples of Primary Data Sources versus Secondary Data Sources” shows some examples of primary versus secondary data sources.

Table 10.1 Examples of Primary Data Sources versus Secondary Data Sources

Gauging the Quality of Secondary Data

When you are gathering secondary information, it’s always good to be a little skeptical of it. Sometimes studies are commissioned to produce the result a client wants to hear—or wants the public to hear. For example, throughout the twentieth century, numerous studies found that smoking was good for people’s health. The problem was the studies were commissioned by the tobacco industry. Web research can also pose certain hazards. There are many biased sites that try to fool people that they are providing good data. Often the data is favorable to the products they are trying to sell. Beware of product reviews as well. Unscrupulous sellers sometimes get online and create bogus ratings for products. See below for questions you can ask to help gauge the credibility of secondary information.

Gauging the Credibility of Secondary Data: Questions to Ask

• Who gathered this information?
• For what purpose?
• What does the person or organization that gathered the information have to gain by doing so?
• Was the information gathered and reported in a systematic manner?
• Is the source of the information accepted as an authority by other experts in the field?
• Does the article provide objective evidence to support the position presented?

Types of Research Design

Now let’s look specifically at the types of research designs that are utilized. By understanding different types of research designs, a researcher can solve a client’s problems more quickly and efficiently without jumping through more hoops than necessary. Research designs fall into one of the following three categories:

• Exploratory research design
• Descriptive research design
• Causal research design (experiments)

An exploratory research design is useful when you are initially investigating a problem but you haven’t defined it well enough to do an in-depth study of it. Perhaps via your regular market intelligence, you have spotted what appears to be a new opportunity in the marketplace. You would then do exploratory research to investigate it further and “get your feet wet,” as the saying goes. Exploratory research is less structured than other types of research, and secondary data is often utilized.

One form of exploratory research is qualitative research. Qualitative research is any form of research that includes gathering data that is not quantitative, and often involves exploring questions such as why as much as what or how much . Different forms, such as depth interviews and focus group interviews, are common in marketing research.

The depth interview —engaging in detailed, one-on-one, question-and-answer sessions with potential buyers—is an exploratory research technique. However, unlike surveys, the people being interviewed aren’t asked a series of standard questions. Instead the interviewer is armed with some general topics and asks questions that are open ended, meaning that they allow the interviewee to elaborate. “How did you feel about the product after you purchased it?” is an example of a question that might be asked. A depth interview also allows a researcher to ask logical follow-up questions such as “Can you tell me what you mean when you say you felt uncomfortable using the service?” or “Can you give me some examples?” to help dig further and shed additional light on the research problem. Depth interviews can be conducted in person or over the phone. The interviewer either takes notes or records the interview.

Focus groups and case studies are often utilized for exploratory research as well. A focus group is a group of potential buyers who are brought together to discuss a marketing research topic with one another. A moderator is used to focus the discussion, the sessions are recorded, and the main points of consensus are later summarized by the market researcher. Textbook publishers often gather groups of professors at educational conferences to participate in focus groups. However, focus groups can also be conducted on the telephone, in online chat rooms, or both, using meeting software like WebEx. The basic steps of conducting a focus group are outlined below.

The Basic Steps of Conducting a Focus Group

• Establish the objectives of the focus group. What is its purpose?
• Identify the people who will participate in the focus group. What makes them qualified to participate? How many of them will you need and what they will be paid?
• Obtain contact information for the participants and send out invitations (usually e-mails are most efficient).
• Develop a list of questions.
• Choose a facilitator.
• Choose a location in which to hold the focus group and the method by which it will be recorded.
• Conduct the focus group. If the focus group is not conducted electronically, include name tags for the participants, pens and notepads, any materials the participants need to see, and refreshments. Record participants’ responses.
• Summarize the notes from the focus group and write a report for management.

A case study looks at how another company solved the problem that’s being researched. Sometimes multiple cases, or companies, are used in a study. Case studies nonetheless have a mixed reputation. Some researchers believe it’s hard to generalize, or apply, the results of a case study to other companies. Nonetheless, collecting information about companies that encountered the same problems your firm is facing can give you a certain amount of insight about what direction you should take. In fact, one way to begin a research project is to carefully study a successful product or service.

Two other types of qualitative data used for exploratory research are ethnographies and projective techniques. In an ethnography , researchers interview, observe, and often videotape people while they work, live, shop, and play. The Walt Disney Company has recently begun using ethnographers to uncover the likes and dislikes of boys aged six to fourteen, a financially attractive market segment for Disney, but one in which the company has been losing market share. The ethnographers visit the homes of boys, observe the things they have in their rooms to get a sense of their hobbies, and accompany them and their mothers when they shop to see where they go, what the boys are interested in, and what they ultimately buy. (The children get seventy-five dollars out of the deal, incidentally.) (Barnes, 2009)

Projective techniques are used to reveal information research respondents might not reveal by being asked directly. Asking a person to complete sentences such as the following is one technique:

People who buy Coach handbags __________.

(Will he or she reply with “are cool,” “are affluent,” or “are pretentious,” for example?)

KFC’s grilled chicken is ______.

Or the person might be asked to finish a story that presents a certain scenario. Word associations are also used to discern people’s underlying attitudes toward goods and services. Using a word-association technique, a market researcher asks a person to say or write the first word that comes to his or her mind in response to another word. If the initial word is “fast food,” what word does the person associate it with or respond with? Is it “McDonald’s”? If many people reply that way, and you’re conducting research for Burger King, that could indicate Burger King has a problem. However, if the research is being conducted for Wendy’s, which recently began running an advertising campaign to the effect that Wendy’s offerings are “better than fast food,” it could indicate that the campaign is working.

Completing cartoons is yet another type of projective technique. It’s similar to finishing a sentence or story, only with the pictures. People are asked to look at a cartoon such as the one shown in Figure 10.8 “Example of a Cartoon-Completion Projective Technique” . One of the characters in the picture will have made a statement, and the person is asked to fill in the empty cartoon “bubble” with how they think the second character will respond.

Figure 10.8 Example of a Cartoon-Completion Projective Technique

In some cases, your research might end with exploratory research. Perhaps you have discovered your organization lacks the resources needed to produce the product. In other cases, you might decide you need more in-depth, quantitative research such as descriptive research or causal research, which are discussed next. Most marketing research professionals advise using both types of research, if it’s feasible. On the one hand, the qualitative-type research used in exploratory research is often considered too “lightweight.” Remember earlier in the chapter when we discussed telephone answering machines and the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld ? Both product ideas were initially rejected by focus groups. On the other hand, relying solely on quantitative information often results in market research that lacks ideas.

The Stone Wheel—What One Focus Group Said

Watch the video to see a funny spoof on the usefulness—or lack of usefulness—of focus groups.

Descriptive Research

Anything that can be observed and counted falls into the category of descriptive research design. A study using a descriptive research design involves gathering hard numbers, often via surveys, to describe or measure a phenomenon so as to answer the questions of who , what , where , when , and how . “On a scale of 1–5, how satisfied were you with your service?” is a question that illustrates the information a descriptive research design is supposed to capture.

Physiological measurements also fall into the category of descriptive design. Physiological measurements measure people’s involuntary physical responses to marketing stimuli, such as an advertisement. Elsewhere, we explained that researchers have gone so far as to scan the brains of consumers to see what they really think about products versus what they say about them. Eye tracking is another cutting-edge type of physiological measurement. It involves recording the movements of a person’s eyes when they look at some sort of stimulus, such as a banner ad or a Web page. The Walt Disney Company has a research facility in Austin, Texas, that it uses to take physical measurements of viewers when they see Disney programs and advertisements. The facility measures three types of responses: people’s heart rates, skin changes, and eye movements (eye tracking) (Spangler, 2009).

Figure 10.9

A woman shows off her headgear for an eye-tracking study. The gear’s not exactly a fashion statement but . . .

lawrencegs – Google Glass – CC BY 2.0.

A strictly descriptive research design instrument—a survey, for example—can tell you how satisfied your customers are. It can’t, however, tell you why. Nor can an eye-tracking study tell you why people’s eyes tend to dwell on certain types of banner ads—only that they do. To answer “why” questions an exploratory research design or causal research design is needed (Wagner, 2007).

Causal Research

Causal research design examines cause-and-effect relationships. Using a causal research design allows researchers to answer “what if” types of questions. In other words, if a firm changes X (say, a product’s price, design, placement, or advertising), what will happen to Y (say, sales or customer loyalty)? To conduct causal research, the researcher designs an experiment that “controls,” or holds constant, all of a product’s marketing elements except one (or using advanced techniques of research, a few elements can be studied at the same time). The one variable is changed, and the effect is then measured. Sometimes the experiments are conducted in a laboratory using a simulated setting designed to replicate the conditions buyers would experience. Or the experiments may be conducted in a virtual computer setting.

You might think setting up an experiment in a virtual world such as the online game Second Life would be a viable way to conduct controlled marketing research. Some companies have tried to use Second Life for this purpose, but the results have been somewhat mixed as to whether or not it is a good medium for marketing research. The German marketing research firm Komjuniti was one of the first “real-world” companies to set up an “island” in Second Life upon which it could conduct marketing research. However, with so many other attractive fantasy islands in which to play, the company found it difficult to get Second Life residents, or players, to voluntarily visit the island and stay long enough so meaningful research could be conducted. (Plus, the “residents,” or players, in Second Life have been known to protest corporations invading their world. When the German firm Komjuniti created an island in Second Life to conduct marketing research, the residents showed up waving signs and threatening to boycott the island.) (Wagner, 2007)

Why is being able to control the setting so important? Let’s say you are an American flag manufacturer and you are working with Walmart to conduct an experiment to see where in its stores American flags should be placed so as to increase their sales. Then the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occur. In the days afterward, sales skyrocketed—people bought flags no matter where they were displayed. Obviously, the terrorist attacks in the United States would have skewed the experiment’s data.

An experiment conducted in a natural setting such as a store is referred to as a field experiment . Companies sometimes do field experiments either because it is more convenient or because they want to see if buyers will behave the same way in the “real world” as in a laboratory or on a computer. The place the experiment is conducted or the demographic group of people the experiment is administered to is considered the test market . Before a large company rolls out a product to the entire marketplace, it will often place the offering in a test market to see how well it will be received. For example, to compete with MillerCoors’ sixty-four-calorie beer MGD 64, Anheuser-Busch recently began testing its Select 55 beer in certain cities around the country (McWilliams, 2009).

Figure 10.10

Select 55 beer: Coming soon to a test market near you? (If you’re on a diet, you have to hope so!)

Martine – Le champagne – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Many companies use experiments to test all of their marketing communications. For example, the online discount retailer O.co (formerly called Overstock.com) carefully tests all of its marketing offers and tracks the results of each one. One study the company conducted combined twenty-six different variables related to offers e-mailed to several thousand customers. The study resulted in a decision to send a group of e-mails to different segments. The company then tracked the results of the sales generated to see if they were in line with the earlier experiment it had conducted that led it to make the offer.

Step 3: Design the Data-Collection Forms

If the behavior of buyers is being formally observed, and a number of different researchers are conducting observations, the data obviously need to be recorded on a standardized data-collection form that’s either paper or electronic. Otherwise, the data collected will not be comparable. The items on the form could include a shopper’s sex; his or her approximate age; whether the person seemed hurried, moderately hurried, or unhurried; and whether or not he or she read the label on products, used coupons, and so forth.

The same is true when it comes to surveying people with questionnaires. Surveying people is one of the most commonly used techniques to collect quantitative data. Surveys are popular because they can be easily administered to large numbers of people fairly quickly. However, to produce the best results, the questionnaire for the survey needs to be carefully designed.

Questionnaire Design

Most questionnaires follow a similar format: They begin with an introduction describing what the study is for, followed by instructions for completing the questionnaire and, if necessary, returning it to the market researcher. The first few questions that appear on the questionnaire are usually basic, warm-up type of questions the respondent can readily answer, such as the respondent’s age, level of education, place of residence, and so forth. The warm-up questions are then followed by a logical progression of more detailed, in-depth questions that get to the heart of the question being researched. Lastly, the questionnaire wraps up with a statement that thanks the respondent for participating in the survey and information and explains when and how they will be paid for participating. To see some examples of questionnaires and how they are laid out, click on the following link: http://cas.uah.edu/wrenb/mkt343/Project/Sample%20Questionnaires.htm .

How the questions themselves are worded is extremely important. It’s human nature for respondents to want to provide the “correct” answers to the person administering the survey, so as to seem agreeable. Therefore, there is always a hazard that people will try to tell you what you want to hear on a survey. Consequently, care needs to be taken that the survey questions are written in an unbiased, neutral way. In other words, they shouldn’t lead a person taking the questionnaire to answer a question one way or another by virtue of the way you have worded it. The following is an example of a leading question.

Don’t you agree that teachers should be paid more ?

The questions also need to be clear and unambiguous. Consider the following question:

Which brand of toothpaste do you use ?

The question sounds clear enough, but is it really? What if the respondent recently switched brands? What if she uses Crest at home, but while away from home or traveling, she uses Colgate’s Wisp portable toothpaste-and-brush product? How will the respondent answer the question? Rewording the question as follows so it’s more specific will help make the question clearer:

Which brand of toothpaste have you used at home in the past six months? If you have used more than one brand, please list each of them 1 .

Sensitive questions have to be asked carefully. For example, asking a respondent, “Do you consider yourself a light, moderate, or heavy drinker?” can be tricky. Few people want to admit to being heavy drinkers. You can “soften” the question by including a range of answers, as the following example shows:

How many alcoholic beverages do you consume in a week ?

• __0–5 alcoholic beverages
• __5–10 alcoholic beverages
• __10–15 alcoholic beverages

Many people don’t like to answer questions about their income levels. Asking them to specify income ranges rather than divulge their actual incomes can help.

Other research question “don’ts” include using jargon and acronyms that could confuse people. “How often do you IM?” is an example. Also, don’t muddy the waters by asking two questions in the same question, something researchers refer to as a double-barreled question . “Do you think parents should spend more time with their children and/or their teachers?” is an example of a double-barreled question.

Open-ended questions , or questions that ask respondents to elaborate, can be included. However, they are harder to tabulate than closed-ended questions , or questions that limit a respondent’s answers. Multiple-choice and yes-and-no questions are examples of closed-ended questions.

Testing the Questionnaire

You have probably heard the phrase “garbage in, garbage out.” If the questions are bad, the information gathered will be bad, too. One way to make sure you don’t end up with garbage is to test the questionnaire before sending it out to find out if there are any problems with it. Is there enough space for people to elaborate on open-ended questions? Is the font readable? To test the questionnaire, marketing research professionals first administer it to a number of respondents face to face. This gives the respondents the chance to ask the researcher about questions or instructions that are unclear or don’t make sense to them. The researcher then administers the questionnaire to a small subset of respondents in the actual way the survey is going to be disseminated, whether it’s delivered via phone, in person, by mail, or online.

Getting people to participate and complete questionnaires can be difficult. If the questionnaire is too long or hard to read, many people won’t complete it. So, by all means, eliminate any questions that aren’t necessary. Of course, including some sort of monetary incentive for completing the survey can increase the number of completed questionnaires a market researcher will receive.

Step 4: Specify the Sample

Once you have created your questionnaire or other marketing study, how do you figure out who should participate in it? Obviously, you can’t survey or observe all potential buyers in the marketplace. Instead, you must choose a sample. A sample is a subset of potential buyers that are representative of your entire target market, or population being studied. Sometimes market researchers refer to the population as the universe to reflect the fact that it includes the entire target market, whether it consists of a million people, a hundred thousand, a few hundred, or a dozen. “All unmarried people over the age of eighteen who purchased Dirt Devil steam cleaners in the United States during 2011” is an example of a population that has been defined.

Obviously, the population has to be defined correctly. Otherwise, you will be studying the wrong group of people. Not defining the population correctly can result in flawed research, or sampling error. A sampling error is any type of marketing research mistake that results because a sample was utilized. One criticism of Internet surveys is that the people who take these surveys don’t really represent the overall population. On average, Internet survey takers tend to be more educated and tech savvy. Consequently, if they solely constitute your population, even if you screen them for certain criteria, the data you collect could end up being skewed.

The next step is to put together the sampling frame , which is the list from which the sample is drawn. The sampling frame can be put together using a directory, customer list, or membership roster (Wrenn et. al., 2007). Keep in mind that the sampling frame won’t perfectly match the population. Some people will be included on the list who shouldn’t be. Other people who should be included will be inadvertently omitted. It’s no different than if you were to conduct a survey of, say, 25 percent of your friends, using friends’ names you have in your cell phone. Most of your friends’ names are likely to be programmed into your phone, but not all of them. As a result, a certain degree of sampling error always occurs.

There are two main categories of samples in terms of how they are drawn: probability samples and nonprobability samples. A probability sample is one in which each would-be participant has a known and equal chance of being selected. The chance is known because the total number of people in the sampling frame is known. For example, if every other person from the sampling frame were chosen, each person would have a 50 percent chance of being selected.

A nonprobability sample is any type of sample that’s not drawn in a systematic way. So the chances of each would-be participant being selected can’t be known. A convenience sample is one type of nonprobability sample. It is a sample a researcher draws because it’s readily available and convenient to do so. Surveying people on the street as they pass by is an example of a convenience sample. The question is, are these people representative of the target market?

For example, suppose a grocery store needed to quickly conduct some research on shoppers to get ready for an upcoming promotion. Now suppose that the researcher assigned to the project showed up between the hours of 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. on a weekday and surveyed as many shoppers as possible. The problem is that the shoppers wouldn’t be representative of the store’s entire target market. What about commuters who stop at the store before and after work? Their views wouldn’t be represented. Neither would people who work the night shift or shop at odd hours. As a result, there would be a lot of room for sampling error in this study. For this reason, studies that use nonprobability samples aren’t considered as accurate as studies that use probability samples. Nonprobability samples are more often used in exploratory research.

Lastly, the size of the sample has an effect on the amount of sampling error. Larger samples generally produce more accurate results. The larger your sample is, the more data you will have, which will give you a more complete picture of what you’re studying. However, the more people surveyed or studied, the more costly the research becomes.

Statistics can be used to determine a sample’s optimal size. If you take a marketing research or statistics class, you will learn more about how to determine the optimal size.

Of course, if you hire a marketing research company, much of this work will be taken care of for you. Many marketing research companies, like ResearchNow, maintain panels of prescreened people they draw upon for samples. In addition, the marketing research firm will be responsible for collecting the data or contracting with a company that specializes in data collection. Data collection is discussed next.

Step 5: Collect the Data

As we have explained, primary marketing research data can be gathered in a number of ways. Surveys, taking physical measurements, and observing people are just three of the ways we discussed. If you’re observing customers as part of gathering the data, keep in mind that if shoppers are aware of the fact, it can have an effect on their behavior. For example, if a customer shopping for feminine hygiene products in a supermarket aisle realizes she is being watched, she could become embarrassed and leave the aisle, which would adversely affect your data. To get around problems such as these, some companies set up cameras or two-way mirrors to observe customers. Organizations also hire mystery shoppers to work around the problem. A mystery shopper is someone who is paid to shop at a firm’s establishment or one of its competitors to observe the level of service, cleanliness of the facility, and so forth, and report his or her findings to the firm.

Make Extra Money as a Mystery Shopper

Watch the YouTube video to get an idea of how mystery shopping works.

Survey data can be collected in many different ways and combinations of ways. The following are the basic methods used:

• Face-to-face (can be computer aided)
• Telephone (can be computer aided or completely automated)
• Mail and hand delivery
• E-mail and the Web

A face-to-face survey is, of course, administered by a person. The surveys are conducted in public places such as in shopping malls, on the street, or in people’s homes if they have agreed to it. In years past, it was common for researchers in the United States to knock on people’s doors to gather survey data. However, randomly collected door-to-door interviews are less common today, partly because people are afraid of crime and are reluctant to give information to strangers (McDaniel & Gates, 1998).

Nonetheless, “beating the streets” is still a legitimate way questionnaire data is collected. When the U.S. Census Bureau collects data on the nation’s population, it hand delivers questionnaires to rural households that do not have street-name and house-number addresses. And Census Bureau workers personally survey the homeless to collect information about their numbers. Face-to-face surveys are also commonly used in third world countries to collect information from people who cannot read or lack phones and computers.

A plus of face-to-face surveys is that they allow researchers to ask lengthier, more complex questions because the people being surveyed can see and read the questionnaires. The same is true when a computer is utilized. For example, the researcher might ask the respondent to look at a list of ten retail stores and rank the stores from best to worst. The same question wouldn’t work so well over the telephone because the person couldn’t see the list. The question would have to be rewritten. Another drawback with telephone surveys is that even though federal and state “do not call” laws generally don’t prohibit companies from gathering survey information over the phone, people often screen such calls using answering machines and caller ID.

Probably the biggest drawback of both surveys conducted face-to-face and administered over the phone by a person is that they are labor intensive and therefore costly. Mailing out questionnaires is costly, too, and the response rates can be rather low. Think about why that might be so: if you receive a questionnaire in the mail, it is easy to throw it in the trash; it’s harder to tell a market researcher who approaches you on the street that you don’t want to be interviewed.

By contrast, gathering survey data collected by a computer, either over the telephone or on the Internet, can be very cost-effective and in some cases free. SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang are two Web sites that will allow you to create online questionnaires, e-mail them to up to one hundred people for free, and view the responses in real time as they come in. For larger surveys, you have to pay a subscription price of a few hundred dollars. But that still can be extremely cost-effective. The two Web sites also have a host of other features such as online-survey templates you can use to create your questionnaire, a way to set up automatic reminders sent to people who haven’t yet completed their surveys, and tools you can use to create graphics to put in your final research report. To see how easy it is to put together a survey in SurveyMonkey, click on the following link: http://help.surveymonkey.com/app/tutorials/detail/a_id/423 .

Like a face-to-face survey, an Internet survey can enable you to show buyers different visuals such as ads, pictures, and videos of products and their packaging. Web surveys are also fast, which is a major plus. Whereas face-to-face and mailed surveys often take weeks to collect, you can conduct a Web survey in a matter of days or even hours. And, of course, because the information is electronically gathered it can be automatically tabulated. You can also potentially reach a broader geographic group than you could if you had to personally interview people. The Zoomerang Web site allows you to create surveys in forty different languages.

Another plus for Web and computer surveys (and electronic phone surveys) is that there is less room for human error because the surveys are administered electronically. For instance, there’s no risk that the interviewer will ask a question wrong or use a tone of voice that could mislead the respondents. Respondents are also likely to feel more comfortable inputting the information into a computer if a question is sensitive than they would divulging the information to another person face-to-face or over the phone. Given all of these advantages, it’s not surprising that the Internet is quickly becoming the top way to collect primary data. However, like mail surveys, surveys sent to people over the Internet are easy to ignore.

Lastly, before the data collection process begins, the surveyors and observers need to be trained to look for the same things, ask questions the same way, and so forth. If they are using rankings or rating scales, they need to be “on the same page,” so to speak, as to what constitutes a high ranking or a low ranking. As an analogy, you have probably had some teachers grade your college papers harder than others. The goal of training is to avoid a wide disparity between how different observers and interviewers record the data.

Figure 10.11

Training people so they know what constitutes different ratings when they are collecting data will improve the quality of the information gathered in a marketing research study.

Ricardo Rodriquez – Satisfaction survey – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

For example, if an observation form asks the observers to describe whether a shopper’s behavior is hurried, moderately hurried, or unhurried, they should be given an idea of what defines each rating. Does it depend on how much time the person spends in the store or in the individual aisles? How fast they walk? In other words, the criteria and ratings need to be spelled out.

Collecting International Marketing Research Data

Gathering marketing research data in foreign countries poses special challenges. However, that doesn’t stop firms from doing so. Marketing research companies are located all across the globe, in fact. Eight of the ten largest marketing research companies in the world are headquartered in the United States. However, five of these eight firms earn more of their revenues abroad than they do in the United States. There’s a reason for this: many U.S. markets were saturated, or tapped out, long ago in terms of the amount that they can grow. Coke is an example. As you learned earlier in the book, most of the Coca-Cola Company’s revenues are earned in markets abroad. To be sure, the United States is still a huge market when it comes to the revenues marketing research firms generate by conducting research in the country: in terms of their spending, American consumers fuel the world’s economic engine. Still, emerging countries with growing middle classes, such as China, India, and Brazil, are hot new markets companies want to tap.

What kind of challenges do firms face when trying to conduct marketing research abroad? As we explained, face-to-face surveys are commonly used in third world countries to collect information from people who cannot read or lack phones and computers. However, face-to-face surveys are also common in Europe, despite the fact that phones and computers are readily available. In-home surveys are also common in parts of Europe. By contrast, in some countries, including many Asian countries, it’s considered taboo or rude to try to gather information from strangers either face-to-face or over the phone. In many Muslim countries, women are forbidden to talk to strangers.

And how do you figure out whom to research in foreign countries? That in itself is a problem. In the United States, researchers often ask if they can talk to the heads of households to conduct marketing research. But in countries in which domestic servants or employees are common, the heads of households aren’t necessarily the principal shoppers; their domestic employees are (Malhotra).

Translating surveys is also an issue. Have you ever watched the TV comedians Jay Leno and David Letterman make fun of the English translations found on ethnic menus and products? Research tools such as surveys can suffer from the same problem. Hiring someone who is bilingual to translate a survey into another language can be a disaster if the person isn’t a native speaker of the language to which the survey is being translated.

One way companies try to deal with translation problems is by using back translation. When back translation is used, a native speaker translates the survey into the foreign language and then translates it back again to the original language to determine if there were gaps in meaning—that is, if anything was lost in translation. And it’s not just the language that’s an issue. If the research involves any visual images, they, too, could be a point of confusion. Certain colors, shapes, and symbols can have negative connotations in other countries. For example, the color white represents purity in many Western cultures, but in China, it is the color of death and mourning (Zouhali-Worrall, 2008). Also, look back at the cartoon-completion exercise in Figure 10.8 “Example of a Cartoon-Completion Projective Technique” . What would women in Muslim countries who aren’t allowed to converse with male sellers think of it? Chances are, the cartoon wouldn’t provide you with the information you’re seeking if Muslim women in some countries were asked to complete it.

One way marketing research companies are dealing with the complexities of global research is by merging with or acquiring marketing research companies abroad. The Nielsen Company is the largest marketing research company in the world. The firm operates in more than a hundred countries and employs more than forty thousand people. Many of its expansions have been the result of acquisitions and mergers.

Step 6: Analyze the Data

Step 6 involves analyzing the data to ensure it’s as accurate as possible. If the research is collected by hand using a pen and pencil, it’s entered into a computer. Or respondents might have already entered the information directly into a computer. For example, when Toyota goes to an event such as a car show, the automaker’s marketing personnel ask would-be buyers to complete questionnaires directly on computers. Companies are also beginning to experiment with software that can be used to collect data using mobile phones.

Once all the data is collected, the researchers begin the data cleaning , which is the process of removing data that have accidentally been duplicated (entered twice into the computer) or correcting data that have obviously been recorded wrong. A program such as Microsoft Excel or a statistical program such as Predictive Analytics Software (PASW, which was formerly known as SPSS) is then used to tabulate, or calculate, the basic results of the research, such as the total number of participants and how collectively they answered various questions. The programs can also be used to calculate averages, such as the average age of respondents, their average satisfaction, and so forth. The same can done for percentages, and other values you learned about, or will learn about, in a statistics course, such as the standard deviation, mean, and median for each question.

The information generated by the programs can be used to draw conclusions, such as what all customers might like or not like about an offering based on what the sample group liked or did not like. The information can also be used to spot differences among groups of people. For example, the research might show that people in one area of the country like the product better than people in another area. Trends to predict what might happen in the future can also be spotted.

If there are any open-ended questions respondents have elaborated upon—for example, “Explain why you like the current brand you use better than any other brand”—the answers to each are pasted together, one on top of another, so researchers can compare and summarize the information. As we have explained, qualitative information such as this can give you a fuller picture of the results of the research.

Part of analyzing the data is to see if it seems sound. Does the way in which the research was conducted seem sound? Was the sample size large enough? Are the conclusions that become apparent from it reasonable?

The two most commonly used criteria used to test the soundness of a study are (1) validity and (2) reliability. A study is valid if it actually tested what it was designed to test. For example, did the experiment you ran in Second Life test what it was designed to test? Did it reflect what could really happen in the real world? If not, the research isn’t valid. If you were to repeat the study, and get the same results (or nearly the same results), the research is said to be reliable . If you get a drastically different result if you repeat the study, it’s not reliable. The data collected, or at least some it, can also be compared to, or reconciled with, similar data from other sources either gathered by your firm or by another organization to see if the information seems on target.

Stage 7: Write the Research Report and Present Its Findings

If you end up becoming a marketing professional and conducting a research study after you graduate, hopefully you will do a great job putting the study together. You will have defined the problem correctly, chosen the right sample, collected the data accurately, analyzed it, and your findings will be sound. At that point, you will be required to write the research report and perhaps present it to an audience of decision makers. You will do so via a written report and, in some cases, a slide or PowerPoint presentation based on your written report.

The six basic elements of a research report are as follows.

• Title Page . The title page explains what the report is about, when it was conducted and by whom, and who requested it.
• Table of Contents . The table of contents outlines the major parts of the report, as well as any graphs and charts, and the page numbers on which they can be found.
• Executive Summary . The executive summary summarizes all the details in the report in a very quick way. Many people who receive the report—both executives and nonexecutives—won’t have time to read the entire report. Instead, they will rely on the executive summary to quickly get an idea of the study’s results and what to do about those results.

Methodology and Limitations . The methodology section of the report explains the technical details of how the research was designed and conducted. The section explains, for example, how the data was collected and by whom, the size of the sample, how it was chosen, and whom or what it consisted of (e.g., the number of women versus men or children versus adults). It also includes information about the statistical techniques used to analyze the data.

Every study has errors—sampling errors, interviewer errors, and so forth. The methodology section should explain these details, so decision makers can consider their overall impact. The margin of error is the overall tendency of the study to be off kilter—that is, how far it could have gone wrong in either direction. Remember how newscasters present the presidential polls before an election? They always say, “This candidate is ahead 48 to 44 percent, plus or minus 2 percent.” That “plus or minus” is the margin of error. The larger the margin of error is, the less likely the results of the study are accurate. The margin of error needs to be included in the methodology section.

• Findings . The findings section is a longer, fleshed-out version of the executive summary that goes into more detail about the statistics uncovered by the research that bolster the study’s findings. If you have related research or secondary data on hand that back up the findings, it can be included to help show the study did what it was designed to do.
• Recommendations . The recommendations section should outline the course of action you think should be taken based on the findings of the research and the purpose of the project. For example, if you conducted a global market research study to identify new locations for stores, make a recommendation for the locations (Mersdorf, 2009).

As we have said, these are the basic sections of a marketing research report. However, additional sections can be added as needed. For example, you might need to add a section on the competition and each firm’s market share. If you’re trying to decide on different supply chain options, you will need to include a section on that topic.

As you write the research report, keep your audience in mind. Don’t use technical jargon decision makers and other people reading the report won’t understand. If technical terms must be used, explain them. Also, proofread the document to ferret out any grammatical errors and typos, and ask a couple of other people to proofread behind you to catch any mistakes you might have missed. If your research report is riddled with errors, its credibility will be undermined, even if the findings and recommendations you make are extremely accurate.

Many research reports are presented via PowerPoint. If you’re asked to create a slideshow presentation from the report, don’t try to include every detail in the report on the slides. The information will be too long and tedious for people attending the presentation to read through. And if they do go to the trouble of reading all the information, they probably won’t be listening to the speaker who is making the presentation.

Instead of including all the information from the study in the slides, boil each section of the report down to key points and add some “talking points” only the presenter will see. After or during the presentation, you can give the attendees the longer, paper version of the report so they can read the details at a convenient time, if they choose to.

Key Takeaway

Step 1 in the marketing research process is to define the problem. Businesses take a look at what they believe are symptoms and try to drill down to the potential causes so as to precisely define the problem. The next task for the researcher is to put into writing the research objective, or goal, the research is supposed to accomplish. Step 2 in the process is to design the research. The research design is the “plan of attack.” It outlines what data you are going to gather, from whom, how, and when, and how you’re going to analyze it once it has been obtained. Step 3 is to design the data-collection forms, which need to be standardized so the information gathered on each is comparable. Surveys are a popular way to gather data because they can be easily administered to large numbers of people fairly quickly. However, to produce the best results, survey questionnaires need to be carefully designed and pretested before they are used. Step 4 is drawing the sample, or a subset of potential buyers who are representative of your entire target market. If the sample is not correctly selected, the research will be flawed. Step 5 is to actually collect the data, whether it’s collected by a person face-to-face, over the phone, or with the help of computers or the Internet. The data-collection process is often different in foreign countries. Step 6 is to analyze the data collected for any obvious errors, tabulate the data, and then draw conclusions from it based on the results. The last step in the process, Step 7, is writing the research report and presenting the findings to decision makers.

Review Questions

• Explain why it’s important to carefully define the problem or opportunity a marketing research study is designed to investigate.
• Describe the different types of problems that can occur when marketing research professionals develop questions for surveys.
• How does a probability sample differ from a nonprobability sample?
• What makes a marketing research study valid? What makes a marketing research study reliable?
• What sections should be included in a marketing research report? What is each section designed to do?

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Burns A. and Ronald Bush, Marketing Research , 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010), 85.

Malhotra, N., Marketing Research: An Applied Approach , 6th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall), 764.

McDaniel, C. D. and Roger H. Gates, Marketing Research Essentials , 2nd ed. (Cincinnati: South-Western College Publishing, 1998), 61.

McWilliams, J., “A-B Puts Super-Low-Calorie Beer in Ring with Miller,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , August 16, 2009, http://www.stltoday.com/business/next-matchup-light-weights-a-b-puts-super-low-calorie/article_47511bfe-18ca-5979-bdb9-0526c97d4edf.html (accessed April 13, 2012).

Mersdorf, S., “How to Organize Your Next Survey Report,” Cvent , August 24, 2009, http://survey.cvent.com/blog/cvent-survey/0/0/how-to-organize-your-next-survey-report (accessed December 14, 2009).

Rappeport A. and David Gelles, “Facebook to Form Alliance with Nielsen,” Financial Times , September 23, 2009, 16.

Spangler, T., “Disney Lab Tracks Feelings,” Multichannel News 30, no. 30 (August 3, 2009): 26.

Wagner, J., “Marketing in Second Life Doesn’t Work…Here Is Why!” GigaOM , April 4, 2007, http://gigaom.com/2007/04/04/3-reasons-why-marketing-in-second-life-doesnt-work (accessed December 14, 2009).

Wrenn, B., Robert E. Stevens, and David L. Loudon, Marketing Research: Text and Cases , 2nd ed. (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2007), 180.

Zouhali-Worrall, M., “Found in Translation: Avoiding Multilingual Gaffes,” CNNMoney.com , July 14, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/07/smallbusiness/language_translation.fsb/index.htm (accessed December 14, 2009).

Principles of Marketing Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Learn what goes in a marketing report, when to create one, and how business owners use the reporting process to optimize their marketing strategies.

Business leaders and marketing professionals agree: marketing efforts drive business growth. However, ask either party how, why, and to what degree marketing activities affect sales, and the answer can get complicated.

You can run multiple campaigns at a time, but without a structured reporting system, the marketing data generated by these campaigns can feel less like a record of your successes and more like a general soup of information. For this reason, many companies use the marketing campaign reporting process to compile, organize, and analyze marketing data. Here’s what a marketing report is and how to compile one.

What is a marketing report?

A marketing report helps you assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and make informed decisions. It is a document or presentation that provides an overview of a company’s marketing performance during a given reporting period. Ecommerce marketing reports typically include updated key performance indicators (KPIs) and highlight trends and insights observed during the period. In some cases, they can also contain relevant data analysis, projections, and research findings.

Benefits of marketing reports

Recognize marketing successes, identify missed opportunities, efficiently allocate budgets, align internal teams.

A good marketing report can help you monitor key metrics and gain valuable insights into how your marketing department's performance supports progress toward your business goals. 

Preparing and delivering a marketing report can help marketing teams and business owners take a step back from day-to-day tasks to evaluate what works (and what doesn’t). One outcome of this process is an opportunity to identify and celebrate your team’s successes and use this information to inform future campaigns.

For example, if 50% of your new leads within a particular reporting period came from three blog posts, you might conclude blogging is a promising tactic. You can then dig deeper into successful posts to look for patterns in content type and subject matter, and use your findings to refine your content marketing strategy.

While celebrating a job well done is important, reviewingmarketing metrics can also help you identify holes in your strategy. For example, if your social media engagement data shows that a key segment of your target audience isn’t interacting with your content, you might rethink your strategy to reach this demographic. 

Reports can help you quantify the impact of your marketing investments. A comprehensive overview of marketing results can help you make informed decisions about future budget allocations. This includes how much money to allocate to marketing as a whole and how to distribute funds across marketing strategies.

For example, if your return on investment (ROI) for influencer marketing partnerships is five times greater than your average marketing ROI, you might increase spending on this tactic and reduce spending on others.

Marketing reports can facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. Many marketing teams distribute reports to product development, customer service, and sales teams, increasing transparency and encouraging employees to share insights across departments.

Marketing data can also help teams that work with marketing manage workflows. For example, incorporating anticipated sales-qualified leads for the upcoming quarter in your report can enable your sales team to better strategize.

How often should you create a marketing report?

Weekly marketing reports, monthly marketing reports, quarterly marketing reports.

Reporting frequency varies by company, report type, and purpose. Although daily marketing reports are rare, many teams use weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports. Here’s an overview of when to consider each option:

Marketers use weekly reports to monitor active, short-term campaigns (such as holiday sales events) and make data-driven adjustments to optimize results. Granular in nature, weekly reports help individual teams keep tabs on day-to-day performance.

For example, a social media marketing team might pull important metrics like post reach, engagement, and click-through-rate (CTR) data weekly to determine whether their campaign is on track, identify high- and low-performing posts, and spot relevant performance trends. 

Monthly marketing reports help align entire marketing departments on common, medium-term goals. A month is typically enough time to reveal meaningful performance trends, but monthly reports are also frequent enough to allow in-depth data analysis and support mid-course adjustments to ongoing campaigns.

Monthly reporting also makes it easy to compare performance to the same month in the previous year. For example, a retail company might compare November 2024 data to November 2023 data to contrast both years’ seasonal uptick in sales.

Longer reporting periods encompass more data and summarize high-level trends, making them ideal for company-wide meetings. Because of the volume of data, quarterly reports tend to focus on broad outcomes over granular details, making them useful for monitoring long-term progress. The broader scope of data also minimizes statistical anomalies and improves the accuracy of future performance predictions based on historical outcomes. Like monthly reports, quarterly reports also facilitate year-over-year comparisons.

For example, a CMO might present the quarterly report at the Q1 all-hands meeting, informing employees across departments about the marketing team’s successes and insights into customer behavior.

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What to include in a marketing report

Initiatives.

General marketing reports typically include a strategy overview, a highlights section, an overview of marketing activities, and an analytics section. Here’s what to include in each:

Provide high-level information about the marketing strategy relevant to the report, including information about goals, budgets, target audiences, and marketing channels. Orienting report readers to your marketing strategy provides context that can help them interpret report data.

Including a highlights section allows you to showcase your success and provides readers skimming the report with key takeaways. You might include particularly strong or improved KPIs, high-performing tactics or content types, and information about relevant trends in the data.

Provide details about the marketing initiatives covered in the report. Include information about marketing campaigns, events, and any major projects, like updating your site content or brand messaging.

Include key channel and campaign analytics, such as:

• Social media marketing analytics. Your social media marketing report should include key metrics from social media channels such as post reach, engagement rates, and click-through rates (CTR). You can pull this data directly from social media platforms or a social media analytics tool .
• Email marketing analytics. Include email campaign metrics like open rate, CTR, bounce rate, new subscribers, total subscribers, and unsubscribe rate. Many email marketing platforms , like Shopify Email and Mailchimp , make it easy for marketers to access campaign data and run reports.
• Website analytics. Most digital marketing reports include web performance data, including website traffic metrics like total site visits, unique visitors, average time on page, and bounce rate. You can also provide data on referral sources. For example, you can use Google Analytics to review traffic from your email newsletter, social media channels, and search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Search engine optimization analytics. SEO involves tweaking your site’s structure and content to improve its performance in search engine rankings and increase relevant traffic to your online store. Popular metrics include keyword rankings, number of backlinks, domain authority score, and information about organic site traffic and conversions. You can pull website data from Google Analytics or use an SEO tool with analytics and reporting capabilities to access this information.
• Advertising campaign analytics. Some marketing reports also contain information about specific advertising campaigns. The content and data-gathering methods of your digital marketing report vary according to the advertising strategies you use. For example, you might use Google Ads to generate a pay-per-click report , or PPC marketing report, and rely on an external ad vendor to provide metrics for ads placed through the third-party platform. Common advertising campaign metrics include total impressions, cost per impression (CPI), and cost per click (CPC).

Marketing reporting FAQ

How do you write a marketing campaign report.

Here’s how to create a marketing report in five steps:

1. Identify the report's audience and purpose.

2. Determine your reporting period.

3. Gather key marketing metrics.

4. Organize data by channel, tactic, and type.

5. Include brief analysis where applicable.

If this is your first time creating a marketing report, you can review marketing report examples or use a reporting template to help you structure your findings.

What is a market report in marketing?

A market report is an organized presentation of market research findings; it provides an overview of a company’s marketing performance. Although marketing reports are typically data-driven, some include research findings as well (i.e., a report on a specific market).

What tools can you use to create marketing reports?

Many marketing and ecommerce platforms provide reporting tools to make it easier for teams to create effective marketing reports. Shopify allows users to automatically generate reports using customized marketing report templates .

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Practical Marketing Research

10. how to present the findings.

(Textbook page 389)

This textbook unit discusses basic communications principles and approaches to report writing, presentations and workshops to ensure research findings are accessible, useable and shareable within the client organization.  

Deliverables can include: 

• the full set of research instruments (questionnaires, sampling and tab plans)
• field disposition reports (number of interviews completed and incidence and qualification rates)
• a topline report (an early and succinct view into the data focused only on key objectives)
• the final deliverable (could include raw data, data cross-tabulations, a written report and a personal presentation and/or workshop)

Structure of a Formal Research Report (P.391)

Deliverables should be in formats that can be used and circulated within the client organization with minimal changes – sometimes a delicate balance between the client’s style sheet and the supplier’s own branding.  Most reports should include:

• Title or Cover Page – provides the study name, names of the research house and client, and the date.  The “look” sets the tone and should carry through the whole report.
• Executive Summary – contains a brief summary of objectives, methodology and key findings in one or two slides with bullet points or more visual representations.  It is read first, intensely and by senior people who may not read the rest of the report.  
• Background – outlines why the client commissioned the study; the marketing problem. 
• Objectives – lists the key research objectives as written in the proposal the client had accepted.
• Methodology – describes the research process, target population, sampling and field methodology, data cleaning and analytics methods, all to confirm the validity of the project.  
• While results are traditionally presented with a headline, question asked, a table or graph of numerical frequencies and a sidebar with interpretation, more innovative and visual approaches are emerging.
• It is good practice to organize the report around the objectives so readers can easily find the answers to their business questions. 
• The guiding principle should be to keep the reader’s interest with succinct and direct writing and well-designed tables, charts, graphics and infographics
• Recommendations – are where the researcher becomes a trusted advisor, recommending a course of action for the business. 
• Appendix – contains additional methodological information and the questionnaire, results that have no bearing on the storyline and alternative views of the data 
• Contact information and project number – should be included to help find the right researcher later when questions arise or the study is to be replicated.

Basic Principles of Communication (P.397)

• Write with your audience in mind – including your clients’ internal clients
• Make your report readable and usable, remembering that in a presentation format (e.g. PowerPoint) each page is treated as a single and complete unit.  
• Use fewer words
• Don’t be afraid of white space
• Select a non-intrusive, light background and dark text
• Use clipart and images intelligently
• Use an easy-to-read font
• Use colours judiciously
• Don’t overdo emphasis
• Don’t overuse charts and graphs
• Simplify charts
• Make your headings tell a story
• Keep sidebars focused on insights

Reproducible Research (P.415)

•     R Markdown and Jupyter Notebooks are Graphical User Interfaces that let you produce full text-based or slide-base reports based on interim data, and then automatically read and update the report when final data is available. 

Live Presentations: Principles (P.417)

• Written reports are linear, explaining the content because no one is there to explain it.  Fonts are smaller, and ideas are developed regardless of the space they occupy. 
• In a presentation, the focus is on the presenter who explains the argument while the slides reinforce and illustrate, add proof and visual interest and are markers (what topic are we on?). 
• Create a storyboard to think through the best way to tell the story
• Keep your presentations short by communicating only the critical findings. Think carefully about how many slides you can show in the allotted time.
• Know your audience and what they expect
• Use fonts that make it easy to read from the back of the room or on smartphone screens
• Be economical with words
• Simplify graphs
• Make your charts as lean as possible
• Keep gimmicks to a minimum
• Be mentally prepared by knowing your material and rehearsing 
• Work on your physical presence and speaking style (see textbook tips)

How to Integrate the Findings: The Workshop (P.427)

To ensure the report doesn’t disappear into the archives, set up a workshop with exercises that help stakeholders apply the findings to the decisions they will have to make.  This section of the textbook unit offers tips to help a researcher organize and facilitate a workshop, an added step that elevates the research function and brings it into strategic discussions. 

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104 Reading: The Marketing Research Process

A standard approach to research inquiries.

Marketing research is a useful and necessary tool for helping marketers and an organization’s executive leadership make wise decisions. Carrying out marketing research can involve highly specialized skills that go deeper than the information outlined in this module. However, it is important for any marketer to be familiar with the basic procedures and techniques of marketing research.

It is very likely that at some point a marketing professional will need to supervise an internal marketing research activity or to work with an outside marketing research firm to conduct a research project. Managers who understand the research function can do a better job of framing the problem and critically appraising the proposals made by research specialists. They are also in a better position to evaluate their findings and recommendations.

Periodically marketers themselves need to find solutions to marketing problems without the assistance of marketing research specialists inside or outside the company. If you are familiar with the basic procedures of marketing research, you can supervise and even conduct a reasonably satisfactory search for the information needed.

Step 1: Identify the Problem

The first step for any marketing research activity is to clearly identify and define the problem you are trying to solve. You start by stating the marketing or business problem you need to address and for which you need additional information to figure out a solution. Next, articulate the objectives for the research: what do you want to understand by the time the research project is completed? What specific information, guidance, or recommendations need to come out of the research in order to make it a worthwhile investment of the organization’s time and money?

It’s important to share the problem definition and research objectives with other team members to get their input and further refine your understanding of the problem and what is needed to solve it. At times, the problem you really need to solve is not the same problem that appears on the surface. Collaborating with other stakeholders helps refine your understanding of the problem, focus your thinking, and prioritize what you hope to learn from the research. Prioritizing your objectives is particularly helpful if you don’t have the time or resources to investigate everything you want.

To flesh out your understanding of the problem, it’s useful to begin brainstorming actual research questions you want to explore. What are the questions you need to answer in order to get to the research outcomes? What is the missing information that marketing research will help you find? The goal at this stage is to generate a set of preliminary, big-picture questions that will frame your research inquiry. You will revisit these research questions later in the process, but when you’re getting started, this exercise helps clarify the scope of the project, whom you need to talk to, what information may already be available, and where to look for the information you don’t yet have.

Applied Example: Marketing Research for Bookends

To illustrate the marketing research process, let’s return to Uncle Dan and his ailing bookstore, Bookends. You need a lot of information if you’re going to help Dan turn things around, so marketing research is a good idea. You begin by identifying the problem and then work to set down your research objectives and initial research questions:

Identifying Problems, Objectives, and Questions

Core business problem Dan needs to solve

• How to get more people to spend more money at Bookends.

Research Objectives

• Identify promising target audiences for Bookends
• Identify strategies for rapidly increasing revenue from these target audiences

Initial research questions

• Who are Bookends’ current customers?
• How much money do they spend?
• Why do they come to Bookends?
• What do they wish Bookends offered?
• Who isn’t coming to Bookends, and why?

Step 2: Develop a Research Plan

Once you have a problem definition, research objectives, and a preliminary set of research questions, the next step is to develop a research plan. Essential to this plan is identifying precisely what information you need to answer your questions and achieve your objectives. Do you need to understand customer opinions about something? Are you looking for a clearer picture of customer needs and related behaviors? Do you need sales, spending, or revenue data? Do you need information about competitors’ products or insight about what will make prospective customers notice you? When do you need the information, and what’s the time frame for getting it? What budget and resources are available?

Once you have clarified what kind of information you need and the timing and budget for your project, you can develop the research design. This details how you plan to collect and analyze the information you’re after. Some types of information are readily available through  secondary research and secondary data sources. Secondary research analyzes information that has already been collected for another purpose by a third party, such as a government agency, an industry association, or another company. Other types of information need to from talking directly to customers about your research questions. This is known as primary research , which collects primary data captured expressly for your research inquiry.   Marketing research projects may include secondary research, primary research, or both.

Depending on your objectives and budget, sometimes a small-scale project will be enough to get the insight and direction you need. At other times, in order to reach the level of certainty or detail required, you may need larger-scale research involving participation from hundreds or even thousands of individual consumers. The research plan lays out the information your project will capture—both primary and secondary data—and describes what you will do with it to get the answers you need. (Note: You’ll learn more about data collection methods and when to use them later in this module.)

Your data collection plan goes hand in hand with your analysis plan. Different types of analysis yield different types of results. The analysis plan should match the type of data you are collecting, as well as the outcomes your project is seeking and the resources at your disposal. Simpler research designs tend to require simpler analysis techniques. More complex research designs can yield powerful results, such as understanding causality and trade-offs in customer perceptions. However, these more sophisticated designs can require more time and money to execute effectively, both in terms of data collection and analytical expertise.

The research plan also specifies who will conduct the research activities, including data collection, analysis, interpretation, and reporting on results. At times a singlehanded marketing manager or research specialist runs the entire research project. At other times, a company may contract with a marketing research analyst or consulting firm to conduct the research. In this situation, the marketing manager provides supervisory oversight to ensure the research delivers on expectations.

Finally, the research plan indicates who will interpret the research findings and how the findings will be reported. This part of the research plan should consider the internal audience(s) for the research and what reporting format will be most helpful. Often, senior executives are primary stakeholders, and they’re anxious for marketing research to inform and validate their choices. When this is the case, getting their buy-in on the research plan is recommended to make sure that they are comfortable with the approach and receptive to the potential findings.

Applied Example: A Bookends Research Plan

You talk over the results of your problem identification work with Dan. He thinks you’re on the right track and wants to know what’s next. You explain that the next step is to put together a detailed plan for getting answers to the research questions.

Dan is enthusiastic, but he’s also short on money. You realize that such a financial constraint will limit what’s possible, but with Dan’s help, you can do something worthwhile. Below is the research plan you sketch out:

Identifying Data Types, Timing, Budget, Data Collection Methods, Analysis, and Interpretation

Types of data needed

• Demographics and attitudes of current Bookends customers
• Current customers’ spending patterns
• Metro area demographics (to determine types of people who aren’t coming to the store)

Timing and budget

• Complete project within 1 month
• No out-of-pocket spending

Data collection methods

• Current customer survey using a free online survey tool
• Store sales data mapped to customer survey results
• Statistics Canada data on metro-area demographics
• 8 to 10 intercept (“man on the street”) interviews with non-customers

Analysis plan

• Use Excel or Google Sheets to tabulate data
• Marina (statistician cousin) to assist in identifying data patterns that could become market segments

Interpretation and Reporting

• You and Dan will work together to comb through the data and see what insights it produces. You’ll use PowerPoint to create a report that lays out significant results, key findings, and recommendations.

Step 3: Conduct the Research

Conducting research can be a fun and exciting part of the marketing research process. After struggling with the gaps in your knowledge of market dynamics—which led you to embark on a marketing research project in the first place—now things are about to change. Conducting research begins to generate information that helps answer your urgent marketing questions. As previously mentioned, there are two types of research: primary and secondary. Primary research is research that you conduct yourself (i.e., you go out into the field and find data and complete experiments). Secondary research is research conducted or synthesized by someone else (i.e., someone else has gone out into the field or someone else has compiled multiple sources of research). Though it may seem counterintuitive based on their names, typically data collection begins by reviewing any existing secondary research. After getting everything you can from secondary research, it’s time to shift attention to primary research. After all, it’s much easier (and smarter!) to review existing research before potentially redoing experiments or recapturing known information.

Secondary Research

With secondary research, it’s important to narrow your scope to existing research and data that provide some information or insight about the problem. Prior research projects, internal data analyses, industry reports, customer satisfaction survey results, and other information sources may be worthwhile to review. Even though these resources may not answer your research questions fully, they may further illuminate the problem you are trying to solve. Secondary research and data sources are nearly always cheaper than capturing new information on your own. Your marketing research project should benefit from prior work wherever possible.

Primary Research

You may not always complete primary research, but it is often part of research plans. Primary research involves asking questions and then listening to and/or observing the behavior of the target audience you are studying. In order to generate reliable, accurate results, it is important to use proper scientific methods for primary research data collection and analysis. This includes identifying the right individuals and number of people to talk to, using carefully worded surveys or interview scripts, and capturing data accurately. Without proper techniques, you may inadvertently get bad data or discover bias in the responses that distorts the results and points you in the wrong direction. The module on Marketing Research Techniques discusses these issues in further detail since the procedures for getting reliable data vary by research method.

Applied Example: Getting the Data on Bookends

Dan is on board with the research plan, and he’s excited to dig into the project. You start with secondary data, getting a dump of Dan’s sales data from the past two years, along with related information: customer name, postal code, frequency of purchase, gender, date of purchase, and discounts/promotions (if any).

You visit the U.S. Census Bureau website for Arkansas to download demographic data about a metro area. The data show all census subdivisions in the area, along with population size, gender breakdown, age ranges, income, and education levels.

The next part of the project is customer survey data. You work with Dan to put together a short survey about customer attitudes toward Bookends, how often and why they come, where else they spend money on books and entertainment, and why they go other places besides Bookends. Dan comes up with the great idea of offering a 5 percent discount coupon to anyone who completes the survey. Although it eats into his profits, this scheme gets more people to complete the survey and buy books, so it’s worth it.

For a couple of days, you and Dan take turns doing “man on the street” interviews (you interview the guy in the red hat, for instance). You find people who say they’ve never been to Bookends and ask them a few questions about why they haven’t visited the store, where else they buy books and other entertainment, and what might get them interested in visiting Bookends sometime. This is a lot of work, but for a zero-budget project, it’s coming together pretty well.

Step 4: Analyze and Report Findings

Analyzing the data obtained in a market survey involves transforming the primary and/or secondary data into useful information and insights that answer the research questions. This information is condensed into a format to be used by managers—usually a presentation or detailed report.

Analysis starts with formatting, cleaning, and editing the data to make sure that it’s suitable for whatever analytical techniques are being used. Next, data is tabulated to show what’s happening: what do customers actually think? What’s happening with purchasing or other behaviors? How do revenue figures actually add up? Whatever the research questions, the analysis takes source data and applies analytical techniques to provide a clearer picture of what’s going on. This process may involve simple or sophisticated techniques, depending on the research outcomes required. Common analytical techniques include regression analysis to determine correlations between factors; conjoint analysis to determine trade-offs and priorities; predictive modeling to anticipate patterns and causality, and analysis of unstructured data such as Internet search terms or social media posts to provide context and meaning around what people say and do.

Good analysis is important because the interpretation of research data—the “so what?” factor—depends on it. The analysis combs through data to paint a picture of what’s going on. The interpretation goes further to explain what the research data means and make recommendations about what managers need to know and do based on the research results. For example, what is the shortlist of key findings and takeaways that managers should remember from the research? What are the market segments you’ve identified, and which ones should you target?  What are the primary reasons your customers choose your competitor’s product over yours, and what does this mean for future improvements to your product?

Individuals with a good working knowledge of the business should be involved in interpreting the data because they are in the best position to identify significant insights and make recommendations from the research findings. Marketing research reports incorporate both analysis and interpretation of data to address the project objectives.

The final report for a marketing research project may be in written form or slide-presentation format, depending on organizational culture and management preferences. Often a slide presentation is the preferred format for initially sharing research results with internal stakeholders. Particularly for large, complex projects, a written report may be a better format for discussing detailed findings and nuances in the data, which managers can study and reference in the future.

Applied Example: Analysis and Insights for Bookends

Getting the data was a bit of a hassle, but now you’ve got it and you’re excited to see what it reveals. Your statistician cousin, Marina, turns out to be a whiz with both the sales data and the census data. She identified several demographic profiles in the metro area that looked a lot like lifestyle segments. Then she mapped Bookends’ sales data into those segments to show who is and isn’t visiting Bookends. After matching customer survey data to the sales data, she broke down the segments further based on their spending levels and reasons they visit Bookends.

Gradually a clearer picture of Bookends’ customers is beginning to emerge: who they are, why they come, why they don’t come, and what role Bookends plays in their lives. Right away, a couple of higher-priority segments—based on their spending levels, proximity, and loyalty to Bookends—stand out. You and your uncle are definitely seeing some possibilities for making the bookstore a more prominent part of their lives. You capture these insights as “recommendations to be considered” while you evaluate the right marketing mix for each of the new segments you’d like to focus on.

Step 5: Take Action

Once the report is complete, the presentation is delivered, and the recommendations are made, the marketing research project is over, right? Wrong.

What comes next is arguably the most important step of all: taking action based on your research results.

If your project has done a good job interpreting the findings and translating them into recommendations for the marketing team and other areas of the business, this step may seem relatively straightforward. When the research results validate a path the organization is already on, the “take action” step can galvanize the team to move further and faster in that same direction.

Things are not so simple when the research results indicate a new direction or a significant shift is advisable. In these cases, it’s worthwhile to spend time helping managers understand the research, explain why it is wise to shift course, and explain how the business will benefit from the new path. As with any important business decision, managers must think deeply about the new approach and carefully map strategies, tactics, and available resources to plan effectively. By making the results available and accessible to managers and their execution teams, the marketing research project can serve as an ongoing guide and touchstone to help the organization plan, execute, and adjust course as it works toward desired goals and outcomes.

It is worth mentioning that many marketing research projects are never translated into management action. Sometimes this is because the report is too technical and difficult to understand. In other cases, the research conclusions fail to provide useful insights or solutions to the problem, or the report writer fails to offer specific suggestions for translating the research findings into management strategy. These pitfalls can be avoided by paying due attention to the research objectives throughout the project and allocating sufficient time and resources to do a good job interpreting research results for those who will need to act on them.

Applied Example: Bookends’ New Customer Campaign

Your research findings and recommendations identified three segments for Bookends to focus on. Based on the demographics, lifestyle, and spending patterns found during your marketing research, you’re able to name them: 1) Bored Empty-Nesters, 2) Busy Families, and 3) Hipster Wannabes. Dan has a decent-sized clientele across all three groups, and they are pretty good spenders when they come in. But until now he hasn’t done much to purposely attract any of them.

With newly identified segments in focus, you and Dan begin brainstorming about a marketing mix to target each group. What types of books and other products would appeal to each one? What activities or events would bring them into the store? Are there promotions or particular messages that would induce them to buy at Bookends instead of Amazon or another bookseller? How will Dan reach and communicate with each group? And what can you do to bring more new customers into the store within these target groups?

Even though Bookends is a real-life project with serious consequences for your uncle Dan, it’s also a fun laboratory where you can test out some of the principles you’re learning in your marketing class. You’re figuring out quickly what it’s like to be a marketer.

Well done, rookie!

Introduction to Marketing - MKTG 3433 Copyright © 2022 by WCOB Marketing Faculty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Home » Research Report – Example, Writing Guide and Types

Research Report – Example, Writing Guide and Types

Table of Contents

Research Report

Definition:

Research Report is a written document that presents the results of a research project or study, including the research question, methodology, results, and conclusions, in a clear and objective manner.

The purpose of a research report is to communicate the findings of the research to the intended audience, which could be other researchers, stakeholders, or the general public.

Components of Research Report

Components of Research Report are as follows:

Introduction

The introduction sets the stage for the research report and provides a brief overview of the research question or problem being investigated. It should include a clear statement of the purpose of the study and its significance or relevance to the field of research. It may also provide background information or a literature review to help contextualize the research.

Literature Review

The literature review provides a critical analysis and synthesis of the existing research and scholarship relevant to the research question or problem. It should identify the gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions in the literature and show how the current study addresses these issues. The literature review also establishes the theoretical framework or conceptual model that guides the research.

Methodology

The methodology section describes the research design, methods, and procedures used to collect and analyze data. It should include information on the sample or participants, data collection instruments, data collection procedures, and data analysis techniques. The methodology should be clear and detailed enough to allow other researchers to replicate the study.

The results section presents the findings of the study in a clear and objective manner. It should provide a detailed description of the data and statistics used to answer the research question or test the hypothesis. Tables, graphs, and figures may be included to help visualize the data and illustrate the key findings.

The discussion section interprets the results of the study and explains their significance or relevance to the research question or problem. It should also compare the current findings with those of previous studies and identify the implications for future research or practice. The discussion should be based on the results presented in the previous section and should avoid speculation or unfounded conclusions.

The conclusion summarizes the key findings of the study and restates the main argument or thesis presented in the introduction. It should also provide a brief overview of the contributions of the study to the field of research and the implications for practice or policy.

The references section lists all the sources cited in the research report, following a specific citation style, such as APA or MLA.

The appendices section includes any additional material, such as data tables, figures, or instruments used in the study, that could not be included in the main text due to space limitations.

Types of Research Report

Types of Research Report are as follows:

Thesis is a type of research report. A thesis is a long-form research document that presents the findings and conclusions of an original research study conducted by a student as part of a graduate or postgraduate program. It is typically written by a student pursuing a higher degree, such as a Master’s or Doctoral degree, although it can also be written by researchers or scholars in other fields.

Research Paper

Research paper is a type of research report. A research paper is a document that presents the results of a research study or investigation. Research papers can be written in a variety of fields, including science, social science, humanities, and business. They typically follow a standard format that includes an introduction, literature review, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion sections.

Technical Report

A technical report is a detailed report that provides information about a specific technical or scientific problem or project. Technical reports are often used in engineering, science, and other technical fields to document research and development work.

Progress Report

A progress report provides an update on the progress of a research project or program over a specific period of time. Progress reports are typically used to communicate the status of a project to stakeholders, funders, or project managers.

Feasibility Report

A feasibility report assesses the feasibility of a proposed project or plan, providing an analysis of the potential risks, benefits, and costs associated with the project. Feasibility reports are often used in business, engineering, and other fields to determine the viability of a project before it is undertaken.

Field Report

A field report documents observations and findings from fieldwork, which is research conducted in the natural environment or setting. Field reports are often used in anthropology, ecology, and other social and natural sciences.

Experimental Report

An experimental report documents the results of a scientific experiment, including the hypothesis, methods, results, and conclusions. Experimental reports are often used in biology, chemistry, and other sciences to communicate the results of laboratory experiments.

Case Study Report

A case study report provides an in-depth analysis of a specific case or situation, often used in psychology, social work, and other fields to document and understand complex cases or phenomena.

Literature Review Report

A literature review report synthesizes and summarizes existing research on a specific topic, providing an overview of the current state of knowledge on the subject. Literature review reports are often used in social sciences, education, and other fields to identify gaps in the literature and guide future research.

Research Report Example

Following is a Research Report Example sample for Students:

Title: The Impact of Social Media on Academic Performance among High School Students

This study aims to investigate the relationship between social media use and academic performance among high school students. The study utilized a quantitative research design, which involved a survey questionnaire administered to a sample of 200 high school students. The findings indicate that there is a negative correlation between social media use and academic performance, suggesting that excessive social media use can lead to poor academic performance among high school students. The results of this study have important implications for educators, parents, and policymakers, as they highlight the need for strategies that can help students balance their social media use and academic responsibilities.

Introduction:

Social media has become an integral part of the lives of high school students. With the widespread use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, students can connect with friends, share photos and videos, and engage in discussions on a range of topics. While social media offers many benefits, concerns have been raised about its impact on academic performance. Many studies have found a negative correlation between social media use and academic performance among high school students (Kirschner & Karpinski, 2010; Paul, Baker, & Cochran, 2012).

Given the growing importance of social media in the lives of high school students, it is important to investigate its impact on academic performance. This study aims to address this gap by examining the relationship between social media use and academic performance among high school students.

Methodology:

The study utilized a quantitative research design, which involved a survey questionnaire administered to a sample of 200 high school students. The questionnaire was developed based on previous studies and was designed to measure the frequency and duration of social media use, as well as academic performance.

The participants were selected using a convenience sampling technique, and the survey questionnaire was distributed in the classroom during regular school hours. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlation analysis.

The findings indicate that the majority of high school students use social media platforms on a daily basis, with Facebook being the most popular platform. The results also show a negative correlation between social media use and academic performance, suggesting that excessive social media use can lead to poor academic performance among high school students.

Discussion:

The results of this study have important implications for educators, parents, and policymakers. The negative correlation between social media use and academic performance suggests that strategies should be put in place to help students balance their social media use and academic responsibilities. For example, educators could incorporate social media into their teaching strategies to engage students and enhance learning. Parents could limit their children’s social media use and encourage them to prioritize their academic responsibilities. Policymakers could develop guidelines and policies to regulate social media use among high school students.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, this study provides evidence of the negative impact of social media on academic performance among high school students. The findings highlight the need for strategies that can help students balance their social media use and academic responsibilities. Further research is needed to explore the specific mechanisms by which social media use affects academic performance and to develop effective strategies for addressing this issue.

Limitations:

One limitation of this study is the use of convenience sampling, which limits the generalizability of the findings to other populations. Future studies should use random sampling techniques to increase the representativeness of the sample. Another limitation is the use of self-reported measures, which may be subject to social desirability bias. Future studies could use objective measures of social media use and academic performance, such as tracking software and school records.

Implications:

The findings of this study have important implications for educators, parents, and policymakers. Educators could incorporate social media into their teaching strategies to engage students and enhance learning. For example, teachers could use social media platforms to share relevant educational resources and facilitate online discussions. Parents could limit their children’s social media use and encourage them to prioritize their academic responsibilities. They could also engage in open communication with their children to understand their social media use and its impact on their academic performance. Policymakers could develop guidelines and policies to regulate social media use among high school students. For example, schools could implement social media policies that restrict access during class time and encourage responsible use.

References:

• Kirschner, P. A., & Karpinski, A. C. (2010). Facebook® and academic performance. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(6), 1237-1245.
• Paul, J. A., Baker, H. M., & Cochran, J. D. (2012). Effect of online social networking on student academic performance. Journal of the Research Center for Educational Technology, 8(1), 1-19.
• Pantic, I. (2014). Online social networking and mental health. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 17(10), 652-657.
• Rosen, L. D., Carrier, L. M., & Cheever, N. A. (2013). Facebook and texting made me do it: Media-induced task-switching while studying. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 948-958.

Note*: Above mention, Example is just a sample for the students’ guide. Do not directly copy and paste as your College or University assignment. Kindly do some research and Write your own.

Applications of Research Report

Research reports have many applications, including:

• Communicating research findings: The primary application of a research report is to communicate the results of a study to other researchers, stakeholders, or the general public. The report serves as a way to share new knowledge, insights, and discoveries with others in the field.
• Informing policy and practice : Research reports can inform policy and practice by providing evidence-based recommendations for decision-makers. For example, a research report on the effectiveness of a new drug could inform regulatory agencies in their decision-making process.
• Supporting further research: Research reports can provide a foundation for further research in a particular area. Other researchers may use the findings and methodology of a report to develop new research questions or to build on existing research.
• Evaluating programs and interventions : Research reports can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of programs and interventions in achieving their intended outcomes. For example, a research report on a new educational program could provide evidence of its impact on student performance.
• Demonstrating impact : Research reports can be used to demonstrate the impact of research funding or to evaluate the success of research projects. By presenting the findings and outcomes of a study, research reports can show the value of research to funders and stakeholders.
• Enhancing professional development : Research reports can be used to enhance professional development by providing a source of information and learning for researchers and practitioners in a particular field. For example, a research report on a new teaching methodology could provide insights and ideas for educators to incorporate into their own practice.

How to write Research Report

Here are some steps you can follow to write a research report:

• Identify the research question: The first step in writing a research report is to identify your research question. This will help you focus your research and organize your findings.
• Conduct research : Once you have identified your research question, you will need to conduct research to gather relevant data and information. This can involve conducting experiments, reviewing literature, or analyzing data.
• Organize your findings: Once you have gathered all of your data, you will need to organize your findings in a way that is clear and understandable. This can involve creating tables, graphs, or charts to illustrate your results.
• Write the report: Once you have organized your findings, you can begin writing the report. Start with an introduction that provides background information and explains the purpose of your research. Next, provide a detailed description of your research methods and findings. Finally, summarize your results and draw conclusions based on your findings.
• Proofread and edit: After you have written your report, be sure to proofread and edit it carefully. Check for grammar and spelling errors, and make sure that your report is well-organized and easy to read.
• Include a reference list: Be sure to include a list of references that you used in your research. This will give credit to your sources and allow readers to further explore the topic if they choose.
• Format your report: Finally, format your report according to the guidelines provided by your instructor or organization. This may include formatting requirements for headings, margins, fonts, and spacing.

Purpose of Research Report

The purpose of a research report is to communicate the results of a research study to a specific audience, such as peers in the same field, stakeholders, or the general public. The report provides a detailed description of the research methods, findings, and conclusions.

Some common purposes of a research report include:

• Sharing knowledge: A research report allows researchers to share their findings and knowledge with others in their field. This helps to advance the field and improve the understanding of a particular topic.
• Identifying trends: A research report can identify trends and patterns in data, which can help guide future research and inform decision-making.
• Addressing problems: A research report can provide insights into problems or issues and suggest solutions or recommendations for addressing them.
• Evaluating programs or interventions : A research report can evaluate the effectiveness of programs or interventions, which can inform decision-making about whether to continue, modify, or discontinue them.
• Meeting regulatory requirements: In some fields, research reports are required to meet regulatory requirements, such as in the case of drug trials or environmental impact studies.

When to Write Research Report

A research report should be written after completing the research study. This includes collecting data, analyzing the results, and drawing conclusions based on the findings. Once the research is complete, the report should be written in a timely manner while the information is still fresh in the researcher’s mind.

In academic settings, research reports are often required as part of coursework or as part of a thesis or dissertation. In this case, the report should be written according to the guidelines provided by the instructor or institution.

In other settings, such as in industry or government, research reports may be required to inform decision-making or to comply with regulatory requirements. In these cases, the report should be written as soon as possible after the research is completed in order to inform decision-making in a timely manner.

Overall, the timing of when to write a research report depends on the purpose of the research, the expectations of the audience, and any regulatory requirements that need to be met. However, it is important to complete the report in a timely manner while the information is still fresh in the researcher’s mind.

Characteristics of Research Report

There are several characteristics of a research report that distinguish it from other types of writing. These characteristics include:

• Objective: A research report should be written in an objective and unbiased manner. It should present the facts and findings of the research study without any personal opinions or biases.
• Systematic: A research report should be written in a systematic manner. It should follow a clear and logical structure, and the information should be presented in a way that is easy to understand and follow.
• Detailed: A research report should be detailed and comprehensive. It should provide a thorough description of the research methods, results, and conclusions.
• Accurate : A research report should be accurate and based on sound research methods. The findings and conclusions should be supported by data and evidence.
• Organized: A research report should be well-organized. It should include headings and subheadings to help the reader navigate the report and understand the main points.
• Clear and concise: A research report should be written in clear and concise language. The information should be presented in a way that is easy to understand, and unnecessary jargon should be avoided.
• Citations and references: A research report should include citations and references to support the findings and conclusions. This helps to give credit to other researchers and to provide readers with the opportunity to further explore the topic.

Advantages of Research Report

Research reports have several advantages, including:

• Communicating research findings: Research reports allow researchers to communicate their findings to a wider audience, including other researchers, stakeholders, and the general public. This helps to disseminate knowledge and advance the understanding of a particular topic.
• Providing evidence for decision-making : Research reports can provide evidence to inform decision-making, such as in the case of policy-making, program planning, or product development. The findings and conclusions can help guide decisions and improve outcomes.
• Supporting further research: Research reports can provide a foundation for further research on a particular topic. Other researchers can build on the findings and conclusions of the report, which can lead to further discoveries and advancements in the field.
• Demonstrating expertise: Research reports can demonstrate the expertise of the researchers and their ability to conduct rigorous and high-quality research. This can be important for securing funding, promotions, and other professional opportunities.
• Meeting regulatory requirements: In some fields, research reports are required to meet regulatory requirements, such as in the case of drug trials or environmental impact studies. Producing a high-quality research report can help ensure compliance with these requirements.

Limitations of Research Report

Despite their advantages, research reports also have some limitations, including:

• Time-consuming: Conducting research and writing a report can be a time-consuming process, particularly for large-scale studies. This can limit the frequency and speed of producing research reports.
• Expensive: Conducting research and producing a report can be expensive, particularly for studies that require specialized equipment, personnel, or data. This can limit the scope and feasibility of some research studies.
• Limited generalizability: Research studies often focus on a specific population or context, which can limit the generalizability of the findings to other populations or contexts.
• Potential bias : Researchers may have biases or conflicts of interest that can influence the findings and conclusions of the research study. Additionally, participants may also have biases or may not be representative of the larger population, which can limit the validity and reliability of the findings.
• Accessibility: Research reports may be written in technical or academic language, which can limit their accessibility to a wider audience. Additionally, some research may be behind paywalls or require specialized access, which can limit the ability of others to read and use the findings.

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• How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

Published on August 30, 2022 by Tegan George . Revised on July 18, 2023.

A results section is where you report the main findings of the data collection and analysis you conducted for your thesis or dissertation . You should report all relevant results concisely and objectively, in a logical order. Don’t include subjective interpretations of why you found these results or what they mean—any evaluation should be saved for the discussion section .

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Table of contents

How to write a results section, reporting quantitative research results, reporting qualitative research results, results vs. discussion vs. conclusion, checklist: research results, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about results sections.

When conducting research, it’s important to report the results of your study prior to discussing your interpretations of it. This gives your reader a clear idea of exactly what you found and keeps the data itself separate from your subjective analysis.

Here are a few best practices:

• Your results should always be written in the past tense.
• While the length of this section depends on how much data you collected and analyzed, it should be written as concisely as possible.
• Only include results that are directly relevant to answering your research questions . Avoid speculative or interpretative words like “appears” or “implies.”
• If you have other results you’d like to include, consider adding them to an appendix or footnotes.
• Always start out with your broadest results first, and then flow into your more granular (but still relevant) ones. Think of it like a shoe store: first discuss the shoes as a whole, then the sneakers, boots, sandals, etc.

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If you conducted quantitative research , you’ll likely be working with the results of some sort of statistical analysis .

Your results section should report the results of any statistical tests you used to compare groups or assess relationships between variables . It should also state whether or not each hypothesis was supported.

The most logical way to structure quantitative results is to frame them around your research questions or hypotheses. For each question or hypothesis, share:

• A reminder of the type of analysis you used (e.g., a two-sample t test or simple linear regression ). A more detailed description of your analysis should go in your methodology section.
• A concise summary of each relevant result, both positive and negative. This can include any relevant descriptive statistics (e.g., means and standard deviations ) as well as inferential statistics (e.g., t scores, degrees of freedom , and p values ). Remember, these numbers are often placed in parentheses.
• A brief statement of how each result relates to the question, or whether the hypothesis was supported. You can briefly mention any results that didn’t fit with your expectations and assumptions, but save any speculation on their meaning or consequences for your discussion  and conclusion.

A note on tables and figures

In quantitative research, it’s often helpful to include visual elements such as graphs, charts, and tables , but only if they are directly relevant to your results. Give these elements clear, descriptive titles and labels so that your reader can easily understand what is being shown. If you want to include any other visual elements that are more tangential in nature, consider adding a figure and table list .

As a rule of thumb:

• Tables are used to communicate exact values, giving a concise overview of various results
• Graphs and charts are used to visualize trends and relationships, giving an at-a-glance illustration of key findings

Don’t forget to also mention any tables and figures you used within the text of your results section. Summarize or elaborate on specific aspects you think your reader should know about rather than merely restating the same numbers already shown.

A two-sample t test was used to test the hypothesis that higher social distance from environmental problems would reduce the intent to donate to environmental organizations, with donation intention (recorded as a score from 1 to 10) as the outcome variable and social distance (categorized as either a low or high level of social distance) as the predictor variable.Social distance was found to be positively correlated with donation intention, t (98) = 12.19, p < .001, with the donation intention of the high social distance group 0.28 points higher, on average, than the low social distance group (see figure 1). This contradicts the initial hypothesis that social distance would decrease donation intention, and in fact suggests a small effect in the opposite direction.

Figure 1: Intention to donate to environmental organizations based on social distance from impact of environmental damage.

In qualitative research , your results might not all be directly related to specific hypotheses. In this case, you can structure your results section around key themes or topics that emerged from your analysis of the data.

For each theme, start with general observations about what the data showed. You can mention:

• Recurring points of agreement or disagreement
• Patterns and trends
• Particularly significant snippets from individual responses

Next, clarify and support these points with direct quotations. Be sure to report any relevant demographic information about participants. Further information (such as full transcripts , if appropriate) can be included in an appendix .

When asked about video games as a form of art, the respondents tended to believe that video games themselves are not an art form, but agreed that creativity is involved in their production. The criteria used to identify artistic video games included design, story, music, and creative teams.One respondent (male, 24) noted a difference in creativity between popular video game genres:

“I think that in role-playing games, there’s more attention to character design, to world design, because the whole story is important and more attention is paid to certain game elements […] so that perhaps you do need bigger teams of creative experts than in an average shooter or something.”

Responses suggest that video game consumers consider some types of games to have more artistic potential than others.

Your results section should objectively report your findings, presenting only brief observations in relation to each question, hypothesis, or theme.

It should not  speculate about the meaning of the results or attempt to answer your main research question . Detailed interpretation of your results is more suitable for your discussion section , while synthesis of your results into an overall answer to your main research question is best left for your conclusion .

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I have completed my data collection and analyzed the results.

I have included all results that are relevant to my research questions.

I have concisely and objectively reported each result, including relevant descriptive statistics and inferential statistics .

I have stated whether each hypothesis was supported or refuted.

I have used tables and figures to illustrate my results where appropriate.

All tables and figures are correctly labelled and referred to in the text.

There is no subjective interpretation or speculation on the meaning of the results.

You've finished writing up your results! Use the other checklists to further improve your thesis.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or research bias, make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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The results chapter of a thesis or dissertation presents your research results concisely and objectively.

In quantitative research , for each question or hypothesis , state:

• The type of analysis used
• Relevant results in the form of descriptive and inferential statistics
• Whether or not the alternative hypothesis was supported

In qualitative research , for each question or theme, describe:

• Recurring patterns
• Significant or representative individual responses
• Relevant quotations from the data

Don’t interpret or speculate in the results chapter.

Results are usually written in the past tense , because they are describing the outcome of completed actions.

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Reporting Research Findings

Introduction.

• Reference Resources
• History and Trends
• Guidance on Reporting Quantitative Reports, Syntheses, and Meta-analyses
• Linguistic Analyses of Written Research Results
• Writing Review Articles
• Writing Qualitative Research
• Scientific Reviewing
• Rhetoric of Evidence-Based Management
• Research on Graphics Perception
• Statistical-Technological Trends

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Reporting Research Findings by James T. Austin LAST REVIEWED: 24 June 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 24 June 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846740-0032

Not all research culminates in publication. This updated article surveys themes in reporting research findings for scholars and students. As context, consider that investigations of organizational phenomena require a series of choices that are cast here as craft. Choices span primary, secondary, and synthesis designs across qualitative and quantitative traditions. Primary research is the traditional design, measurement, and analysis of collected data, while secondary research involves reanalysis of existing data sets (obtained from peers or repositories), and research synthesis involves narrative or quantitative aggregation of studies. This distinction also holds for the qualitative mode. Reporting research findings is important for dissemination and for synthesis and evidence-based management (EBM). Primarily, the importance lies in dissemination across conferences, journals, books, and increasingly digital media. Understanding and replication by outside scholars depend on complete and accurate reporting; this centrality to the research craft commands a learning-development focus. Within a communications paradigm, individuals or teams create or send a persuasive message and the reader or listener receives (or may choose not to receive) the message. Persuasion is targeted via rhetoric across writing and graphics. Although oral and written forms of dissemination dominate, data repositories are emerging. Two additional reasons for importance pertain to the accumulation of knowledge. One is research synthesis. Structuring knowledge through synthesis uses the results of individual studies as data, and the audience is scientists. Narrative and quantitative reviews depend on the completeness and accuracy of reported findings. A related source of importance pertains to evidence-based management at the interface of research and practice—translation of research findings into practices and bundles of practices that can be used by managers. Given that practicing managers appear to rely on obsolete knowledge (aka “fads, fashions, and folderol” as used by Dunnette), proponents of evidence-based management advocate that firms consider the adoption of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Communicating clearly and establishing a context of implementation to assist practitioners are essential for EBM (in parallel to research synthesis, for an audience of practitioners). This article organizes a range of resources on writing and reviewing articles across the taxonomy above. For completeness, this article includes citations for scientific graphics (tables, charts, figures, etc.) organized around conceptualizations of graphics and related guidance, research on perception of scientific graphics, and recent developments in computing technology. Especially relevant are software routines for interactive graphics based on “grammars.” While this article draws on work in management studies (organizational behavior and human resources), it necessarily searches beyond traditional boundaries for relevant insights.

There are sporadic specialized sources on reporting of research findings. On scholarly writing, Cummings and Frost 1995 is an influential analysis of the publishing system in the organizational sciences. Abelson 1995 defines rhetoric as styles of writing up results in psychology. Research synthesis writing is addressed comprehensively in Cooper, et al. 2009 (cited under Guidance on Reporting Quantitative Reports, Syntheses, and Meta-analyses ). There are two major standards available for research synthesis: Meta-Analysis Reporting Standards (MARS) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses ( PRISMA ).For graphics and quantitative studies, Tufte 2001 and Tukey 1977 are classics for guidance and perspective; others, including Cleveland 1985 , Kosslyn 2006 , Wainer 2000 (cited under History and Trends ), and Wilkinson 2005 , provide unique value. The work on maps in Börner 2015 is aptly named Atlas of Knowledge , while Grant 2019 provides a concise introduction to data visualization with a section on interactive graphics (a related instance is the class of data explorers used for large data sets as the Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] and the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]—both large-scale testing programs). Sternberg and Sternberg 2010 is typical guidance offered to students and is not the only such resource. Many of these texts can be mined for dimensions to code the content and results of published organizational behavior and human resources research to facilitate critique A trio of books by Katy Börner ( Börner 2010 , Börner 2015 ) and colleagues ( Börner and Polley 2014 ) represents the newest in knowledge mapping. In addition, a rapidly emerging topic across science is the reproducibility and replicability of results—the consensus review published in 2019 by a committee of the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering provides an excellent overview.

Abelson, Robert P. Statistics as Principled Argument . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995.

Describes magnitude-articulation-generality-interestingness-credibility (MAGIC) criteria to organize rhetoric in presenting research findings. Accepting statistics as an organizer of arguments using quantitative evidence allows identification of styles. Brash and stuffy are end points on a liberal-conservative style dimension. Management students and scholars could learn MAGIC for reporting quantitative findings; qualitative researchers might consider translation.

Börner, Katy. Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know . Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2010.

Books by Katy Börner show the potential and the practice of science and knowledge mapping. Atlas of Science (2010) presents three themes: power of maps (switching from geographic cartography to research-collaboration mapping), reference systems, and forecasts, as well as numerous examples.

Börner, Katy. Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone Can Map . Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2015.

Börner deftly gives readers principles for visualizing knowledge with more than forty large-scale and over a hundred small-scale color maps. Drives home the point that data literacy is as important as language literacy. She introduces a theoretical framework meant to guide readers through user and task analysis; data preparation, analysis, and visualization; visualization deployment; and the interpretation of science maps. Together with Börner 2010 and Börner and Polley 2014 , this trio provides levels of analysis from frameworks to workflow that support improved visualizations of science, knowledge, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Börner, Katy, and David E. Polley. Visual Insights: A Practical Guide to Making Sense of Data . Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2014.

Along with Börner 2010 and Börner 2015 , a practical book by Börner and Polley based on the Information Visualization MOOC includes seven chapters—from a visualization framework through “when, where, what, and with whom” and dynamic visualizations—and concludes with chapters on case studies and discussion/outlook.

Cleveland, William S. The Elements of Graphing Data . Monterey, CA: Wadsworth Advanced Books and Software, 1985.

Cognitive science and statistical principles help dissect and improve graphics (a predecessor book from 1983 and articles that searched prestigious journals for common graphic errors are also useful). Based on extensive experience with AT&T data, the author distills and emphasizes procedural knowledge for constructing graphic displays.

Cummings, Larry L., and Peter J. Frost, eds. Publishing in the Organizational Sciences . 2d ed. Foundations of Organizational Science. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1995.

This classic covers most aspects of publishing in organizational behavior and human resources (absent are emergent digital-technological issues). Organized into sections on perspectives on and realities of publishing, which are insightful for scholar and student alike. Benjamin Schneider’s ten propositions on “getting research published” end with practicing the skill of writing. This edition inaugurated the Foundations of Organizational Science series, and the 1985 edition is also useful.

Few, Stephen. Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis . Oakland, CA: Analytics, 2009.

Suggests that in a data-dense world, the human brain—and hence, visualization—is key to avoiding overload. Three sections, namely “Building Core Skills for Visual Analysis” and “Honing Skills,” each with six chapters plus a “Further Thoughts and Hopes” with eight promising trends, cover much ground. Based on quantitative preferences, the most substantive portion is contained in Part 2. The book ends with an excerpt from the poetry of T. S. Eliot.

Grant, Robert. Data Visualization: Charts, Maps and Interactive Graphics . Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2019.

This author provides a vast range of examples of data visualization, mostly open source and with code available on a website . It provides a good mix of detail with sharing of tacit knowledge.

Kosslyn, Stephen M. Graph Design for the Eye and Mind . New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195311846.001.0001

Based on sound cognitive science and ample research by the author, presents and elaborates eight principles of effective graph construction (summarized in pp. 5–20). Analyzes prominent guidance on graphics, Edward R. Tufte for example, and suggests flaws. that could lead to productive research.

Sternberg, Robert J., and Karin Sternberg The Psychologist’s Companion: A Guide to Writing Scientific Papers for Students and Researchers . 5th ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511762024

Aligned to American Psychological Association (APA) style as a prototype of good practice in publishing; the author is a productive researcher and APA journal editor; thus tacit knowledge in this edition is well grounded and expressed. Represents a class of books on research communication. Some translation required to organizational behavior and human resources context. Comparable to Cooper 2010 (cited under Writing Review Articles ). Next edition will need to conform to the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association .

Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . 2d ed. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001.

Revises a classic 1983 text in analytic design (Tufte’s preferred term); presents and expands on five core principles and coins numerous terms (“chartjunk” as well as “sparkline” and “data-ink ratios” are personal favorites). Critiqued for its advice, however, by other researchers on graphics ( Kosslyn 2006 ).

Tukey, John W. Exploratory Data Analysis . Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1977.

A classic presenting Tukey’s data detective work rooted in his 1962 “The Future of Data Analysis” exposition ( Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33.1: 1–67). Premise is that exploratory data analysis (EDA) deserves status with confirmatory. Loaded with philosophy of EDA and tools—the stem leaf, box plot, and “five-number summary.” Graphic display and analysis are covered in the service of learning about data. A part of research craft to be honed post-schooling.

Wilkinson, Leland L. The Grammar of Graphics . 2d ed. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2005.

Cited by many, this conceptualization rooted in the work of Jacques Bertin extends work done with the Task Force on Statistical Reporting in 1999. Within an object-oriented design approach, the grammar consists of the rules and elements of graphics, for example, geoms, scales, and coordinates. Framework has been useful for deriving tools, such as Wilkinson’s GPL, Wickham’s ggplot2, and others.

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Accounting Conservatism and the Stock Market

Insights from Three Decades of Research and New Evidence from the Italian Setting

• © 2024
• Carlo D'Augusta 0

Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

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• Presents core components of the accounting conservatism literature
• Analyses the Italian capital market during the Covid-19 pandemic
• Discusses various aspects of financial reporting

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Accounting (BRIEFSACCOUNTING)

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About this book

This book comprehensively examines accounting conservatism and its relationship with the stock market. Through a historical overview and a review of recent literature, it explores the evolution of conservatism research and the conceptual developments, measurement advancements, and empirical findings produced by academic scholars over the last decades. Additionally, it critically evaluates the applicability of conservatism models developed in the U.S. market to the Italian setting, offering a thorough analysis of their validity. Furthermore, the book presents novel empirical findings on conservatism's impact on the Italian stock market during the Covid-19 pandemic. This nuanced exploration offers valuable insights for academics, practitioners, and researchers seeking to understand the complexities of financial reporting practices in diverse market environments.

• Financial Accounting
• Capital Markets
• Asymmetric Recognition Timeliness
• Conservative Reporting
• Italian Stock Market
• Market Uncertainty

Table of contents (6 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

• Carlo D’Augusta

Conceptual Developments

Measurement of conservatism for empirical research, conservatism and the stock market: major empirical findings from three decades of research, conservatism’s role in the italian stock market: three empirical studies, concluding remarks, authors and affiliations.

Carlo D'Augusta

About the author

Carlo D'Augusta is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Bocconi University (Italy). Before joining Bocconi University's faculty in 2021, he was part of the accounting faculty at Georgia State University and Middle Tennessee State University (USA).

His research explores the impact of financial information characteristics on capital markets and investors' responses to financial disclosures. He investigates how various types of disclosures interact to influence information users. Specifically, he has delved into the interconnectedness of accounting conservatism, voluntary disclosure practices, and the stock market. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including  The Accounting Review ,  Contemporary Accounting Research , the  European Accounting Review, the  Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance , the  Review of Accounting and Finance ,  The International Journal of Accounting, and Finance Research Letters.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Accounting Conservatism and the Stock Market

Book Subtitle : Insights from Three Decades of Research and New Evidence from the Italian Setting

Authors : Carlo D'Augusta

Series Title : SpringerBriefs in Accounting

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67145-6

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Business and Management , Business and Management (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-67144-9 Published: 12 September 2024

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-67145-6 Published: 11 September 2024

Series ISSN : 2196-7873

Series E-ISSN : 2196-7881

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : VI, 84

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour

Topics : Accounting/Auditing , Capital Markets , Financial Accounting

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Oil Market Report - September 2024

About this report

The IEA Oil Market Report (OMR) is one of the world's most authoritative and timely sources of data, forecasts and analysis on the global oil market – including detailed statistics and commentary on oil supply, demand, inventories, prices and refining activity, as well as oil trade for IEA and selected non-IEA countries.

• Global oil demand growth continues to decelerate, with reported 1H24 gains of 800 kb/d y-o-y the lowest since 2020. The chief driver of this downturn is a rapidly slowing China, where consumption contracted y-o-y for a fourth straight month in July, by 280 kb/d. Average annual gains of 900 kb/d in 2024, compared to 2.1 mb/d last year, will take demand to almost 103 mb/d. An increase of 950 kb/d in 2025 will be equally subdued.
• World supply rose by 80 kb/d to 103.5 mb/d in August, with outages caused by a political dispute in Libya combined with maintenance in Norway and Kazakhstan offset by higher flows from Guyana, Brazil and elsewhere. Annual gains strengthen from 660 kb/d this year to 2.1 mb/d in 2025. Non-OPEC+ increases by 1.5 mb/d this year and next, while OPEC+ may fall by 810 kb/d in 2024 but rise by 540 kb/d next year if voluntary cuts stay in place.
• Global refinery throughputs are forecast to increase by 440 kb/d to 83 mb/d in 2024, and by 630 kb/d to 83.7 mb/d next year. Much weaker than expected Chinese runs in July and a further deterioration in margins continue to weigh on the forecast. Cracking margins briefly turned negative in Europe and Singapore. US Gulf Coast cracking margins are more resilient, but they have nevertheless fallen by two-thirds versus year-ago levels.
• Global observed oil stocks declined by 47.1 mb in July. The drawdown was concentrated in crude oil, NGLs and feedstocks (-75.5 mb), while oil products built to their highest level since January 2021. OECD industry stocks fell counter-seasonally by 12.3 mb in July to stand 78.5 mb below the five-year average. Preliminary data show continued stock declines in August.
• Oil prices spiralled lower in August and early September, with ICE Brent futures plunging by about $10/bbl as floundering Chinese demand and economic headwinds heightened oversupply fears. Investor selling added to the bearish sentiment, with net speculative exchange holdings slumping to multi-year lows. At the time of writing, Brent was trading at around $70/bbl - the lowest level since late-2021 and down $20/bbl from April's 2024 high.

When the music stops

The rapid decline in global oil demand growth in recent months, led by China, has fuelled a sharp sell-off in oil markets. Brent crude oil futures have plunged from a high of more than $82/bbl in early August to a near three-year low at just below $70/bbl on 11 September, despite hefty supply losses in Libya and continued crude oil inventory draws.

Global oil demand growth is slowing sharply from its post-pandemic rates, as already forecast in the OMR for some time. Reported monthly data covering 80% of global oil demand during the first half of 2024 confirm the steep decline in the rate of growth in oil consumption, which we have been projecting since our first forecast for 2024 was published in June 2023. Demand rose by 800 kb/d year-on-year over the first half of the year, dramatically lower than the growth of 2.3 mb/d recorded in 2023, but close to our initial forecast. For the year as a whole, global oil demand is on course to increase by 900 kb/d in 2024 and 950 kb/d next year.

The recent slowdown in China has seen its oil consumption declining y-o-y for a fourth consecutive month in July, by 280 kb/d. This stands in marked contrast to the 1 mb/d average pace of growth over the preceding 12 months, or the post-Covid surge of 1.5 mb/d in 2023. The country’s oil demand is now set to expand by only 180 kb/d in 2024, as the broad-based economic slowdown and an accelerating substitution away from oil in favour of alternative fuels weigh on consumption. Surging EV sales are reducing road fuel demand while the development of a vast national high-speed rail network is restricting growth in domestic air travel. The implications of the fundamental shift in the Chinese economic outlook and rapid changes to its vehicle fleet and transport modes are discussed in detail in our recent reports Oil 2024 and World Energy Outlook 2023.

Outside of China, oil demand growth is tepid at best. Latest data for the United States show a sharp decline in gasoline deliveries in June, following unexpected strength in May. As such, gasoline use in the world’s largest oil consumer declined y-o-y in five out of the first six months of this year. Structural headwinds and anaemic economic growth mean that deliveries continue to contract in a number of advanced economies. This could leave advanced economies’ oil use this year nearly 2 mb/d below its pre-pandemic level. With the steam seemingly running out of Chinese oil demand growth, and only modest increases or declines in most other countries, current trends reinforce our expectation that global demand will plateau by the end of this decade.

In an apparent effort to halt the precipitous slide in oil prices, in early September Saudi Arabia and its OPEC+ allies announced that they would postpone by two months the start of their planned unwinding of extra voluntary production cuts. The delay gives the alliance some time to further evaluate demand prospects for next year, as well as the impact of Libyan outages and its plan to phase out additional curbs of 2.2 mb/d by the end of next year. But with non-OPEC+ supply rising faster than overall demand – barring a prolonged stand-off in Libya – OPEC+ may be staring at a substantial surplus, even if its extra curbs were to remain in place. In the context of a rapidly evolving market, reliable energy data and unbiased market analysis will become more important than ever.

OPEC+ crude oil production 1 million barrels per day

1. Includes extra voluntary curbs where announced. 2. Capacity levels can be reached within 90 days and sustained for an extended period. 3. Excludes shut in Iranian, Russian crude. 4. Angola left OPEC effective 1 Jan 2024. 5. Iran, Libya, Venezuela exempt from cuts. 6. Mexico excluded from OPEC+ compliance. 7. Bahrain, Brunei, Malaysia, Sudan and South Sudan.

Oil Market Report Documentation

Definitions of key terms used in the OMR.

For more info on the methodology, download the PDF below.

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IEA (2024), Oil Market Report - September 2024 , IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-september-2024

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