How to Do Market Research Yourself Before You Pay for It

Most owners we talk to are about to spend money on a guess. A new service, a bigger ad budget, a second van. The guess is usually "there are plenty of people around here who want this," and nobody has checked.

You can check. This post shows how to do market research yourself, in one afternoon, with a browser and a legal pad. It will not replace a proper study, and we will say plainly where it stops. What it will do is tell you whether the idea deserves a proper study at all.

The five steps below are the same first pass we make in our own market research work for small businesses, before anything deeper is worth paying for.

Step 1: Describe the customer by the job they need done

Ask an owner "who are my customers?" and the usual answer is a demographic: homeowners, 35 to 60. That is too loose to count and too loose to write for.

Describe the job instead. Write one sentence in this shape: a person in a situation, who needs a result, under a constraint.

• A homeowner with a wet basement who needs it dry before the house goes on the market.

• An office manager who needs 500 folders printed by Friday and cannot drive across the county to approve a proof.

The job tells you what triggers the purchase, how urgent it is, and how far someone will travel for it. A demographic tells you none of those. Write two or three job sentences and stop. If you cannot, call your last ten customers and ask what was going on the week they first rang you.

Step 2: Count them with Census data

Now put a number on each sentence. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey publishes population, households, income, home ownership and age for every city and township in the country, free. Go to the Census Bureau's data site (data.census.gov), type the name of your township or city, and open its profile.

Two things to know before you trust a figure.

First, use the 5-year estimates. According to the Census Bureau's own guidance, 1-year estimates are published only for areas with 65,000 people or more, while 5-year estimates cover all areas. Most Michigan towns a local business serves are smaller than that, so the number you are reading is a five-year average, not a snapshot of last year. It is also a sample survey, so every figure carries a margin of error, and the smaller the town, the wider it is.

Second, count the thing in your job sentence. The basement company wants owner-occupied homes, not residents. A daycare wants households with children under five.

If your customers are other businesses, use County Business Patterns instead, an annual Census Bureau series that gives the number of establishments by industry down to county and ZIP code level. It counts only establishments with paid employees, and that matters more than it sounds. The SBA Office of Advocacy's 2025 profile of Michigan counts 983,079 small businesses in the state, and 809,426 of them have no employees at all (2022 data). If you sell payroll services or uniforms, your market is the much smaller group with staff, not the headline.

Write the count on the pad with its source and year beside it.

Step 3: List what they type into a search box

The best of the free market research tools is the search box itself. Start typing the job from step 1 into Google and stop halfway. In our experience the suggestions that drop down reflect what real people type. Search, then scroll: the "People also ask" questions and the related searches at the bottom of the page give you more.

Copy the phrases down word for word. You are collecting vocabulary, not volumes. You say "hydrostatic pressure." Your customer types "water coming up through basement floor." The second phrase is the one that belongs on your website.

Do not go hunting for search volume numbers at this stage. In our experience the free ones are national figures, and a national number tells you very little about one county. Judge each phrase on fit: is this something you sell, typed by someone ready to buy it?

If how a typed phrase turns into a visit is new to you, our plain-English guide to SEO covers the mechanics.

Step 4: See who shows up for those searches

Take your five best phrases and search each one in a private browser window, so your own history does not colour the results. For each, write down who holds the page:

• the map listings

• directories that sell leads

• national brands

• local businesses with their own sites

Then three notes. Who appears again and again? What do they have that you do not (a page for each service, prices, photos of finished work)? And what does nobody on the page offer?

A page owned by directories and national chains is expensive to fight for. A page of local businesses with thin websites is open.

Step 5: Read the reviews for praise and complaints

Open the reviews of the three businesses that kept appearing in step 4, and your own. Make two columns, praise and complaint, and put a tally mark every time a word repeats.

What everyone is praised for is the price of entry. If every shop in town is "friendly," friendly will not set you apart. The complaint that repeats across several competitors is the opening. "Never called back." "Quote took two weeks." If you already do that thing well, you have just found your headline.

Where doing market research yourself stops

At the end of the afternoon you have one page: who the customer is, roughly how many there are, the words they use, who they currently find, and what they wish somebody did better.

That is enough for cheap, reversible decisions. Which service gets its own page. What the home page should say first. Whether a small ad test is worth running. Do not pay anyone for research on a decision like that. Just try it.

DIY market research is not enough for the expensive ones: a second location, a lease, a new service line that needs equipment and a hire. There the margin of error in a small-town Census figure, and the things you cannot see from a browser (what competitors charge, how busy they really are), start to matter. And if the afternoon says the market is too small, you have saved the fee entirely.

What to do this week

Block out one Saturday morning and do the five steps on paper. If the page you end up with raises a question bigger than an afternoon can settle, send it to us and we will tell you honestly whether it needs paid research or just a better website. That first conversation is free, and our fixed monthly pricing is published.