Human behavior is fascinating. Not only can it give you a good chuckle at times, but it can also provide great insights that you can use for business purposes.
You can gain a much better understanding of consumers’ true wants and needs. This will help you to grow your brand and improve your product.
Surveys remain one of the most effective ways to gather consumer intel. However, there are many other types of tools and strategies that can be equally valuable. There's a wealth of social data available online just waiting to be interpreted. Whether you prefer to go straight to the source and gather first-party data or want to search the web, here are 11 consumer insights software solutions and tools that are up for the task.
Top Consumer Insights Software for the Informed Marketer:
What’s Consumer Insights (CI) Software?
Consumer insights software solutions can give you valuable data about customer preferences, behavior, and changes in customer satisfaction over time. From surveys to social media, it can gather insights from a wide range of sources.
While the term consumer insights is often used interchangeably with market research and customer research, these phrases don’t refer to entirely the same thing. However, as there’s a big overlap, don’t write off a software solution that sells itself as a tool for market research entirely. The data can still be valuable even though it might not get to the real reason behind the data.
Best Consumer Insights Software Solutions
For over a decade, Brandwatch has been following online news to help brands stay informed about what consumers were posting about them. Thanks to a recent merger with Falcon.io, its consumer intelligence platform now also offers a wide variety of social media marketing tools to help you implement the insights gathered. However, if you’re interested in purely a consumer intelligence platform, you can still get that as a standalone product. Brandwatch will monitor the web on your behalf. And, by web, we mean more than 100 million online sources, 1.4 trillion posts as well as the millions of new conversations that get added daily. So, it’s basically the entire web. It will then also index data into a searchable database and share its analysis in an attractive, visualized format. You can, for example, sort it by positive sentiment, specific emotions, and the standard demographics. Not only does it offer a powerful platform, but the onboarding process is pretty simple. If you should get stuck, rest assured that based on hundreds of online reviews its quality of support is regarded as one of its top selling points. Then, to ensure that your user experience is equally seamless, it gives you a high degree of control over its alerts feature. With the help of filters, you can basically set it up in such a way that you get notified about whatever is important to you. Other standout features include: Plans and pricing: Brandwatch offers custom pricing which is available upon request. Talkwalker describes itself as a consumer intelligence acceleration platform and the source of consumer intelligence for brands like Dentsu International and Adidas. It uses proprietary BlueSilk technology to combine external and internal data from customers and consumers. To try and quantify just how powerful it is, its proprietary crawling technology covers more than 150 million data sources while its predictive analytics analyzes over 30 billion data points. Then, to help prevent information overload, it uses a visual analytics center to visualize all the data in an intuitive interface. Pair that with its award-winning AI engine and you’ll be able to access 1000s of automatic segmentations for even more focused analysis. Some of its standout features include: Plans and pricing: Talkwalker offers several pricing plans aimed at SMBs as well as enterprise clients. For a tailored quote, you’ll need to fill out a form on their website. With over 18,000 reviews on G2 and with thousands more on Capterra, it’s safe to say that SurveyMonkey remains one of the most popular survey tools on the market. What’s arguably even more impressive is that it’s used to answer 20 million questions on a daily basis, according to their website. With a tool like SurveyMonkey in your arsenal, there’s no monkeying around and you’ll be able to get to the bottom of how your target audience really feel. It offers loads of survey templates and if you want to use it specifically for customer feedback, here are some of its sample templates to help with customer data and market research: If you prefer not to use one of these templates, you’re welcome to start with a blank canvas and design from scratch. Plans and pricing: SurveyMonkey offers a number of individual and team plans. An enterprise solution is also available. For individual plans, pricing starts at about $30 per month. For team plans, pricing starts at about $20 per user per month. Typeform is one of the best online form builders for surveys, making it a good alternative to SurveyMonkey. It offers various templates that you can use to gather feedback, complete research, and generate leads. What makes it such a good tool to use is that the forms are optimized for mobile devices. Also, the question sequence can be based on the previous answers, helping you to create more personalized experiences. As for team management, it offers integrations with several popular solutions like Google Sheets, Slack, and Mailchimp. This means that you can forward the responses that you’ve collected to the team management tools that the rest of your team currently uses, helping to streamline your workflow. Some of its popular templates include: Plans and pricing: Typeform offers a free plan, three paid options as well as an enterprise solution. Pricing starts at $29 per month when billed monthly (or $25 per month when billed yearly). Statista is one of our websites that we regularly seek out when we need a recent stat. And, we’re not the only ones. Trusted by thousands of companies, Statista offers facts and insights across nearly 200 industries and can be a great place for finding forecasts and studies. Some of the popular topics that users search include: In addition to all the Statista surveys, you can also get access to market research tools when you sign up for Statista Consumer Insights. It, for example, includes its primary study – the Global Consumer Survey. It’s completed in over 55 countries among 60,000 respondents per country. Equipped with these insights, you can compare local and global trends in consumer behavior across the world. Plans and pricing: Access to Statista Consumer Insights will cost you $860 per month when billed yearly. The name itself will make you fall in love with the product. While it’s definitely not some homemade preserve as the name on an empty stomach might like you to believe, it’s a tool that will help you to preserve your good online presence. It’s designed for marketers, product teams, researchers, and UX designers. Its solutions can be used to: Its heatmapping tool deserves special mention. After all, how people interact with your website offer valuable insights into their needs. If you prefer a more direct approach, you can use survey templates or feedback widgets. What makes feedback widgets such a nice approach is that it lets you gather customer insights throughout their journey. Plans and pricing: Hotjar offers several plans as well as a custom package. Pricing starts at about $30 per month when paid yearly, but depending on your needs you might also be able to use it for free. With thousands of reviews on G2, Qualtrics is one of the most popular market research tools and offers a number of products. For help with research, you can check out its Qualtrics CoreXM product that offers a suite of premium analytics tools. It offers several survey templates that have been designed by pros to help you access insights about customers. You can, for example, use the customer satisfaction survey to find out more about the current customer experience, while the net promoter score survey can give you a quick glimpse into how likely customers are to recommend your brand. Other key features include: Plans and pricing: You’ll have to reach out to Qualtrics directly or request a demo to find out more info about pricing. AnswerThePublic is another one of the tools created by NP Digital, an agency co-founded by Neil Patel, one of the most influential marketers across the globe. Not only can it help you to gather consumer insights, but also help with search engine optimization and to inform your content strategy. It’s very easy to use. All you need to do is enter a topic, brand, or product into the search bar, select the country, language, and click on search. It will then generate results showing what customers want to find out about your brand or your product. Not only will it show the search volume, but also the cost per click (CPC). The premise might be simple and the insights raw, but the information can have a powerful impact on how you approach your product and content marketing strategy moving forward. Plans and pricing: With the free version of AnswerThePublic, you can have up to three free searches per day. For more searches or to be able to see data on all the keywords, you need to upgrade to the PRO plan. After a free seven-day trial, pricing starts at $99 per month. It also offers an attractive lifetime deal for a one-time fee of $948. If you don’t have a massive subscriber list for sending out surveys via email, you can check out Qualaroo. It offers a unique approach by enabling you to survey consumers via your website or app, similar to Hotjar. What’s more, you get to choose when to ask what, helping to create a more personalized experience and gather specific answers. This way, you can target website visitors based on certain actions. For example, if a website visitor scrolled down the fold, you could ask about layout or content feedback. Another useful way to use it is to target visitors when they’re about to abandon a cart. Other key features include: Plans and pricing: After a free 15-day trial (no credit card required), pricing starts at $99 per month (or $828 when billed annually – a saving of 20%). For those wanting to embrace the power of artificial intelligence, there’s Meltwater. It helps brands like Lacoste and Lexus to get a deeper understanding of consumers, what motivates their customers specifically, and how different groups are chatting online about their brand. Its consumer insights platform combines AI with a touch of human intervention to share actionable insights that you can use at all stages of the customer journey. Plus, as they rely on real-time social data, you can rest assured that your insights will still be relevant. In addition to social data, they also use data sources like: For example when Brut., a French digital-media firm, needed assistance with analyzing social conversations, Meltwater could use data available within its platform to give them a deeper understanding of audience behavior. Armed these insights, they could identify target audiences and inform their content production accordingly. Plans and pricing: For more information about Melwater’s pricing, you’ll need to reach out to them directly or request a demo. Founded in 2015, Attest is a self-serve, consumer research platform that combines research tech (including machine learning and AI) with human expertise to simplify the whole process. To translate its capabilities into numbers, it empowers you to survey 125 million consumers in over 55 countries. Using filters (there are up to 17 that you may use), you can then refine the group to whom you want to send your online surveys further. If you’re trying to reach a global group, it also includes translation as an in-platform service. As for the survey, you can use various types of questions including: Analyzing your results is also made simple with the help of an interactive results dashboard. You can use demographics to filter and it’s also currently testing free text analysis that will highlight the common words found in individual answers for open-text questions. Plans and pricing: Instead of charging a fixed monthly subscription, users are charged per response. Pricing starts at $0.44 per response.1. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
2. Talkwalker Analytics
3. SurveyMonkey
4. Typeform
5. Statista
6. Hotjar
7. Qualtrics
8. AnswerThePublic
9. Qualaroo
10. Meltwater
11. Attest
Wrapping Things Up
Brands should be customer-focused. Instead of making the main theme of your messages how amazing your product is, your content should focus on your customers and their pain points. In other words, how your product can help them.
To do this, though, you’ll need to get to know them. Whether it’s asking them to complete a quick survey or taking it upon yourself to scrutinize what they’ve written online, brands need consumer insights (like customers need your product).
It’s a key extra step that will take you one step closer to personalizing your marketing and creating a better customer journey. Not only will this help you increase the value of your current customers but also make it easier for you to reach new customers.
