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As a business owner, you need to keep your finger on the pulse constantly. Not only do you need to know about the changes that impact your own target audience, but also the bigger market.
It’s a necessary exercise, but without the right market research tools in your tech stack it can easily lead to information overload. To help prevent that from happening, here are 16 tools that you can use to create an online survey, identify search terms, etc. and a couple of practical guidelines for how to use all your new data.
Best Market Research Tools to Help You Become a Market Leader:
Benefits of Market Research
From brand research to competitor research to usability testing, market research can take on different forms. Whatever your reason, here’s why it’s never a wasted activity:
- It helps you to understand your customers, empowering you to serve them better.
- It uncovers new opportunities for business growth.
- It makes it easier to identify emerging trends, helping you to stay ahead of the competition.
- It minimizes risk as you can test product ideas beforehand.
- It makes it easier to measure the success of your business by using benchmarks.
Popular Market Research Tools:
Mention is one of the leading social media monitoring tools and can help with a number of use cases. Included in its feature and service list is competitive analysis and social media listening. With the competitive analysis, you can keep track of specific competitors and then compare key metrics. By keeping tabs on what your competitors are up to, you’ll essentially get a much better idea of what’s trending in your market currently. Another way that you can use Mention for market research is with the help of its social listening feature. This will give you an accurate idea of your target audience’s exact needs without having to organize costly focus groups or time-consuming interviews. For example, Dove used Mention’s social listening feature to gather a massive load of data on social media alone. This data identified one shocking trend — the majority of females have already experienced body-shaming comments. In response, they started their #SpeakBeautiful campaign. The result — an increase of more than 60% in sales. Key features include: Plans and pricing: Mention offers three paid plans. After a free 14-day trial, pricing starts at $49 per month (or $41 per month when paid yearly). If you’re a regular reader of Influencer Marketing Hub, you would know that we like to use Statista a lot. It’s one of our go-to tools for statistics. In addition to yours truly, it’s also trusted by global brands like Adobe, PayPal, and Samsung. Here, you can find insights and facts across 170 industries and over 15 countries. You can use it to gain deep insight into key figures like KPIs and revenue metrics. Armed with these insights, you can calculate market potential, better understand how volume can impact revenue, and compare key players. One drawback, though, is that it doesn’t come cheap. That said, it does offer a few free statistics. Also, while you might not be able to access the graph, some of the key information might still be visible for free. Key features include: Plans and pricing: You can either choose to sign up for a subscription or sign up for a one-month solution only. The subscription option costs $860 per month billed annually, while the one-month solution is $1,950 billed once. Along with Statista, Similarweb is another one of our go-to tools when we need to back things up with accurate numbers. All in all, it’s a great tool for competitor research and useful for seeing how you stack up against rivals in any location or industry. It includes over 50 digital traffic and engagement metrics to help you get a comprehensive picture of your industry. From consumer trends to changes in top-performing marketing channels to tracking historical trends, there are various things that you can research. Key features include: Plans and pricing: If you’re a small business, pricing starts at about $170 per month. Custom quotes are also available upon request. SurveyMonkey is one of the top competitor analysis and research tools for online startups looking to scale. As its name indicates (more specifically the first part), it’s used for creating surveys. In fact, the chances are good that you’ve already helped another brand with their market research in your personal capacity by completing a survey created by SurveyMonkey. You can either use one of its templates or create your survey from scratch. If it will be used for market research specifically, it offers a number of templates. You can, for example, check out the new Product Research Template, before you launch your project. If you’re busy with product testing, there’s the Product Testing Survey Template. In addition to these templates, SurveyMonkey also shares a lot of useful tips and suggestions on their website to help ensure that your market research is and remains on the right track. Key features include: Plans and pricing: In addition to a free basic plan, it offers a number of individual and team plans. Individual plans start at about $30 per month. Team plans start at about $20 per user per month when billed annually (a minimum of three users must be added). AnswerThePublic is a tool created by NP Digital. You can use it to get raw search insights instantly and directly from your customers. In short, it uses autocomplete data from Google and other search engines and then generates all the useful questions that users want to know about a keyword. All in all, it’s a great tool for generating ideas for your next blog post or identifying ways to improve your service or product. The info can also be useful for developing content strategies. You’ll be surprised to learn what your target market is really searching for online. In addition to content marketing and customer research, other popular use cases include public relations, paid media and SEO. Key features include: Plans and pricing: After a free seven-day trial, pricing starts at only $9 per month. It also offers an attractive lifetime deal for a one-time fee of $99. Tableau offers a self-service visual analytics platform that helps people to work with data, irrespective their level of skill. It’s trusted by tens of thousands of users including individuals as well as Fortune 500 companies and their client list include names like Lenovo and Lufthansa. It can be used across several departments. For example, marketing teams can use it to gain insight into customer journeys. Combine this with its ability to create more visually appealing analysis and you’ll realize why it’s loved and trusted by thousands. Plans and pricing: Pricing ranges from $15 per user per month to $70 per user per month. If you’re searching for a similar tool to SurveyMonkey, you can also check out Typeform. In addition to surveys, you can also use it to create no-code forms, polls, and quizzes. These can be great for completing quick market research, but also for engaging with your target audience. For example, if you want to use it purely for market research, you can create surveys that will help you to get to know your customers better. You can then use this info to tweak your strategy so that it better addresses their needs. Surveys are optimized for mobile and visually striking, a huge encouragement for recipients to get started. Also, as you can base the next question on their previous answer, the survey feels more engaging and less generic. This helps to attract deeper answers too. Key features include: Plans and pricing: Typeform offers a free plan and two paid plans. Pricing starts at $59 per month when billed monthly (or $50 per month when billed yearly). Qualtrics is a firm favorite among business schools, but it can also be used by corporate clients to solve difficult research problems. When used in a corporate setup, it can help to boost sales, attract new customers, and increase customer satisfaction. You can use it to create advanced-flow surveys. If that sounds like a mouthful, rest assured the interface uses drag-and-drop functionality making it very intuitive. From product testing to monitoring market trends to tracking consumer behavior, it can be used in a long list of ways. Not only does it give you the tool to complete your surveys, but you can also buy access to respondents that fall within your target audience. Key features include: Plans and pricing: You’ll have to reach out to Qualtrics directly to find out more details about pricing. If you want to find out more about brand awareness specifically, you can check out a tool like Latana. It’s trusted by a long list of global brands that include the likes of Wise, Headspace, and Udemy. Its goal is to help businesses of all sizes measure how people view their brand. In fact, according to their website their tool is the only brand tracking tool that can share consumer insights from more than 100 countries. In addition to brand awareness, it can also be used to track market size (aka the total number of potential buyers) and purchase drivers. Knowing which factors have the most significant influence on whether or not people decide to use your brand can make it easier to improve the performance of your brand. Key features include: Plans and pricing: All packages are tailored to suit each individual brand. To receive a custom quote, you need to complete an online form on their website. If you’re keen on embracing artificial intelligence, you should try Pollfish. Brands like Microsoft, Adidas, and Netflix already are. It’s another useful tool that you can use to create surveys. Basically, you type the goal of your survey and let AI create it for you. For a more formal description of what Pollfish does, it’s a DIY market research provider that offers an end-to-end solution. It can deliver real-time responses of hundreds of millions of real customers from all over the globe. This huge distribution network means that they can use the right audience for your market research project. Key features include: Plans and pricing: Pricing starts at $95. Make My Persona is one of the best free marketing tools for brands with limited funds. Brought to you by HubSpot, one of the leading names in all things marketing, this free tool helps you to create buyer personas quickly. These buyer personas can be used by all departments helping them to improve their marketing strategies and campaigns and ultimately to sell more. Not only can you use it to create buyer persona templates that highlight the unique qualities of your target audience, but you can also customize the layout to plot each persona. Plans and pricing: Make My Persona is free to use. If you need help with focus groups, you can check out Remesh. It’s been named as the best online market research tool for this use case by Similarweb. Trusted by names like Barclays, Deloitte, and Nestlé, Remesh can give you “qualitative insights at quantitative scale”. In short, it enables you to start a live conversation with hundreds of consumers at the same time. In other words, create your very own focus group at scale. Then, with the help of AI, you can sort and analyze their responses to help you understand their responses better in real time. Armed with these valuable insights, you can make better products, test packaging, and craft more effective marketing messages. You can also group participants into custom segments, helping you to understand your buyer personas. Key features include: Plans and pricing: You’ll have to reach out to Remesh directly to find out more details about pricing. Voxco can be used for a number of purposes, including market research. Its platform makes it easy to collect data and measure sentiment to find out which customers are unsatisfied or close to becoming. You can then use this data to identify actionable insights. All in all, it’s a great tool for businesses of any size that want to find out more about what their customers need and want. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll have a more accurate picture of which products or services you need to invest your resources. Key features include: Plans and pricing: Voxco offers flexible pricing options for all their clients. There are a number of factors that can impact pricing such as add-on features and the number of survey responses. If you specifically need help with refining your user experience (UX), be sure to try out Loop11. Similarweb has voted Loop11 as their top market research tool for UX testing. It includes an intuitive test builder that you can use to create usability tests. You can then customize your test further by creating specific tasks that participants need to complete or adding survey questions. Not only does it help you to create the actual usability test, but it also helps you to find participants (they have a panel of verified participants). Alternatively, if you want to tickle current customers’ brains or have quite a niche audience, you’re also free to add your own participants. Key features include: Plans and pricing: After a free 14-day trial, pricing starts at $199 per month (or $179 per month when billed annually). Google remains one of the most powerful research tools. If you’ve mostly been using the search bar up until now, it’s time that you reconsider how you use Google. It also offers a suite of digital research tools (Think with Google). You can use it to view trends, statistics, and consumer insights. While it doesn’t offer data in real-time, it’s a great tool if you’re more interested in historical data. You’re probably already familiar with Google Trends. In addition to Google Trends, it also includes tools like Find My Audience and Grow My Store. Plans and pricing: Think with Google is free to use. The U.S. Census Bureau might be a strange entry on this listicle. However, if your market is mostly located in the United States, this can be a very useful tool. On their website, they share a number of how-to videos, in-depth courses, webinars, and tutorials. From employment to income to population estimates, you can find a wealth of valuable data. Plans and pricing: The information is available free of charge.
1. Mention
2. Statista
3. Similarweb
4. SurveyMonkey
5. AnswerThePublic
6. Tableau
7. Typeform
8. Qualtrics
9. Latana
10. Pollfish
11. Make My Persona
12. Remesh
13. Voxco
14. Loop11
15. Think with Google
16. U.S. Census Bureau
How to Use Marketing Research Data
Now that you know where and how to get the data, what to do with it? Most of these tools offer analytics too. This makes it much easier to digest the data.
Basically, you’ll need to find a way to organize the data that makes sense to you. For example, if the data is mostly numerical like sales figures and operational costs, you can use a spreadsheet. For quantitative data like open-ended questions that reveal more about brand affiliation, you can, for example, use graphs.
Once you have all the data organized in a logical way, it’s time to analyze the results. In short, your goal should be to identify patterns or any significant changes. You can then use these findings to evaluate your current marketing strategy. For example, if the data shows that your target audience is spending more time on TikTok, perhaps it’s time to create marketing campaigns specifically for this social channel. Using it to improve your marketing strategy is one of the best ways to put this data to use.
