Free tool
Market Research Template & Industry Analysis Doc
Work through the guided research scaffold — objective, market trends, the TAM/SAM/SOM sizing ladder, a competitor table, and a buyer persona — and get a structured research doc your team can act on. Autosaves in your browser; copy the text or download a PDF. Free, no account.
1. Scope & objective
2. Market overview & trends
4. Competitor table
Your top three rivals — one honest line per cell.
5. Buyer persona
6. Key finding
Market Research
Research objective
The decision this doc informs — everything below exists to answer it.
For : .
Market overview & trends
Where the market is heading — each shift with the source that says so.
Market sizing
The TAM → SAM → SOM ladder — each rung a value plus the method behind it.
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TAM — total addressable market
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SAM — serviceable available market
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SOM — serviceable obtainable market
Competitor landscape
Who's already serving this market — and where each one is beatable.
| Competitor | Positioning | Pricing | Exploitable weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
Buyer persona
The person the market sections are ultimately about.
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Who they are
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The pain
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Their goal
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Where they research
Key finding & opportunity
The answer to the research objective — the paragraph the reader acts on.
The shelf-life test: the trends, the pricing column, and the weaknesses in this doc were true the day you wrote them. Date the doc, name your sources, and re-check the competitor table before anyone bets a quarter on it.
You just mapped the landscape — it changes every week.
The competitor table and the sizing in this doc are a snapshot. Outmano watches your competitors' pricing, features, positioning, and reviews — and tells you when the landscape moves, so the research stays true after the week you wrote it.
The market research template, section by section
Whether you call it market research or an industry analysis, the same six sections answer the questions a decision-maker will ask. This template asks for them in order:
- Objective. The decision the research informs, in one sentence. Research without a stated objective grows appendices instead of answers — write the decision first and every later section has a job.
- Trends. Two or three shifts changing the market, each with a source. This is the secondary research half — analyst reports, category studies, competitors' own announcements.
- Sizing. TAM, SAM, SOM — each a value plus the method that produced it. A sizing number without its method can't be challenged, which means it can't be trusted either. See market sizing for the ladder.
- Competitor table. Name, positioning, pricing, and one exploitable weakness per rival. The weakness column is the one that turns an inventory into intelligence — leave it honest or leave it out.
- Persona. Who buys, what pain sends them looking, what success looks like, and where they research. This is the primary research half — interviews beat any purchased report here.
- Key finding. The answer to the objective, in one paragraph. If the reader only reads this section, the research still did its job.
How to run market research with this template
The template is the scaffold; the work is filling it honestly. A working order:
- Write the objective before anything else. "Understand the market" is not an objective; "decide whether to enter the mid-market segment" is. The objective decides which sections deserve depth.
- Fill the industry-analysis half from published sources. Trends, sizing inputs, and the competitor table's positioning and pricing columns are all public — category reports, review sites, and the rivals' own pricing pages.
- Size top-down and bottom-up, and keep both methods in the doc. When the two ladders disagree, the gap is the finding. The TAM SAM SOM Calculator does the arithmetic.
- Earn the weakness column. Read each rival's worst reviews, not their homepage. A weakness their own customers name in public is one you can build a wedge on.
- Interview before you write the persona. Five conversations with real buyers beat any template prompt. Write down the words they use — the persona's pain in the buyer's own phrasing is reusable everywhere.
- Date it, and schedule the re-check. Research decays: pricing changes, positioning shifts, new entrants land. A dated doc with a re-check date is research; an undated one is folklore. See market research for the discipline.
The research doc is one artifact in the set. The TAM SAM SOM Calculator works the sizing ladder with real arithmetic, the Competitor Analysis Generator deepens the competitor table into a full side-by-side, the Porter's Five Forces Template runs the structural half of an industry analysis on its own, and the Competitor Finder builds the rival list from any domain in about 30 seconds. There's more in the free tools catalog.
Market research template FAQ
- What is a market research template?
- A structured doc that walks you through the questions every market study has to answer, in order: what decision the research informs (objective), what's changing in the market (trends), how big the opportunity is (TAM, SAM, SOM), who you're up against (competitor table), and who actually buys (persona). Fill the sections in and you get a research doc a teammate can act on — instead of a folder of disconnected notes. This template renders the doc live as you type, autosaves in your browser, and exports as text or PDF.
- What should a market research report include?
- Five sections cover most internal decisions: a one-line research objective, the market's direction of travel (2–3 trends with a source each), a sizing ladder (TAM → SAM → SOM, each with the method that produced the number), a competitor table (name, positioning, pricing, exploitable weakness — per rival), and a buyer persona (role, pain, goal, where they research purchases). Charts and appendices are optional; a stated objective and sourced numbers are not — a report that skips them reads as opinion.
- What is the difference between market research and industry analysis?
- Mostly scope. Industry analysis studies the playing field itself — size, growth, structural forces, who competes — while market research adds the customer: who buys, why, and what they'd switch for. In practice one doc covers both, which is why this template pairs the industry sections (trends, sizing, competitor table) with a persona section. If you only need the structural-forces half, the Porter's Five Forces template does that framework on its own.
- How do you do market research without a budget?
- Start secondary, then go primary. Secondary research is what's already published — analyst reports, competitors' pricing pages, review sites, job postings, industry stats — and it fills the trends, sizing, and competitor sections of this doc for free. Primary research is what you collect yourself: five to ten customer interviews will fill the persona section better than any purchased report. The expensive part of market research isn't gathering — it's keeping the doc current after the week you wrote it.
- Is this market research template free? Do I need an account?
- Yes, and no account. The form and preview run entirely in your browser and autosave locally — nothing you type is sent to our servers. We only ask for an email when you copy the finished doc or download it as a PDF.