We use cookies to personalize and deliver appropriate content. By clicking "Accept" you agree to our terms.
Research Plan: What Is It & How To Write It [with Templates]
In today's fast-paced world, comprehensive data and analytics are crucial for businesses and institutions to streamline their decision-making processes. Therefore, to gather truly valuable insights, a meticulously designed research proposal is necessary. This is where many research teams fall short, focusing only on general research planning instead of creating a holistic research plan.Basic research planning encompasses only the initial stages of a research project, focusing on defining research questions, timelines, objectives, and methods. While crucial, it offers only a rudimentary outline of the research approach.
On the other hand, a well-executed research plan is a detailed, systematic, and structured document that outlines every aspect of the project. It ensures a focused, organized, and rigorous approach that maximizes the quality and reliability of the research findings.
What Is a Research Plan?
A research plan is a comprehensive document that outlines the entirety of your research project. It details the research process, from defining the problem statement and research objectives to selecting the research method and outlining the expected outcomes. This plan serves as a blueprint for your research activities, ensuring a focused and efficient approach.
The objective, methodology, and method depend on the context of your research. For instance, social media or UX research plans may focus on qualitative research methodologies , while a scientific research strategy might involve formulating hypotheses and conducting experiments.
How To Write a Research Plan in 6 Steps
Crafting an effective research plan empowers you to conduct a focused and productive investigation. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you create a plan tailored to your specific needs:
Define the Purpose of Your Project
As a starting point for your research plan, you need to clearly articulate what you aim to achieve with your research. What questions are you seeking to answer? What problem are you trying to solve? Properly defining the project’s purpose ensures your research remains focused and avoids scope creep.
Identify Research Objectives
After you have defined what the main goal for the project is, you will have to identify the specific steps or objectives needed to achieve your goal. This will help you streamline your process in a more efficient way.
Noting down individual objectives can be especially helpful if a large group is working on the project, as they can allocate tasks more effectively according to each person’s expertise. Even if a single person is conducting the research, the identified steps can assist them in sorting tasks according to their priority.
Develop a Hypothesis
In some research projects, you might benefit from developing a hypothesis , which, in basic terms, is a tentative prediction about the outcome of your investigation. The research plan will then include the tests and methodologies to help accurately confirm or disprove the original hypothesis.
Choose a Suitable Research Method and Sample
Choose the research methods best suited to gather the kind of data you need. Qualitative methods like focus groups, user interviews, and usability testing provide rich, in-depth insights. Quantitative methods like close-ended questionnaires offer broader data points.
A combination of both quantitative and qualitative research methods can be used if you want to take a more holistic approach. Next, identify your research sample. Define the demographics of your ideal participant and the sample size you need to come to get relevant insights.
Recruit Participants and Distribute Tasks
If you’re the one leading the research study, recruiting participants can help simplify the tasks. You can divide all the work according to each person’s proficiency, allowing you to prioritize the managerial tasks of your plan, such as how you will display your results.
Set a Realistic Timeline
Establish a clear timeline for each stage of your research, allocating sufficient time for tasks like data collection, analysis, and reporting. It is best practice to allow for extra time when noting down each task’s deadline in case a team member isn’t able to meet it or in case of any unexpected developments. A timeline is crucial even if you’re working alone, as it allows you to organize your time accordingly.
Why Do You Need a Research Plan?
A research plan is more than just a document. It's a roadmap for all your research activities. A well-defined plan helps you stay organized and focused on achieving your objectives.
The plan serves as an effective tool for transparent communication among team members and stakeholders. It also makes it easier to track the progress of research goals, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
7 Marketing Plan Templates Built and Used by Leading Companies
Actual case studies of effective research planning processes can give you valuable insight. Here are seven plan templates with different use cases created and used by renowned companies:
1. Jobs To Be Done User Research Guide at Replit
Tabish Gilani, Director Head of Product at Replit, created a user research interview guide to teach employees how to conduct interviews efficiently using the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) Framework . It is an excellent resource for companies that need to generate large-scale interview campaigns where users are “difficult to find.”
The interviews were meant to help get a more comprehensive outlook on Replit users worldwide regarding who they are, what they do, and why. The framework especially helped them with effective segmentation, as Replit is used globally for several different reasons. Therefore, according to geography, unique patterns and behaviors would be found that basic usage data cannot provide insight into.
Through the JTBD framework, they were able to interview users to pinpoint product themes to help them better understand their Ideal User Profile. This included the four forces influencing the point of view of the product, two of which are pull forces that attract the user and two push forces that repel them. They also specified four broad segmentations of behavioral, geographical, psychographic, and demographic to help them find relevant interviewees.
2. Design Methods Research Planning for Facebook Audience Insights
Behzod Sirjani, the Senior User Experience Researcher at Facebook, took an unconventional research approach that successfully helped them redesign the Audience Insight tool, which didn’t get great feedback when it was launched.
When designing the research plan , they prioritized making it fun and qualitative to get a subjective view of what users would want the ad tool to look like and why. These answers would also give a good insight into what competitors are doing right without having to go through competitive analysis.
Behzod didn’t just rely on interviews to get customer feedback. They took the approach of giving the user a blank page and marker to draw what they think will be useful for them. Then, they can ask why that will help them and delve into deeper conversations. This is great if you do not want to restrict answers.
They also kept rolling recruitment to reach higher-value customers and not spend excessive time with each. This approach worked as the team did not want empirical research but points that could help them learn and adapt to user preferences.
3. Enterprise App Management Research - Discussion Guide at Slack
Head of Research Operations at Slack, Behzod Sirjani, created an effective discussion guide used when conducting interviews with Slack Enterprise App Admin customers. This is especially helpful for B2B contexts, which was the case here.
The first part of the discussion focuses on warm-up questions to orient the participant and build a rapport. This allows the interviewer to gauge the answering style and adapt their questions accordingly for higher effectiveness.
The second part is designed to get context regarding the company and processes. The third section consists of the core questions, which are meant to take the most amount of time. This part of the discussion is where the interviewer delves deeper into how the product is managed and used and any challenges faced. At the end, the guide gives prompts on how to wrap up the discussion and get any information that may have been missed or could be discussed further.
4. Research Plan - Concept Testing at Niagahoster
Muhammad Aditya Ardiansyah, UX Researcher at Niagahoster, curated a research plan that is incredibly useful for people who want to gain insight into a feature. The plan focused mainly on getting insights about the concept and conducting usability testing.
The team first created hypotheses to validate if their feature is easy to use and useful. Their research plan also highlighted the in-depth process of creating two profile types that would include three participants each. The methods will involve in-depth interviews and moderated usability testing research to get a holistic idea of the attitudes and behaviors of users towards the product.
To incentivize participation, the research team gave a reward in the form of a discount voucher for their product, company merchandise, or money.
5. Automatic Outreach Research Process and Tracker at Coda
Coda Product Manager Matt Woods used the latest management software to help automate the process of reaching out to participants and tracking their feedback. This makes the guide particularly useful for those who want to schedule calls on scale.
This innovative method allowed for a streamlined interviewing process. It has proven to help the Coda product team get valuable insights regarding customer pains and improved user intuition.
6. Automatically Scheduling Customer Interviews at VEED
Thomas Christensen, Senior Product Manager, Growth at VEED.IO created a system that allowed them to conduct continuous interview research sessions . This was to improve user intuition and reveal the pains, desires, and unmet needs of their target market.
They segmented users into three groups:
- “Habit users” who make videos every week
- “Aha users” who just created their first video
- New users who did not make a video at all.
This allowed them to cater their outreach methods accordingly. For example, the first two types of users were sent recruitment emails. The third type was reached out via the app itself.
This approach also helped personalize the email and messages to get more responses. This guide is excellent if you want to scale your outreach process in a convenient way.
7. Qualitative and Quantitative Design Research Approach at Reforge
Lead Product Designer at Reforge, Ali Riehle, created a diagram to help guide their cross-functional research project . This spectacular guide can help you create a research plan that uses both quantitative and qualitative methods.
The structured approach using the diagram allowed each stage and task to be distinguished, which helped streamline communication and collaboration across the three different pods. The research outcomes heavily and positively contributed to the creation of Reforge’s strategy for 2024.
Click here to discover more of our Research Plan artifacts.
How To Customize a Research Plan Template
When selecting a template to customize for your research project, make sure it covers all essential components, such as:
- Introduction: Briefly introduce the research topic and target audience.
- Background: Define the problem or opportunity you're addressing.
- Objectives: Clearly outline your specific research goals.
- Methodology: Explain how you'll collect and analyze data.
- Timeline: Set realistic deadlines for each research stage.
- Expected Outcomes: Describe the anticipated results of your research.
- Communication Plan: Outline how you'll present your research findings.
Explore Artifacts of All Kinds
Career Development
Data Analysis
Product Development
Team Operations
User Research
Topics Related to Research Plans
Customer Satisfaction Measurement
Rapid Prototyping
Research Report
Usability Test
User Experience Audit
User Interview Guide
User Journey Map
User Segmentation
Related Blog Posts
ref:AI Presents: The AI Marketing Playbook
By Kieran Flanagan & Brian Balfour
Your User Research Questions Answered: A Recap of Our AMA with Behzod Sirjani
By Behzod Sirjani
The Top 10 Marketing Plan Templates
How To Create an Effective Buyer Persona
21 Important Marketing Questions and How To Answer Them
The Ultimate Guide to Brand Messaging: Framework + Templates
The Secret to Building a Customer-Centric Culture
By Tom Willerer & Kevin Bechtel
Some Testing is a Waste of Time: Making Business Cases for Big Bets
By Michael Kaminsky, Tom Vladeck & Michael Taylor
Meme Mapping: Learn to Run Better Creative Tests by Reverse-Engineering Hollywood
By Michael Taylor
Developing a Complete Brand Strategy
Brand marketing is actually made up of four components. In this guide, we’ll focus on the first one — how to develop a brand strategy.
Marketing Channels: A Starter Guide to Prioritizing, Investing, & Optimizing
So, you want to invest in a new marketing channel? Before you start, it's essential to evaluate each new channel on 3 attributes.
Marketer’s Guide to Mastering Brand Identity
Learn how brand identity impacts elements like brand guidelines, personality, & more that can reinforce a strong brand at every touchpoint.
Why Most Managers Aren’t Effective Coaches
By Natalie Rothfels
What Is Growth Marketing In 2023? We Asked 6 Growth Experts
By Kevin Bechtel, Yousuf Bhaijee, Dorian Kendal, Mark Fiske, Stephanie Kwok & Patrick Moran
What Reforge’s Industry Partners Are Thinking About in 2022
Contributions By Stephanie Kwok, Sachin Rekhi, Elena Verna
A Hype-Free Overview of Web3 Marketing
By Alanna Gregory
The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World
3 Ways Marketing and Product Teams Can Improve Collaboration — And Drive Better Business Outcomes
By Natalie Rothfels & Adam Fishman
Marketing is More Than Growth: The 3 Parts of a Complete Strategy
By Stephanie Kwok & Natalie Rothfels
Solving Martech: Reforge Acquires the Marketing Technology Academy
By Brian Balfour & Austin Hay
Today, Reforge is excited to announce the acquisition of The Marketing Technology Academy, and that Austin Hay — the owner of the academy, and industry-leading martech expert — will be joining Reforge as an EIR.
As part of this acquisition, we’ll be folding the academy courses into Reforge over the next few months, building new martech-specific case studies, and offering new frameworks, blogs, mini-lessons, and other content to help our members prepare for and better manage the growing challenges that arise from using these tools and systems.
How To Choose, Test, and Scale Emerging Acquisition Channels
By Adam Grenier & Scott Tousley
The Hidden Freemium Advantage
By Elena Verna
When freemium products first became popular in the early- to mid- 2000s, they were considered valuable if the free product generated enough new paid users to offset the cost of developing and maintaining the free product. The problem is that times have changed. It's not the early- to mid- 2000s anymore, and this reductive view of when freemium makes sense is no longer valid.
The Word of Mouth Coefficient
By Yousuf Bhaijee
Crossing the Canyon: Leading Your First Marketing Team
By Brittany Bingham & Mark Fiske
How does a marketing manager cross the canyon towards becoming a marketing leader? Marketing experts Brittany Bingham and Mark Fiske walk us through how.
Does Content Marketing Actually Work? The Data Says Yes
Patrick Campbell, Co-founder & CEO @ ProfitWell, takes a look at the data behind the content marketing efforts at 3,000 companies to see how it is working.
Content Marketing CAC: No Longer Cheap, and Rising Faster Than Paid
Content marketing used to be the poor man's way to feed every part of our funnel, including retention after conversion. But just as we suspected, content marketing is getting more expensive and less effective.
CAC has gone up across the board almost 50% over the past five years, and CAC for content isn't an exception
Facebook Ads vs Boosted Posts: A Performance Analysis
Facebook's organic reach for brands is now at an all-time low, and the platform is becoming increasingly “pay-to-play.”
How You Can Overcome These 3 Types of User Friction
Most teams only tackle basic forms of user friction. Sachin Rekhi categorizes user friction into three levels: Interaction, Cognitive & Emotional.
Understand Your Most-Engaged Users with the Power User Curve
Usually, when products want to see how engaged their users are, they look at the (Daily Active Users) / (Monthly Active Users) ratio metric.
And while that’s useful, it only gives a single, blended average. It doesn't show where users fall across the activity spectrum.
By looking at the Power User Curve, a 30-day histogram that graphs user engagement by the total number of days per month they were active, you can see a more detailed breakdown of engagement to identify and understand power users.
7 Principles To Mastering Growth Marketing
By Brian Balfour
5 Data Science Models for Predicting Enterprise Churn
Sharon Lin, Analytics Manager @ Twitch and former Data Scientist at Okta on tackling the difficult task of creating a churn prediction model at Okta, the criteria she used, and the models she evaluated.
The 8 Most Important Metrics for Marketplace Growth
Several founders have asked us tips to structure their data-driven approach to growing a marketplace, so we’ve decided to publish a guide to help founders do it.
To save you time, we’ve built for you a generic dashboard for a marketplace, in open-source.
Let’s now consider some of the most important KPIs of this dashboard.
Outcome-Based Onboarding for Users vs. Customers
Ty Magnin, Director of Marketing @ Appcues, breaks down three things that your user onboarding needs to do.
Thrive Market's Multi Channel Content Machine: A Study of Content-Based Growth
This is a case study of Thrive Market, a subscription e-commerce business that specializes in delivering natural and organic foods, but at wholesale prices. They recently closed at $111 million dollar series B, and have just passed the $120 million dollar annual revenue mark.
As a student of content and growth, I’ve long admired Thrive Market for the way they’ve used content as a dominant growth channel to achieve unusual, and positive, results.
I recently spoke to Thrive Market’s founder and co-CEO Gunnar Lovelace at a fireside event for 500 Startups in LA about his company’s content-fueled growth, and what content frontiers they’re exploring next.
The Growth Experiment Management System that Tripled Our Testing Velocity
By Joey DeBruin
All the fastest growing companies move at lightspeed.
Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and Facebook are some of the fastest growing companies in history, in part because they built high velocity testing into their cultures from day one. Lindsay Pettingill, a data science manager on Airbnb’s growth team, reports that her team has increased their experiment cadence from 100 to 700 experiments per week over the past two years.
Airbnb isn’t the only rocketship that prioritizes speed. For years Facebook’s motto was, “Move fast and break things.”
4 New Ad Opportunities to Test Before Your Competition
By Andrew Krebs-Smith
Is growth getting harder?
Many existing channels have extended past their golden age and are reaching saturation points in their lifecycles for a variety of reasons.
Additionally, everyone's getting smarter about growth, including consumers. Now, most invite systems no longer have the same novelty value or efficacy today as they did 10 years ago, and consumers’ “banner blindness” extends far beyond actual display advertising to encompass referral systems and virality programs.
Finally, the proliferation of robust off-the-shelf tools like Mixpanel, Optimizely, and many others is closing the gap on being data-driven at companies, and makes all of us (including our peers and competitors) smarter and faster.
But, growth is not finished; it’s just changing. Today, increased competition has led more companies to emphasize paid acquisition as a core driver of growth.
Retention is Hard, and Getting Harder — Here’s Why
By Brian Balfour, Shaun Clowes & Casey Winters
In this essay, we will examine how 3 market dynamics have created the perfect storm - making retention much harder than it used to be: Increased competition, Channel fatigue, and The rise of monopolies in tech. Then we’ll dig into each of these factors individually to understand more deeply how they affect retention throughout the three stages of the user lifecycle.
How I Went from Entry-Level Sales to SVP Marketing at SurveyMonkey in 8 Years
By Ada Rekhi
In her early and mid-20s, Ada Chen Rekhi achieved "hockey stick" growth within her own career, eventually leading growth and marketing as the SVP of Marketing at SurveyMonkey after starting out just 8 years earlier as a new college grad in an entry level sales job at Microsoft.
In this post, Ada shares a few frameworks that anyone can use to trigger a high growth inflection point in their career.
How to Leverage User Psychology to Trigger Growth and Adoption, with James Currier
Marketplaces are important, and the success stories are well known: Etsy gives makers a global reach, Upwork connects Web developers in Vietnam with graphic designers in Romania, eBay has spawned legions of niche entrepreneurs in the 21 years since it was first founded as an auction site.
But James Currier, managing partner at NFX Guild and member of the Reforge Collective, says it’s their sister category “market networks” that will drive the next wave of innovation, and unicorns.
Currier is a four-time CEO and co-founder of multiple venture-backed companies, including self-assessment testing company Tickle, and Ooga Labs, which spun out casual games company WonderHill, Jiff, a secure network and marketplace for connecting the mobile health ecosystem to the healthcare industry, and Iron Pearl, which was purchased by PayPal before it had a chance to officially launch.
In 2015, Currier and his partners created NFX Guild as a programmatic, invitation-only venture firm that rapidly accelerates the growth of networks and marketplaces. The company’s name stands for “Network Effects,” as the firm’s singular focus is on building businesses that become more useful and valuable with each additional user.
We talked to Currier about the universal triggers he’s identified that shape user psychology, the emergence of market networks, and proven ways for growing these platforms.
How to Grow By Stealing Market Share
By Brianne Kimmel
Growth is getting harder and competition more fierce as technology markets mature - which is why ignoring competition is no longer an option.
Growth leader at Zendesk and Reforge alum, Brianne Kimmel, walks us through using her OODA Loop framework to build a competitive marketing program and systematically steal market share from competitors.
How to Detect and Fight Back Against Ad Fatigue
Paid acquisition in Facebook's news feed, on Instagram, or on Google is one of the fastest ways to grow — but it's also one of the fastest ways to hit audience saturation with your target audience because it's that much faster and easier to scale up than organic alternatives.
The good thing about user acquisition on advertising platforms, however, is that you can get a good idea of where your ceiling is simply by doing “burst” tests. In a burst test, you increase spend to your ad campaigns in a specific audience and channel for a single (or few days) to understand how the variables in your growth strategy perform at that spend level.
Makes sense, right? In the rest of this post, I'll go over two different ways to think about the audience saturation problem — and why burst testing may not always be the best way to go.
Where Are You on the Growth Marketer's Hierarchy of Skills?
By Scott Tousley
How can I develop my career on this awesome company's Growth team?”
When I joined HubSpot’s growth team in 2014, led by Brian Balfour, I felt wildly unqualified. I had one skill. I (sort of) understood content marketing. That was it.
I couldn’t read a retention chart. I thought “copywriting” meant filing a trademark. And the countless acronyms (CPA, LTV, CPC, CAC, etc…) made the process seem even more complex.
I was squeezed between Harvard MBA graduates, innovative product managers, and entrepreneurs who sold previous companies for millions. So I asked myself a question:
“How can I develop my career on HubSpot’s Growth Team?”
Unfortunately, there was no clear answer. A “growth marketer” role had never existed at HubSpot previously, so there was no rubric. There was no career path, there was no framework. This was unexplored terrain.
Now, let’s fast-forward two years later. The problem still persists at HubSpot. I would argue it persists in the industry as a whole. There is still no clear framework or roadmap for career progression in growth marketing (other than Reforge).
That’s why, after many hours of deliberating this topic, and fine-tuning feedback from other intelligent growth marketers, I’m happy to share the internal career progression framework we use at HubSpot.
RealtyShares' Marketplace Efficiencies and Network Effects
RealtyShares recently announced that it had closed a $28M Series C that the company plans to use to expand its crowdfunding platform to better cater to high net worth individuals and institutions looking to access new tiers of the real estate investment market.
Founded in 2013, RealtyShares connects accredited investors looking to put money into commercial or residential real estate, with real estate developers looking to raise capital. The company says it has 120,000 users on its platform, who have invested $500 million since the company's inception.
Zello's Explosive Growth by Design, and Freemium to Enterprise Ladder
While many in America are hearing about Zello for the first time only now, the app has quietly accumulated over 100 million registered users and $10M a year in revenue, all while remaining completely bootstrapped with a staff of 20 people.
This week, we’ll look how Zello's unique, growth-oriented product design has enabled it to take advantage of unfortunate but massive linear growth opportunities and to ladder up from a freemium SaaS into an enterprise model.
Dropbox’s Playbook for International Expansion, with ChenLi Wang
There have been two pillars to growth at Dropbox. The first, Dropbox’ freemium model based on word-of-mouth referrals, is something that most of us have experienced if we count ourselves among the company’s 500 million users. The second driver behind Dropbox’s growth to hit the 500 million user milestone is something that’s less visible many of its core users.
As of this year, 75% of Dropbox’s users are now outside of the U.S. In the past year and a half, Dropbox finalized key distribution partnerships with Softbank, Vodafone, Telmex and other partners that help carry it into new geo-linguistic markets (as well as onto different platforms).
We recently spoke to ChenLi Wang, who oversaw international expansion as head of the company’s product and business operations teams, about frameworks for international growth, which countries and what timing, deciding on your first international outpost, some unexpected benefits of international, and its biggest risks.
How an $800M Company Grows through Influencers and Content
Ipsy is a vertically integrated beauty company, covering all ends of the consumer funnel from discovery through its media properties and creator relationships, to sampling with its monthly subscription beauty bag to commerce through its site and app. The company is valued upward of $800 million based on last year's series B and the growth the business has seen since then.
Ipsy’s a fascinating case study because the company seeded its growth with influencers and content. When I spoke with Ipsy’s EVP of media and partnerships, Spencer McClung, at a 500 Startups event in Los Angeles, we dug into how Ipsy (which is part of the 500 Startups portfolio) has scaled its influencer-driven content marketing -- and kept it affordable and defensible -- in the hyper competitive space of makeup and beauty.
Casey Winters On Pinterest's Retention Wins & Why 90% of SEO Advice Is Wrong
By Casey Winters
Pinterest recently announced that they hit 150 million monthly active users sharing over 75 billion “ideas.” This represents a 50% increase in their top line metric, and was accompanied by growth in new demographics.
Casey Winters is the former growth product lead at Pinterest where he helped the service to crack international growth and surpass its 150 million MAU mark. Winters previously led growth at GrubHub where he helped that company grow from three cities to over 500. We sat down with Winters to unpack the metrics that really matter at Pinterest (and any other business), the right way to run experiments and deal with failures and why 90% of everything that’s written about SEO out there is wrong.
Explore more blog posts from top experts
Challenge the status quo.
Sign up for expert takes from the top leaders in product and growth, directly in your inbox.
IMAGES