How To Write A Good Market Research Report And Great Executive Summary

After successfully conducting a field market research, the job will not be considered as completed with a report with executive summary.


When writing an Executive Summary, think about the purpose of an executive summary. You need to provide a one page, or at most two page, summary of the results of your marketing research. Be sure to hit all of the major points of the rest of your report in this summary. Many people will read the summary first, to get a quick overview of your results.


The summary should include specific, numeric details from the rest of your report. These details should be condensed into bullet points and made prominent on the report.



Features of the Executive Summary


Describe your company: The summary should provide a basic account of what your company does, where it is located, what type of employees (if any) you have, and any other organizational details. Also describe your products and goals for your future products or sales.



Detail the objective of your research: Your report should specify what exactly you were trying to determine in your marketing research. This could be whether or not your marketing was effective in content, whether or not it reached the right audience, whether or not it properly informed customers about your product, or any other determination you wished to make.



Related post: How to carry out market research



Evaluate how well you are reaching your intended audience: Typically, the objective of your market research is to assess how well you are convincing people in your target audience to buy your product. You need to be making sure that you're reaching an audience that will actually be purchasing your product. If you're not doing so, explain why you think this is the case and offer suggestions for different courses of action.



Display marketing conversion data: This figure represents how many potential customers or visitors to your website actually purchased a product. This can be evaluated with site traffic counters. If this number is particularly low, you should offer explanations as to why this might be the case and how you can improve on it.



Admit any data collection difficulties or incomplete sections: Your executive summary should also include a section where you explain whether or not you had any difficulty attaining the data within. This could help explain incomplete or omitted sections or topics. Sometimes, there's no way to obtain a certain set of data reliably. If this is the case, explain why it is so in your summary.



Explain any factors that you think might come into play: This can include more people coming online, more traffic coming to links to your website, or any other trends that you think might help or hurt your marketing techniques.
You should also consider the fact that other competitors will arise if you are successful. Significant returns attract more competition, so if you don't have direct competitors now, rest assured that you will in the future. Have a plan in place to sustain your competitive advantage in spite of new entrants to the market.



Calculate marketing return on investment: It's also important to know if the money you're spending on advertising is increasing your revenue enough to make it worth it. Simply total your expenditures on certain marketing campaigns and compare that to how much your sales have (or have not) increased in the time since beginning those campaigns. Keep in mind that there may be a significant delay between implementing your marketing campaign and the resulting bump in sales. Consider the value you are getting for spending your money on advertising.



Conduct surveys and compile the results: You can conduct surveys on your website or by using a email marketing campaign. You can also get information from focus groups. Your focus group should include people in your target audience.

To get the most out of your focus group, carefully plan the exact series of questions you want to ask. Your marketing report should include the questions you ask and why those questions are important to you.
In your survey or focus group, ask people how they first heard about your product.


Document the results of both your surveys and your focus groups. Your report should provide both questions and responses. Give the reader the percentage of each type of response.

Your qualitative research (survey and focus group questions) may be 5 to 10 pages of your report. The responses to those questions will also be 5 to 10 pages of material.



Use your marketing report to make changes in your business: The purpose of your market research is to find out what is working and where you need to improve. If you can make the right changes, you can market more effectively without increasing your marketing budget.

Evaluate the extent to which your customers view your product as different and better than the competition. If they don’t see a difference, dig into their responses and find out why.


Decide on some conclusions: You conclude, for example, that your website needs to emphasize that your product is much more durable/reliable/nutritive/better than the competition.

You decide to make changes to your website and your other marketing communication pieces.

After a period of time, you can assess these changes to see how they have impacted your market share. Perform more market research to evaluate the impact of your changes.