Marketing Research Template: From Competitor Analysis to Audience Research

Marketing decisions based solely on assumptions rarely lead to good results. Whether you’re planning a new campaign, evaluating a channel, or trying to understand your competitors, structured research helps you move forward with confidence.

In this article, you’ll find ready-to-use marketing research templates, a guide on how to incorporate them into your Jira workflow, and practical tips from our marketing team.

What Does Marketing Research Typically Include?

Marketing research encompasses a wide range of activities. Essentially, it refers to any structured effort to gather information that helps a marketing team make better decisions.

While marketing research is a very broad term, there are several common types that every marketer should be familiar with

Research Type	What It Covers
Target audience research	Understanding who your customers are, how they behave, what they need, and how they make decisions. This includes persona development, segmentation, and buyer journey mapping.
Competitive analysis	Studying what competitors are doing in terms of positioning, messaging, content, pricing, and channels. The goal is to identify gaps and opportunities, which can be done with SWOT analysis and other approaches.
Channel and media research	Evaluating which marketing channels are most effective for reaching your audience and where to invest next. This covers both organic and paid channels.
Content research	Analyzing which topics, formats, and angles resonate with your audience. This encompasses keyword research, content gap analysis, and trend monitoring.
Trend and industry research	Tracking macro trends, emerging technologies, and shifts in buyer behavior. These factors can significantly impact your marketing strategy.

Any of these can be a standalone project or a section within a larger research initiative. The scope depends on your business context and goals.

When Do You Need to Conduct Marketing Research? Key Use Cases

There are several common situations when marketing research is essential. Here are the main ones:

• Building a marketing strategy for a new product or client. When you’re starting from scratch, research helps you understand the audience, the competitive landscape, and which channels and messages are most likely to work.
• Entering a new market or region. Audience behavior, competition, and effective channels can differ significantly from what you’re used to. Research helps you adapt rather than guess.
• Repositioning the brand or refreshing messaging. If your market has shifted or your product has evolved, research helps you validate new positioning before rolling it out.
• Conducting regular competitor analysis. Unlike many other types of marketing research, competitor analysis isn’t a one-time task. Competitors change their strategies, pricing, and messaging over time, so it’s important to revisit your findings periodically.
• Validating one more crazy idea: Investing time into researching the idea is a rule of thumb; a few hours of research can save months of guesswork.

What is a Marketing Research Template and How Can It Help You?

Definition

A marketing research template is a structured framework that guides your team through gathering, analyzing, and documenting marketing intelligence. It can cover areas such as audience analysis, competitor benchmarking, and market research for a new country or region.

Depending on your workflow, a marketing research template can take various forms. In this guide, we focus on templates designed for agile teams using Jira or Monday. There are two main types to consider:

• A checklist template: a reusable list of steps that your team needs to follow during the research process. It’s placed inside a single Jira work item and helps keep things consistent and visible. To create a marketing research template in checklist format, use Smart Checklist for Jira by TitanApps.
• A work item template: a ready-made Jira task or a set of tasks with child work items. It can include standard descriptions, checklists, assignees, due dates, and variables. This format is a good fit for more complex research processes that involve multiple people or teams. Natively, Jira doesn’t offer work item templates, but you can create them with Smart Templates for Jira.

In this article, we provide templates of both types. They are optimized for Jira but can also be used with Monday.

Why Use a Marketing Research Template and Competitor Analysis Template

It may seem like a small addition to your workflow, but a good template solves several problems at once. By using such a template, your team can:

• Create a repeatable process that saves time on future projects
• Ensure that no critical steps are overlooked
• Make research progress visible to the team and stakeholders
• Keep the process consistent regardless of who runs the research
• Collaborate more easily when multiple people are involved
• Build documentation for future reference and stakeholder alignment

A Free Marketing Research Template in the Checklist Format

As I mentioned earlier, marketing research is a broad term encompassing many research types. In this article, we focus on two key types: target audience research and competitor analysis, for which we prepared reusable templates.

They were both created with Smart Checklist for Jira and can be added directly to your Jira work items. Feel free to adjust them by adding, removing, or rearranging steps to match your team’s workflow.

Target Audience Research Checklist

Competitor Analysis Checklist Template

How to Add These Checklists to Your Jira Work Items

1. Install Smart Checklist for Jira from the Atlassian Marketplace.
2. Copy the target audience research checklist or competitor analysis checklist shared above.
3. Paste it into the Smart Checklist section of your work item.
4. Customize the checklist to fit your needs. You can tag team members, add deadlines, include links to internal resources, or add expandable sections for individual steps.
5. Save the checklist as a template if your team conducts competitor analysis regularly or works with multiple clients. This way, you can reuse it across projects with just a few clicks.

Add checklists to your Jira tasks

• Add and edit items
• Make recurring templates
• Automate them with your conditions
• Tag colleagues, add deadlines
• View a progress bar

Try it free

A Competitor Analysis Template Organized as a Set of Jira Work Items

If your research process is more complex or involves multiple people, a checklist inside a single work item may not be enough. In this case, you can organize your template as a set of Jira work items with child tasks.

For example, you can create a parent task called “Marketing Research: {{Project Name}}” and add subtasks for each stage of the process. This can be audience research, competitor analysis, channel evaluation, or something else. Each subtask can have its own description, checklist, assignee, and due date.

With Smart Templates, you can save this entire structure as a reusable template and share it across all projects in your Jira instance. Once saved, the entire set of work items can be generated with one click or even automatically on a schedule. 

Here’s an example of a competitor analysis template organized as a set of Jira work items (Epic + Tasks + checklists):

Smart Templates also support variables for dynamic parameters, such as {{Product}}, {{Country Name}}, or {{Client Name}}. You add them to your template as placeholders, and they get replaced with actual values each time you generate new tasks from the template.

This approach is especially valuable for teams that conduct marketing research frequently, whether for different clients, campaigns, or products. Instead of setting up tasks manually each time, you get a ready-made structure with all the steps, owners, and details already in place.

Optimize processes with Smart Templates

• Spend less time on recreating or cloning recurring tasks
• Optimize your workflow with flexible templates and reduce human error
• Enforce company standards

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Benefits of Using Smart Tools for Your Marketing Research Templates

Using Smart Checklist and Smart Templates together provides your marketing team with a practical system for managing research. Here’s what this setup brings to the table:

• Standardized process. Every research or competitor analysis project follows the same structure, no matter who runs it or how often it’s done.
• Clear ownership. Team members are assigned to specific steps or subtasks, ensuring everyone knows their responsibilities.
• Progress at a glance. You can check the status of any research project by looking at the checklist or task board – no need to chase people for updates.
• Less manual setup. Saved templates eliminate repetitive work. Instead of creating the same tasks from scratch, you generate them in a few clicks.
• Automation support. Checklists can be assigned to work items automatically based on conditions, and work item templates can be generated on a schedule.
• Easier onboarding. New team members can follow the established research process without needing a detailed walkthrough.

Best Practices for Marketing Research and Competitor Analysis 

Here are some practical tips that help us keep our marketing research process efficient and useful:

• Start with a research goal, not with data collection. Before diving into tools and spreadsheets, take the time to define what you’re looking for and how it aligns with your business and marketing goals. A clear research goal and plan keep the team focused and prevent you from collecting data you’ll never use.
• Don’t overload your market research report with raw data. Stakeholders care about insights, not spreadsheets. Focus your market research findings on what matters most: key patterns, clear takeaways, and specific recommendations that can inform business strategies.
• Mix quantitative and qualitative methods. Numbers show you what’s happening, but conversations explain why. Combine metrics from your analytics tools with customer interviews or surveys to get a fuller picture.
• Set a timebox and stick to it. Research can expand endlessly if you let it. Give your team a clear deadline and prioritize the highest-impact areas first. A good-enough market analysis delivered on time is more valuable than a perfect one delivered too late.
• Be ready for changes. With every research or competitor analysis project, you can discover many ways to optimize your messaging, channels, or strategy. Be prepared to invest time into implementation and testing different options – this will make your research truly impactful. 
• Conduct research regularly. Even major marketing research becomes outdated over time: the market is changing, new competitors are emerging, and the audience is evolving. Ensure you regularly update your knowledge to keep your strategy relevant.

Additional Tips For Competitor Analysis

• Focus on a small set of competitors. Trying to track every player in the market is overwhelming. Pick 3–5 direct competitors and 2–3 indirect ones. You can always expand later.
• Don’t just copy what competitors do. The goal of competitor analysis is to find opportunities, not to replicate someone else’s strategy. What works for them may not work for your audience or business model.
• Track competitors over time, not just once. A single snapshot is useful, but ongoing monitoring helps you spot shifts in strategy, new campaigns, or changes in positioning before they affect your market share.
• Use a consistent format for competitor audits. A simple matrix or spreadsheet makes it easier to compare competitors side by side and update findings over time.

Organize Work Efficiently With Your Marketing Research Template

A well-structured marketing research template helps your team streamline the process from start to finish. Whether you’re analyzing customer experiences to improve retention, exploring demographic and psychographic data to better understand your ideal customer, or conducting market research to inform product development, having a repeatable system makes a real difference.

The templates shared in this article provide a practical starting point. Use the checklist format for lightweight research projects or set up a full work item structure for more complex initiatives. Both options work natively in Jira with Smart Checklist and Smart Templates by TitanApps.

For more templates and guides, please refer to our other articles:

• Market Research Template for Jira – a guide for building a template that focuses on target market analysis, market share evaluation, and risk assessment.
• SEO Audit Template – walks you through a structured methodology for auditing your website’s search performance.
• Product Discovery Template – offers a step-by-step checklist for validating product ideas.
• Marketing Management Guide – provides a broader look at how to organize and manage your marketing team’s workflow in Jira.

Add checklists to your Jira tasks

• Add and edit items
• Make recurring templates
• Automate them with your conditions
• Tag colleagues, add deadlines
• View a progress bar

Try it free

FAQs: Using Templates in Marketing Research and Competitor Analysis

What is marketing research?

Marketing research is the process of gathering and analyzing information to support marketing decisions. It can cover a wide range of activities, from studying your target audience and evaluating competitors to reviewing channel performance and tracking industry trends. The goal is to replace assumptions with evidence so your team can plan and execute more effectively.

How is marketing research different from market research?

Market research focuses on understanding the market itself. This includes aspects like market size, demand, customer segments, and pricing. 

Marketing research is broader. It encompasses any research that informs marketing activities, including channel evaluation, content analysis, brand perception, and campaign performance.

What does a marketing research process typically look like?

It usually begins with defining the research objective and the decision it should inform. From there, the team determines what data is needed and where to obtain it. This is followed by data collection, which can include analytics review, competitor audits, surveys, or interviews. Once the data is gathered, it’s analyzed and summarized into key findings. The final step is to present recommendations and assign next steps.

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is the process of studying what other companies in your space are doing in terms of marketing. This includes their positioning, messaging, content, pricing, advertising, and channel strategy. The goal is to understand their strengths and weaknesses so you can find opportunities to differentiate and make more informed marketing decisions.

What should a competitor analysis include?

The scope depends on your goals, but a typical competitor analysis covers several core areas:

• Identifying direct and indirect competitors
• Reviewing their websites, messaging, and value propositions
• Analyzing their content strategy
• Checking their social media presence
• Reviewing their paid advertising 
• Documenting findings 

Why should teams use a marketing research template?

Such a template gives your research process a clear structure. Without one, it’s easy to skip important steps, lose track of findings, or approach each project differently depending on who’s running it. With a template, the team follows the same process every time. This saves time, improves consistency, and makes onboarding new team members easier.

Who is responsible for marketing research in a team?

It depends on the team’s size and structure. In smaller teams, research is often handled by a marketing generalist or the team lead. In larger organizations, it may involve multiple people, such as a content marketer handling competitive content analysis while a PPC specialist reviews ad performance.

What methods can marketing teams use to collect research data?

There are many ways to gather data for marketing research. The right mix depends on your goals, timeline, and available resources. Here are some key methodologies: 

• Surveys and questionnaires. Collect structured feedback from customers or prospects using tools like Google Forms, Typeform, or SurveyMonkey.
• Customer interviews. Have one-on-one conversations to gain deeper context on motivations, pain points, and decision-making.
• Social listening. Monitor brand mentions, industry discussions, and audience sentiment across social media platforms.
• Competitor analysis. Review competitor websites, ads, content, and public communications to identify patterns and positioning.
• Focus groups. Bring together a small group of target users to discuss perceptions, preferences, or reactions to specific ideas.
• Third-party reports and industry data. Use research from firms like Gartner, Statista, or HubSpot to benchmark against broader market trends.

Article by Olga Cheban

Content Writer at TitanApps. I love it when my writing helps people find smarter ways to manage their time. Whether for individual professionals or large companies, even small changes in managing daily tasks can have a huge impact. My goal is to share practical advice that promotes efficiency and facilitates growth.