Market research template

Understanding your target market, competitive landscape, and customer pain points is the foundation of any sound market research strategy. With research spread across docs, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools, insights get lost and decisions stall. This free market research template gives marketing and product teams a connected workspace to plan research initiatives, capture findings, track competitors, and move from raw data to actionable analysis with embedded AI that generates project summaries and next-step recommendations on demand.

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Try the template

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What is a market research template?

A market research template is a structured framework that guides teams through the full market research process, from defining objectives and research methods to capturing findings and presenting results to stakeholders.

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This free template gives product marketing, product management, and customer research teams a step-by-step system to run market research projects end-to-end, with connected data for research projects, methods, findings, and competitors, and built-in AI that surfaces insights and suggested next actions as work progresses.

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Why should product and marketing teams use our market research template?

Running a market research project across static docs and spreadsheets makes it hard to connect findings to the methods that produced them, or to trace insights back to the business decisions they were meant to inform. This template replaces that fragmentation with a connected workspace where every research method, finding, and competitor profile links back to the project it supports — alongside AI tools that reduce the manual work of summarizing progress and identifying next steps. It fits teams of any size, from a startup validating a business plan to a SaaS product team building out a roadmap, and it's free, flexible, and customizable as your team's market research efforts grow.

Here are some benefits:

• Centralized market research management: Keeping research projects, methods, findings, and competitors in one place means teams spend less time hunting for background information and more time acting on it. The research projects data tracks status, ownership, and due dates so nothing falls through the cracks across a market research project.
• Traceable findings: Each finding connects to the method that produced it and the project it belongs to, so teams can filter by confidence level or theme and see exactly where an insight came from. This makes it easier to build a credible market research report template or briefing for stakeholders without reconstructing the methodology from scratch.
• Automated workflow progression: Two built-in automations keep projects moving without manual follow-up. When a research method is marked complete, the project owner is notified automatically. When all methods on a project are complete, the project status updates to analysis on its own.
• Real-time visibility: The research projects by status dashboard shows every active initiative on a kanban board, with completion percentage, funnel stage, and due date visible on each card. Teams and stakeholders get a clear picture of where each market research project stands without having to ask.

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Tips for using a market research template

This template is straightforward to get started with and flexible enough to adapt to any research methodology, whether you're running a competitive analysis, a buyer persona study, or a pricing research initiative. Here are some tips:

• Start every project with a clear objective: Before adding research methods or capturing findings, write the research objective and note which key decisions the project will support. This keeps every piece of data you collect tied to a real business question, whether that's entering a new market, refining a product roadmap, or sizing a target market.
• Use themes and confidence levels consistently in findings: When logging insights, assigning a theme (such as customer needs, pricing, competitive landscape, or market trends) and a confidence level (high, medium, or low) makes it much easier to spot patterns across methods and prioritize which findings should drive decisions. The high confidence findings dashboard filters automatically for your most reliable insights.
• Connect competitors to the projects where they're relevant: Rather than maintaining a separate competitive intelligence doc, add competitor profiles directly in the competitors data and link them to the research projects they inform. This keeps market analysis and market research data in the same place and makes it easy to revisit as competitive conditions change.
• Use AI to accelerate analysis and research: Airtable's built-in building expert, Omni, can answer questions about your research data, add or modify fields and views, and build new dashboards all through a natural language prompt. The two Field Agents in the research projects data generate on-demand project summaries and next-action recommendations, so teams spend less time writing status updates and more time acting on what the research shows. You can also connect Airtable to Claude to run deeper market analysis directly against your data (more on this below).

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Features of our market research template

A strong market research template captures not just what you learned, but how you learned it, who it applies to, and what it means for the decisions ahead. Here's what's included in this one:

• Research projects hub: The central hub for tracking every market research initiative. Each project captures the research objective, funnel stage, status, owner, due date, total and completed methods, and the key decisions the project is meant to support. A completion percentage field updates automatically as methods are marked done.
• Research methods tracking: Tracks the specific approaches used within each project — surveys, interviews, focus groups, competitive analysis, secondary research, and more. Each method captures sample size, target audience segment, start and completion dates, and duration, so teams have a clear record of their methodology when it comes time to write up results.
• Findings database: Stores every insight from every method, organized by theme and rated by confidence level. Findings connect to both the source method and the parent project, and support attachments for evidence or documentation. The high confidence findings dashboard surfaces only the most reliable insights for quick review.
• Competitors data: A reusable repository for competitive intelligence. Each profile captures positioning, key strengths and weaknesses, pricing model, target audience, and a last-reviewed date, and links to the research projects where that competitor is relevant.
• Research projects status dashboard: A kanban view that organizes all active initiatives by status, from planned through complete. Each card shows the project name, objective, funnel stage, due date, and completion percentage at a glance.
• Embedded AI agents: Two Field Agents are built into the research projects data. The project summary agent generates a concise overview of each project on demand. The next action agent recommends a specific next step based on where the project currently stands. Both reduce the manual work of keeping stakeholders informed across long-running market research projects.
• No-code customization: Omni lets you extend or reshape this template without writing any code. Ask it to add a budget field to research projects, create a table for tracking research participants, or build a new dashboard for a specific team view. You can also ask Omni to search the web for competitor information, industry trends, or market research methodology best practices and pull the results directly into your workspace.
• AI-powered reporting: Omni can query your research data to answer questions like which projects are in progress, what findings have been captured at high confidence, or how sample sizes compare across quantitative studies. This makes it faster to pull together a market analysis summary or draft a market research report template without manually compiling data across views.

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Run market research in Airtable with Claude

Connecting Airtable to Claude via the MCP integration gives product and marketing teams a way to run market research analysis, generate insights, and populate this template directly from a conversation. Marketers can use Claude to synthesize findings by theme, draft competitive summaries, or generate survey questions from a research objective, with this template as the system of record that keeps all outputs organized and traceable. Here are some prompts to try:

• "Summarize all high-confidence findings in my market research base, grouped by theme, and flag any patterns relevant to pricing or competitive positioning."
• "Based on the research objectives in my Airtable base, generate a set of survey questions for a customer segmentation study targeting small business owners."
• "Search for recent information on [competitor name]'s product positioning and pricing model, then add a new record to my Competitors data with what you find."

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Streamline your market research with Airtable

When product and marketing teams are juggling multiple research initiatives across disconnected tools, tracking progress and connecting findings to decisions falls through the cracks. Airtable's market research template brings it all into one place — with customizable dashboards, flexible workflows, and built-in AI that generates summaries, surfaces high-confidence findings, and recommends next steps. Teams move faster from data collection to analysis to reporting — and stakeholders always have a clear view of where every project stands.

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Try Airtable's free marketing solutions and turn your next market research project into a repeatable, scalable process.

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Frequently asked questions

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What should a market research template include?

A market research template should include dedicated sections for research objectives, target audience and demographics, competitive landscape, research methods and methodology, findings organized by theme, and a summary of key insights with recommended next steps. This template covers all of those areas across four connected data sets — research projects, research methods, findings, and competitors — so teams can manage the full market research process in one place.

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What is the difference between a market research template and a market research report template?

A market research template guides the process of running a research initiative from start to finish, covering planning, data collection, and analysis. A market research report template is focused on communicating results — typically to stakeholders or leadership — once the research is complete. This template supports both: the research projects and findings data capture everything needed to run the work, and the high confidence findings dashboard and

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AI-generated project summaries make it straightforward to pull together a clear, credible report.

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How often should teams update their market research template?

Most teams revisit their market research on a quarterly basis or ahead of a major decision, like a product launch, a move into a new market, or a pricing strategy review. Because this template lives in a connected workspace rather than a static doc, updating findings, competitor profiles, and project status is an ongoing part of the workflow rather than a periodic rebuild from scratch.

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Can this template be used for competitive analysis?

Yes. The competitors data is built specifically for competitive intelligence and tracks positioning, key strengths and weaknesses, pricing model, and target audience for each competitor. Profiles link directly to the research projects where they're relevant, so competitive landscape data stays connected to the broader market research analysis rather than sitting in a separate spreadsheet.

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What is the most important part of a market research template?

The research objective is the foundation. Without a clearly defined goal, market research efforts risk producing data that doesn't connect to real decisions. This template prompts teams to write the research objective and identify the key decisions each project will support before any methods or findings are logged, keeping the full research initiative anchored to a measurable outcome from the start.

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