marketing research tools

The 12 best market research tools for reliable data analysis in 2024

Market research tools help you get to grips with your market and audience, faster. Here are 12 of the best market research tools you can use today.

12 market research platforms and tools for accurate analysis

Choose the best market research software platform, which is the best tool for market research your faqs answered.

It’s the time of year again when you get to plan a trip. You only have so much to spend on your holiday, and you’ve got other people to keep the whole group happy. 

You scan Google Flights, TripAdvisor, and sneak peek on Instagram to see what people posted at the hotel you were eying. You’re doing your own market research. Because you only get to spend every dollar once, right?

Launch your next product with a data-driven strategy

Attest’s market research platform comes complete with a team of insights professionals who will help your team get real results from your survey data.

Similarly, when it comes to launching a new product , engaging your audience , and making important business decisions, market research is your roadmap to success, and the right tools help you get there.

Here we’ll explore some of the top market research tools and creative testing tools and industry benchmarking that can help you navigate the ever-changing landscape of your market and arrive at your destination with confidence. We’ll cover a bunch of the top market research companies in the US and beyond, so whether your research is local, national or global, make sure your research tool does the job!

Strapped for time? Here’s our TL;DR list of market research tools:

Use these top tools and market research software platforms to gather informed insights about your target audience.

With Attest, you can easily conduct regular surveys, spot trends, and work towards predicting market changes instead of just following them. This ability to predict changes in the market can help you stay ahead of your competitors and make strategic decisions to better prepare for the future. By using Attest’s market research platform, you can make your operations more bulletproof against big changes, ensuring you stay agile and adaptable in a constantly evolving market.

Attest gives you quality consumer insights that are delivered fast! And every Attest customer has a designated research manager to offer advice throughout your research project.

I love Attest. I love the speed and agility. I also really love that you guys provide a dedicated rep. I’m a marketer by trade, not a researcher, so it is nice to be able to have somebody to talk to whenever I have questions. Monica Aguilo, Senior Director – Consumer Insights, Strategy, & Social at Manscaped

Price: Find out more about Attest pricing .

Standout features:

• Dedicated research expert on standby: we want you to make the most of your research. That’s why all of our packages include a dedicated research manager who’ll help you create solid surveys, analyze your data and action your findings. There is no limit on platform support and research advice.
• Always the right audience: you get access to 125 million people in 59 countries. But go ahead and make your survey audience as niche as you need! You can layer different targeting specs to make sure you’re getting super-relevant results.
• Highest data quality: our sampling approach gives you the reliable answers you need from the people you’re looking to speak to. We use a mixed-methodology approach, meaning every survey is answered by multiple high-quality sample sources. Add to that three layers of quality control, both human and machine-learning-led, and you can confidently use your data for business decisions .

Best uses: you want to launch a survey for solid market research . Whether it be a competitive analysis, concept testing, consumer profiling or anything else—Attest has you covered. If you are looking for full support, we’re here for you. Check out our free market research survey templates and get started in seconds!

Turn insights into action with Attest

Our cutting-edge consumer insights platform is cost-effective, easy to use, and truly global. You’ll also get dedicated support from our Customer Research Team to make sure that you get the most valuable insights from your audience.

2. Google Trends

Price: Google Trends is a completely free market research tool!

• Search term analysis over time: imagine being able to track the rise and fall of a trend in real-time, like a stock market chart for search terms. With Google Trends, you can do just that. You can see how frequently a term is being searched and where in the world it’s most popular.
• Related topics and queries: want to know what your customers are thinking about? Check out the “related topics” and “related queries” features. This will give you an idea of the other search terms that are closely related to your original search term, giving you a glimpse into the minds of your target audience.
• Comparative keyword research: with the ability to compare multiple search terms, you can see how your brand stacks up against the competition, or even find new opportunities for growth.

Best uses: the main use case for Google Trends is to see market trends evolve over time. You can easily uncover basic data on how interest in a particular product, brand or industry changes over time. It’s a great starting place for market research to see what direction to go in.

Price : You can book a demo with Latana to find out how much it would cost for your business.

• Industry benchmarking: Latana helps you understand where your brand ranks in your entire industry. You can easily compare your own KPI data against your competitors in an interactive dashboard. They’ve got data from hundreds of industries and thousands of brands.
• Mobile-first micro surveys: with Latana you can conduct your own market research using mobile-optimized surveys. They have a reach of over 6 billion smartphone users, which you can access through in-app surveys.
• MRP algorithm for data quality: Latana uses machine learning to select the right audience for you.

Best uses: Latana is great for quick surveys with short and simple questions. It’s used for brand tracking as well.

4. Pollfish

Price : The concept testing feature starts from $1 per completed survey. A basic plan starts at $95 and allows you to collect up to 100 completed surveys with up to 5 questions.

• AI-powered surveys: tell AI what you want to know, and it will automatically create a survey for you.
• Mobile-optimized surveys: Pollfish has a mobile-first approach, meaning your survey will land on the smartphone of your users.
• Easy concept testing: Pollfish has a feature that lets you test whether your logo is giving you the responses you’re looking for from your target audience.

Best uses: Pollfish is great for short and sweet surveys, for instance for concept testing or brand tracking.

Price: the cheapest Solo plan allows you to do social listening and publishing, and you can set up 2 basic alerts for up to 5,000 mentions. That all starts at just $41 per month.

• Real-time social media monitoring: mention is like having a live news feed for your brand. You can track conversations and mentions of your brand on social media and the web, and find out what people are saying about you, without having to go look for it.
• Competitive analysis: mention doesn’t just monitor what people are saying about you. You can complete your market research by adding what your target audience is saying about your biggest and smaller competitors, to paint a better picture of where you stand.
• Industry tracker: mention comes with a retail and finance industry tracker, allowing you to track live online conversations around trending topics.

Best uses: your market research focuses on what your target market thinks about your brand or about competitors. This is perfect for market research revolving around branding, marketing campaigns and customer experiences.

Price: there’s no mention of pricing on the website, so book a demo to find out more.

• Scalable focus group: Remesh works like a scalable focus group. You can launch a live conversation with an audience that is relevant to you, with up to 1,000 participants at once.
• Live AI analysis: ask in-depth questions to a lot of people at once and let AI do the analytics part. The Remesh AI will uncover trends and themes, compare responses and segment your audience, all automatically.
• Different question types: you can keep the conversation flowing with open-ended questions and polls, and even add visuals to make it more clear what you are asking about.

Best uses: Remesh is ideal for concept testing and innovation processes. It works well if you want to go deep, like in a one-on-one, but need to talk to a lot of people in your target market at once to verify what the best decision is.

7. Heartbeat Ai

Price: Heartbeat Ai doesn’t mention any prices on their website, so book a demo to find out.

• Qualitative text analysis: Heartbeat Ai is like that friend who just knows how you feel by reading the texts you send. They’ve got a strong sentiment analysis tool that can recognize emotions and themes in your qualitative text data.
• Sophisticated sentiment analysis: Heartbeat Ai goes beyond identifying positive and negative sentiments. It can categorize text input into 9 primary emotions, 97 secondary emotions and 3 body sensations.
• Science-based: Heartbeat Ai is a market research tool made with cognitive psychology and affective neuroscience in mind

Best uses: you’re looking to uncover valuable insights on the qualitative side of market research. If you have text data and don’t have the manpower to manually read into the sentiment of it, Heartbeat Ai does the heavy lifting.

8. Answer the Public

Price: You get one free search per day, and can create a free account to unlock 3 free searches per day. If you need more, start with the individual plan for $9 per month and 100 searches per day.

Standout Features:

• Search listening: enter one or two words, a region, and watch all the adjacent topics, questions and thoughts people have about your keywords.
• Content ideas: struggling to come up with content ideas? Give in some keywords and ATP gives you a lot of related topics that will surely inspire your next piece of content.
• Data visualization: all the flat datasets you get can be turned into data visualizations for you to share with your team.

Best uses: during the ideation phase or to track specific key words and find what else people are wondering or saying about that. Also great for research for your content marketing.

9. Stravito

Price: book a demo to find out what pricing plan works best for you.

• Company content database: gather all your company knowledge in one place. Keep it organized and give people access in just a few clicks. With seamless drag-and-drop upload and a wide variety of integrations to centralize all your company knowledge.
• Intuitive UX: Stravito has a drag-and-drop upload system, uses multilingual search powered by Natural Language Processing for finding what you’re looking for, and tops it off with AI-powered content recommendations.
• Dedicated support: Stravito has a clear onboarding plan, promising to get you up and running within 6 to 8 weeks.

Best Uses: for enterprises who have a lot of knowledge, reports and data and want their employees to have easy access to this.

10. Typeform

Price: The cheapest plan starts at $21 per month, but only includes 100 responses.

• User-friendly surveys: Typeform is another survey creation tool that shows respondents one question at a time, mimicking a human conversation.
• Question formats: it’s not just what you ask, it’s how as well—that’s the philosophy at Typeform. They offer all kinds of question formats, like multiple-choice, scale ratings, and open-ended questions. Add in conditional logic to structure your survey based on a respondent’s answers.
• Ease of use: Typeform offers a bunch of pre built survey templates, which helps you to send great-looking surveys in mere minutes. And with all its integrations, you can integrate it in your workflow easily.

Best uses: you want to survey but also be on-brand. It matters to you that each survey elevates the customer experience. Your research can be both qualitative and quantitative, shorter or longer.

11. Qualtrics

Price: It will depend on which market research tools you are looking to use, so reach out to them for a custom demo.

• Survey tool with audience management: don’t have access to your own list of respondents? You can purchase access to millions of respondents through Qualtrics. If you do have your own lists, the tool will help you create neat panels.
• Analyze existing data: upload an existing data set and Qualtrics will run statistical tests and apply visualizations on it to help you make sense of the data you have, and to communicate it to stakeholders.
• A variety of market research tools: Qualtrics comes with tools to measure and analyze purchase behavior, market segmentation, competitor analysis benchmarking—to name a few.

Best uses: Qualtrics has a wide variety of market research possibilities, so if you’re very regularly doing different types of research, this platform might be a good fit for you.

If you’re looking for market research survey software, check out our list of the top 11 Qualtrics alternatives .

12. Statista

Price: you can check out some stats for free, but if you want to have full access to their best market research tools, a starter account starts at €39 per month. Access to Market Insights for one month will cost you €1,950.

• Statistical reports: if you’re wondering about certain statistics, chances are Statista has it. Pick any topic, industry, and country and find detailed reports, numbers and trusted content made by industry experts.
• Visual data: practically anyone can make sense of the data on Statista, thanks to its visualization and easily interpretable data representation.
• Consumer insights tools: With Statista Consumer Insights you get access to all kinds of market research tools and all results of the exclusive Statista surveys.

Best uses: it’s a great starting point for any research, but also a great source to support your research with trusted stats, numbers and existing market research data.

The best market research tools and market research services are the ones that help you reach your goals efficiently. Any tool is just as good as the support you can get, and that’s where Attest sets itself apart from the rest.

If you’re looking to launch market research surveys with ease and expertise combined, reach out to our team. You’ll get a dedicated research expert assigned to you that will help you get all the customer feedback and market data you need. Sign up today!

Choose the #1 market research tool

Attest gives you the best of both worlds in consumer insights: a cutting-edge platform and dedicated research expertise when you need it.

Market research tools come in all shapes and sizes. There are reporting tools that help you visualize data, survey tools that get you first-hand data and tools that give you an in-depth analysis of what’s being said about you on social media platforms. Attest gives you access to a global audience, with the power to drill down into the demographics that matter most.

It depends on the needs of your business. Always keep the desired action in mind when choosing a market research tool: what do you want to be able to decide or change after this? Then trace back which information you need to make those decisions to choose the best market research tools for your plans. Attest makes local and global market research easy.

Depending on your business’s needs, you can choose survey tools, data visualization tools, tools that help you identify trends and many other marketing tools. The best market research tools are the ones that help you reach your goals and enable your business to live up to its full potential!

If you choose the right market research tool for your goals and needs, then yes, market research tools are worth the investment. Market research tools provide your business with insights into your audience, competition and trends. This knowledge will help you minimize risks and maximize profitability in the long run. Plus, many of these tools offer features that save time and resources, such as automated survey distribution or data analysis. 

Market research is what can elevate creative ideas into powerful solutions that your customers will love and buy. It helps you uncover the information you need to reach customers better, to create marketing campaigns that are effective, and to craft products or services that will generate profit over a long period of time. Without data supporting all these elements, you’re taking big risks, and it can slow down your decision-making. Market research helps you take impactful steps, with confidence. 

Customer Research Lead 

Nick joined Attest in 2021, with more than 10 years' experience in market research and consumer insights on both agency and brand sides. As part of the Customer Research Team team, Nick takes a hands-on role supporting customers uncover insights and opportunities for growth.

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17 Market research tools you should be using

From trawling the mighty US Census, to calculating percent change in an instant, there’s a whole lot of research tools out there to help you do your job as a market researcher. When you’re conducting market research , the obvious tool you need is a world-class research platform. But let’s look at some other tools to help you create the best possible experience for your customers and employees.

Here are 17 of the best.

1. Pew Research Center

Insightful, rigorous and transparent data. This is what you can expect from The Pew Research Center , a non-profit organization that conducts research and analysis across a diverse range of areas. These include:

• US politics and policy
• Public opinion polling
• Social and demographic trends
• News and media
• Technology and the internet
• Hispanic interest
• Global interest

More specific topics of interest and research include:

• Social media
• Online privacy
• Broadband access
• IoT (the internet of things)

2. Growthbar

(Free Trial)

The quickest and easiest way to perform market research has to be GrowthBar. The tool allows you to do market research on the fly -- instantly unlocking critical data points about your competitors or any website and the growth channels and keywords that are working for them. This data will help you identify what others in your space are doing as well as identify which marketing channels may work to grow your own business.

See the following data for any website:

• Domain Authority
• Organic Traffic
• Top Organic Keywords
• Top Paid Keywords
• Top Backlinks
• Suggested Keywords
• Keyword Search Volume

Take actionable next steps to compete with the market by creating content that ranks fast, utilizing their powerful Open AI technology. Enter any keyword and instantly get a content outline that tells you exactly what to write to optimize for SEO. You can also pair this tool up with Sitechecker Link Extractor that helps you extract all the links from your target website to see who they're linking to.

3. Living Facts

Described as the Pew Research Center’s sister site, and created by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Living Facts has the simple strapline, ‘about Americans today—who we are and how we live. Our goal is to inform and inspire. That’s it.’

With clean, colorful design and infographics, and chock-full of statistics, educational quizzes and fascinating facts, Living Facts covers:

• Communities
• Demographics

4. US Census Business Data

There’s nothing to top the data to be found in the US Census when it comes to free market research . Start with Data Gems , videos that explain how to access census data to inform your business decisions.

Then dive into the data, with useful tools that cover:

• Economics : the Consumer Price Index and Bureau of Economic Analysis
• Money Statistics from the Federal Reserve banks.
• Income : Earnings by Occupation and Education and Income Statistics .
• The labor market : Employment and Unemployment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Industries : North American Industry Classification System or NAICS system.

5. Sample Size Calculator

You need to create surveys for a number of people so that they are representative of your target audience, but you don’t know how many. What do you do? Use our sample size calculator .

• confidence level
• population size
• margin of error

and it’ll calculate the sample size you’ll need within seconds.

6. Google Keyword Tool

Where eyes are the window to the soul, Google Keywords are the window to the web. Google’s keyword tool is very popular as it accesses the best data – Google’s.

To start you will need to create a free AdWords account to access all the results.

This Google tool shows you:

• the volume of keyword searches
• how competitive those keywords are
• how keywords are related to each other

You’ll also be able to

• limit your keyword searches to a language or geographical area
• limit searches to only those on mobile devices
• filter results by your chosen criteria

7. Qualtrics Panels

( Contact us for a demo and quote)

It’s hard work finding the right respondents for your surveys, and a survey that no one takes is pretty useless. When you deploy our panel team, you’ll get access to hundreds of thousands of opt-in survey respondents, both B2B and B2C, who are already vetted and qualified. When our team handles your research project, you’ll be able to:

• choose any target audience and access a representative sample
• boost the accuracy of your tracking studies sampling that’s 47% more consistent than standard sampling methods
• get support for your best-in-class study at every stage, from survey launch to results reporting

8. Social Mention

Would you like to know what everyone’s saying about your brand? Social Mention scours more than 100 social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs, videos and images for mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you wish to input. Then, it gives them to you in a single information feed.

You’ll get four key metrics:

• Strength : How much your keywords crop up on social media.
• Sentiment : Positive vs. negative mentions
• Passion : How many people are repeatedly talking about your keywords.
• Reach : Range of influence, i.e, how many individual users are mentioning your keywords.

9. Google Trends

While Google Trends has some crossover with Social Mention, it has the added feature of factoring in data from the Google search engine in addition to social platforms.

Google Trends:

• Shows how frequently your search term is entered into Google compared with the site’s total search volume over a specific period of time.
• Provides keyword-related and geographic data about Google’s users.
• Can be used for comparative keyword research and to uncover keyword spikes triggered by events.
• Gives you a more comprehensive perspective on the news, opinions, posts and perceptions affecting your brand.

10. Think with Google

This tool will give you all the information you need for uncovering market trends, understanding consumer behavior and gaining market insights, ready for your product launch. You’ll find everything from high-level insights to deck-ready statistics and useful marketing tools.

Using fascinating and useful content from Google, using data from their digital searches, Think with Google will inform your marketing campaigns by:

• Making sense of the data with articles that explain its implications
• Highlighting trends in real time
• Showing what other companies have achieved

11. Facebook Audience Insights

With around 2.45 billion monthly active users , marketers are missing a trick if they don’t track social media giant Facebook for marketing purposes. And Facebook Audience Insights will give you information about two groups:

• People connected to your Facebook page
• People on Facebook generally

These will help you create and target content, and find more people who match your target audience. You’ll also be able to extract:

• Demographic information : age, gender, job titles education, relationship status
• What people like : hobbies, interests, pastimes
• Lifestyles : location and relationship status combine to identify the types of people interacting with your business.

12. R Studio

Sometimes it just feels good to get your hands dirty romping through raw data.

• R is free language and environment software for stats computing, data manipulation and graphics, and you’ll need to install it first.
• R Studio gives you a range of statistical analysis tools to use with R. It requires that you know some coding, but it gives you tremendous power to create custom statistical analysis. RStudio is a free, open-source integrated development environment, which means it’s constantly being improved by the data-analysis community that uses it.

13. Stats iQ

( Book a Stats iQ demo )

Stats iQ may be the polar opposite to R Studio because you can do hardcore stats analysis without needing to be a hardcore stats wonk. It’s the world’s most powerful statistical analysis tool , that also happens to be the world’s easiest.

Stats iQ automatically:

• finds relationships in your data
• shows how strong those relationships are
• runs the right statistical tests and visualizations
• translates your results into simple language that anyone can put into action.

14. Make My Persona

Every marketer knows that buyer personas help your business focus time and resources, and inform product development and marketing. A buyer persona is a model of an ideal customer, created through market research and existing customer data.

Make My Persona helps you create these semi-fictitious characters in seven simple steps that you fill in, including:

• Job responsibilities
• Goals or objectives
• Preferred method of communication
• Biggest challenges
• Anything else you want to include

The tool then gives you a profile of your buyer persona that you can share with your whole organization to inform and inspire.

15. Percent Change Calculator

You use percent change to track change over time – e.g. the fluctuations of sales, subscriptions, or prices of financial securities.

For example, you sold 15,000 bicycles this year, and 9,000 last year. You want to know the percent change of your sales:

15,000 (new number) – 9,000 (old number) = 6,000

6,000 x 100 = 66.66666

You’ve sold 67% more bicycles this year.

But do you want to do this calculation every time? No! Put your two values into a simple percent change calculator and it will do the math for you.

16. AMZScout

(Free trial. Prices start at $14.99 per month)

When it comes to understanding what is happening in a market, there is no data more useful than sales numbers. AMZScout is an innovative eCommerce software that provides sellers with the insights they need to identify items that have high profit potential.

With AMZScout you can:

• Get stats for every product, including average monthly sales, reviews, sales history, and more.
• Review demand and competition levels for both products and niches.
• Predict costs and profit margins.
• Track seasonal trends and consumer behavior.

This leads to unexpected product discoveries, significant new customer flows,  efficient market insights, and long-term revenue growth.

17. Tableau

( Prices start at $70 per month for 1 creator, rising to $278 per month for a team.)

Tableau is a tool for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. It helps you see and understand your market research data pictorially, using analytics, visualization and business intelligence .

It works like this:

• It extracts data from PDFs, Excel, text, R, Hadoop, Python or SAS, to cloud databases.
• The Tableau desktop takes the data, analyses it, then presents it as an interactive and shareable dashboard which shows trends and variations with colorful charts and tables.
• The data can be published, with features such as collaboration and automation included.
• Users can view their visualized data on platforms such as email, mobile and desktop.

Did we miss your favorite market research tool ? Let us know by tweeting us @Qualtrics

Use our market research tool for free

Aaron Carpenter // Experience Management Content Strategist

Aaron is a highly skilled and accomplished content strategist specializing in experience management. With a keen understanding of the ever-evolving landscape of digital content, Aaron brings a unique perspective to the art of crafting engaging and impactful experiences for users.

Ruth D'Alessandro

Ruth has been writing digital content for many years. She’s fascinated by what big data and artificial intelligence can bring to the human experience, and loves writing about it for Qualtrics.

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The 19 Best Market Research Tools Of 2023

Market research is a crucial component of any business strategy. Here are some of the best tools you can use in your market research efforts.

Building a successful business is no easy feat, especially in a world where consumers have more options – and distractions – than ever before.

That’s why market research is essential to any business marketing plan and marketing strategy .

Market research lets you learn more about our target consumers and their behavior, spot emerging trends, uncover important data, and make informed business decisions.

But with so many target consumers out there and so many places and methods to reach them, where should you start?

In this article, we’ll cover some of the best market research tools available to you across a variety of tactics and approaches.

Let’s get started.

1. SurveyMonkey

One of the more well-known survey tools, SurveyMonkey offers a broad list of features and capabilities for creating audience surveys.

Whether you want to create your own survey or choose from one of its 250+ expert-created templates, SurveyMonkey offers a user-friendly interface that enables you to customize your surveys to your needs.

It also offers a suite of helpful features, including AI-powered knowledge to help you pose the right questions, as well as built-in reporting and analytics.

• SurveyMonkey offers a free Basic tier with unlimited surveys featuring up to 10 questions and 25 responses per survey.
• Individual plans start at $39/month with unlimited surveys and questions, and up to 15,000 responses per year.
• Team plans start at $25/user/month, starting at three users. This level also gives you unlimited surveys and questions, but offers 50,000 responses per year.

2. Typeform

Typeform is an easy-to-use tool focused on helping users create intuitive and engaging forms, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more. Its selling point is the ability to create truly conversational, beautiful forms.

With Typeform, you can create slick surveys with customizable interactive elements, such as images and videos, that encourage your audience to take action. Its focus on interactivity makes it an appealing tool for market research.

Typeform offers plenty of useful features – from conditional logic to creating dynamic surveys – that adapt based on answers to real-time data analytics and integrations with tons of popular tools, from Slack to Google Analytics.

The company even offers a standalone video tool, VideoAsk, where users can create “video forms” to prompt responses.

• Typeform offers a Free plan with unlimited typeforms and 10 responses per month.
• Paid plans start at $25/month billed annually for Basic, $50/month billed annually for Plus, and $83/month billed annually for Business.
• The company also offers an Enterprise plan.

3.  BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that can help you gather some powerful market insights.

Regarding market research, BuzzSumo can help you understand the content landscape in your industry (and beyond), find out what’s resonating with your target consumers, identify influencers in your niche, and track how your content is performing vs. your competitors’.

The BuzzSumo tool analyzes articles (over 5 billion!) and social media posts across the internet to identify top-performing content. It allows you to comb through five years of data so that you can discover the right content ideas for your audience.

• 30-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Membership tiers start at $159/month billed yearly for Content Creation (individual) plan, $239/month billed yearly for PR & Comms plan, $399/month billed yearly for the Suite plan, and $999/month billed yearly for the Enterprise plan.

4. Qualaroo

Want to capture user feedback and deepen your understanding of market trends? Qualaroo might be the tool for you.

Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback tool that claims to be “10X more valuable than email surveys.” Using Qualaroo, you can add a survey to a page on your website or integrate it into your product.

The tool uses behavioral triggering to show surveys or feedback prompts in response to specific user behavior, so you know you’re targeting the right people with the most relevant questions.

Qualaroo also offers visual customization so you can get the branding right, automatic language translation, a library of survey templates, audience targeting, and IBM Watson Sentiment Analysis to help you organize your results.

• 15-day free trial (no credit card required).
• Plans start at $69/month billed annually for Essentials, $149/month billed annually for Premium, and $299+/month billed annually for Business tier.

SpyFu is a great choice if you’re looking to conduct competitive analysis as part of your market research efforts.

It allows you to effectively “spy” on your competitors by viewing their marketing strategies, advertising history, what keywords they’ve bought on Google Ads, and more – which can help you find gaps in the market and optimize your own approach.

You can feed the SpyFu tool a URL, and it will instantly show you its results for SEO topics like organic keywords, top pages, backlink analysis, total traffic, competition, and more.

Not only can SpyFu help you gain an understanding of the SEO landscape for your industry and gain a competitive advantage, but it can also tell you how hard it might be to dominate a specific niche.

• SpyFu offers paid plans starting at $16/month for Basic, $36/month for Professional, and $149/month for Team (billed annually).

Another great tool for SEO and competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a popular choice of many marketers for good reason.

Using Ahrefs, you can learn more about the search landscape of your market, discover what keywords your customers are searching for, track your competitors, and analyze content in your industry to inform your own strategies.

With its keyword and content capabilities, Ahrefs will help you find gaps and opportunities in the market so that you can improve your content, your site, and your search visibility.

• Website owners can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free limited access to its Site Explorer and Site Audit tools.
• Paid plans start at $83/month for Lite, $166/month for Standard, $333/month for Advanced, and $833/month for Enterprise (billed annually).

7. Delve AI

User personas are a crucial facet of an effective marketing strategy – and as such, developing them is a common step in any market research process.

Thanks to tools like Delve AI , it’s easier than ever to build user personas.

Delve AI offers a suite of persona-building tools based on your needs and the data available to you. Depending on what stage your business is in, you can generate:

• Competitor personas using Delve AI’s data.
• Social personas based on your social audience.
• Customer personas using your customer information.
• Live personas for your website based on Google Analytics data.

Beyond its multi-channel capabilities, Delve AI uses AI algorithms for accuracy in personas, offers behavioral insights, real-time updates to your personas, and more.

• The company offers a free Lite plan.
• Business plans start at $71/month for Standard, $159/month for the Growth tier, and $439/month for Pro (billed annually).
• Agency plans start at $167/month for Standard, $343/month for Growth, and $687/month for the Pro tier (billed annually).

8. Sprout Social

We don’t need to tell you about the importance of social media when it comes to connecting with your audience and driving business success. It can also play a major role where market research is concerned.

Sprout Social offers a robust suite of social media management features. Perhaps the most useful for market research are social listening features – which allow you to track market trends, industry keywords, and social conversations – and its competitor analysis capabilities.

It also provides insights into audience demographics, behavior, and interests, which you can use to inform your marketing approach.

• Free 30-day trial.
• Plans start at $249/month for Standard, $399/month for Professional, and $499/month for Advanced.
• Sprout Social also offers an Enterprise tier plan.

9. Google Trends

How can you supercharge your market research efforts? Look to search data.

Google Trends is an incredible tool that enables you to analyze real-time and historical search data to discover market trends, up-to-date consumer insights, and more.

By using this tool to access the latest information on how people search on Google, you can spot emerging interests and opportunity areas, and keep an eye on what consumers are most interested in.

It also offers location filtering so that you can see what’s trending in any given market.

10. Statista

If you’re looking for data and statistics on pretty much anything in the world of business and marketing, you might want to check out Statista.

It’s a business intelligence platform that provides “statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries.” This means that if you’re looking for specific market research insights, Statista most likely has something to fit your needs.

From in-depth reports to data visualizations and industry forecasts, Statista can give you reliable insights into what’s happening in markets around the world, and highlight market and consumer trends.

• Free Basic account available.
• Paid accounts start at $149/month for Starter and $490/month for Personal (billed annually), with more options available.

11. Qualtrics

If you’re looking for something extremely robust, Qualtrics ’ market research platform is an all-in-one, AI-powered solution for your market research needs.

It offers a suite of features and capabilities, including:

• Panel Management : Enables you to create research panels from email lists, site visitors, social followers, and more.
• On-Demand Respondents : Companies can pay for access to survey respondents that match their target demographic.
• Product Development : Get access to early feedback on your new products and services from customers.
• Purchase Behavior : Explore data on what is fueling purchase decisions among your target customers.

While it requires a more dedicated investment, Qualtrics’ software is scalable and powerful. It comes with automation and integration with many other tools, and customers have access to a support team.

• Qualtrics offers a free survey maker tool with up to 500 responses.
• For pricing details, reach out to the Qualtrics team.

It’s important to stay on top of how your customers feel about your business, services, and products – and Temper provides a super simple way to do just that.

The concept is simple: Come up with a simple question you want to ask your question, and your customers can respond by clicking a smiley face that corresponds to how they feel.

You might want to ask your customers, “How do you feel about our new product?” or “Please rate your experience with our customer support team.” With just a little bit of code, you can place a Temper widget on your webpage, in a blog post, or in an email footer and get quick feedback on audience sentiment.

• Plans start at $12/month for Hobby tier, $49/month for Pro, $89/month for Business, and $199/month for White Label.
• Temper offers a 60-day risk-free, money-back guarantee.

You’ve likely heard of the question-and-answer site Quora , but have you considered its potential as a market research tool?

Quora is an online community where real people can go to ask questions about anything they’d like, and share their experiences and opinions with others via answers.

It offers a unique opportunity for brands to conduct market research within their specific industry or area by connecting with Quora’s diverse community of consumers, professionals, and others.

Try searching Quora for topics related to your business or niche, and look at what types of conversations are trending. Or, you could ask a question yourself!

It’s a great tool for engaging your audience , keeping an eye on your competitors, and even developing new ideas for content, product development, and more.

• Quora is free to use, though it also offers separate business solutions.

14. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is a handy tool for getting a good picture of your industry landscape and how your competitors are faring.

It’s a database of companies that includes information like funding round data, investors, and financial information for each business. It also includes information such as employee headcount, leadership data, and more.

You can search Crunchbase by region or industry, allowing you to see how other companies in your niche are growing, and who is deciding to fund them. This can help you identify investment opportunities and market gaps, or even just gauge the overall health of your industry.

• Crunchbase offers a Free plan where you can preview profile pages at no cost.
• Paid options start at $29/month for Starter and $49/month for Pro (billed annually).
• An Enterprise option is also available with custom billing.

15. Google Market Finder

Another excellent market research tool from Google is Market Finder . This free, interactive tool is focused mostly on researching target markets – so you can use it to discover which markets might have the most potential for your company, monitor demand for your products or services, and more.

There are two primary features within Market Finder:

• Test your export readiness.  By providing your company’s URL and completing a short quiz, the tool will grade your “readiness” to expand into new markets abroad.
• Dive into new markets. You can take another short quiz that will suggest new market recommendations based on the information you provide, as well as external data like search volume and Google Ads.

Market Finder can also integrate with your Google Analytics data for more accurate information.

16. Semrush

Semrush is a one-stop marketing tool that can be leveraged to gain incredibly useful market research insights.

The company offers features dedicated to this type of research, such as its Market Explorer tool, which enables you to get quick information on your specific industry, conduct an analysis of market share, and benchmark your business against your competitors. You can also use the tool to analyze the potential of a new niche or market region for your business.

You might also find Semrush’s traffic analytics tool useful, as it allows you to go deeper with competitive analysis and target consumer demographics.

• Semrush offers a free account with limited capabilities.
• Paid accounts start at $108.33/month for Pro, $208.33/month for Guru, and $416.66/month for Business (billed annually).

17. Pew Research Center

While not a traditional marketing tool, the Pew Research Center is a widely known and respected resource that can be super effective when it comes to market research.

The site hosts a robust catalog of reports, surveys, and research covering everything from tech and digital media to politics, cultural trends, and more. The data is unbiased and credible, offering a unique perspective into what today’s consumers think and feel on various topics.

You can use the Pew Research Center as a tool to further hone your market research efforts, providing you with insights into the attitudes and behaviors of your target consumer, as well as the various factors that are impacting their desires and purchasing decisions.

18. Exploding Topics

We all know the saying, “I liked it before it was popular” – well, with Exploding Topics , your business can be the one to say this.

Exploding Topics helps you spot trends before they become super popular by analyzing searches, mentions, and conversations across the web to identify products, topics, and industries that are on the rise.

You can use Exploding Topics as a resource to help you predict shifts in the market and consumer interests, which can inform everything from your product design and strategy to your marketing approach.

It’s a lot like Google Trends, with some key differences; it pulls in data from a variety of sources and is focused on highlighting emerging trends before they take off.

• Exploding Topics offers a free version of its Trend Database.
• Paid tiers begin at $39/month for Entrepreneur, $99/month for Investor, and $249/month for Business (billed annually).

In today’s day and age, you can’t build a successful business without an effective website. But how can you know whether your website will resonate with your target consumer?

You can use Loop11 , a usability testing platform that helps facilitate user testing of your products.

Loop11 makes it simple to create a usability test and secure participants.

It enables you to view the user’s experience through video, audio, and screen recordings. Then, it presents you with in-depth insights and UX metrics to help you understand what’s working with your website, app, or product and what’s preventing people from converting.

• Free 14-day trial with full capabilities.
• Paid plans start at $179/month for Rapid Insights, $358/month for Pro, and $533/month for Enterprise (billed annually).

Market research is key to any business plan, no matter what industry you’re in, what stage of growth your business is at, or what customers you’re serving.

From competitive analysis to keyword research, user feedback, and more, focusing on your market research efforts will pay dividends to your business in the long run.

And while there are plenty of different ways to approach market research, these represent some of the best tools available to you – and can be a great jumping-off point for you to get started.

More Resources: 

• How To Calculate Your Total Addressable Market (TAM) For SEO
• Market Intelligence: What It Is & How To Use It
• Competitor Mapping: What Is It & How To Do It

Featured Image: LAONG/Shutterstock

Writer, digital marketer, and content strategist. Annabelle has 8+ years of experience in social marketing, copywriting, and storytelling for best-in-class ...

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How to do market research in 4 steps: a lean approach to marketing research

From pinpointing your target audience and assessing your competitive advantage, to ongoing product development and customer satisfaction efforts, market research is a practice your business can only benefit from.

Learn how to conduct quick and effective market research using a lean approach in this article full of strategies and practical examples. 

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A comprehensive (and successful) business strategy is not complete without some form of market research—you can’t make informed and profitable business decisions without truly understanding your customer base and the current market trends that drive your business.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct quick, effective market research  using an approach called 'lean market research'. It’s easier than you might think, and it can be done at any stage in a product’s lifecycle.

How to conduct lean market research in 4 steps

What is market research, why is market research so valuable, advantages of lean market research, 4 common market research methods, 5 common market research questions, market research faqs.

We’ll jump right into our 4-step approach to lean market research. To show you how it’s done in the real world, each step includes a practical example from Smallpdf , a Swiss company that used lean market research to reduce their tool’s error rate by 75% and boost their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) by 1%.

Research your market the lean way...

From on-page surveys to user interviews, Hotjar has the tools to help you scope out your market and get to know your customers—without breaking the bank.

The following four steps and practical examples will give you a solid market research plan for understanding who your users are and what they want from a company like yours.

1. Create simple user personas

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on psychographic and demographic data from people who use websites and products similar to your own. Start by defining broad user categories, then elaborate on them later to further segment your customer base and determine your ideal customer profile .

How to get the data: use on-page or emailed surveys and interviews to understand your users and what drives them to your business.

How to do it right: whatever survey or interview questions you ask, they should answer the following questions about the customer:

Who are they?

What is their main goal?

What is their main barrier to achieving this goal?

Pitfalls to avoid:

Don’t ask too many questions! Keep it to five or less, otherwise you’ll inundate them and they’ll stop answering thoughtfully.

Don’t worry too much about typical demographic questions like age or background. Instead, focus on the role these people play (as it relates to your product) and their goals.

How Smallpdf did it: Smallpdf ran an on-page survey for a couple of weeks and received 1,000 replies. They learned that many of their users were administrative assistants, students, and teachers.

Next, they used the survey results to create simple user personas like this one for admins:

Who are they? Administrative Assistants.

What is their main goal? Creating Word documents from a scanned, hard-copy document or a PDF where the source file was lost.

What is their main barrier to achieving it? Converting a scanned PDF doc to a Word file.

💡Pro tip: Smallpdf used Hotjar Surveys to run their user persona survey. Our survey tool helped them avoid the pitfalls of guesswork and find out who their users really are, in their own words. 

You can design a survey and start running it in minutes with our easy-to-use drag and drop builder. Customize your survey to fit your needs, from a sleek one-question pop-up survey to a fully branded questionnaire sent via email. 

We've also created 40+ free survey templates that you can start collecting data with, including a user persona survey like the one Smallpdf used.

2. Conduct observational research

Observational research involves taking notes while watching someone use your product (or a similar product).

Overt vs. covert observation

Overt observation involves asking customers if they’ll let you watch them use your product. This method is often used for user testing and it provides a great opportunity for collecting live product or customer feedback .

Covert observation means studying users ‘in the wild’ without them knowing. This method works well if you sell a type of product that people use regularly, and it offers the purest observational data because people often behave differently when they know they’re being watched. 

Tips to do it right:

Record an entry in your field notes, along with a timestamp, each time an action or event occurs.

Make note of the users' workflow, capturing the ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘for whom’ of each action.

Don’t record identifiable video or audio data without consent. If recording people using your product is helpful for achieving your research goal, make sure all participants are informed and agree to the terms.

Don’t forget to explain why you’d like to observe them (for overt observation). People are more likely to cooperate if you tell them you want to improve the product.

💡Pro tip: while conducting field research out in the wild can wield rewarding results, you can also conduct observational research remotely. Hotjar Recordings is a tool that lets you capture anonymized user sessions of real people interacting with your website. 

Observe how customers navigate your pages and products to gain an inside look into their user behavior . This method is great for conducting exploratory research with the purpose of identifying more specific issues to investigate further, like pain points along the customer journey and opportunities for optimizing conversion .

With Hotjar Recordings you can observe real people using your site without capturing their sensitive information

How Smallpdf did it: here’s how Smallpdf observed two different user personas both covertly and overtly.

Observing students (covert): Kristina Wagner, Principle Product Manager at Smallpdf, went to cafes and libraries at two local universities and waited until she saw students doing PDF-related activities. Then she watched and took notes from a distance. One thing that struck her was the difference between how students self-reported their activities vs. how they behaved (i.e, the self-reporting bias). Students, she found, spent hours talking, listening to music, or simply staring at a blank screen rather than working. When she did find students who were working, she recorded the task they were performing and the software they were using (if she recognized it).

Observing administrative assistants (overt): Kristina sent emails to admins explaining that she’d like to observe them at work, and she asked those who agreed to try to batch their PDF work for her observation day. While watching admins work, she learned that they frequently needed to scan documents into PDF-format and then convert those PDFs into Word docs. By observing the challenges admins faced, Smallpdf knew which products to target for improvement.

“Data is really good for discovery and validation, but there is a bit in the middle where you have to go and find the human.”

3. Conduct individual interviews

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. They allow you to dig deep and explore their concerns, which can lead to all sorts of revelations.

Listen more, talk less. Be curious.

Act like a journalist, not a salesperson. Rather than trying to talk your company up, ask people about their lives, their needs, their frustrations, and how a product like yours could help.

Ask "why?" so you can dig deeper. Get into the specifics and learn about their past behavior.

Record the conversation. Focus on the conversation and avoid relying solely on notes by recording the interview. There are plenty of services that will transcribe recorded conversations for a good price (including Hotjar!).

Avoid asking leading questions , which reveal bias on your part and pushes respondents to answer in a certain direction (e.g. “Have you taken advantage of the amazing new features we just released?).

Don't ask loaded questions , which sneak in an assumption which, if untrue, would make it impossible to answer honestly. For example, we can’t ask you, “What did you find most useful about this article?” without asking whether you found the article useful in the first place.

Be cautious when asking opinions about the future (or predictions of future behavior). Studies suggest that people aren’t very good at predicting their future behavior. This is due to several cognitive biases, from the misguided exceptionalism bias (we’re good at guessing what others will do, but we somehow think we’re different), to the optimism bias (which makes us see things with rose-colored glasses), to the ‘illusion of control’ (which makes us forget the role of randomness in future events).

How Smallpdf did it: Kristina explored her teacher user persona by speaking with university professors at a local graduate school. She learned that the school was mostly paperless and rarely used PDFs, so for the sake of time, she moved on to the admins.

A bit of a letdown? Sure. But this story highlights an important lesson: sometimes you follow a lead and come up short, so you have to make adjustments on the fly. Lean market research is about getting solid, actionable insights quickly so you can tweak things and see what works.

💡Pro tip: to save even more time, conduct remote interviews using an online user research service like Hotjar Engage , which automates the entire interview process, from recruitment and scheduling to hosting and recording.

You can interview your own customers or connect with people from our diverse pool of 200,000+ participants from 130+ countries and 25 industries. And no need to fret about taking meticulous notes—Engage will automatically transcribe the interview for you.

4. Analyze the data (without drowning in it)

The following techniques will help you wrap your head around the market data you collect without losing yourself in it. Remember, the point of lean market research is to find quick, actionable insights.

A flow model is a diagram that tracks the flow of information within a system. By creating a simple visual representation of how users interact with your product and each other, you can better assess their needs.

You’ll notice that admins are at the center of Smallpdf’s flow model, which represents the flow of PDF-related documents throughout a school. This flow model shows the challenges that admins face as they work to satisfy their own internal and external customers.

Affinity diagram

An affinity diagram is a way of sorting large amounts of data into groups to better understand the big picture. For example, if you ask your users about their profession, you’ll notice some general themes start to form, even though the individual responses differ. Depending on your needs, you could group them by profession, or more generally by industry.

We wrote a guide about how to analyze open-ended questions to help you sort through and categorize large volumes of response data. You can also do this by hand by clipping up survey responses or interview notes and grouping them (which is what Kristina does).

“For an interview, you will have somewhere between 30 and 60 notes, and those notes are usually direct phrases. And when you literally cut them up into separate pieces of paper and group them, they should make sense by themselves.”

Pro tip: if you’re conducting an online survey with Hotjar, keep your team in the loop by sharing survey responses automatically via our Slack and Microsoft Team integrations. Reading answers as they come in lets you digest the data in pieces and can help prepare you for identifying common themes when it comes time for analysis.

Hotjar lets you easily share survey responses with your team

Customer journey map

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the way a typical prospect becomes a paying customer. It outlines their first interaction with your brand and every step in the sales cycle, from awareness to repurchase (and hopefully advocacy).

The above  customer journey map , created by our team at Hotjar, shows many ways a customer might engage with our tool. Your map will be based on your own data and business model.

📚 Read more: if you’re new to customer journey maps, we wrote this step-by-step guide to creating your first customer journey map in 2 and 1/2 days with free templates you can download and start using immediately.

Next steps: from research to results

So, how do you turn market research insights into tangible business results? Let’s look at the actions Smallpdf took after conducting their lean market research: first they implemented changes, then measured the impact.

Implement changes

Based on what Smallpdf learned about the challenges that one key user segment (admins) face when trying to convert PDFs into Word files, they improved their ‘PDF to Word’ conversion tool.

We won’t go into the details here because it involves a lot of technical jargon, but they made the entire process simpler and more straightforward for users. Plus, they made it so that their system recognized when you drop a PDF file into their ‘Word to PDF’ converter instead of the ‘PDF to Word’ converter, so users wouldn’t have to redo the task when they made that mistake. 

In other words: simple market segmentation for admins showed a business need that had to be accounted for, and customers are happier overall after Smallpdf implemented an informed change to their product.

Measure results

According to the Lean UX model, product and UX changes aren’t retained unless they achieve results.

Smallpdf’s changes produced:

A 75% reduction in error rate for the ‘PDF to Word’ converter

A 1% increase in NPS

Greater confidence in the team’s marketing efforts

"With all the changes said and done, we've cut our original error rate in four, which is huge. We increased our NPS by +1%, which isn't huge, but it means that of the users who received a file, they were still slightly happier than before, even if they didn't notice that anything special happened at all.”

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Market research (or marketing research) is any set of techniques used to gather information and better understand a company’s target market. This might include primary research on brand awareness and customer satisfaction or secondary market research on market size and competitive analysis. Businesses use this information to design better products, improve user experience, and craft a marketing strategy that attracts quality leads and improves conversion rates.

David Darmanin, one of Hotjar’s founders, launched two startups before Hotjar took off—but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded.

With Hotjar, they did things differently . Long story short, they conducted market research in the early stages to figure out what consumers really wanted, and the team made (and continues to make) constant improvements based on market and user research.

Without market research, it’s impossible to understand your users. Sure, you might have a general idea of who they are and what they need, but you have to dig deep if you want to win their loyalty.

Here’s why research matters:

Obsessing over your users is the only way to win. If you don’t care deeply about them, you’ll lose potential customers to someone who does.

Analytics gives you the ‘what’, while research gives you the ‘why’. Big data, user analytics , and dashboards can tell you what people do at scale, but only research can tell you what they’re thinking and why they do what they do. For example, analytics can tell you that customers leave when they reach your pricing page, but only research can explain why.

Research beats assumptions, trends, and so-called best practices. Have you ever watched your colleagues rally behind a terrible decision? Bad ideas are often the result of guesswork, emotional reasoning, death by best practices , and defaulting to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO). By listening to your users and focusing on their customer experience , you’re less likely to get pulled in the wrong direction.

Research keeps you from planning in a vacuum. Your team might be amazing, but you and your colleagues simply can’t experience your product the way your customers do. Customers might use your product in a way that surprises you, and product features that seem obvious to you might confuse them. Over-planning and refusing to test your assumptions is a waste of time, money, and effort because you’ll likely need to make changes once your untested business plan gets put into practice.

Lean User Experience (UX) design is a model for continuous improvement that relies on quick, efficient research to understand customer needs and test new product features.

Lean market research can help you become more...

Efficient: it gets you closer to your customers, faster.

Cost-effective: no need to hire an expensive marketing firm to get things started.

Competitive: quick, powerful insights can place your products on the cutting edge.

As a small business or sole proprietor, conducting lean market research is an attractive option when investing in a full-blown research project might seem out of scope or budget.

There are lots of different ways you could conduct market research and collect customer data, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just one research method. Four common types of market research techniques include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer observation.

Which method you use may vary based on your business type: ecommerce business owners have different goals from SaaS businesses, so it’s typically prudent to mix and match these methods based on your particular goals and what you need to know.

1. Surveys: the most commonly used

Surveys are a form of qualitative research that ask respondents a short series of open- or closed-ended questions, which can be delivered as an on-screen questionnaire or via email. When we asked 2,000 Customer Experience (CX) professionals about their company’s approach to research , surveys proved to be the most commonly used market research technique.

What makes online surveys so popular?  

They’re easy and inexpensive to conduct, and you can do a lot of data collection quickly. Plus, the data is pretty straightforward to analyze, even when you have to analyze open-ended questions whose answers might initially appear difficult to categorize.

We've built a number of survey templates ready and waiting for you. Grab a template and share with your customers in just a few clicks.

💡 Pro tip: you can also get started with Hotjar AI for Surveys to create a survey in mere seconds . Just enter your market research goal and watch as the AI generates a survey and populates it with relevant questions. 

Once you’re ready for data analysis, the AI will prepare an automated research report that succinctly summarizes key findings, quotes, and suggested next steps.

An example research report generated by Hotjar AI for Surveys

2. Interviews: the most insightful

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. Nothing beats a face-to-face interview for diving deep (and reading non-verbal cues), but if an in-person meeting isn’t possible, video conferencing is a solid second choice.

Regardless of how you conduct it, any type of in-depth interview will produce big benefits in understanding your target customers.

What makes interviews so insightful?

By speaking directly with an ideal customer, you’ll gain greater empathy for their experience , and you can follow insightful threads that can produce plenty of 'Aha!' moments.

3. Focus groups: the most unreliable

Focus groups bring together a carefully selected group of people who fit a company’s target market. A trained moderator leads a conversation surrounding the product, user experience, or marketing message to gain deeper insights.

What makes focus groups so unreliable?

If you’re new to market research, we wouldn’t recommend starting with focus groups. Doing it right is expensive , and if you cut corners, your research could fall victim to all kinds of errors. Dominance bias (when a forceful participant influences the group) and moderator style bias (when different moderator personalities bring about different results in the same study) are two of the many ways your focus group data could get skewed.

4. Observation: the most powerful

During a customer observation session, someone from the company takes notes while they watch an ideal user engage with their product (or a similar product from a competitor).

What makes observation so clever and powerful?

‘Fly-on-the-wall’ observation is a great alternative to focus groups. It’s not only less expensive, but you’ll see people interact with your product in a natural setting without influencing each other. The only downside is that you can’t get inside their heads, so observation still isn't a recommended replacement for customer surveys and interviews.

The following questions will help you get to know your users on a deeper level when you interview them. They’re general questions, of course, so don’t be afraid to make them your own.

1. Who are you and what do you do?

How you ask this question, and what you want to know, will vary depending on your business model (e.g. business-to-business marketing is usually more focused on someone’s profession than business-to-consumer marketing).

It’s a great question to start with, and it’ll help you understand what’s relevant about your user demographics (age, race, gender, profession, education, etc.), but it’s not the be-all-end-all of market research. The more specific questions come later.

2. What does your day look like?

This question helps you understand your users’ day-to-day life and the challenges they face. It will help you gain empathy for them, and you may stumble across something relevant to their buying habits.

3. Do you ever purchase [product/service type]?

This is a ‘yes or no’ question. A ‘yes’ will lead you to the next question.

4. What problem were you trying to solve or what goal were you trying to achieve?

This question strikes to the core of what someone’s trying to accomplish and why they might be willing to pay for your solution.

5. Take me back to the day when you first decided you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this goal.

This is the golden question, and it comes from Adele Revella, Founder and CEO of Buyer Persona Institute . It helps you get in the heads of your users and figure out what they were thinking the day they decided to spend money to solve a problem.

If you take your time with this question, digging deeper where it makes sense, you should be able to answer all the relevant information you need to understand their perspective.

“The only scripted question I want you to ask them is this one: take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this kind of a goal. Not to buy my product, that’s not the day. We want to go back to the day that when you thought it was urgent and compelling to go spend money to solve a particular problem or achieve a goal. Just tell me what happened.”

— Adele Revella , Founder/CEO at Buyer Persona Institute

Bonus question: is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

This question isn’t just a nice way to wrap it up—it might just give participants the opportunity they need to tell you something you really need to know.

That’s why Sarah Doody, author of UX Notebook , adds it to the end of her written surveys.

“I always have a last question, which is just open-ended: “Is there anything else you would like to tell me?” And sometimes, that’s where you get four paragraphs of amazing content that you would never have gotten if it was just a Net Promoter Score [survey] or something like that.”

What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?

Qualitative research asks questions that can’t be reduced to a number, such as, “What is your job title?” or “What did you like most about your customer service experience?” 

Quantitative research asks questions that can be answered with a numeric value, such as, “What is your annual salary?” or “How was your customer service experience on a scale of 1-5?”

 → Read more about the differences between qualitative and quantitative user research .

How do I do my own market research?

You can do your own quick and effective market research by 

Surveying your customers

Building user personas

Studying your users through interviews and observation

Wrapping your head around your data with tools like flow models, affinity diagrams, and customer journey maps

What is the difference between market research and user research?

Market research takes a broad look at potential customers—what problems they’re trying to solve, their buying experience, and overall demand. User research, on the other hand, is more narrowly focused on the use (and usability ) of specific products.

What are the main criticisms of market research?

Many marketing professionals are critical of market research because it can be expensive and time-consuming. It’s often easier to convince your CEO or CMO to let you do lean market research rather than something more extensive because you can do it yourself. It also gives you quick answers so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Do I need a market research firm to get reliable data?

Absolutely not! In fact, we recommend that you start small and do it yourself in the beginning. By following a lean market research strategy, you can uncover some solid insights about your clients. Then you can make changes, test them out, and see whether the results are positive. This is an excellent strategy for making quick changes and remaining competitive.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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The 13 Best Market Research Tools

Jan 3, 2024

9 min. read

The 328 million terabytes of data we create each day can be very telling about your target audience’s preferences and buying habits. This same data can also be inaccurate and low quality, depending on the source. That’s why the market research tools you choose matter — you need to be able to get the most up-to-date insights and trust what the data is telling you.

While traditional manual methods of market research still have a time and place in the digital world, marketers are supplementing them with market research platforms and software that do most of the heavy lifting.

Astronomical amounts of market-related data are created at lightning speed, far outpacing our ability to consume it all. To help find, filter, sort, and make sense of all this information, we’ve chosen 13 of the best market research tools to streamline and improve the process :

Meltwater Radarly

Think with google, ubersuggest, surveymonkey, answer the public, brandmentions, heartbeat ai, u.s. census bureau.

A leader in AI market research tools, Radarly is Meltwater’s AI-powered market research platform that provides real-time insights into consumer preferences . This always-on consumer intelligence suite uses a combination of data science, AI, and human market research expertise to surface insights about customers based on online conversations and activities.

Most of the world’s data is unstructured ( about 90% , by some estimates), making it harder to act on and understand its significance. Radarly brings structure to the unknown by detecting patterns and understanding audience sentiments.

Also, Meltwater for market research continuously sources new information and works in real-time. This gives marketers an advantage by working with the latest data so they can make informed decisions when it matters most.

See Meltwater Radarly live in action by requesting a free tour of our platform. Simply fill out the form at the bottom of this post and we'll be in touch.

Statista offers data trends and reports on a wide range of topics and interests, from Facebook’s monthly active users to leading beer brands based on sales. In total, the market research platform spans more than 170 industries and 150 countries .

What sets this resource apart is its visualizations — all of Statista’s stats have been compiled into neat and tidy graphs that are ready to publish or share in your own reports. This makes it easy to see trends over time or gain quick insights about consumer preferences.

There’s a chart for just about anything, and they’re updated on a regular basis. In many cases, Statista will include a brief explanation of the chart’s findings and recommend related charts for further research.

Google’s status as the world’s most popular search engine makes it a great resource for market research. Google has access to billions of first-party data points based on what people are searching for online. 

For market research purposes, users can tap into Google Trends to see the popularity of searches over time. See the terms that are trending on a daily or weekly basis, or check out shopping-related trends to predict the hot new products of the season ( trend prediction ).

Google’s Market Finder can also pinpoint new markets that might be a great fit for your product or service. Learn how various markets compare to each other and how your business might fit in.

And if you’re selling physical products, you can see how sales trends might impact your business using Google’s Rising Retail Categories . Retailers use this tool often to predict hot-selling holiday items and right-size their inventory.

Attest brings old-school focus groups and surveys into the digital era with its rapid-response approach. In the past, organizing interviews and focus groups took weeks or even months. Once the research activities were finished, analysts required additional time to compile the results. No more.

With Attest, you can hear directly from consumers who fit your audience profiles, with ready-made questions and respondents at your fingertips. All responses are recorded in the Attest platform, and the market research software analyzes results and collects consumer insights on your behalf.

Users pay per response, so you can scale your market research as needed.

A popular survey tool, Typeform offers a mobile-friendly way to collect market research insights . It’s unique in that it only shows users one field at a time to limit distractions. The look and feel lend to a more casual, conversational approach, which may encourage survey takers to be more candid in their responses. (We can’t prove it, though.)

Users can create various question types, including multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and scale ratings. It’s intuitive and makes basic market research a breeze.

Ubersuggest, a popular k eyword research tool , also has market research capabilities packed into its user-friendly interface . That’s because keyword research is a form of market research , giving you a glimpse of what people are actively searching for online.

Let’s say you’re launching a new facial cleaning device for your beauty brand . By using Ubersuggest for keyword research, you can also uncover:

• Other brands selling facial cleaning devices
• Publications talking about facial cleaning devices
• The popularity of online searches for facial cleaning devices
• Competition for related keywords
• Questions related to the keyword “facial cleaning device”
• Cost per click to rank for the keyword via paid ads
• Search volume (and interest) over time

This is a great tool to help you see who your top competitors are online, what type of content ranks well for a keyword, and how crowded a market is for a particular product or service.

Market research doesn’t always have to be a costly, complex beast, and SurveyMonkey is a great example. This easy-to-use survey tool can create simple or in-depth surveys sent to targeted audiences for feedback. 

For example, you might have one-off questions to ask customers who made a purchase to learn more about their buying habits. Or, you might want to send longer surveys to customers to help develop a new product. No matter your use case, you can customize surveys to reach highly specific audiences and compile their answers instantly. 

SurveyMonkey also offers turnkey market research solutions, including a global panel survey, translation services, and a reporting dashboard. These services can help you reach more people and get more use from your data.

Answer the Public is a free search listening tool that compiles the questions people are asking online. These questions can serve as a starting point for new product development, product improvements, and content marketing .

This market research software uses autocomplete data from Google . When you start typing a search, Google will try to guess what you’re looking for based on what other people have searched for. You can do this manually, but it’s time-consuming and relies only on your ideas.

Answer the Public makes life easier by compiling related questions in an easy-to-understand graphic. And since the data comes from Google, market researchers can trust its reliability and quality.

Ever wonder what it is about a brand (including yours) that people love? The things that get people talking? BrandMentions can help provide some context.

Specializing in social media monitoring , BrandMentions takes the next step into showing why a particular keyword is buzzing. Type in a keyword and you’ll see recent social media posts that also contain that keyword.

You can also see the keyword’s Reach, Performance, and Number of Mentions — all of which can come in handy when you’re planning a new product launch. You can use these insights to plan your launch-related posts to generate the most buzz.

Tip: Learn more about brand monitoring , brand tracking , brand reputation measurement , about the best brand tracking software , and understand why your brand mentions are spiking .

AI market research tools like Heartbeat AI allow you to put market research on autopilot , or at least close to it. Using sentiment analysis , this market research tool recognizes themes and trends in qualitative text data.

No more poring through pages and pages of text — Heartbeat AI can quickly surface insights about how your audience feels regarding your brand or products (or your competitors). What’s more, it can turn these insights into attractive visuals for simpler understanding or sharing with other stakeholders.

Qualitative research can be more difficult to sort and analyze because it contains more variables. Unlike quantitative research, which deals with specific, measurable data, qualitative research involves the complexities of human behavior and perception. The results are subjective in nature, and it involves more work to extract their value.

Discuss aims to change the narrative with AI-powered insights . Offering video capabilities, built-in note-taking, and auto-generated highlight reels, marketers can capture the “Aha!” moments without losing efficiency.

The market research platform makes it easy to refer back to conversations and keep their audience engaged throughout the process, leading to more complete data.

One of the oldest but most trusted market research sources , the U.S. Census Bureau offers basic demographic information about U.S. citizens. This platform gives you instant insight into America’s people , including things like family sizes, income levels, and populations.

Beyond demographics, the market research platform has thousands of tables and maps to bring your research to life. You can customize your own maps and tables using any of the data available.

Another option is to find your business’s North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code , and then filter the Tables tool to focus on your industry. This allows you to see where your industry is most popular and where it might be over- or under-saturated.

Tableau from Salesforce is a business intelligence platform that connects to all of your data sources, making it easier to connect the dots between disparate systems. It excels at transforming unstructured data into visualizations to streamline decisions.

Their goal is to democratize data and make it more accessible and user-friendly. It accomplishes its mission with a user-friendly interface, visual data transcriptions, and a community of more than a million members who share how-tos and best practices.

Make Your Market Research Tools Work for You

Online market research tools aren’t replacing the traditional survey or focus group — they’re enhancing them by providing an always-on approach to speed up results. By tapping into the wealth of data people are openly sharing online, businesses can gain more insights than ever before, on demand.

Meltwater offers some of the best tools for market research that are accurate, reliable, and easy to use. By tapping into billions of data points and analyzing them in the context of your business, you can make valuable data-driven decisions to move your company forward.

Learn more when you request a demo by filling out the form below:

Continue Reading

How To Do Market Research: Definition, Types, Methods

What Are Consumer Insights? Meaning, Examples, Strategy

Market Intelligence 101: What It Is & How To Use It

Consumer Intelligence: Definition & Examples

24 Best Market Research Tools: Focus Groups to Data Analysis

Rev › Blog › Marketing › 24 Best Market Research Tools: Focus Groups to Data Analysis

Your product team builds a flashy new offering, and you’re excited to see a flood of new engagement. Yet days, weeks, months, and years follow with a trickle of users or purchases. Eventually, it becomes clear your team has made a crucial error: They’ve tried to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The damage has been done. Your team has been shouting into the void. But there’s something to be learned from all those content crickets, and that’s the importance of market research.

At its core, market research is any effort that helps you better understand your potential customers—their preferences and behaviors.

We’ve assembled a list of the best market research tools (both free market research tools and premium tools) for every step of the process:

• Focus Groups: Bringing together groups of potential or current customers to gather insights into their preferences, behaviors, and purchasing patterns
• Interviewing: One-on-one research sessions to dig deeper into consumer’s psychology
• Observational Research: Studying the behavior of consumers in real-world settings
• Survey Tools: Short or long questionnaires that can be completed on participant’s own time
• User-Behavior Tools: Tools for studying how users interact with your products or wares
• Market Research Data & Statistics Analysis Tools: Rich databases that can give you broader insights into market trends

TOOLS FOR FOCUS GROUPS

As opposed to more “hands-off” observational research, there’s plenty of information to be gleaned from specifically bringing people together to share their insights on your product(s) and the broader market. Focus groups—typically composed of 6-10 current or potential customers—offer the opportunity to capture insights from many people at once.

1. CALENDLY

Calendly is a free calendar tool that enables users to indicate their availability for future meetings. Users can select several start times that work for them, all of which sync with the calendar of the person setting the meeting.

• Market Research Takeaway: Finding a time that works for all focus group participants can be difficult, so using a calendaring tool like Calendly frees researchers to hone their questions and their overall approach to the sessions

2. BREATHER

Breather is an app that allows you to book space in conference rooms and other locations (think Airbnb for short-term office space ) for your focus groups or other meetings. Breather’s spaces are comfortable, spacious, and impeccably decorated, adding credibility and flair to your research session.

• Market Research Takeaway: The success of focus groups hinges on just that—the group’s ability to focus and share their insights in a comfortable setting. Cramming participants together in a small room can lead to disengagement.

Rev offers a fast and reliable transcription service for audio and video content. Rev’s transcripts capture exchanges among numerous speakers, even when there’s cross talk and interruptions, so it’s perfect for recordings where there’s a lot of banter among participants.

• Market Research Takeaway: Recording focus groups or interviews for later transcription frees researchers from capturing direct quotes in the moment and feverishly taking notes.

Tools for interviewing

The energy and spontaneity of focus groups can take your research in unexpected directions, but when you’ve got a pointed series of questions that you need answered, it’s best to interact with customers one-on-one. It’s crucial, however, that you recruit interviewees who will give you a full picture of your customer base.

4. HUBSPOT’s “MAKE MY PERSONA” TOOL

Make My Persona is a simple online tool for creating detailed profiles of customers to help identify their unique likes, dislikes, and behaviors. HubSpot’s pointed questions help you quickly flesh out your customer profiles. This tool is best suited for researchers who already have a good sense of their target market but want to ensure that they’re addressing all of their customers effectively.

• Market Research Takeaway: When recruiting for research studies and interviews, you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting a healthy representation of your customer base.

5. USERFORGE

Userforge’s software is designed to help you organize your research, create user personas, and study the relationships between them. The platform has a social media feel, producing profiles that can help your team visualize your customers and bring life to your market discussions. Once created, user personas can be used across a number of different projects and grouped under larger “Archetypes” that highlight connections and overlap between user types.

• Market Research Takeaway: Creating user personas in advance can help you craft questions that dig below the surface and engender insights into consumer psychology.

6. ZENDESK SELL

Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) is a customer relationship management tool that enables you to track your interactions with customers and prospects. Primarily developed for sales teams, Sell is also a useful tool for storing information about individual customers and research participants. Sell can capture a wide range of customer interactions, from phone calls to email campaigns, and its data visualizations help make your presentations compelling.

• Market Research Takeaway: Communication is key to effectively coordinating interviews and research activities, and it becomes more difficult as the number of participants increases—use Sell or another CRM to track your outreach and ongoing connections.

Zoom is an audio- and video-conferencing tool that works across a wide range of platforms and devices, from desktop to mobile. The clean user interface and high-definition connection make remote interviews a breeze, so you’re not married to recruiting subjects locally. Zoom enables you to share your screen, view the screen of your connected parties, and record the meetings for further review and/or transcription.

• Market Research Takeaway: Disruptions during an interview can distract participants and make it difficult for them to effectively engage with you during your time together. Zoom’s reliable servers and clean interface help you build trust by make your participants feel your presence more deeply.

8. Rev’s Call Recorder

Rev also offers an app for recording and transcribing interviews. The app is currently only available for iPhone users, but enables simple recording and in-app transcription. Teams can quickly share recordings and transcripts with one another via Dropbox and other sharing tools. Another alternative from Rev is their Voice Recorder app , though it’s more appropriate for dictation and sharing general audio notes with other team members.

• Market Research Takeaway: When videoconferencing isn’t feasible, recording phone conversations can adequately capture interviewing insights. Transcription of interviews makes reviewing their contents far more efficient, freeing team members to search directly for the information that they’re seeking.

Observational research

There’s no real substitute for watching customers “in the wild.” Whether you’re visiting a retail location or studying online behavior, direct observation of current and potential customers can help you better understand how they’ll interact with your offerings in the future.

EnjoyHQ is a cloud-based “research repository” that stores research insights that allow you to study deeply and share with your team. All market research tools generate a wealth of data, so it’s important to have a centralized place for your findings to help identify patterns and connections.

• Market Research Takeaway: Combing through your research notes for particular terms and/or themes can be incredibly time-consuming, so it’s helpful to store them in a database with quick, effective search functionality

10. Brickstream

Brickstream’s 3D sensors monitor the movements of customers in and outside of retail locations. Although consumers may think they have a good sense of how they move around a retail location, they’re often distracted by the products on offer. “People counters” like Brickstream help get a true sense for customers’ movement patterns, and store traffic in general.

• Market Research Takeaway: When customers are considering your product, it’s rarely in isolation. Factors like product placement and packaging can have a major impact on who interacts with your offerings, so tools like Brickstream tracking technology can give you a sense for where customers’ senses are leading them as they move through a store

11. Shopify’s behavior reports

Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, and their Behavior Reports provide rich insights about the actions users take (or don’t take) when completing a purchase online. For $29/month, Shopify users can access a full-fledged site management tool that tracks users’ interactions with your brand from the very first click.

• Market Research Takeaway: When customers interact with your brand online, there are countless small interactions they make when moving toward purchase. Understanding the role and relative influence of supporting content, like reviews and associated products, can help you tailor a more effective purchasing flow and boost conversions

12. Invision

InVision is a design platform for creating beautiful, interactive prototypes of new products. It’s best for teams wanting to quickly build minimum viable products without leaning too heavily on their company’s development resources. One of the tool’s biggest strengths is its version-control features: Users can create several “branched” versions of a prototype without worrying about losing their changes.

• Market Research Takeaway: Watching customers interact with your digital products—even in prototype form—can provide valuable insights into what’s working and what isn’t

13. JustInMind

JustInMind is a desktop design tool for creating site and application mock-ups. Unlike InVision, JustInMind enables designers and researchers to create conditional prototypes that incorporate user responses to fields and forms.

• Market Research Takeaway: Observing users’ unmediated interactions with your product can provide surprising insights about common sticking points and more popular features

14. Wistia’s soapbox

Wistia’s Soapbox tool is a screen-recording tool for Google’s Chrome browser that also allows you to capture video and audio of the person interacting with your site or product.Soapbox simultaneously records user’s on-screen actions and their facial expressions and body language.

• Market Research Takeaway: Studying the faces of research participants gives another layer of insight into the emotions elicited by your product and online offerings. For an even better sense of your users’ experience, consider asking participants to share their thoughts aloud when interacting with your wares.

Survey Tools

Focus groups and interviews are extremely effective and revealing, but surveys enable researchers to connect with a broader customer base.

15. SURVEYMONKEY

SurveyMonkey enables you to create surveys to share with interviewees and other research participants. Surveys are a great way to get participants thinking about your areas of research in advance and can also provide useful follow-up to any issues or concerns that arise during your interview(s). Basic versions of SurveyMonkey are free; the paid version supports complex, branching surveys that adapt to user responses.

• Market Research Takeaway: Many useful research subjects aren’t comfortable in groups or one-on-one interview settings, so creating sharable surveys allows you to connect with participants on their terms.

16. Qualtrics

Qualtrics offers access to a database of millions of potential interview and survey subjects.Qualtrics tracks a large number of factors for individuals, ranging from income information to preferred brands to purchasing patterns. Researchers can use the data that Qualtrics has gathered to help shape their understanding of the broader market and recruit potential respondents.

• Market Research Takeaway: You don’t have to rely on word of mouth or “gig” sites like Craigslist to find research participants. There’s a huge number of people who are willing to share their insights (and their demographic information). Breadth can be just as important as depth, so take advantage of Qualtrics’ herculean efforts in curating their database

Temper is a lightweight add-on that helps you create one-question survey pop-ups on your website. Some survey respondents will balk at a lengthy questionnaire but happily answer one-off questions as they navigate your site. Users can even respond with an emoji, if they’re more comfortable expressing themselves that way.

• Market Research Takeaway: You don’t always need in-depth responses to get deep insights into your potential customers. Querying users when they’re currently in or around your product is a good way to gauge their mind-set when they interact with your brand.

User-Behavior Tools

What consumers say about their preferences is one thing; sometimes it’s best to study what they do when interacting with your product. User-behavior research is focused on just that—how consumers interact with your offerings.

As mentioned in the Observational Research section, there are a number of tools, such as footfall counters and checkout scanners, to help you study in-store and off-line behaviors. Online and software applications, however, provide the unique opportunity to study the most minute elements of user behavior, from slight movements of a mouse to length of time spent with a given segment of content.

18. CRAZY EGG

Crazy Egg tracks a user’s interactions with a website, from cursor movements to clicks. The software is free and, thankfully, crazy simple to implement via a small snippet of code. Recording users’ on-screen behavior via video tools like Zoom is helpful, but researchers then have to manually code the interactions to identify patterns and sticking points. Crazy Egg compiles all of that data for you, making it simple to compare different users and identify what’s working on your site.

• Market Research Takeaway: Your designers may think they’ve built a simple, effective site or product, but there’s no substitute for watching people try to navigate it on their own.

Hotjar records user behavior across all sections of your site or product. Hotjar’s “heat maps” of individual pages help you understand where users’ cursors—and therefore their attention—go as the users interact with your brand. You can also create short pop-up surveys and questionnaires that are triggered in response to specific user actions. Hotjar makes it easy to identify “drop-off” points, where users abandon the paths set for them by designers, whether in completing a purchase or submitting a form.

• Market Research Takeaway: Survey questions, even if it’s a simple emoji selector, can be even more powerful when surfaced in the context of users’ actual engagement with your products. It’s crucial to have an understanding of how visitors are interacting with your site to identify opportunities for pop-ups or other calls to action.

Data & Stats Analysis Tools

Every research method here provides a wealth of data for decision-making, but there are a number of existing repositories that do the hard work of data gathering for you.

20. CLARITAS

Claritas—a Nielsen product—is a massive database of consumer information ranging from purchasing patterns to political preferences. Claritas’ original research and the work of over 40 of their research partners yield an incredibly detailed collection of consumer insights. Their segmentation tools identify unexpected habits and connections between user groups.

• Market Research Takeaway: Creating user personas on your own is extremely useful, but it’s also important to look at real data to get a sense for all of the factors that make up your consumers’ unique personalities

21. Pew ResearcH Center

Pew offers downloadable collections of consumer research. It conducts a wide range of research on topics ranging from societal trends to consumers’ media-consumption habits, all of which is free to access. Researchers can use Pew’s data to enrich their conception of potential customer groups by understanding their lives more deeply. Pew frequently queries respondents about the major issues of the day, giving researchers a current snapshot into the ideas and attitudes of their customer base.

• Conducting Market Research Takeaway: Creating user personas on your own is extremely useful, but it’s also important to look at real data to get a sense for all of the factors that make up your consumers’ unique personalities

22. Google Trends

Google remains the web’s most popular search engine, and their Trends toolprovides insights on popular local search patterns, both recent and historic. Trends allows users to segment their search by time frame to study the changes in interest for particular topics over time.

• Market Research Takeaway: When consumers are searching for information on the web, Google is usually their first stop. How consumers phrase their queries can be extremely revealing because it helps you understand what they think they’re looking for, and how they go about trying to find it.

23. Google’s Adwords

AdWords is Google’s largest paid-advertising platform. Advertisers can target certain search terms and phrases and serve their ads on search-results pages. Running a small ad campaign with a low budget can still provide valuable insights on consumer response to your messaging and their willingness to engage with your products and content. You can drill down deeply into your specific targets and test marketing or product messaging in a real-world setting.

• Market Research Takeaway: Creating sample ads requires researchers to bring all of their findings to bear and to then gauge their hypothesis about what resonates most deeply with potential customers.

24. Hootsuite

Hootsuite tracks social media activity around certain topics, themes, and keywords. Social media conversations are a window into consumers’ minds—ranging from their likes and dislikes to the issues that get them inspired and, occasionally, enraged. Hootsuite enables you to track topics across a number of different platforms, from Facebook to Twitter, and sends optional alerts whenever your research subject or brand is mentioned.

• Market Research Takeaway: Social media banter offers a real-time snapshot of global trends and consumer attitudes. Influencers—users with huge followings—have become major gatekeepers for new products and services, so it’s useful to study their posts and see how their followers respond to them.

Market research tools lead to better products

Market researchers have more tools at their disposal than ever before, so there’s no excuse for building a product that doesn’t solve users’ problems. Companies and individuals can save countless hours of development time by studying user desires and behaviors in real time, whether it’s from macro, trend level or on a more individual basis. A healthy mix of the different approaches provided above should suffice, but anything that helps you learn more about your potential customers is worthy of investment.

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The 8 free market research tools and resources you need to know.

With over 400,000 new businesses opening in the United States each month, the need for individual companies to conduct their own market research has never been more urgent.  However, conducting market research isn’t an easy task — it presents challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

With that being said, those with large budgets do enjoy certain advantages. When you have access to an endless array of top-tier tools and resources, you can uncover strategy-changing insights with relative ease.

Does that mean businesses with small (or non-existent) budgets are out of luck? Absolutely not.

Nowadays, free market research tools and resources are abundant — and you’ll be familiar with eight of our favorites by the time you’re done reading this blog post.

But first, some housekeeping:

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about your customers — both current and prospective — with the intent of optimizing your business strategy.

Customer-related information that you may want to gather includes (but is not limited to):

• The goals they want to achieve
• The pain points they want to alleviate
• The income or budget that constrains them
• The products and/or services they use (a.k.a. your competitors)
• The strengths and weaknesses of the products and/or services they use

Why is market research important?

Market research is important because — if you’re thorough and open-minded — it dramatically improves your chances of long-term success. Only through market research can you uncover the insights you need to develop a product or service that (1) satisfies the demands of your prospects and (2) stands out from the competition.

For a complete overview of how conducting market research can benefit your business, here’s Market Research Defined and How to Get Started .

Cool? Cool. Let’s dive into the good stuff.

Top 4 Free Market Research Tools

For clarity, we will define a free market research tool as any tool that:

• Costs nothing, and
• Helps with the collection and/or analysis of customer-related information

Keep in mind that “customer-related information” encompasses everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

1. Google Trends

If you want to get a sense of the level of interest in a particular product or service — as well as how that interest fluctuates over time and across regions — Google Trends is an excellent tool.

All you need to do is enter a search query and toggle with the filters. As an example, take a look at the level of interest in “office supplies'' in the U.S. over the past five years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, interest peaked in February 2020 — at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic:

Plus, you can explore variations in interest across the 50 states, as well as related topics and queries that are surging in popularity:

The “interest by subregion” data is powerful. In Wyoming, searches for “office supplies” account for a greater percentage of all search queries than in any other state. Your average resident of Wyoming, in other words, is more interested in searching for office supplies than is your average resident of, say, Louisiana — a valuable insight for anyone who sells office supplies online.

Equally valuable is the insight that searches for “where to buy office supplies in bulk” are on the rise — potentially indicative of an emerging pain point.

2. SurveyMonkey

As some of you already know, one of the best ways to conduct market research is to ask your customers a handful of open-ended questions. You can do this for free with SurveyMonkey .

Specifically, with a free SurveyMonkey account, you can ask up to 10 questions and field up to 40 responses with each of your surveys.

Open-ended questions you may ask your customers include (but are not limited to):

• Why did you buy our product?
• What has our product helped you accomplish?
• How does our product compare to others that you’ve used in the past?

With just three questions — well under the limit of a free survey — you can learn quite a bit about your target market. If, for example, the majority of respondents say they bought your product because they were struggling to do their jobs in a cost-effective manner, that gives you a clearer picture of your prospects’ pain points and your competitors’ weaknesses .

3. Make My Persona

As you collect and analyze customer-related information, it’s a good idea to create or tweak your buyer personas : detailed profiles of the semi-fictional people for whom your product or service is designed. In the context of market research, personas are useful because they help you synthesize and comprehend the information you’re gathering.

Thanks to our friends at HubSpot, you can use a wonderful free tool called Make My Persona .

Intuitive and fun, Make My Persona is a seven-step process that walks you through the essential components of your target customer: demographic information, firmographic information, job title, pain points, and so on. And if you want to go beyond the bare essentials, you can add as many extra sections of information as you like.

Important note: Your personas should be dynamic. As you conduct further market research and learn more about your target customers, your personas should evolve accordingly.

4. WordSift

Make My Persona is appealing, in part, because it enables you to make sense of raw data — to separate the signal from the noise. The same can be said about WordSift , the final free tool we’ll be discussing today.

Built to help teachers with the instruction of vocabulary and reading comprehension, WordSift allows you to generate word clouds: images that represent the frequency with which certain words are used in a given body of text. Look what happens when I copy the introduction to this blog post and paste it into WordSift:

Instantaneously — and unsurprisingly — I can conclude that “business,” “market,” and “research” are among the most frequently used words in the introduction to this post.

What does this have to do with market research? Well, let’s say you’ve been using SurveyMonkey to ask your customers about their reasons for buying your product. One by one, if you were to copy their responses and paste them into WordSift, you’d be able to see which words your customers use most often. That’s a market research gold mine!

Top 4 Free Market Research Resources

Again, for clarity, we will define a free market research resource as any resource that:

• Helps with the collection of customer-related information

The scope of “customer-related information" remains the same  —  encompassing everything from a pain point to a weakness of one of your competitors’ products.

5. Bureau of Labor Statistics

A government organization that “measures labor market activity, working conditions, price changes, and productivity in the U.S. economy to support public and private decision-making,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a wealth of information.

Because this is a blog post about market research — not an economics class — we’ll focus on BLS’ industry- and region-specific information. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Data Tools drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink to something titled “Industry at a Glance.” Click on that, find your industry of interest, and explore the dozens of statistics that BLS has aggregated.

If, for example, you’re interested in the apparel manufacturing industry — either because you’re in the industry or you sell into it — you can see how earnings, prices, and productivity figures are changing over time.

Head back to the homepage, hover over the Subjects drop-down menu, and you’ll see a section labeled Geographic Information:

Select your region of interest, filter by state or metropolitan area (if necessary), and take a tour of BLS’ enormous library of area-specific data.

6. U.S. Census Bureau

On a mission to “serve as the [United States’] leading provider of quality data about its people and economy,” the U.S. Census Bureau is another terrific resource that costs nothing to use.

Just as we did with the BLS, we’ll focus on industry- and region-specific information. Admittedly, using the Census website to find industry-specific information is slightly more complicated than it is when using the BLS website. If you’re on the homepage and you hover over the Explore Data drop-down menu, you’ll see a hyperlink titled “Explore Data Main.”

Click on that, and you’ll be brought to the Census’ search engine. Then, click inside the search bar and select “Advanced Search.”

Underneath “Find A Filter,” type in the name of the industry you’re interested in researching. Once the search suggestions load, simply check the appropriate box and click “Search.”

From there, you’ll be able to explore thousands of data tables, maps, and whitepapers — many of them chock-full of industry-specific information that you can use to your advantage.

Finding region-specific information is a bit more straightforward. Head back to the Advanced Search engine, select “Geography” from underneath Browse Filters, and go from there:

7. Pew Research Center

A nonprofit dedicated to “inform[ing] the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world,” the Pew Research Center is one of the most authoritative sources of information for anyone striving to make better business decisions.

Whereas the BLS and the Census are (among other things) aggregators of economic data, the Pew Research Center is a “fact tank” — an organization focused on public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis, and other forms of social science inquiry. 

So, although you can’t necessarily use Pew to uncover hyper-specific insights related to your industry or region, you can use it to learn more about your target audience. The best way to do this is through the Topics section of the Pew website.

Clicking that hyperlink brings you to an index of dozens of topics, ranging from Online Video to Homeownership to Democracy. Selecting any of these topics will bring you to a list of relevant content — reports, fact tanks, transcripts, and other forms of media that can date back as far as the early 1980s.

As an example, let’s say you’re developing a product or service that targets new homeowners. If you were to click on the Homeownership topic, you’d land on a list of reports like this one:

If I were you, that’s not a report I’d want to overlook!

We’ll wrap up today’s guide with a free resource specifically for those of you in the software world. Designed to help buyers determine which products are best suited to their needs, G2 is the leading source of validated, unbiased software reviews.

G2 is, in other words, an excellent way to find out what your target customers are saying about your competitors’ products. Do a quick search for the type of software you’re developing and you’re in business.

If you were developing a sales compensation software product and you searched this keyword, you’d be brought to the page you see below. To learn more about Spiff — one of your top-rated industry competitors — all you’d need to do is click “Read Spiff Reviews.”

If you want to get granular, you can filter reviews in a number of different ways. As an example, let’s say you’re developing a sales compensation software product specifically for small businesses. G2 has the filter you’re looking for:

And just like that, you’ve got access to dozens of valuable insights like this one:

Start using market research tools today!

If you try to bring a product or service to market without an understanding of your target customers, your chances of success are slim. According to the most recent State of Competitive Intelligence Report , 84% of businesses say their industry has gotten more competitive in the last three years. With the range of choices at your prospects’ fingertips growing by the day, the need for a thorough market research strategy only intensifies.

We hope you find these free market research tools and resources useful. And if you decide to make the leap to a paid solution, make sure to request a demo of Crayon — the competitive intelligence platform that enables you to track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside your businesses’ four walls.

See why Gong, Mastercard, and ZoomInfo trust Crayon to help them win more competitive deals.

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The 24 Best Market Research Tools & Software in 2024

Product Manager at Qualaroo

Dwayne is a seasoned Product Manager 10+ years of experience. His articles offer a fresh perspective on the dynamic and ever-evolving world of customer-centric strategies.

Market research tools have been at the heart of every business’s success. In a world where competition seems to be never-ending, knowing the ins and outs of your target market is more crucial than ever. 

According to a study conducted by PwC , companies that benchmark can achieve 69% faster growth and 45% greater productivity as compared to those that don’t. 

Market research has enabled organizations to uncover not only some of the biggest revelations about the market but also the tiniest details that most people miss. Market research helps organizations read between the lines and make informed decisions, which makes the process ever so important. 

Thankfully, in the 21st century, we do not require an insider to give us data about the market in the name of research. We now have some of the world-class software tools at our fingertips that would enable us to truly improve, evolve and empower our products and services for the people. 

In this blog, we’ve included a list of 12 of the best market research software and tools out there with some of the key details that you should know before making a decision to choose the one for you. 

But first, let’s take a closer look at what market research actually is.

The 24 Best Market Research Tools in 2024

There are plenty of online market research software tools that you can choose from. Here is a list of 12, which the users think very highly of:

Market research tool # 1.  Qualaroo

Qualaroo is the best market research tool and one of the best  online survey software  out there for conducting market research. It provides users with a market research platform that is easy to use and also offers actionable insights.

Qualaroo also helps you  develop user personas  through  advanced targeting , which helps you better  understand your users  and easily track their goals & behavior patterns.    

• Easy to set up and can instantly start taking feedback.
• Professionally designed survey templates to ask just the right questions.
• Catches your visitors in real-time with context for valuable responses. 
• Users can easily determine who and where the survey targets are
• Can help create detailed  customer journey maps . 
• Ask for product/website/app feedback from the audience based on engagement. 
• Supports branching logic to easily go through the redundant users. 
• Integrates with popular tools like Hubspot, Zapier, and Slack. 
• Perfect for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty using Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
• Helps to gather user experience (UX) feedback at every stage of the design process for any product.
• You can test prototype templates through unobtrusive pop-up surveys called Nudges™.
• Makes analyzing customer sentiments and open-ended survey results easier through the sentiment analysis engine
• Needs more filters and export options for the reports.
• Lacks a bulk action button in the survey dashboard.

Pricing:   Starts from $69 per month.

Market research tool # 2.  Google Trends

Google Trends is a free market research tool that presents data in the form of trend lines from all over the internet. When you enter a specific term into Google Trends, it will give you an accurate representation of how trendy that term has been over the course of time and also gives it a score out of 100.

• Shows the frequency of your searched term in Google with respect to the website’s total search volume over a given period of time.
• Refines your search by adding location filters.
• Presents the trend graphically for better visualization of the result.
• Easy to respond to surveys on any device, including mobile, tablets, and computers. 
• Integrates with popular tools such as  Zapier , Automate.io, and Integromat. 
• Data is generated into organized Google Sheets that can be instantly presented without making any alterations. 
• Useful tool to acquire keyword-related and geographic data about the users.
• Instantly uncover any search spikes due to special events for a search.
• Sometimes shows irrelevant results for a searched term.
• Shows only relative numbers, so a comparison analysis is necessary.

Pricing:  Free to use

Market research tool # 3.  SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is another market research software that offers new market research techniques and provides different ways to customers for voicing their opinions. They have combined an enterprise-grade platform with a suite of specialized market research and customer experience solutions to ensure that the power of feedback can be given to organizations of all sizes. 

• Professionally built question bank to ask accurate questions.
• Personalized survey techniques like skip logic, branching logic, etc.
• AI-powered analysis tool to get expert feedback on the survey draft. 
• Test creative concepts by asking the right set of questions from the right audience. 
• Ensures quality of data gathered from over 144 million users worldwide.
• Ability to get help from market research experts and dedicated accounts managers with the flexible engagement model.
• Potential to monitor market dynamics of a specific product category over time.
• Easily design recurring surveys to track sentiments with time.
• Embed survey questions into emails to improve response rates.
• Provides accurate context from the updated benchmark data.
• Analytical dashboard needs improvement to make data presentation better.
• Sometimes glitches a little while designing surveys.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/user/month. 

Market research tool # 4.  Statista

Statista is one of the top market research tools that specializes in data visualization and market research. It picks up data from reputable reports that are present all over the internet and makes them easy to comprehend and digest for researchers and other users. It can find the specific data relating to your industry and create a statistical report on it, which would be much easier to understand. 

• Ability to filter content based on a specific type. 
• Hundreds of metrics to choose from and the ability to customize visualizations.
• Also features forecasts and surveys reports.
• Flexibility to analyze the markets across 150+ countries. 
• Presents global stories and statistics in a vividly visualized manner. 
• Ability to conduct Global Consumer Surveys to understand what drives the consumers. 
• Can integrate with other marketing tools by simply copying the HTML code. 
• Great tool for portraying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand the consumer market outlook.
• Helps research and gather information about the companies like their headquarters, the number of employees, and revenue performance.
• Can be challenging to find relevant data for long-tail search terms.

Pricing:  Starts at $39/month

Market research tool # 5.  Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool is a highly sophisticated  market research software and analysis tool  that acts as a window into the behavior of customers when searching online. Google Keyword tool provides valuable insights into queries that your target audience is searching on google.

It acts as an accurate product research tool that tells you what the customers are looking for. To use it, you need to create a free Google Adword account.

• Shows you the volume of keyword searches.
• Lets you filter keyword searches based on location and language.
• Lets you filter searches based on the device that people use to search.
• Helps marketers build a content strategy and marketing strategies as well. 
• Offers users insights into the current marketing trends.
• Expand long-tail efforts by discovering other important keywords in the same domain.
• Integrates with other tools using Google API.
• Shows the relationship between different keywords to help you find targeted related keywords.
• Excellent tool to understand the competitiveness of the keywords.
• Shows fewer keyword suggestions than other similar tools.
• Needs more keyword filters in the dashboard.

Pricing:  Free to use.

Market research tool # 6.  Tableau Software

Tableau is a business intelligence suite for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. Tableau uses analytics, visualization, and business intelligence to present the data in a visually appealing fashion for a better understanding.

It aims to transform the way we see and use data to make decisions. Tableau empowers its users with the help of its highly sophisticated market research tools to make the best out of their data. 

• Lets you visualize data on anything.
• Can easily extract data from PDFs, Excel, text, Python, SAS, and many more.
• Tableau dashboard provides a comprehensive and wholesome view of your data.
• Enables the marketing team to directly access the data from different formats.
• Visualizes the market research data to generate actions and make quick decisions. 
• Natively integrates with other market research tools like Qualtrics and Salesforce. 
• Flexible team collaboration and data sharing options.
• Makes it easy to connect with live data sources to stay up to date. 
• Offers data heat maps to give a general sense of the emerging patterns in the market.
• Can be an expensive tool for some businesses.
• You may need help from the IT department to set up the tool.

Pricing:  Starts at $70/user/month.

Market research tool # 7.  Typeform

Typeform is another market research software and online survey tool that allows you to conduct market research surveys to get a direct response from your targeted audience. It has a built-in photo and video libraries and a wide range of design themes to choose from. Typeform primarily aims to create people-friendly forms by making them appealing, which would gather more responses and better insights.

• Shows the viewers one form field at a time. 
• Easy to use and optimize for mobile devices.
• Let’s you create a wide range of question types. 
• Make the form uniquely yours with a wide range of customization options.
• Integrates with other tools like Google Sheets, Salesforce, Slack, etc.
• The drag and drop feature allows users to create forms within minutes.
• Variety of question types including multiple-choice, rating, opinion scale, free-form text, and many more.
• Creating conversational and casually approached surveys. 
• Gathering demographics of the customers to understand their behavior patterns. 
• Creating positioning strategy through survey results. 
• Survey design options need more flexibility and customization options.
• It would be good if there were more filters in the reporting dashboard.

Pricing:  Starts at $25/month.

Market research tool # 8.  SEMrush

SEMrush is another very effective market research software tool that marketers use to boost their conversion rates. It has over 40 tools under its portfolio that can be used to attract more visitors and increase conversions. 

This tool primarily aims at improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights by offering services like SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR,  Content Marketing , Marketing Insights, analytical tools for market research , Campaign Management.

• Provides tools like keyword research, on-page SEO, and local SEO.
• Easily monitor and manage organic rankings.
• Provides tools for content marketing, creation, distribution, optimization,
• It’s the best  tool for market analysis . 
• Lets you explore and analyze the demographics of competitors in the market. 
• Determine how to market competitors earn their traffic and also estimate your market share. 
• Integrates with popular Google and social networking applications. 
• The technical audit report gives in-depth suggestions for site optimization.
• One of the best enterprise-level tools.
• Provides a plethora of segmentation options for keyword suggestions to find the right keywords.
• Training docs can be hard to navigate. It can be hard to find what you are looking for.
• Backlink suggestions dashboard can be improved. Sometimes, it misses a lot of backlinks.

Pricing:  Starts at $119.95/month. 

Market research tool # 9.  Ahrefs

Ahref is also the top  tool for business research  or market research that offers a fully-packaged suite of  conversion rate optimization tools  is Ahrefs. It is an extremely diverse software that has tons of functionality and can easily make anyone an SEO expert. It is an extremely powerful tool for backlinks, SEO analysis, and also managing your SEO health over time.

• Ranks keywords with respect to their level of difficulty and traffic potential. 
• Conduct site audits to understand the weak links and boost the conversion rates.
• Conducts keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon.
• Finds content that performs well on a given topic.
• Tons of different metrics to measure the data on.
• Integrates with tools like Tray.io and Rank Ranger using Ahrefs API
• Provides insights into competitors’ organic search and backlinking profiles on different websites.
• Helps to find the most optimized and well-performing content to generate new ideas and analyze competitors’ content.
• Coes with a slight learning curve. Needs inline tooltips in the product menus for quick access.
• PPC features need some optimization.

Starts at $83/month, billed annually 

Pricing:  Starts at $99/user/month.

Market research tool # 10.  Upwave (Formerly Survata)

Upwave, formerly Survata, is one of the best analytics and market research platforms to help you measure the effects of your brand advertising efforts. You can use the inbuilt dashboard to track every campaign across various channels and optimize them to improve ROI. The data from Upwave has been featured in brands like Forbes, USA Today, CBS News, and The New York Times.

• Track and optimize brand advertisement to improve brand awareness.
• Get real-time updates about outperforming aspects of every campaign to run timely optimization.
• Receive email notifications to get refreshed reports directly in your inbox.
• Provides automated tracking of different demographic & behavioral profiles in each campaign.
• You can see how accurately each campaign is reaching the target audience across various channels.
• Create customer dashboards to monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Leverages AI-based Upwave Customer Forecast feature to predict brand lift and customer acquisition for your campaigns.
• Track market penetration, i.e., the percentage of the target audience you reached for any campaign.
• You can estimate customer acquisition numbers to study the effectiveness of your brand marketing campaigns and make changes.
• Needs more filters to include other behavioral traits in the dashboards.
• Dashboard UI can be overwhelming for new users.

Contact for a quote

Market research tool #11.  AnswerThePublic

Answer the public is the best software for market research according to their home page, ‘There are 3 billion Google searches every day, and 20% of those have never been seen before”.  AnswerThePublic is responsible for listening to autocomplete data from search engines and cranking out every useful phrase or question that people are asking about a given keyword.

• Helps you get a sense of what the people are really asking for. 
• Gives you the context behind every search. 
• Very easy to use and digestible for beginners. 
• Listens to autocomplete data from search engines like Google and cranks out useful phrases and questions. 
• Also acts as a goldmine for consumer insights, and the data can be used to create extremely useful content and product.
• Integrates with other popular applications to generate more insights. 
• An excellent tool for insights, validation, creativity, and creating content strategies.
• Word Cloud feature is fantastic to visualize related keywords and their relationships.
• Helps to uncover the untapped potential of search demands for different queries.
• The database is constantly updated to help you spot new trends, slang, and topics.
• Sometimes, the results become less relevant when you search for more than two keywords simultaneously.
• It’s challenging to find keywords for niche markets.

Market research tool #12:  Social Mention

Social Mention is one of the  best tools for market research  that digs through 100+ social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and many more, to determine the number of times your brand or keyword has been mentioned. It has the ability to accurately track and measure what people are saying about your brand.

• Displays how much your keyword crops on all social media platforms.
• Distinguishes between positive and negative sentiments.
• Gives a general overview of the customer’s perception of your brand. 
• Users can determine the overall footprint of their brand and make informed decisions.
• Supports simple integration with popular social media applications for more meaningful data.
• You can also determine the number of people talking about your keyword at any given time. 
• You can set up alerts for more minor updates using tags within broader categories.
• Consolidates the data from all over the internet under one dashboard for real-time monitoring.
• Makes it easy to research specific domains where the audience is looking.
• The UI can be updated to improve navigation for new users.

Market research tool # 13. Think With Google

Think With Google is a one-stop information resource to monitor customer behavior, get marketing insights, and view the latest industry trends. It offers several tools to find the right demographic audience for your business, test and optimize your website, and track real-time consumer behavior across any location. So, if you are looking for the best market research resources, this is the one to go for.

• Run a site audit on your domain and get custom tips on improving site speed, UX, and other aspects.
• Lets you search trends and actionable consumer insights for specific locations.
• Track emerging technologies to plan the future of your marketing strategies.
• Benchmark your website against industry standards with a simple test.
• Use Google Trends to discover trending topics, latest stories, and other hot topics.
• Free-to-use online repository to explore new markets, find the right audience, and access global consumer behavioral data.
• No advanced features to find information on sub-categories or niche markets.

Market research tool # 14. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an excellent content marketing and researching platform to produce high-performing content. You can do keyword research, competitive analysis, brand monitoring, and more to grow your business. The platform also offers a chrome extension to make the job easier.

• Find the target keywords to design your content based on monthly search volume, cost per click, and other parameters.
• Track viral trends in real-time for any domain, topic, and location.
• Track new content around your target keywords to design your SEO strategies.
• Find the most popular influencers worldwide for any topic to sponsor them for your brand.
• Set alerts for desired keywords, blogs, brand mentions, competitors, and influencers.
• Track backlinks to your domain from all over the internet.
• One of the best tools for social listening and keyword research.
• The Chrome extension is an excellent addition to one-tap monitor the performance of your campaigns.
• Doesn’t monitor the content or engagement data for Instagram posts.
• Needs more filters to separate news and general topics.

Starts @ $79/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 15. Make My Persona

If you are new to building a buyer or user persona , then MakeMyPersona is your tool. It’s a simple market research software from HubSpot that creates a buyer persona based on the data you enter into the form. Just fill in the details, and you get a ready-to-use persona template to study different customer segments. And it’s free.

• Uses demographic and psychographic details of your target audience to build a buyer persona.
• It asks for details like age, organization’s size, job title, goals, challenges, etc.
• You can also add new sections manually, if necessary.
• Download and export the buyer persona with a click.
• Quick and easy to use to build customizable persona templates.
• Requires market data from your end. You cannot use it to find information on the target market.

Market research tool # 16. PureSpectrum Insights

PureSpectrum Insights (formerly Upwave Instant insights) is a consumer insights platform to collect market research and brand tracking data. You can create surveys and questionnaires to ask questions to the right audience to gather valuable insights for your marketing strategies. The company also offers PureSpectrum Marketplace to help you buy samples from multiple market research panels with one click.

• Create focused research and brand tracking surveys and distribute them to the target audience.
• Target the right people based on age, gender, shopping behaviors, income, job title, and other inbuilt attributes.
• Get real-time updates about the performance of your market research campaign.
• Use the PureSpectrum marketplace to find the right target audience for your surveys.
• Track the data in real-time using detailed reporting dashboards.
• The panel service helps to get to the required sample size quickly.
• To improve data quality, you can create crosstab reports and set up significance tests in minutes.
• Limited survey options as compared to other tools.

Contact for quote

Market research tool # 17. Loop11

Loop11 is a usability testing and market research tool to build better products. You can perform usability testing, benchmarking, prototype testing , information architecture testing, and more using the same tool. It offers both moderated and unmoderated testing so you can find the right audience to test your product and prototypes. 

As an audience research tool, you can use it to see how your product appeals to your new target market, explore their preferences, and channel the insights into the design.

• Offers a user-friendly test builder to guide you at every step of designing a test. No coding is required.
• Create tasks, such as five-second, first click, tree testing, etc.
• Add surveys to your test to collect in-depth demographic and psychographic data.
• Design surveys using multiple question types like multiple-choice, single-choice, NPS, rating, and System Usability Scale (SUS).
• Run your test on any device like desktop, mobile, or tablet.
• Provides a dedicated participant panel service to find the right participants globally for your tests.
• Offers video, audio, and screen capture to collect first-hand data from users.
• Edit videos to extract useful points like adding time-stamps, assigning tags, and more.
• Track test metrics like task completion rate, lostness, time on task, and NPS scores.
• Use inbuilt behavioral analysis tools like heatmaps and clickstream to map participants’ journeys during the test.
• Offer more flexibility in annotating and sharing the clips than other similar tools.
• An inexpensive tool with a wide range of testing options.
• The participant panel offers niche filters to help you target the right people for your tests.
• You cannot make changes to a test after publishing it.
• It may slow down your website a little.

Starts at $63/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 18. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is one of the most advanced experience management platforms in the market. It comprises different product suites to cover different aspects of your business. You can gauge customer satisfaction, optimize products and services, run market research campaigns, and track brand awareness from the same platform. Plus, AI-based analytics put it among the leading Market research tools to collect data for brand tracking and advertisement optimization.

• Track brand awareness through AI-based dashboards.
• Uncover the aspects that provide positive and negative brand perceptions among your audience.
• Set up automated alerts to track changes in brand signals or awareness.
• Run surveys to collect customer feedback and market research data.
• Offers 27+ deployment channels like website, app, link, email, and QR code.
• Use the drag-&-drop builder, 50+ answer types, branching logic, 100+ templates, theme customization options, rebranding, and other features to design surveys.
• Provides targeting options to target the right people.
• The iQ™ analysis engine leverages AI, machine learning, and NPL to extract data, spot opportunities, and suggest improvements automatically.
• Offers XM services to collect and manage market research data for you.
• Generate custom resorts to align your data with your business KPIs for real-time insights.
• Limited customization options for your surveys.
• It takes time to add the contract data to directories. It could be improved to make the process faster.

Market research tool # 19. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is among the most trusted and leading market research tools that offer in-depth data on different industries. You can find the top website, best apps, top trending topics, and other data around your industry. The company also offers data intelligence services to help you collect insights into your target market and audience. Plus, you can perform keyword research to find relevant keywords for your marketing strategies.

• Analyze any website and mobile app to view their ranking, total traffic, demographic targeting, competitors, marketing channels, etc.
• Uncover top keyword trends based on organic vs. paid search, channels, traffic sources, and other attributes.
• Perform keywords research to find new keywords.
• Run benchmarks for your website against industry standards.
• Leverage the data repository to track and monitor consumer data signals from over 100 million sites worldwide.
• Explore competitive insights, global market trends, and audience behavior on domain and sub-domain levels.
• Get shopper insights to track consumer behavior across your website, marketplace listings, and app.
• Offers a Chrome extension to get quick performance insights about any open web page.
• Easy to use and navigate. The UI is intuitive and user-friendly.
• Sometimes the data does not accurately represent the actual insights.
• Poses a learning curve for new users. Could benefit from a detailed knowledge base.

Market research tool # 20. Userlytics

Userlytics is one of the best tools for market research and user testing. You can easily conduct remote usability testing to align your products with the target audience. It also lets you collect information about your participants and interact with live conversations to gather in-depth market data without the hassle of arranging personal interviews, making it a perfect online market research tool.

• Choose from a plethora of test types like tree testing, card sorting, usability testing, prototype testing, and more.
• Use the tests to find the right product-market fit, test products, and conduct in-depth market research.
• Offers features like multiple question types, branching logic, rebranding, multi-language support, and others to create targeted tasks.
• Use built-in targeting options to select the right audience for your tests.
• Provides picture-in-picture recording to view how participants perform the tasks.
• Choose your own participants or access Userlytics’ panel services to select your target audience.
• Offers advanced dashboards to track metrics like NPS scores, time on tasks, and success/failure rate.
• The Global participant panel with inbuilt filters makes it easy to find the right audience.
• The feedback editing tool lets you create highlight reels, bookmark, download, tag, share, and rate the transcripts to extract valuable insights.
• The panel credits needed to recruit participants cannot be shared with other users within the same company. So, you have to buy more credits for each separate account.
• It can be expensive for small businesses.

Subscription plans start at $399/month. billed annually

Market research tool # 21. Temper

Temper is among the more straightforward feedback and audience research tools that let you collect user insights and other important data about your products and services. With simple surveys on different web pages, you can measure customer satisfaction, collect demographic and behavioral data on your target audience, gauge customer experience, and do more. 

The tool is perfect for small businesses getting started with market research resources or creating a feedback loop.

• Create and add survey widgets to your website and email.
• You can show the widget as a page pop-up or embed it into the page.
• Provides multiple question types like NPS, emoji, free-text, rating scale, and more.
• Fetches respondents’ meta-data to build your market research resources.
• Add custom tracking variables to pull other user data like email address, user ID, order number, etc.
• Offers inbuilt targeting options to show the widget to the right audience.
• In-built sentiment analysis dashboard to show overall sentiment score for each campaign.
• Beautiful dashboard to view scores with time and track any changes in real-time.
• The dashboard is simple but intuitively designed to display all the data without appearing overwhelming.
• Custom tracking is an excellent way to identify logged-in users and quickly act on their feedback.
• Lacks more question types offered by other similar tools.
• No advanced tools for quick data analysis.

Starts at $12 month

Market research tool # 22. BrandMentions

If you want to know what people are saying about your brand, BrandMentions is the perfect tool. It’s a great market analysis tool to instantly search every corner of the internet and track brand engagements. From social listening to competitor spying, you can do it all and more with this feature-packed platform.

• Track aggregated social mentions across various social channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Respond to people’s brand mentions from the dashboard to build an online community.
• Find and connect with the right influencers to fuel your marketing efforts.
• Monitor Hashtag performance across different channels.
• Run sentiment analysis of all the brand mentions and track the overall sentiment tone of people about your brand.
• Perform competitive analysis to analyze how your rivals are performing on the internet.
• Track your competitors’ brand mentions, social shares, and other data to identify their most popular channels.
• Set alerts for trending topics and news to stay on top of optimizing your business strategies.
• The UI is simple to use and navigate.
• Set real-time alerts for negative mentions to take quick action and build brand reputation.
• The initial setup takes time. We recommend consulting tutorials or help guides.
• Needs a bigger integration stack to export/import data to other workspace tools.

Starts at $99/month

Market research tool # 23. GrowthBar SEO

GrowthBar offers an all-in-one SEO toolkit for keyword research and competitive analysis to grow your business. You can find new target keywords, create new content ideas, and track competitors’ websites with a click. The business research tool also offers a Blog Marketplace to help you find the top freelance SEO writers for your blogs.

Features 

• Offers AI-based content assistant to auto-generate optimal titles, headers, introductions, word counts, images, and more for your blog posts.
• Use the inbuilt dashboard to view related keywords, difficulty scores, and suggestions for any keyword.
• Track DA, targeted keywords, Google and Facebook Ads, backlinks, and other data for any competitor website.
• Access the Blog Marketplace to find the right freelance writers to publish quality blogs.
• Offers Chrome extension to get SEO insights about any open webpage without leaving the browser.
• The AI-based content assistant comes in handy to generate optimized content outlines in minutes.
• Cannot do advanced SEO research like other similar tools.
• No option to track broken links.

Starts at $29/month, billed annually

Market research tool # 24. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is another market research tool to generate new keyword ideas for your campaigns. You just need to enter a domain or keyword. The tool shows keywords suggestions, monthly volume, and other data to help you identify the best opportunities for the target keyword. UberSuggest was acquired by Neil Patel, who has since expanded its feature list significantly.

• Generate long-tail and short-tail keywords ideas for your target keyword.
• Track metrics for each keyword like monthly search volume, PPC competition, average CPC, SEO competition, and more.
• Track top-ranking pages for any target keywords with estimated traffic, social share, and domain scores for each website.
• You can also analyze any domains for traffic, domain score, organic keywords, backlink score, and other useful information.
• Provides an SEO analyzer to run Site Audit and speed tests on your website and show suggestions to optimize it.
• The free version offers all the features to generate new keyword ideas.
• Uses location-based data to enhance data accuracy.
• Offers Word-Cloud keyword display to help you identify relevant keywords around the target term.
• Lacks several technical SEO features.
• Show limited results for niche target markets.
• No custom reporting option.

Free. Paid plans start at $12/month

Must-Have Features in Market Research Tools

You have already come across what market research software tools can do and how they are useful to marketers. But what makes a market research tool great and desirable? Let’s take a look at some of the features that every market research online tool should have

1. Identifying the Target Audience

Each step in the process of market research is crucial, but it stems from identifying your target audience in the initial stages. The inability to identify the right target audience would automatically result in the market research being void and halt the process entirely.  Therefore, a market research tool should, first and foremost, be able to fetch you the right set of audience to ask the questions from.

2. Creating a Research Questionnaire

The step that follows the identification of the target audience is the creation of a research questionnaire that will fetch you the answers that you are looking for. 

A good market research tool should provide users the ability to draft questions that: 

• Make the surveys engaging 
• Keep the surveys short 
• Always ask the right questions

3. Sharing Your Research Questionnaire

Another must-have feature of any market research tool is the ability to share the research questionnaire on multiple platforms through different channels. The flexibility of sharing your research questionnaire on different platforms is directly correlated to gathering accurate and significant data.

Respondents should be given the ability to opt for platforms that are convenient to them, like emails, social media, web links, SMS shares , and many more.

4. Collecting Data and Creating Information

A good market research tool should always be able to collect raw data and process it in such a way that it gives valuable information to the researcher. This is where an analysis tool comes in. 

The analysis conducted by the research tool should give actionable market insights by analyzing the data on a granular level and presenting it with the help of a robust reporting system.

Final Tips for Conducting Market Research

At this point, you are well aware of how important ongoing market research is for the organization’s long-term success. But even if you fully understand the depths of market research, you need to leverage it effectively. 

For that, here are some of the quick tips that would be useful for you while conducting market research:

1. Context Is Everything

Data is everywhere, yet so little of it is of any use. Even with tons of invaluable information at our fingertips, we often are clueless as to how we should use them. Understanding the true meaning and the reasoning behind the information is what makes research complete. 

As a good researcher, you should always be aware of the possibilities and limitations out there and harness the vast potential of information out there to paint a clear picture in the form of market research.

This can be done by always trying to look beyond the data points and asking questions to understand the actual meaning around the data.

Also Read: How To Measure Customer Satisfaction In Context

2. Make It Personal

When it comes to interpreting the data, you should always try and engage with the researchers and the analysts to understand how the data would be applicable to your organization. Market research is not about reading recorded visuals and texts or purchasing a report card and moving on. 

There is a vast amount of information captured on a daily basis that does not make it to a publication and remains unused. Research is often widely applicable, which is why you should personally engage with research personnel or analysts who work behind the scenes to curate the research.

Asking them the right questions about the applicability of research would give you a much better understanding.

Remember, Research Is an Ongoing Process

We live in an ever-changing society, where the consumer’s needs and market trends change at a rapid pace. In order to analyze and interpret those trends and consumers’ needs, you need to study them on a regular basis. Research needs to be an ongoing process with no inevitable end to ensure that you always stay ahead of the curve at any given point in time.

Ask the Right Questions

Before starting with your marketing research, you need to have your objectives in place. These objectives act as a blueprint for your research and would guide you towards successful market research. 

While focusing on the core objective, you would need to derive the right set of questions that would gather the specific data needed to fulfill your research. Here is a quick example of questions that can be applied in your research:

To understand how your visitors came to know about you

• How did you find our website?
• What search term did you use to find our website?
• What was the first thing you found out about us?

Understanding the purpose of your visitors

• What brings you to this website today?
• What product or service are you looking for?

Understanding the exit intent

• What is preventing you from signing up?
• What is preventing you from starting a trial?
• What could we do to make this site more useful?

Related Read – To know more about the survey questions, have a look at What Survey Questions Should I Ask?

Reflect on the Insights

Conducting market research is not the end of the process. The important bit is what comes afterward. Sharing the research data with your team and other organization members is the ideal thing to do when it comes to interpreting it. 

You can also use the analytical tool provided in the market research software that would comprehensively decipher the data and give you a bird’s-eye view. This is how reflecting on the data would give you the ability to make critical decisions.

Ultimately, market research will always be considered as a highly sophisticated way of gaining insights and answers that will eventually reduce business risk and ensure overall success.

Research success can always be determined by comparing your discoveries with the business objectives. Proper deployment of market research tools is one of the biggest enablers of this success.

With that being said, you have been enlightened with some of the best market research tools out there. All you need to do now is evaluate your needs and map them with the tool that can make it happen for your business by helping you develop what your customers need.

About the author

Dwayne charrington.

Dwayne Charrington is a seasoned Product Manager with 10+ years of experience. He brings a wealth of expertise to the world of UX improvement and user research. Dwayne's also an insightful author who writes compelling pieces that assist entrepreneurs and organizations in navigating the intricate landscape of customer experience. He shares in-depth industry insights and practical tips on delivering exceptional customer experience and creating genuinely happy customers through the Qualaroo blog post.

Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.

MARKET RESEARCH KIT

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

Updated: 02/21/24

Published: 02/21/24

Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.

Enter: Market Research.

Whether you're new to market research or not, I created this guide to help you conduct a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is market research?

Primary vs. secondary research, types of market research, how to do market research, market research report template, market research examples.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value effectively.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry. But if you ask me, it's hardly a crystal ball that marketers can rely on for insights on their customers.

Market researchers investigate several areas of the market, and it can take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the business landscape.

However, researching just one of those areas can make you more intuitive to who your buyers are and how to deliver value that no other business is offering them right now.

How? Consider these two things:

• Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It‘s very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition’s immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge.
• Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand.

The market research services market is growing rapidly, which signifies a strong interest in market research as we enter 2024. The market is expected to grow from roughly $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 .

Free Market Research Kit

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.

As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.

By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into the following:

• Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
• Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
• What's trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
• Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
• What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience
• Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
• Whether there‘s demand for the business initiatives you’re investing in
• Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
• Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.

As a result, you can make better business decisions.

To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get , consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.

Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.

That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.

It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.

Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:

• Exploratory Primary Research: This kind of primary market research normally takes place as a first step — before any specific research has been performed — and may involve open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of people.
• Specific Primary Research: This type of research often follows exploratory research. In specific research, you take a smaller or more precise segment of your audience and ask questions aimed at solving a suspected problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).

Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors . The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:

• Public Sources: These sources are your first and most-accessible layer of material when conducting secondary market research. They're often free to find and review — like government statistics (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau ).
• Commercial Sources: These sources often come in the form of pay-to-access market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew , Gartner , or Forrester .
• Internal Sources: This is the market data your organization already has like average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data that can help you draw conclusions on buyer needs.
• Focus Groups
• Product/ Service Use Research
• Observation-Based Research
• Buyer Persona Research
• Market Segmentation Research
• Pricing Research
• Competitive Analysis Research
• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
• Brand Awareness Research
• Campaign Research

1. Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.

3. Product/Service Use Research

Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.

4. Observation-Based Research

Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX , and which aspects of it could be improved.

5. Buyer Persona Research

Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.

6. Market Segmentation Research

Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.

7. Pricing Research

Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy . It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.

8. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition .

9. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs , rewards, remarkable customer service).

10. Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.

11. Campaign Research

Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.

• Define your buyer persona.
• Identify a persona group to engage.
• Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
• List your primary competitors.
• Summarize your findings.

1. Define your buyer persona.

You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.

This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Buyer personas — sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Use a free tool to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Free Guide & Templates to Help Your Market Research

Marketing software that helps you drive revenue, save time and resources, and measure and optimize your investments — all on one easy-to-use platform

• Digital Marketing
• Apps & Website

20 Essential Market Research Tools For Your Business

• Key Takeaways

Statista : Provides market data and research with access to over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources, catering to over two million registered users​.

ProProfs Survey Maker: A versatile platform for online surveys, offering customization options and insights like Net Promoter Score (NPS) for customer and employee engagement analysis​​.

SEMrush: Offers a comprehensive package for SEO, PPC, SMM, and content, with the ability to identify the most profitable keywords in specific areas of interest​​.

Market research tools are crucial for startups to understand and engage their audience effectively, helping in tailoring marketing strategies and improving customer satisfaction​​.

Utilizing these tools can significantly aid in developing customer personas, identifying market trends, and creating targeted marketing campaigns, which increases the effectiveness of marketing efforts​​.

These tools not only provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences but also aid in making data-driven decisions, optimizing marketing strategies, and testing new products or services.

As the term suggests, market research tools tell you a lot about your company’s impact on its targeted area. We might find a comfortable space in everything we do, but some things always require improvements or revisions. And who tells you about those needed improvements? 

If you want to achieve a particular position in your industry and continue growing, you should maintain a healthy relationship with your consumers. And market research tools help you understand their response to your actions, which often tells you how to work better and achieve more. There is a pool of research tools to choose from.

20 Best Market Research Tools for Startups

• 1. Statista

Used For: Market Data, Market Research, and Market Studies

Statista consolidates statistical data on over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources and makes it available on four platforms: German, English, French, and Spanish. It has more than two million registered users. The company owns ecommercedb.com, a market analysis, lead generation , and benchmarking starting point. 

You can gain comprehensive insights from web sales figures and KPIs through this platform. As an individual, you can research and create customized videos, infographics, and presentations using corporate templates.

As part of the free package, users can access the platform’s basic statistics. And if you opt for a premium account and want access to all the statistics, it will charge you $49 per month .

• 2. ProProfs Survey Maker

Used For: Online surveys

As the name suggests, ProProfs Survey Maker helps you create survey forms to meet your market research goals. The platform offers you choices in abundance regarding choosing from multiple formats. You can customise your forms by incorporating logos, colour schemes, and backgrounds of your choice.

The platform also provides insights as part of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), enabling companies to keep track of loyal, engaged, and satisfied customers and employees. At the same time, NPS also provides the company with enough data to analyse how to streamline the customer experience with its products and services. It also makes them think about increasing brand loyalty among their consumers. It provides an already-built-in dashboard with reports and analytics based on the survey information gathered. It comes at the cost of approximately $0.05 per month.

State of Technology 2024

Humanity's Quantum Leap Forward

Explore 'State of Technology 2024' for strategic insights into 7 emerging technologies reshaping 10 critical industries. Dive into sector-wide transformations and global tech dynamics, offering critical analysis for tech leaders and enthusiasts alike, on how to navigate the future's technology landscape.

Used For: SEO, PPC, SMM, and Content

Semrush is a package deal that provides services like search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), keyword research, competitive analysis, social media, public relations, and content marketing. Semrush’s ability to research the most searched and profitable keywords for your area of interest is one of its most notable features. It helps you save time on experimentation and provides you with the right keywords. 

If you use all the tools it supports together, your competitor’s research takes a different turn, and the results are analytically flourishing in every department. The platform has four premium plans. And the starting value is $99.95 per month .

• 4. Qualaroo

Used For: User Research and Customer Feedback

Qualaroo collects users’ real-time feedback when spending time on your website. The platform is efficient in helping you create customised surveys with the help of an in-app editor and already-available templates. It includes advanced audience targeting and design options to create attractive and appealing surveys.

And it also enables you to analyse the survey responses with the help of its AI-powered analytics feature. Through the platform, you can gather information about your customers, like where they are on your website, their visit history, and their payment history. It also creates exit surveys to record information about users not processing products in their carts and abandoning the website without acting on the options provided. Therefore, the platform will inform you of the points that work for your company and those that don’t. The platform works for you for $80 per month .

Used For: Split testing, Optimisation, and Instant Consumer Research

PickFu is your next-door feedback platform. Its power as a market research tool is reliable and impressive because it gets you many feedback and reviews in a minute. It reaches out to the audience that you select as your target for a particular question or a survey and delivers an unbiased response from actual respondents. Another striking feature of this platform is that it asks your respondents to explain why they made a particular choice. 

You can narrow down your target audience based on your questions and focus on a specific group based on their demographic information to get your product or service reviewed or ask questions. It is an umbrella tool that houses most options, and you can design a survey, leaving the rest of the work as part of the platform’s responsibility. They locate and deliver responses in the shortest amount of time possible. It charges you as per your response .

• 6. Google Trends

Used For: Popular Search Queries

Google processes over 99,000 searches every single second. It is a go-to place for almost everyone who is looking for information. And the best part? Google always has answers. When finding the proper market research tool, the platform can quickly become your favourite space. When you use Google Trends , it stays true to its name and presents you with the most popular searches on the internet based on location and other details. 

If you are worried about SEO for your company, you can rely on Google Trends for authentic insights. You can see how frequently a term has been searched on Google up against the website’s total search volume. It also tells you about the most popular keywords and helps you refine your searches. And the search is accessible on your laptop, mobile device, tablet, etc., with graphically represented data if needed. Google Trends is accessible to all and free to use.

• 7. Facebook Audience Insights

Used For: Taking Insights from Facebook

Facebook Audience Insights gives you an idea about your target audience’s interests, likes, and dislikes. It also gives you information about those on Facebook and allows you to bring them onto the same page as you. This practice makes it easier to plan the content that will resonate with both the audience connected to you and the potential leads. To access the Facebook Audience Insights option, click on the main menu on the top left of the Facebook Ads Manager, and under the “Plan” column, find “Audience Insights.” It is a free market research tool.

• 8. Tableau Software

Used For: Data Visualisation

Tableau helps you streamline complex data, thus proving to be a robust market research tool. Users can use this platform to connect with a data source and transform the information into appealing visuals and easy-to-interpret reports. Insights can be hard to comprehend, but Tableau converts them into colourful charts and tables and allows data from all sources like spreadsheets, PDFs, etc. It also has a shareable dashboard that enables you to analyse your data. You can access Tableau on all of your devices.

• 9. QuestionPro

Used For: Online Surveys 

You can gather a complete sense of all the market trends and customer sentiments by using surveys with the help of QuestionPro . It houses multiple numbers of templates listing different types of questions. And the templates are customisable.

It makes creating surveys easier if you are a beginner and saves you a lot of time and labour. Through surveys, you can gather a comprehensive insight into the market and get a chance to re-evaluate your content to boost engagement. It provides you with real-time reports of your surveys, enabling you to take immediate action to help your audience base grow. QuestionPro is priced at $99 per month .

• 10. Userlytics

Used For: User Research

Userlystics conducts extensive research on user experience and enables you to circulate various usability tests among the user base better to understand the quality of your products and services. Sometimes a company focuses on what it does best and, in the process, misses out on the needs of its customers. On the other hand, needs are often dynamic, so one needs to stay updated. To keep up with these kinds of changes, the tests prove helpful. 

Users can use their built-in analytics dashboard to see their NPS scores, task results, and success metrics. Hence, Userlystics also promises transparency between your company and its consumers. They provide customisable packages based on your budget.

11. Typeform  

Used For: Online Form Building

If you want to create appealing feedback forms, you can use Typeform . Who would have thought that even forms could be appealing? As an added advantage, Typeform provides you with a detailed reporting and analytics section to record real-time survey responses. The surveys are customisable and open to experimenting to find the right fit for your brand image. 

The format is one question at a time because Typeform focuses on keeping the surveys conversational. And users can add life to forms by using the built-in photo and video inventory. Depending on the responses, it attempts to narrow the focus and bring the appropriate questions to the forefront. It starts at $25 per month .

• 12. Qualtrics

Used For: Customer Feedback and Analytics

Qualtrics runs on AI and enables you to extensively research the market to ensure a quality customer experience for your users. Multiple services, like customer feedback, analytics, audience segmentation, and competitive benchmarking, are present on the platform. And to provide insights about your brand’s performance, it uses statistical methods based on your chosen demographic. You can rely on Qualtrics for current market trends because it will keep you posted. It uses multiple channels, like phone calls and social media, to gather feedback. You can contact the company for a quote.

Used For: Online surveys and gather data

Temper is a market research tool that helps businesses and individuals to conduct online surveys and gather data to make informed decisions. The platform provides an intuitive interface for creating, launching, and managing surveys, as well as powerful analytics tools for analyzing survey results.

Some of the features of Temper include customizable survey templates, a wide range of question types, real-time reporting and analytics, and the ability to export data in multiple formats. The tool also provides insights into respondents’ behaviour and demographics, making it useful for targeted marketing and audience research.

• 14. Census bureau

Used For: Demographic data

This collection of tools and resources provided by the United States Census Bureau aims to make demographic data from that agency easy for users to access and analyze. With it, they can get access to population/housing info, economic info, as well as business/industry info. With just a few clicks they can create custom tables or maps with data files for further use in applications or analyses.

Designed with ease in mind by technical experts across various levels of proficiency, the Census Bureau tool serves as an invaluable resource for anyone needing access to demographic info for research or planning purposes.

• 15. Make My Persona

Used for: Creating a buyer personas

HubSpot has developed a tool called Make My Persona that assists businesses in creating accurate and detailed buyer personas. A buyer persona is an imaginary representation of your ideal customer based on market research data as well as existing customer information. With this helpful resource, businesses can easily create accurate representations of their ideal customers with ease.

The Make My Persona tool guides users through a series of questions to learn about their target audience, including demographic information, interests, goals and challenges. It provides templates and suggestions for creating customer profiles as well as the option to add custom fields and details.

Make My Persona is a free tool available on HubSpot that helps businesses better comprehend their customers and tailor their marketing approaches accordingly. This can increase engagement and conversions, as well as enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Plus, this valuable resource is available at no cost on their website.

• 16. Qualtrics Experience Management (XM)

Used For: Market Research to uncover unmet customer and employee needs.

Qualtrics Experience Management (XM) is a comprehensive platform that enables businesses to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback across multiple channels. It integrates customer, employee, product, and brand experiences, providing advanced data analysis tools, such as predictive intelligence and automated actions, to help organizations understand consumer needs and improve their experience.

• 17. GapScout

Used For: Discover the hidden opportunities in your market.

Go beyond basic listening. GapScout delves deeper, analyzing emotions and context for a richer understanding. Identify emerging trends before they take off, grasp customer desires and frustrations, and track competitor moves – all on autopilot.

Automated data collection saves precious time, while topic clustering organizes insights into clear themes. Actionable takeaways help you make informed decisions and drive results. Clothing brands discover sustainable fashion trends, software companies prioritize feature improvements based on customer feedback, and restaurants learn from competitor menus – all thanks to GapScout.

Used For: Testify to the truth or genuineness of something .

Ditch the lengthy surveys and embrace Attest’s bite-sized approach. This speedy tool delivers the answers you need in minutes, not days. Test new product concepts, validate marketing materials, and understand customer sentiment with laser focus. Access a diverse pool of qualified respondents and get real-time results that translate directly into action. No more waiting, just actionable insights at your fingertips. Attest is your perfect partner for uncovering valuable customer feedback, fast. Stop the wait, start getting smarter today.

• 19. Think with Google

Used For: To Stay informed about Consumer Trends .

Think with Google, a free tool from the search giant itself, grants you just that. Uncover a treasure trove of insights into real-time search trends, popular content, and consumer behavior across demographics and regions. Understand your target audience’s search patterns and glean inspiration for your own marketing strategies, all without spending a dime. Think with Google – the key to unlocking consumer secrets and crafting winning marketing campaigns.

• 20. Brandwatch Consumer Research

Used For: Consumer Research .

Brandwatch Consumer Research is your secret weapon for navigating the online buzz. Feeling lost in the cacophony of social media chatter, forums, and news articles? Brandwatch acts as your personal translator, filtering and analyzing the noise to deliver clear insights. Craft laser-focused queries to target relevant conversations about your brand, industry, or competitors. Then, Brandwatch’s AI deciphers the buzz, using sentiment analysis, topic clustering, and influencer identification to reveal key trends, customer preferences, and potential opportunities. It’s more than just social listening. Unmask your competitors, nip crises in the bud, and build customer-centric products with valuable insights.

Data from Market Research Tool: How to Use It

• 1. Develop customer personas

To create customer personas, you can use customer data from market research tools . These personas should reflect your target audience. They should include information such as their age, gender and income. You can target specific customers with targeted marketing messages and increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by creating customer personas.

• 2. Identify market trends

Market research tools can be used to identify new trends and shifts in consumer behaviour. You can adapt your marketing strategies to meet changing customer demands by staying current with market trends. This will help you distinguish your brand from other competitors and position yourself as a market leader.

• 3. Targeted marketing campaigns are possible

To create targeted marketing campaigns that resonate, you can use data from your market research tool. You can create marketing messages that will grab attention and convert more customers by understanding the preferences and behaviour of your target audience. This will help increase customer engagement and brand awareness and drive sales.

• 4. Marketing ROI analysis

Market research data can be used to assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and pinpoint areas that need improvement. You can make data-driven marketing decisions by analysing data about customer behaviour, sales and marketing ROI. This will help you optimise your marketing strategy and get better results from your marketing campaigns.

• 5. Try out new products and services

Before launching new products or services to the marketplace, you can use market research data to test the

• Conclusion 

Market research should be your top priority while setting up your company and scaling it. It is integral to your venture because you need to know what you are stepping into to crack the algorithm that will boost your audience base. It also helps you constantly revise your content postings and keep quality checks on your products. There is an elementary logic to staying close to market research tools: research helps you to know your consumers, and that further assists you in delivering what they want. And the whole process of staying close to your clients is made accessible through these tools. So why not try them?

• Q. How can businesses maximise the benefits of using market research tools?

To maximise the benefits of using market research tools, businesses should first identify their specific research needs and goals. They should then choose a tool that aligns with those needs and goals and take advantage of all available features and resources, such as training materials and customer support. Additionally, businesses should analyze and interpret the data collected to inform strategic decision-making and drive business growth.

• Q. What are some key features to look for when choosing a market research tool?

When choosing a market research tool, it’s important to look for features such as ease of use, customisation and flexibility, data security and privacy, data visualisation and reporting capabilities, and customer support and training resources.

• Q. What are market research tools, and why are they important for businesses?

Market research tools are software or services that help businesses collect, analyse, and interpret data related to their target market, industry trends, and consumer behaviour. They are important for businesses because they provide valuable insights that can inform strategic decision-making and improve overall business performance.

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19 best market research software tools for 2024

Last updated

25 March 2024

Reviewed by

Whether you're marginally satisfied with your current market research software or are venturing out to find your first software option, keep reading. In this article, we'll share some of the best market research tools available for 2023. Based on user reviews, affordability, and efficiency, these are the top considerations your company should look into for market research software.

Market analysis template

Save time, highlight crucial insights, and drive strategic decision-making

• Different types of market research software

Since there are several types of market research, there are different types of market research software solutions. Before you begin your hunt for the best-fit software, recognize what type of market research you do most.

Determine which metrics are the most valuable to your company. Work out if this key data is best gathered via a consumer survey, questionnaire , interview, or checklist form. From there, you can begin to look for various market research software options offering features and calculations that make the most sense for your needs.

Decide which types of market research matter to you, each requiring its own tools and methods:

Primary market research

Secondary market research

Quantitative research

Qualitative research

Branding research

Competitor research

Customer or client research

Product research

• Uses of market research software

As you evaluate your market research software options, start by reviewing each tool's strengths and core uses. Then, look at each through the lens of these four steps, checking how well they perform at each stage. This will also form your process when it comes to using them.

1. Identify the target audience

Know your target audience first. This might be a data pool of prospects based on your buyer personas . But it might also be an unknown segment of people if you’re conducting market research on a new region or for a new offering.

The ideal market research software will provide insights to help you identify your target audience in any scenario.

2. Create a research questionnaire

Market research software should have the capability of creating research questionnaires . These surveys are instrumental in learning more about a particular audience segment , region, or market dynamic.

3. Share your research questionnaire

Creating your market surveys and research-related questionnaires is one thing. You'll also need to share those questionnaires with participants. A great market research software tool will have additional layers of features to help you send and receive surveys.

4. Collect data and create information

A great market research software tool will also help you collect data and create usable insights from those metrics. You'll need a seamless way to gather market information and disseminate it throughout your organization in an actionable, effective way.

• Benefits of using market research software

When you harness the right market research software, prepare for some significant advantages. Automation alone makes data analytics faster. But your datasets will also be more accurate when you use software to collect and share insights.

As an added benefit for companies, researchers, and organizations, using market research software means easier report generation and the ability to spot trends and patterns in your collected data.

The bottom line: market research software tools will help you keep up with consumer behavior trends and market fluctuations, allowing you to capitalize on emerging shifts and changes.

• 19 market research platforms and tools for accurate analysis

Based on industry reviews, effectiveness, and available features, these market research platforms and tools deserve a look. When accurate data and analysis matter, these are the solutions to have in your toolbox.

Take advantage of free trial periods and start evaluating your research tool and dashboard options.

Keep these top software solutions on your roster of must-try tools, and you'll be able to keep up with whatever's happening in your market.

Software strengths:

Precision accuracy in transcription with an advanced speech engine

Custom fields for structured data

Importable datasets

Sentiment analysis

Project templates

Access control and unlimited viewership capabilities

Flexible and customizable editing

Another market research tool worth exploring is  Qualtrics . This software solution can help you draft surveys, analyze captured data, and run statistical testing.

Qualtrics also provides a representative sample of recipients if you don't already have an audience segmented.

In addition, the platform includes training on demand if your teams need help navigating it.

Easy to create and facilitate survey processes

Top-notch dataset reporting

Ability to boost your survey audience

QuestionPro

If you want survey customization and ultimate flexibility,  QuestionPro  is a great market research tool. It uses survey logic tech to seamlessly adjust the survey in real time based on participant responses.

Choose from a variety of software plans, most of which are ideal for creating, sharing, and analyzing collected metrics.

There's also 24/7 live chat for ongoing support.

Easy to navigate and customize

The free plan is fairly robust

Analysis can be exported or carried out in the app

If you prefer visual data, such as graphs showing statistics and market research-related reports, you'll like  Statista .

Statista continuously uploads data, so you can check back on the same charts and see real-time shifts in trends. It's a good resource for consumer behavior insights and covers a broad range of market topics.

Considered one of the best statistics resources

Easy to use and navigate

Hundreds of reports and dashboards available

If your organization needs a more advanced customer survey tool and market research solution,  Qualaroo  is a great option.

The main difference between Qualaroo and other market research tools is that its surveys can be directly embedded into your website or landing page. You can catch and attract participants in real time, which makes their survey responses more valuable.

There are AI analytics tools built in, too, with plenty of features for customizing your questionnaires.

Easy to create, embed, and send surveys

Super-fast reporting turnaround capabilities

Auto language translation

Another piece of market research software worth considering is  Typeform . Explore pre-made templates in an entirely user-friendly platform. Typeform makes creating and customizing forms and surveys a breeze, especially with all the available templates.

Unlike other survey tools, Typeform only sends one question at a time, making it a participant-friendly format.

Explore Typeform as a research software tool for qualitative and quantitative data .

Brilliant visualization of your data

Mobile-optimized

Compatible with hundreds of other apps

SurveyMonkey

Nearly anyone in research or business has heard of  SurveyMonkey . It's another market research solution worth looking into, especially if you need access to 200+ survey templates for inspiration.

This platform is a breeze to navigate, much like Typeform. SurveyMonkey is more of an enterprise-grade dashboard, however, simplifying the process of creating, sending, and analyzing for all your metrics.

Easy for anyone to use

Custom reports available

Robust free plan

If you're looking for a social media marketing research tool with content marketing research features, check out  BuzzSumo . Its software will scrub and analyze billions of articles and trillions of social media engagements, assembling metrics about relevant topics, influencer targeting, and popular trends.

These types of metrics are helpful in any marketing endeavors and content creation. They’re also key in understanding the driving factors of your target consumers.

Accuracy with social sharing metrics

Ideal for competitive research

Ability to monitor mentions

Google Trends

One of the most popular market research tools, firstly because it's Google and secondly because it's free, is  Google Trends . It's not as comprehensive as some of the other tools, but it can be helpful in your research objectives.

Find topics that are popular online or review line graphs that rank widely used terms and keywords. This tool is less about conducting surveys and more about carrying out your own online research and active listening.

Discovering keywords, including long-tail keywords

Find hot-topic conversations to inspire your marketing

Visually appealing and easy to use

Bonus list of market research software tools

While the above market research tools tend to land at the top of the favorites list, there are other solutions worth considering. These are all great tools and platforms to dive into.

Evaluate the features and choose those that align best with the data you're trying to collect and analyze.

Tableau: Business intelligence suite for connecting virtually any data source

Paperform: Free-text interface and customizable surveys for all your personas

Claritas MyBestSegment: Great for digging into demographics and lifestyle habits

Upwave Instant Insights: Distributes surveys to real people, not including paid participants

Userlytics: Test prototypes, mobile apps, or website user experience and opinions

NielsenIQ: Great for evaluating product launch-related market research and data

Loop11: Test website usability and user experience metrics with your participants

Ubersuggest: Keyword and content research tool, great for competitive advantage insights

BrandMentions: Social media monitoring software and platform

Pew Research Center: Gather data regarding social media usage, political sentiments, and economic conditions

• How to choose the right market research software

The market research software tools listed in this article are just the tip of the iceberg. You'll find all kinds of innovative tools with shiny new capabilities worth exploring.

What may be more helpful is a short to-do list outlining how to go about choosing the right research market platform for your project or company. Keep these objectives in mind as you decide to adopt or upgrade your software solutions.

Know your market research objectives

Be mindful of your budget

Evaluate the ease of use for you and your teams

Look for robust data collection features

Look for analytics capabilities

Choose those that integrate with other apps and software

When evaluating the best tools, create and reference your objectives, so you know you'll make the best-fit decision.

What are examples of research tools used today?

Some of the most common market research tools used today include surveys, interviews, checklists, and questionnaires. While the methods have been around for decades, the software used to facilitate and manage these strategies has improved using technology, algorithms, and automation.

What are the four Ps of market research?

When you hear about the four Ps of market research, researchers typically mean the four categories worth researching in a particular market: price, place, product, and promotion.

Why are the different types of market research important?

Because the consumer market, or your target audience, is constantly changing how it makes decisions, interacts with brands, buys products or services, and makes recommendations to others, market research is your first line of defense in keeping up with those changes. Finding the right market research software tool will determine how effectively you collect, share, and act on those emerging shifts in consumer behavior.

The only way to stay ahead in today's consumer product and service landscape is with superior intel. And the best way to learn the very latest about industry shifts, changes in customer behavior, and user preferences is with market research. Today's market research software tools make it easy and efficient to collect all kinds of metrics and apply those insights to effect organizational or core-offering changes.

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The 9 Best Market Research Tools to Try in 2024

If you could find out if there were a market out there to buy a certain product, what would stop you from launching it?

The problem for many entrepreneurs and investors is that they can often only guess if there’s a target audience for a product or service. Instead of relying on a hunch, one of the most useful things you can do is - market research.

But the chances are probably that you barely have an idea of where to get started. Don’t worry - we have a list of the very best tools for market research. Using these tools alone, you can find out if your next business idea is a potential hit or not.

The potential for learning about your customers with Survicate is endless. There are plenty of survey types to ask about your customers’ preferences, including:

• Product market fit survey
• Brand awareness survey
• Brand name testing survey
• Persona survey
• Competitor survey
• And many, many others.

There is a total of 300+ survey templates for various use cases. We have a template for whatever you feel like asking your customers, so you don’t have to wonder which questions to use.

There is a roster of the “standard” survey types, including CSAT , NPS, CES, and others. Don’t have a website yet? No worries, using Survicate, you can easily send our surveys through emails or links before even building an online presence.

The survey software is easy to use, and the intuitive drag-and-drop builder won’t give you a hard time, even if you’re not tech-savvy. It integrates well with the rest of your tech stack as there is support for various CRMs, eCommerce platforms, email marketing tools, and more.

Survicate's 10-day free trial offers all Business plan features, including 30+ native integrations, advanced attribute targeting, and multilingual surveys, as well as many other features.

Overall, Survicate has a lot to offer regarding market research. Even when you launch your product, you can continue using Survicate with its huge variety of surveys. Collecting feedback never ends as you want to refine your product and increase customer satisfaction.

Ready to collect amazing customer insights? Sign up today for your free trial!

For businesses looking to explore new competitors or gain insights into their industry landscape, Brand24 simplifies the process. By setting up projects that track relevant industry keywords, users can identify and analyze companies sharing similarities with their own.

Keeping abreast of every trend in your brand's industry might seem overwhelming, but not with Brand24. Establish a new project targeting keywords related to your niche to stay updated on emerging market trends.

Brand24 provides transparent pricing starting from $99 per month, offering a range of plans tailored to diverse business needs. This allows users to select a plan that suits their requirements and fits within their budget constraints, making it an accessible option for both small enterprises and larger corporations.

As you can probably guess from its name, Paperform is a form builder. Similar to Typeform (which we’ll discuss in a minute), it lets you create good-looking, intuitive forms in minutes.

However, out of all the competitors mentioned here, Paperform probably has the broadest target audience. There are 650 templates in its database, covering uses from RSVP forms, insurance forms, HR forms, evaluation forms, and many others. This makes it incredibly versatile, but that’s not what we came for today.

In market research, they only have three templates: market research survey template , product research survey template , and customer persona survey template . Depending on your goal, this may be more than enough.

The basic plan costs $20 per month and gives you access to up to 1,000 form submissions with an unlimited number of forms and questions. Compared to its major competitor (Typeform), especially considering many templates.

However, you might be looking for more specialized forms dedicated to market research. In this case, you can consider some other alternatives on this list.

SurveyMonkey

If we were to bet on which company first came up with the term “survey software,” SurveyMonkey would be a safe bet. For almost 25 years, this has been one of the most popular tools in the market for various types of quizzes, forms, and surveys.

You can use their large library of survey templates to create surveys for different use cases. And although there is a good number of survey types, the design and UX are a bit lagging compared to the competition.

Besides the typical surveys, they also offer something called “market research solutions.” This part of their product is divided into three different services, industry tracker, consumer segmentation, and usage and attitudes.

Essentially, it boils down to the analysis of your survey results. If you’re looking for a helping hand with your market research, this could be it, as SurveyMonkey helps you set up and analyze your survey results.

The pricing for the survey software is familiar, although it might take a bit to figure out how much you will pay. Nevertheless, surveys start at $32 per month. For the market research solutions suite’s price, you will have to contact the sales department.

If you’re looking for something similar to SurveyMonkey but without the feeling of using Windows 98, Typeform is a logical choice. While they do not specialize in surveys only, You can use Typeform to create a wide variety of forms, applications, quizzes, job applications, and everything else where someone has to fill out their data.

Typeform has a few things going for it, but primarily its nice user experience for your customers and the ease of use for creating forms and surveys. You can use branching and conditional logic to segment your audiences and ask the right questions in front of the right people.

Various templates are available for different forms, surveys, and quizzes, but only one is dedicated to market research. The good news is it’s a pretty decent starting point. You can continue using Typeform even after your product launch, as there is a large number of use cases to engage your customers.

Typeform is a product you’re hard-pressed to criticize. The cheapest plan is $25 per month, getting unlimited Typeforms and endless questions. You only get 100 responses monthly, barely enough for any serious research.

Creating a website with an MVP of your product isn’t too difficult nowadays, and it’s a great idea if you want to test out how a certain audience feels about your product, messaging, offer, or an aspect of your website.

Userlytics helps you do just that. You just create what they call a study topic - a task for your potential customers to perform—for example, checking out a feature in your product, signing up for a free trial, solving one of their pain points, or something else.

Userlytics lets you tap into its audience of 1,5 million users. Based on the target audience you want to go after, you can create a target persona profile in the tool to ask only the people whose opinions count. 

Userlytics provides you with just the platform and will cost $499 per month. To start using the panel of experts, you need the $999 pplanYou get unlimited tests but only with the participants provided by you or a third party. Each participant will cost you an additional $19.

In general, it’s a superb platform if you already have plenty of details about your target market. Otherwise, it’s pretty expensive if you’re just shooting in the dark and trying to do initial research with this platform.

Brandmentions

You must respect a tool that gives you everything you need to know in its title. Brandmentions are exactly what it promises - a way to track brand mentions. You might wonder how this will help if you don’t already have a worthwhile brand monitoring.

It’s pretty simple. Load up your biggest competitors’ names in Brandmentions and watch as alerts come in when someone mentions them. This is one of the easiest ways to get real-time information about your competition, including positive and negative comments, reviews, real-time crises, news updates, and more.

Track your competitors long enough, and you can capture precious information that will help you position yourself in the market. You can find out where your competitors are falling behind and focus on that aspect of the target market.

Brandmentions lets you track your target terms on all social media, websites, forums, communities, and more. You can set up hashtag tracking and get real-time alerts about your target terms.

For $99 per month, you can track 15 keywords across three different projects, which should be a decent starting point for anyone looking into the competitive analysis. There is a free trial available, but only for seven days.

Probably the most advanced software in this list, Qualtrics is the go-to choice for enterprise audiences. It allows various ways to capture customer feedback, including a contact center, omnichannel analytics software, surveys, and more.

For market research, three main aspects of the product are worth your attention. The first is TextIQ, an AI text analysis that can detect the sentiment of your customers’ feedback and quickly sort their entries according to their feelings about a certain topic.

The second is DataIQ which takes another deep look at your entire data set to uncover what needs your most immediate attention and where you can get some quick wins. StatsIQ is similar but for even bigger data sets.

Qualtrics makes a lot of sense if you’re a big company with tons of data from your customers but as a product for initial market research. On top of that, it’s allegedly pretty pricey. The website does not reveal any pricing details, but resources online state that prices start at $1,500 up to $5,000 per year.

From the moment you want to try Qualaroo, you’ll see that their strongest point is website surveys - as they claim they are 10x more effective than email surveys. This tool promises a smooth website experience with the ability to capture feedback on your website, your product, and all of that with AI analytics and reports.

One thing that bothers us with Qualaroo is that they promise a lot and show very little. You don’t get to preview any survey templates, and their website lists only a handful of templates you can try out - once you subscribe to the app.

Using their survey builder, you can easily create a market research survey to share with an audience and gauge their interest. However, the fact that you have to use their tips to find the best questions rather than grabbing a ready-made template is not exactly ideal.

The pricing is adequate, but nothing more and nothing less. The most affordable plan is $80 per month, allowing you unlimited “nudges,” as they call their forms. However, you don’t get advanced customer targeting or basic survey types like NPS and exit surveys.

Overall, a solid offer, but you might want to look into more specialized options for market research.

Wrapping up

While we can’t tell you if your new product sells like hotcakes, we can point you in the right direction. These tools cannot predict if you will become the next Elon Musk, but they will help determine your product's potential. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to get that initial encouragement and work.

If you’re looking for a robust market research tool that you can continue using even after you launch your product, give Survicate a try. With our wide range of surveys for different use cases, you’ll find something for every buyer journey stage. Sign up today for your free trial!

We’re also there

Alex Birkett

The 12 Best Market Research Tools in 2024

Last Updated on March 7, 2024 by Alex Birkett

Understanding the problems your customers have and what they expect requires you to make time for and invest in market research.

However, market research comes with its challenges.

For example, finding honest respondents who are willing to take part in your surveys and interviews is hard. As if that’s not enough, you need to choose tools that will help you collect and analyze the data you collect and get buy-in from other departments to implement your findings.

So even if you want to gather more customer insights or even identify opportunities in the market, these challenges force you to gradually push market research into the backburner.

The result? A mismatch in what you offer and what customers expect:

Image source

While you can’t wish away the challenges that come with market research, using market research tools goes a long way in solving these challenges. These tools help you collect accurate feedback from customers and save time when analyzing the data you collect.

And in this post, I’ve compiled a list of 12 market research tools to help make market research easier for you as you gather useful insights from your customers.

But first, let’s do some housekeeping to make sure we’re on the same page.

What is a Market Research Tool?

A market research tool is a software application that allows you to study market trends, study your competitors, collect customer insights, and feedback about your product or service.

The data you collect using market research tools helps to inform your marketing strategy, improve the product you’re selling, and understand how your customers think and feel about your brand.

Market research tools come with different capabilities. Some help you interact with customers by asking them questions and listen to what they are saying about your brand online.

Other market research tools allow you to study how customers behave online and spy on your competitors to know what they’re up to.

So in addition to helping you collect accurate feedback from customers and save time when analyzing the data you collect, market research tools also help you to:

• Eliminate availability bias by providing you with an accurate picture of what’s going on in your customers’ minds
• Align different departments so market research stops existing in a silo and get everyone’s buy-in when implementing the insights you get after data analysis
• Understand industry trends to help you adapt and position yourself to meet customer needs and expectations
• Understand how customers behave during the buyer’s journey to help you deliver a better customer experience

That said, deciding the kind of market research tool to use isn’t something you have to figure out alone. There are a lot of options out there that provide lots of information about your market allowing you to make better marketing decisions. Here’s a list of the 12 best market research tools I recommend:

The 12 Best Market Research Tools

• SurveyMonkey
• BrandMentions
• Think With Google

1. Qualtrics

As of 2018, Qualtrics was one of the most favorite tools for market research, with 40% of marketers using it to collect data and uncover useful insights from their data.

And it’s easy to see why, given that it is an all-in-one market research platform, taking care of all your market research needs.

Qualtrics is powered by AI and automation meaning that speed, efficiency, and accuracy are baked into its DNA.

Looking through the tool, you’ll find a wide range of features and options available for you when conducting market research and uncovering useful insights from the data you collect:

Image Source

For instance, there’s product development and pricing , which allows you to involve customers during critical stages in product development. Use this feature to:

• Evaluate product-market-fit to avoid saturating the market with a product customers don’t need
• Test different product concepts to make sure your product resonates with customers
• Test different pricing points and models to find out what customers are willing to pay for
• Test what packaging customers prefer to align it with what they desire

And the best part is that Qualtrics allows you to collect all this information from 125 sources and 27 different channels. This makes sure that you have enough variety in the data you collect and avoid availability bias;

As you collect insights from these sources, there’s also iQ , which uses AI to help you uncover unique insights from your data faster, helping you save time.

I also love the fact that in addition to offering a market research tool, Qualtrics also comes with a flexible service model that allows you to either:

• Outsource your research to market research experts from Qualtrics or
• Work together with a market research expert to guide you through the technical details of market research using Qualtrics

Qualtrics also provides on-demand training to users helping them learn how to make the most out of the different features the tool provides. If you’re a researcher looking to grow your career, Quatrics provides certifications to give you the credibility you need when reaching out to and working with your clients.

When it comes to integrations , Qualtrics goes beyond the basics by providing you with a wide range of tools that integrate with it. Take a look:

So if you’re looking to dive deep into market research to collect customer feedback without spending too much time on the process to uncover useful insights, Qualtrics is one of the best market research tools around.

G2 Score: 4.3 / 5

2. SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey comes with three core solutions for large scale market research using surveys:

• Market knowledge
• Product innovation
• Brand and creative development.

Depending on the information you want to get from your market, each of these solutions comes with different options to help you get the feedback you need from your customers through running better surveys.

For example, if you’re looking to understand your market better, use the tool to track current trends in your industry in specific product categories. You can also collect data to help you segment your customers, their preferences, and buying habits.

When using surveys during market research, three elements determine the quality of insights you get: the questions you ask, the people you ask, and how you analyze the responses you get.

Putting these three elements together to create effective surveys can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to figure out everything from scratch.

SurveyMonkey has account managers to help you set things up fast, start your research as soon as possible, and in-house market research experts to help you design effective surveys.

And when it comes to ensuring that you get high-quality data from your surveys, SurveyMonkey:

• Verifies the location and emails of respondents to prevent fraud and duplicate responses in the same survey
• Works with trusted partners who work with panelists in more than 130 countries
• Limits the number of survey invitations to prevent professional survey taking

SurveyMonkey also integrates with more than 100 tools and apps, making it easy for you to optimize your research process:

After creating your survey and sending it out to your respondents, SurveyMonkey uses AI to analyze your responses in real-time.

It also comes with an inbuilt word cloud tool to help you analyze survey responses and identify commonly used words and phrases.

Word clouds cover blindspots that you may not uncover through observation alone.

SurveyMonkey’s AI analysis helps you uncover insights from the responses, their themes, and the emotions behind these responses, helping you derive better insights from your survey responses. Once you’re done with the analysis, SurveyMonkey allows you to compare your insights with industry benchmarks for accuracy.

Another cool feature is the Audience panel , which Wrike, a product management platform used to conduct a survey, analyze the responses they got, and uncover insights that helped them create viral content. Here’s their story;

So whether you’re just getting started with marketing research or you want to refine the information you have about your target market, SurveyMonkey will come in handy to help you get the insights you need.

G2 Score: 4.4/5.0

3. Typeform

It is impossible to have a conversation about market research tools and fail to mention Ty

They’ve always been a crowd favorite in small business circles, given that they make it easy for you to create and manage your market research process using online surveys.

And going by Typeform’s tagline, “there’s a better way to ask” they’ve put a premium on creating simple online surveys that your customers are willing to complete. For starters, the average survey completion rate reduces as the number of survey questions increases;

Given that you’re not the only one sending out surveys to your customers a 65% response rate seems ideal. Also, anything more than eight questions per survey will lead to survey fatigue and a lower completion rate.

So if you’ve struggled with getting a good response rate and your surveys have less than eight questions, here’s how Typeform will help improve your survey completion rate;

It offers you different forms and survey templates for the different types of surveys you want to run:

Using each of these templates, Typeform ensures that respondents see and answer only one question at a time:

From a visual perspective, a single question with multiple choices isn’t overwhelming for your respondents. It also helps them build the momentum they need to answer all your questions by answering one question at a time.

Your respondents have different preferences and to make the survey relevant to them, you want to make sure your questions are relevant to them. Use logic jumps in Typeform to present the next question a respondent sees depending on the answers they provide:

The result is that your surveys will be shorter and you’ll get high-quality responses.

Embed Typeform on relevant pages on your website as a popup, on your sidebar, slider, a full-page embed, among other options to help you get the responses you need from your web visitors:

I also like VideoAsk , one of their latest features which lets you take things a step further by recording your survey questions. In addition to giving the survey a human touch, you can provide more context around each question to help your respondents better understand what you need from them:

Note that respondents also have an option to respond using video, text, or record an audio message. If they’ve got a lot to say, it won’t feel like they have to do a lot of work typing a long response yet they can record an audio or video.

If you’re running a small business, looking for a simple tool that will help you conduct market research to collect customer feedback and valuable insights, keep things simple, and save money while at it, then Typeform should be your first port of call.

G2 Score: 4.5 / 5

4. Statista

If you want to keep up with the latest trends in your industry, forecasts, surveys, and studies, then you’ll love Statista .

It presents valuable insights from the data they collect using neat charts and a high level summary of the key takeaways for the information you’re looking for. Here, there’s no learning curve to help you understand how Statista works.

Start by entering what you need to know about into the search bar and wait for it to provide you with the insights you’re looking for:

Then choose what kind of insights you want from the different categories you see:

Given that market trends evolve, Statista is transparent about the insights they present. Every statistic comes with a date showing when the data was collected, the number of respondents, their region, and demographic information. You also have different options to download the information you get:

You also have access to their market outlooks feature that provides you with analysis of trends from more than 150 countries:

And if you’re looking to understand what drives consumer behavior, take a look at their 2021 global consumer survey :

Accessing ready-made insights might not be the same as conducting your own surveys and analysing your responses to come up with unique insights.

However, since Statista provides you with the latest trends and insights about a given topic then you’ll have an easier time when conducting surveys because you have background information about a topic you want to dig deeper.

For example, you might feel the need to dig deeper to understand the why behind the growing revenues from email marketing. With all the information Statista provides, you already know who to ask (business owners) and the kind of questions to ask e.g. “how do you use email marketing to grow your businesses?”

Statista also provides a done for you market research service for those who don’t have the resources or time to conduct research and analyse their data.

Using a combination of quantitative, qualitative, and analytical research methods, their done for your research service comes with the following options:

• Brand tracking and image studies
• Market monitoring and tracking
• Marketing and PR studies
• Price and product research
• Target group and cluster analysis
• Customer and employee satisfaction
• Market potential and forecast calculation
• B2B market research

For example, their target group and cluster analysis research service provide you with the information you need about your target market, their buying patterns, and their segments.

This information allows you to narrow down your targeting and get a better ROI from your marketing campaigns.

Putting it all together, you’ll realize that Statista isn’t only a pretty tool with a database of insights to help you with market research to identify market trends.

More than 23,000 companies have worked with them led by Adobe, T-Mobile, PayPal, and Samsung to gain insights about their respective markets to improve their marketing strategies.

5. SimilarWeb

Although SimilarWeb has always come across as a website traffic and analytics tool, it has evolved into a formidable market research tool in recent years.

Take a look at a brand like redBus — an online ticket booking service for buses — that has been using it for competitive research and keeping up with industry trends, and it’s clear that SimilarWeb is a solid market research tool.

SimilarWeb has a ton of data from different websites, apps, and industries that allows you to access the information you need about your market such as emerging trends, different industry players, their size, and market share.

So if you’re looking to enter into a new market, you’re going to get enough information that helps you identify opportunities in the market, accurately evaluate market size to see if it is ideal for your product and business goals.

If the information you get from the tool aligns with your business objectives, you’ll then start working on a product launch strategy to enter new markets and establish yourself as a key player.

Similarweb also provides you with an intuitive interface that grows with your needs, giving you control over how you want to access the information you need about your market.

Use the dashboard to create custom categories to track trends you’re interested in to help shape your ongoing marketing strategy.

You can also sort through your data to identify critical insights such as traffic, engagement, and conversions to help you know how your competitors are doing as you compare that with your own performance.

One of SimilarWeb’s cool features is conversion funnel and customer journey analytics which allows you to zoom into your customer’s buying journey to see the different touchpoints, the actions they take, and the channels that lead to conversions.

This information allows you to optimize their buying experience by being present on relevant channels and allocate your resources where they’re needed to help buyers move to the next stage in their journey.

You can also track trends in product searches, to see how you compare against other industry players, and the level of your brand awareness;

With all these features, you’re not only getting a market research tool. SimilarWeb’s market research features will help align your sales and marketing teams to help optimize marketing efforts and improve conversions because they have access to the information they need about your target market.

G2 Score: 4.4 / 5.0

6. BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo is primarily designed for brands that want to identify high performing content in their niche and find influencers they want to collaborate with.

In fact, most users report that the tool has come in handy during market research to inform their content marketing strategy , saving them lots of time in the process.

As Hannah Smith from Distilled puts it, “Historically discovering the most shared content on competitor sites was a slow and painful process – crawl the site with your crawler of choice, clean up your URLs, then use the social APIs to pull back social share data on each URL. With BuzzSumo you can search by domain and modify that search with a topic.”

Now, she uses the tool to identify relevant content that resonates with her target audience and identify gaps in existing content, fast.

Some of the features that help you with during market research features to strengthen your content marketing efforts are such as:

• Competitor intelligence
• Content strategy
• Crisis alerts
• Influencer research
• Video marketing

Buzzsumo’s content strategy feature allows you to find popular content and topics from different sources and angles organized in six different categories:

These categories help paint a clear picture as to what topics are already resonating with your audience. With this information, it is easier to narrow down and choose relevant topics that will help you gain traction.

When it comes to identifying gaps in existing content, Buzzsumo helps you look at the content your competitors are publishing to:

• Identify their content topics and angles,
• Understand how deep they go when covering these topics,
• See how they distribute their content, and
• Identify the mistakes they’re making to help you avoid repeating them.

Besides that, BuzzSumo seems to be catching up with growing demand for video content by providing you with insights to help you create better video content.

Use the video marketing feature to identify videos that are already doing well in your niche.

You’ll also see relevant statistics such as popular topics, the length of the video, and the best channels to post these videos.

With this information, you’re going to create a better video marketing strategy that complements your content marketing efforts to help you get the results you’re looking for,.

So if you’re looking for a tool to help you with market research to understand what content works for your target audience, how to distribute it using the right channels, and work with the right influencers to promote it, then Buzzsumo is one of the best tools I would recommend.

G2 Score: 4.5 / 5.0

The kind of experience users have on your website and product determines your conversion rate and whether you retain users who sign up to use your product.

Loop11 helps you identify what elements get in the way of providing a great user experience on your website and products so that you know what to improve upon to increase engagement and conversions.

Clients cut across all industries from government institutions, retailers, educational institutions, digital agencies, software companies, and big corporations.

If you fall into any of these categories then Loop11 will come in handy in market research by revealing how your target market interacts with your website or products.

Here are some of the notable features:

Choose moderated or unmoderated testing options then Identify users who will perform real tasks on your website, understand what they do once they visit your website, what hurdles get in the way of conversions, and why they leave.

With moderated user testing , you (or someone on your team) interacts with 5-8 users as they navigate through your website, collecting their thoughts, views and studying their non-verbal cues;

You can also test different designs to see which one works better for users depending on the information you collect during testing.

Loop11 also allows you to test how your website renders on different devices, allowing you to optimize for usability depending on the device a customer is using when visiting your website.

Take things a step further with its benchmarking feature to compare how well optimized your website for usability as compared to your competitors.

In addition to knowing what works for your web visitors, benchmarking helps you reverse engineer what your competitors are doing, steer clear of their mistakes and stand out from the pack.

To avoid spending a lot of time developing new products that users don’t like, use Loop11 to test your prototype and wireframes and get feedback on what users expect, solve design issues, and improve on your concepts faster.

Loop11 will provide you with a range of metrics such as heatmaps, time spent on tasks, task completion rate, heatmaps among others so you have enough information to uncover useful insights about how users behave on your website and apps.

If you don’t have your own participants to work with when conducting user testing, use Loop11’s panel of verified participants to save you time and money in the process.

You also have an option of working with their consultants to guide you through user testing or even conduct testing on your behalf.

Finally, one thing I like about this tool is its flexibility. If you want to run tests for a few months, then that’s fine. There’s no contract you’ll have to sign forcing you to commit to using the tool beyond the scope of your needs. Start with their free trial and if youreal-time, like it, start using the tool and enjoy all these features without tons of red tape.

G2 Score: 3.5 / 5.0

8. BrandMentions

As a market research tool, BrandMentions helps you identify what your prospects and customers are saying about your brand online to help inform your social media marketing strategy.

Using BrandMentions’ Boolean search, combine different search terms and include modifiers such as NOT, AND, OR to capture every conversation that’s going about your brand and different topics in your niche.

You can also include negative keywords to help you get hold of mentions that fall outside your keywords to get comprehensive results as some people might use variations of your brand name or make spelling mistakes when talking about your brand.

Most of your prospects are on a buying journey and sometimes, reaching out to friends on social media platforms for advice helps them make informed buying decisions.

Use BrandMentions’ competitor spying feature to keep tabs with what your competitors are saying and what other people are saying about them online.

The information it provides allows you to identify potential business opportunities and fill in existing gaps in the market. Take a look at this example below:

If you follow the thread, you’ll find some suggesting some of the tools they like and are already using and others share their views on tools they didn’t like.

However, the highlight of the conversation is when we have brands like Zoho showing up when mentioned to contribute to the conversation or thank someone who recommended them.

So if you’ve set alerts inside BrandMentions tracking HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and other marketing automation tools, then you’ll be among the first few to notice that there are opportunities with offering integrations, more features, and even friendlier pricing to get more customers.

To make it easier for you to conduct research and keep track of all the information you get, BrandMentions allows you to organize your searches into dashboards.

In your dashboard, filter your data by location, language, number of mentions, and trending hashtags to keep things organized.

These dashboards are shareable so other team members can access different dashboards, and assign custom roles for each team member making it easier for you to share the data you collect without having to export anything from the tool.

BrandMentions also comes with a sentiment analysis feature to help you understand the relationship between what people are talking about and how they feel to help you get in touch with their needs and improve your communications strategy on all your channels.

G2 Score: 4.6 / 5.0

9. Think with Google

Google Trends and Google PageSpeed Insights sound familiar, right?

What you might not be aware of is that these two tools are part of Think With Google , a market research tool that provides you with different market insights to help improve your marketing strategy.

These insights are divided into four categories:

• Consumer insights
• Marketing strategies
• Future of Marketing

What you see in each category varies depending on where you’re searching from as Think With Google wants to make sure you’re accessing relevant information.

For example, consumer insights provides case studies and trends on consumer behavior and insights on the consumer’s buying journey in form of reports, articles, presents, and videos.

Next, we have tools that come in to complement the information you get from other categories.

If you’re in e-commerce, use the Rising Retail Categories to identify different products that people are searching for, the regions they are searching from, and the terms they use to search;

I also like that Rising Retail Categories provides monthly results given that Google users search for different items during different times of the year.

And if you want to enter a new market, use Market Finder to help you narrow down to specific markets that have lots of potential. Here’s the Market Finder tool in action:

Step 1: Enter your URL and let the tool identify categories for you

Step 2: Review and confirm your categories. Feel free to add more categories if you want to:

Step 3: Once you’ve confirmed your categories, go ahead and choose where you want to see your market from the options available. Chose globally or in the region you’re searching from;

4: Choose the market you want to enter from the recommendations you get from Market Finder;

You’ll note that Think with Google isn’t as sophisticated as other market research tools we’re talking about here. However, that doesn’t diminish its usefulness in providing you with information about your target market.

After all, Google is the biggest search engine meaning that most of the information it provides is from everyone who uses it for search purposes.

10. SEMrush

In addition to offering five different toolkits that help you manage all your marketing activities in one place, SEMrush also offers market analysis tools that help you understand your market better and build effective marketing funnels.

To do this, you need to:

• Understand your audience, their needs, and expectations to align your content with what they’re looking for
• Study what your competitors are doing to understand how they build brand awareness, engage prospects, and convert their leads.

Use the market explorer by SEMrush to identify who your competitors are, your growth opportunities, and what products to introduce in the market;

Then study their traffic sources and see how that compares with your traffic sources;

But don’t stop there. Dig deeper to understand how heavily your competitors rely on each traffic source;

Armed with this information, you can then decide what channels to focus on and the techniques you’ll use to get more traffic to help you build brand awareness and outrank your competitors on search engines.

When analyzing a new market to expand your reach, Market Explorer provides you with demographic and geographical information about your target market.

It will also provide you with the topics your audience is interested in to help you create content that keeps them engaged and earns their trust.

And if you’re managing a wide range of products or even operating in different geographical regions, then you’ll need to customize competitor tracking for easier analysis.

SEMrush allows you to create custom lists depending on your needs, add competitors then start tracking their activity.

The other main feature is traffic analytics, which comes with a subfolders report to help you dive deeper into a competitor’s pages to:

• Identify pages in your competitor’s sites that drive the most traffic to identify the topic or new product your audience is interested in
• Identify the techniques they are using to drive traffic to these pages and use them to expand or improve your traffic acquisition strategy.

The traffic analytics tools also provide you with information about user journeys to help you understand the path buyers take on their journey before buying from you.

These insights help you identify gaps that your marketing funnel needs to fill in with relevant content and channels where you need to show up through PR and online advertising to drive qualified traffic to your website.

With Crayon , you’ll find everything you need to conduct competitive research to improve your product and brand positioning in the market.

Unlike other competitive research tools, Crayon goes above and beyond to provide different almost everything you need to know about your competitors:

And it doesn’t stop there. Crayon allows you to keep track of the A/B tests your competitors are conducting and the new landing pages they’re publishing to help you stay a step ahead of them or even find ways to outdo their efforts.

Using its intuitive interface, customize your dashboard to access all your data so you need and share it with team members using email or Slack to ensure that you have a single source of truth and make it easier to make decisions without unnecessary friction.

Before deciding which tool to use, prospects have two or more options on their list to choose from. How do you make sure you stand out from your competitors especially when you have overlapping features?

By using Crayon’s sales battle cards which provide you with insights about your competitors, their product, and ideas to help you win a deal against a competitor. Using their Salesforce CRM integration, sales reps can access these battle cards in one place, helping them to stay organized and efficient.

Michael Greene, Klaviyo’s Product Marketing Manager has nothing but praises for the battle cards they use from Crayon;

“I always have Crayon running in the background, providing me with constant competitive updates that I can reference at any moment…Our competitive win rates have increased as much as 59% since rolling out Crayon Battlecards.”

You can also customize these battle cards and add or remove different elements that your team needs to focus on to improve conversions.

Crayon constantly updates these battle cards such that whenever a competitor introduces a new feature, changes their pricing, or even enters a new market you’ll know.

That means your sales team is always aware of where you excel against your competitors and are able to provide a clear picture of what you offer to help prospects make an informed decision.

Besides, all this information inside a sales battle card improves productivity because sales reps no longer have to figure things out from scratch whenever they have to attend a sales call.

I also like that Crayon has email alerts to keep you in the loop about what you need to know about your competitors. Crayon analysts also share their insights and trends you need to pay attention to in your industry to improve your brand positioning.

When using Hotjar as a market research tool to collect customer feedback and analyze issues with your product or website, there are four main features you’ll be interested in:

• Incoming feedback

For example, if you want to understand the role your content plays in your buyer’s journey,

conduct a survey to understand what’s going on from their perspective.

This information gives you insights into what works for your audience and an in-depth understanding of what problems that your content helps them solve.

This tool also allows you to collect real time feedback from users, know pages that users like interacting with and important pages as well as valuable pages that aren’t getting the attention they deserve:

Hotjar allows you to collect feedback in more than 40 languages so you’re not limited to using the tool in a specific geographical location.

Given that mobile purchases will account for 54% of total sales in e-commerce, then you need to get rid of hurdles that your mobile visitors find when accessing your store from their mobile devices to improve conversions.

Start by tracking their level of engagement on different devices using Hotjar’s heatmaps feature:

You can even record these sessions and see your website from your user’s lenses to understand their behavior, why they leave or choose to use a different device to visit your site.

Hotjar works with different types of website builders and e-commerce platforms. It also integrates with different tools to help optimize your research process and make it easier to share insights with your team.

Finally, no matter how big your team is or the number of clients you’re serving, you won’t have to pay for an extra seat for them to access the tool.

So if you’re looking for a simple tool that’s easy to set up and use to collect customer feedback, insights, study user behavior on all your web properties, backed up by great customer support, you’ll definitely want to consider Hotjar.

G2 Score: 4.3 / 5.0

Thanks to the market research tools in this post, you won’t need to spend a lot of time deciding which market research tool to use and whether each tool has what you’re looking for to conduct market research.

And now that you have a list of tools to choose from, there’s one more question you need to answer;

Which market research tool is right for you? Personally, it depends.

Market research means different things to different people at different times. For some, it’s collecting customer feedback and insights to evaluate the demand for a product they want to launch.

Some use it to keep track of trends in their industry, track competitor activity, or even understand what’s ailing their business. Others want to dive deep and collect all the insights they can get while others want to keep things simple for now.

So whatever your goals are right now, let them guide you to choosing the tool you’re going to use, and then go ahead and collect all the information you need about your market.

And if your goals change, come back and pick a different tool to conduct market research.

The 8 Best Market Research Tools

• By Hailey Friedman
• December 4, 2019 March 24, 2021
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Market research tools have come a long way in recent years. Conducting market research is no longer an enormous, arduous task like it was in the days of Mad Men.

Today there are tools out there to take all the hard work of market research off your hands. You just need to know which tools are best for your business and how to use them.

This is where I can help.

But before I do, let’s cover the basics…

Table of Contents

What is Market Research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about consumers’ needs and preferences.

It is important to spend time doing market research before building a business or formalizing your marketing strategy.

If you skip this step, you can end up spend a lot of time and money in the wrong places. Trust me.

How do you do Market Research?

You do market research by finding out what your customers really want, looking at what your competitors are doing, and using this to deduce the ideal product permutation as well as which marketing channels will work to grow your business.

1- Look at what your competitors are doing

Please, for the love of God look at your competitors.

I stalk my competitors for

• Google Ads and SEO keyword ideas
• Facebook marketing ad inspiration
• Product ideas
• And a whole lot more

There are already plenty signals in the market — that are publicly available — that will tell you what’s working and what’s not as far as product market fit and consumer preferences.

Your competitors (especially ones that are further along) have already done a lot of this work for you, so it makes sense to look at successful businesses in your space and what they’re doing.

The best tool for this: GrowthBar

2- Find out what your customers really want

The best way to find out what your customers really want, is to ask them. You can do that using surveys or setting up calls to talk to the customers you already have about their challenges and desires.

The best tools for this: A few phone calls and/or SurveyMonkey

3- Use these insights to build your product and marketing plan

We help thousands of founders and marketers build a bullet-proof growth strategy and we ALWAYS start with market research. Like I mentioned above, we primarily use GrowthBar and a few phone calls to get the information we need, but below is a comprehensive list of all the best market research tools available as well as our thoughts on them.

The Best Market Research Tools

Here’s an introduction to 8 of the best market research tools to help you get a competitive edge by better understanding your target market and audience’s needs.

1. GrowthBar

About: The tagline reads: “Make it 10X easier to get more customers. The only growth tool marketers and entrepreneurs need for SEO, SEM, and Facebook advertising.”

GrowthBar is the perfect market research tool because it gives you instant access to critical data points about your competitors and the growth channels and keywords that are working for them. It is a market research tool for marketers and for understanding marketing channels. And it’s only $29/month.

GrowthBar has a web version and comes free with a simple Chrome extension that instantly allows you to do market research from the comfort of your Google search page, which saves you a ton of time from having to login to other platforms or switch tabs.

New features are being steadily rolled out that continue to make performing market research a breeze. You can explore your competitors’ backlink data, social signals, which keywords they rank for, best performing keywords, spy on their facebook ads and so on.

Ease of Use:

• Just type in a URL or keyword into GrowthBar and see everything there is to know about that URL or keyword.
• Comes with a free Chrome Extension for the market research obsessed among us!

Features:  

Unlock this data for any website:

• Domain Authority
• Page Authority
• Organic Traffic
• Traffic Value
• Top Paid Keywords
• Organic Keywords
• Keyword Search Volume
• Keywords Competition
• Keywords CPCs
• Keyword Research
• Top Backlinks
• Facebook Ads

Price: GrowthBar is free to try for 5 days and then it costs $29/mo (a steep discount from comparable tools that cost between $100-$200/mo).

Bottom line: GrowthBar is the most complete market research tool that is 100% free to try and more affordable than any alternative. It holds its own against some of the more expensive paid keyword and market research tools on the market, like Ahrefs and SEMrush. It’s become a key part of our market research process for snooping on competitors.

2. SurveyMonkey

About: Are your customers satisfied? Could you be doing more for your customers?

The answers to these questions offer valuable consumer insights if you want to increase lead generation , your conversion rates, customer retention rate, improve your bottom line, and so on.

Questions about your customers are best answered by your customers themselves. This brings me to SurveyMonkey, one of the most popular questionnaire and survey platforms that might be the missing link in your current market research efforts.

• You can create surveys in just a few clicks
• Easy to create and answer questions on both PC and mobile
• A wide range of other tools and products that integrate seamlessly
• Survey creation
• Integrates with other software and platforms
• Tools to measure engagement and analyze results
• Reporting features

Price: Their basic plan is free, which is a great way to get used to the platform and start surveying your audience. You can upgrade for advanced features ranging from $25-$85 per month.

Bottom line: If you don’t survey your audience, you leave money on the table by not getting inside their minds and figuring out what they want from your product or service. My advice is to head over to SurveyMonkey, sign up for a free plan, and get started today.

About: Gartner provides insights into market segments and arm leaders with the right metrics to make informed decisions. 

Known for its Magic Quadrant, the research tool provides accurate data to identify trends, weaknesses, opportunities, and more. 

Get peer insights, research, and a full arsenal to dispose of your competition. 

• Use of visualization
• Comprehensive questionnaires 
• Makes decision-making easier

• User experience reviews
• Presentations and reports
• Analyst calls
• Magic Quadrant

Price: Gartner has a free basic account, but it can cost upwards of $30,000 per year if you want access to expert analysts and other services. 

Bottom line: Gartner offers some of the most accurate market research with expert insights relayed in an easily digestible manner. It can be expensive for startups, but invaluable to organizations on the cutting edge of their industry.

4. Tableau Public

About: Tableau Public enables users to publish interactive visualizations to the internet. Marketers can leverage this research by embedding the data to websites, blogs, and more. 

A product of the popular business intelligence software, Tableau, Tableau Public helps journalists, marketers, and everyone else access the data and research they need. 

It’s basically a free version of Tableau, but users are unable to save workbooks locally with the Public version. 

• Works with Excel, Google Sheets, text files, and more
• Clean and clear dashboard design and menu options
• Easy to read visuals and clear reporting features
• Access to all other Public users’ visualizations (“vizes”)
• Useful data, free of charge and ready to share
• Up to 15 million rows of data

Price: This tool is free, and open to the public. Just remember, your vizes aren’t private.

I Think: As far as market research tools go, Tableau Public is an interesting way to get access to data in your space – so it’s worth checking out to see if there is anything interesting or helpful.

5. BuzzSumo

About: BuzzSumo is a powerful tool that finds the most popular types of content for any given topic. You can then analyze that content to see why it works, which of your competitors benefits from this content, and what you can do better in these areas.

This tool focuses heavily on the social footprint and backlinks of content. These are two very important metrics if you plan on doing some content marketing. You want people to share your content so you get a social mention. The more a piece of content gets shared, the more likely it will attract backlinks.

• Very easy to use, just type in a keyword and hit “Search”
• Large icons and plenty of filtering options
• Fluid and intuitive reporting features
• Social media and content insights
• Personalized alerts and reporting
• Social media analytics
• Backlink analytics

Price: Plans start at $99 per month and go up to $499+ per month for custom plans.

Bottom line: BuzzSumo gives some insight into the minds and wants of content consumers in your niche that you can’t get with many other tools. As far as I’m concerned, it can be super helpful for content marketing strategies.

6. Social Mention

About: Social Mention is an online market research tool that enables you to gather real-time social media data on any site.

All you need to do is type in a website’s URL, and the tool pulls all the social media mentions related to that site. You can either use this on your own site, to see where you’re being talked about on social media, or use it to analyze your competitors.

The strength of the tool is being able to see a social media footprint for a brand across all the media platforms without having to aggregate the data yourself.

• Just simply input a URL to perform a search
• The data is laid out in a simple and easy to read format
• Find out who’s been talking about your brand and how positive your social media presence is
• Use it to discover where and why your competitors are being mentioned to help you tailor your own marketing efforts
• See the sentiment, hashtag, sources, and keywords most frequently associated across social media for a target URL

Price: Free to use.

I Think: While not one of the most powerful marketing research tools on the market, Social Mention gives you a quick point of reference for whether or not social media is important to your business. It’s free to use and the data is good, so it’s worth bookmarking the URL.

About: Survata uses a digital network to help you collect data from millions of customers quickly.

They do this by putting up your surveys on their affiliate sites that users must answer to access the site. This is similar to how Google Surveys operates, but you have more control over your data.

Their dashboard presents the information in real time, enabling you to analyze your customer’s insights to better understand their wants and needs.

• Extremely simple user interface and reporting
• Good customer support
• Ability to reach millions of targeted audiences
• Wide range of reporting options to analyze data
• Granular demographic information and behavioral targeting of respondents

Price: Pricing starts at $1 per respondent.

I Think: Survata opens up more options for businesses that want to survey targeted audiences that they wouldn’t otherwise reach. It’s a valuable tool for small to medium-sized businesses or businesses looking to enter a new market and create accurate buyer personas.

8. Statista

About: Statista is an online portal that aggregates market data from more than 600 industries across 50+ countries. You can tap into this data by typing in keywords related to an industry you want to analyze and browsing their reports.

You may be familiar with the blue charts Statista generates when you perform a search, they’re pretty much a standard for blogs and sites publishing statistics. Statista is one of the best places to get statistical analysis backed by facts and figures for just about any topic.

If you’re performing market research you can get some valuable insights into buyer behavior, market size, market growth and trends, and much more.

• Performing searches couldn’t be any easier, just type a keyword and click “Search”
• The charts provide a clear visual answer to your search
• Download data and statistics in various formats
• Additional data and related statistics are also returned with searches
• Lots of advanced reporting features and tools

Price: Their free to use plan enables you to pull basic statistics. You can upgrade for $59 per month to get full access to their statistical database, or $650 per month for their corporate solution package.

I Think: Statista is great for pulling visual market statistics backed by factual data – an integral part of any research activities and a helpful tool for content marketing efforts as well.

Conclusion & Tips for Conducting Market Research

Market research is one of the key steps in building a sustainable, awesome business. It’s not something you do once and move on — it’s important to get competitive benchmarks as often as possible — and use them to steer your ship in the right direction.

Our favorite tool is GrowthBar.

Some things to remember about research:

• Start broad . I always find that getting on the phone with customers is the best way to begin. Speak with ~10 customers and learn about their likes and dislikes. Let your customers really speak — don’t guide them down any conversation path — you want to hear their real, honest thoughts. You can always drill in on interesting nuggets of information at the end.
• Be unbiased . Yes, that’s basically impossible. But still, don’t put words in anyone’s mouth and be honest with data you collect. Your business will thank you in the long run.
• Ask the right questions . Surveys are only as good as the questions you ask. It’s important to remove biases from questions and focus on getting actionable insights from answers.

Other reading:

• The 8 Best Ways to Launch Your Online Business
• 3 Ways to Use Surveys for Market Research
• How We’ll Make $90,648 this Year from One Software Recommendation

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How Did Warby Parker Grow to a $1.7 Billion Ecommerce Company in 5 Years?

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• December 22, 2022 January 2, 2023

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7 Best Market Segmentation Tools in 2024

How can you be sure that your product or service is exactly what all your customers want? Some may love a new feature, while others might hate it. Using market segmentation tools helps you group your customers based on similar preferences. This way, you can adjust your product, services, and marketing to suit each group’s needs.

Choosing the right marketing segmentation tool can be challenging because there are many options available. If you aim to customize your marketing strategies and messages for different audience groups to make your campaigns more relevant and effective, you now have to determine the best platform for your needs.

In this article, we’ll explore some top market segmentation tools from 2014 and help you decide which one suits your business best.

What is Market Segmentation?

Market segmentation specifies customer groups with similar characteristics and market-specific products or services to meet their needs. For instance, selling comfortable shoes with added cushioning to people aged 60 and above and trendy sneakers to those who are 25 and younger.

Market segmentation typically occurs in four main ways:

• Geographic: Targets customers based on location and regional differences.
• Demographic: Segments based on age, gender, income, etc.
• Psychographic: Focuses on values, lifestyles, and attitudes.
• Behavioral: Analyzes buying behaviors and brand loyalty.

What are Market Segmentation Tools?

Market segmentation tools are software or platforms that assist businesses in splitting their target audience into different groups. They help businesses analyze customer data, find segment similarities, and adjust marketing approaches to reach each group more effectively.

Using the right tools can help you better understand your customers and improve your marketing. Here are some important types of tools to consider for market segmentation. Businesses often use a combination of these tools to effectively segment their market and personalize their marketing strategies to each segment’s specific needs and preferences.

Customer Surveys

Collecting customer feedback through surveys is a great way to understand what customers want and expect. You can use QuestionPro to easily create and send out surveys to collect information about your customers’ demographics, behaviors, and attitudes.

Here’s how customer surveys help with market segmentation:

• Gather feedback directly from customers.
• Collect data on demographics, behaviors, attitudes, and preferences.
• Test value proposition, pricing, and positioning.
• Helps in identifying and differentiating market segments.

Customer Analytics

Customer analytics tools track and analyze data from various channels, such as websites, social media, and email, to understand customer interactions and behaviors. Google Analytics is the best example of a tool that helps monitor demographics, interests, and preferences, providing crucial segmentation data.

Here’s how customer analytics assist with market segmentation:

• Track and analyze customer interactions across various channels.
• Provide insights into demographics, interests, and preferences.
• Monitor customer behaviors, feedback, and loyalty.
• Optimize website and landing pages through heatmaps and A/B testing.
• Market Research

Market research tools offer insights and trends about your industry, competitors, and customers. These platforms provide data and reports on market size, growth, and segmentation, enabling businesses to identify opportunities and threats for segmentation.

Here’s how market research tools assist with market segmentation:

• Provide insights and trends about the industry, competitors, and customers.
• Discover new opportunities and threats in the market.
• Access data and reports on market size, growth, and segmentation.
• Analyze content, keywords, and backlinks against competitors.

Customer Personas

Creating customer personas helps visualize and understand your ideal customers, facilitating segmentation communication within your team. These types of tools allow businesses to build personas based on customer data and research, including demographics, goals, challenges, and motivations.

Here’s how customer personas help with market segmentation:

• Create visual profiles of ideal customers based on data and research.
• Synthesize and communicate segmentation to team and stakeholders.
• Include information like demographics, goals, challenges, and motivations.
• Design and present personas attractively and engagingly.

Customer Journey Maps

Customer journey mapping tools illustrate how customers interact with your brand across different touchpoints and stages. These platforms help identify customer needs, emotions, and pain points throughout their journey, guiding businesses in improving segmentation strategies and customer experiences.

• Illustrate how customers interact with the brand across touchpoints and stages.
• Identify and improve customer needs, expectations, and emotions.
• Include actions, thoughts, feelings, pain points, and opportunities.
• Prototype and test solutions for different segments.

7 Best Market Segmentation Tools of 2024

Customer segmentation helps you customize your offerings, improve marketing strategies, and boost your earnings. For this task, you need the perfect customer segmentation tool. Let’s check out the top 7 market segmentation tools for 2024.

1. QuestionPro

QuestionPro is a comprehensive survey and research platform that offers robust customer segmentation tools to businesses seeking to gain valuable insights from their target audience. It offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to empower businesses to segment their customer base effectively and drive targeted marketing strategies.

QuestionPro empowers businesses to segment their customer base effectively and confidently drive targeted marketing strategies. With its advanced survey design and segmentation features, QuestionPro stands out as a top customer segmentation software for businesses seeking to optimize their customer segmentation efforts.

Key features of QuestionPro:

• Advanced Survey Design
• Robust Segmentation Capabilities
• Real-Time Analytics
• Multi-Channel Distribution
• Integration Capabilities
• Customization and Branding
• Scalability and Flexibility
• Advanced customer segmentation capabilities for precise targeting.
• Customizable surveys to specific segmentation needs.
• Multi-channel distribution options for maximum reach and customer engagement.
• Real-time customer data analytics for instant insights and decision-making.
• Seamless integrations with popular platforms for streamlined data synchronization.
• Pricing may vary depending on the features and customization options required.
• Customization options may require some technical expertise to implement effectively.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the valuable audience segmentation tools. This platform offers powerful capabilities and insights for optimizing marketing campaigns and targeting specific audience segments.

• The platform provides plenty of pre-built audience segment reports, making it easy for marketers to quickly gain insights into different customer segments and their behavior.
• Google Analytics seamlessly integrates with Google Ads, enabling marketers to create audience segments in Analytics and apply them to Google Ads campaigns for targeted advertising.
• Analytics is free to use.
• Limited integration options with third-party platforms.
• Limited segmentation implementation options for non-Google platforms.
• Implementation may be challenging for beginners or smaller marketing teams.

3. MailChimp

Mailchimp is well-known for its powerful email marketing software. It’s known for its ability to group or segment email recipients effectively.

With Mailchimp, you can segment your email list using different criteria, such as previous customer behavior, location, customer status, and even when they usually open emails. Mailchimp’s simple editor makes it easy to set up campaigns. Plus, you can test different versions of your campaigns to see which works best.

Key features include:

• Email Audience Segmentation
• Simple Editor
• Split Testing
• Integration with Other Tools
• Mailchimp offers robust segmentation capabilities, allowing users to create highly targeted email campaigns based on various criteria.
• The platform features a user-friendly editor, making designing and customizing email campaigns without extensive technical knowledge easy.
• Mailchimp’s free plan allows users to maintain up to 500 contacts and send up to 2,500 emails monthly at no cost.
• Mailchimp’s automation capabilities are not as advanced as some other email marketing platforms
• Advanced features can be harder to learn for less experienced users with email marketing.

HubSpot is essential for effective marketing plans. Its easy-to-use design and strong tools help businesses organize their marketing, manage customer connections, and boost growth.

HubSpot offers powerful tools for market segmentation. It allows marketers to divide their audience into specific segments based on demographics, behavior, and engagement. This helps marketers create marketing campaigns personalized to specific groups, leading to better business outcomes and return on investment.

• Contact management
• Lead scoring
• Email marketing
• Marketing automation
• Built-in CRM and multi-channel attribution tools for tracking campaign results effectively.
• Ability to create and manage segmented campaigns across various channels, such as email, social media ads, and web content, from a unified dashboard.
• Extensive marketing segmentation options based on various factors allow for precise targeting of customers and prospects.
• Some advanced features may require higher-tier plans or additional add-ons, potentially increasing costs.
• HubSpot may not be useful for specific industries like e-commerce compared to other platforms.

Segment is a powerful customer segmentation tool for businesses looking to improve customer communication and engagement strategies through data-driven segmentation and omnichannel messaging.

It’s one of the few customer segmentation tools designed specifically to handle audience segmentation across various channels right from the start.

Key Features of Segment:

• Advanced Audience Segmentation
• Omnichannel Communication
• Real-time Dashboards
• Custom Audience Reports
• Segment seamlessly integrates with the other platforms
• Allow users to segment campaigns based on real-time data.
• Segment offers audience segmentation recommendations to create targeted campaigns.
• Expensive Add-ons
• Visits-based Pricing

UpLead provides helpful features to enhance and categorize customer information, making it a handy tool in the customer segmentation process for businesses aiming to find and connect with specific potential customers.

Additionally, UpLead provides the best customer segmentation tools to assist in setting up targeted campaigns and delivering tailored website content to different customer groups.

Key Features of UpLead:

• Account identification
• Lead enrichment
• Prospect segmentation
• Intent data segmentation
• Email campaigns segmentation
• Implementation tools to assist in creating segmented campaigns and delivering personalized website content to specific segments.
• Suitable for businesses utilizing an ABM Lite approach.
• Intent data segmentation allows users to prioritize leads and target accounts based on their level of interest or engagement.
• The pricing model is based on credits, which may limit the number of searches or data enrichment tasks users can perform within a given period.
• UpLead may lack some advanced features found in other market segmentation tools.
• Limited integrations.

7. Survicate

Survicate offers a simple yet powerful solution for customer segmentation through surveys. It allows businesses to gather valuable customer data through surveys.

Survicate enables effective segmentation for various marketing initiatives such as market research, product onboarding, and customer satisfaction programs.

Key features of Survicate:

• Drag-and-Drop Survey Editor
• Template Library
• Survicate offers an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, making it simple for users to create and deploy surveys without extensive technical knowledge.
• Survicate allows surveys to be deployed across multiple platforms, including emails, websites, social media, Intercom chats, and mobile apps, ensuring maximum reach and participation.
• Users can easily customize surveys to match their brand’s aesthetic and messaging, enhancing engagement and response rates.
• Subscription fees are relatively high
• New users can find it challenging to create surveys and analyze data initially.

How to Choose the Right Market Segmentation Tool?

Choosing the right market segmentation tool is really important for businesses that want to improve their marketing and reach their audience well. Here are important things to think about when you’re choosing the right tool:

• Segmentation Capabilities: Evaluate the tool’s segmentation features.
• Integration with Existing Systems: Consider the tool’s compatibility with your existing systems, such as CRM, marketing automation, and analytics platforms.
• Ease of Use and User Interface: Choose a tool with an intuitive user interface and easy-to-use features such as segmentation setup, data analysis, and campaign execution, even for users with limited technical expertise.
• Customization and Flexibility: Look for a tool offering customization options for your business needs and objectives.
• Data Accuracy and Reliability: Ensure the tool provides accurate and reliable data for segmentation purposes.
• Analytics and Reporting: Look for features such as real-time analytics, visualization tools, and customizable reports.
• Cost and Value: Assess the tool’s pricing structure and value proposition in relation to your budget and expected ROI.
• Customer Support and Training: Choose a tool that offers reliable customer support and training resources to help you maximize its potential.

Why QuestionPro is the Best Market Segmentation Tool?

QuestionPro offers businesses the necessary market segmentation tools and abilities to organize their customer base effectively and create focused marketing plans. Its advanced features make it the best customer segmentation tool for companies aiming to improve their customer segmentation and succeed in today’s competitive market.

Here is why you should choose QuestionPro for market segmentation:

• Advanced Segmentation Capabilities: QuestionPro provides advanced audience segmentation features, allowing businesses to divide their audience based on various criteria such as demographics, behavior, preferences, and more.
• Customizable Surveys: QuestionPro’s intuitive survey builder allows users to create customized surveys tailored to their specific segmentation needs, ensuring accurate data collection and analysis.
• Multi-Channel Distribution: QuestionPro’s multi-channel distribution options, including email, web, mobile, social media, and more, allow you to reach your audience wherever they are, maximizing response rates and engagement.
• Real-Time Analytics: QuestionPro’s real-time analytics dashboard provides instant insights into audience segmentation data, enabling quick decision-making and campaign optimization.
• Seamless Integrations: QuestionPro integrates with popular CRM, marketing automation, and analytics platforms, allowing for seamless data synchronization and analysis across multiple systems.
• Expert Support: QuestionPro’s expert support team is available to assist with survey design, implementation, and analysis, ensuring a smooth and successful segmentation process.

Not all customers and potential customers are the same, and how you treat them can really affect how much money you make. It’s important to divide them into different groups based on their interests and needs. This market segmentation should be done regularly, monthly, or even weekly. It might take some time, but the benefits are worth it.

A good way to begin is by simply asking your customers what they like and want and if they’re happy with your products or services. If that sounds good to you, why not try QuestionPro? Get started to make attractive surveys that give you helpful information.

LEARN MORE         FREE TRIAL

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Luxury Market Sees Buying Bounce Back

Recent gains in the stock market have driven a surge in the luxury market. At the same time, other potential buyers are struggling due to high interest rates.

NEW YORK – The U.S. housing market is split with some home buyers staying out of the market due to high mortgage rates and other buyers jumping into the luxury market.

The National Association of Realtors® reported the annualized rate of second-hand homes sales in January was 38% lower at 4 million sales, compared to January 2022. Meanwhile, in the luxury home market valued at $1 million or more, sales in January were 27% higher than a year before, with buyers benefiting from the 34% rise in the S&P 500 stock market index over the past year.

In New York City, the number of all-cash home sales increased by 18% in the last three months of 2023 compared to a year earlier. All-cash sales now account for 68% of all sales, which is a new record, according to Douglas Elliman.

Chen Zhao, head of economic research at Redfin, said, "This time last year almost everyone was predicting a recession, and buyers were more cautious, [saying] 'Maybe I don't need that second home.' Now with this sense [the economy] has achieved a soft landing, there's been a sentiment bounce in the luxury market."  The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 6.87% on March 11, down from the peak of 8.03% in October but higher than the 2.75% low in January 2021.

Joel Kahn, deputy chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said, "Even if you really want to move, it's hard to swap a 3% rate for one at 7%." Part of the cost equation is the higher costs of running a home, with families with median income spending nearly 50% of their income on mortgage and childcare costs in 2019, and the amount of income spending on mortgage and childcare costs rose to 66% in January 2024, according to Zillow.

High mortgage rates are not the only expense keeping potential home buyers on the sidelines, home values have risen by 46% since January 2020, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index. Zillow has reported that the average home price in the United States is now nearly $348,000. In the luxury market, stock market gains have driven the surge in cash payments for homes, making high mortgage rates less concerning.

Source: Financial Times (03/15/24) Cox, Hugo

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Industries Overview

Latest articles, the big answers: banking & payments quiz, industry kpis: youtube and x emerge as leaders for social media advertising attention, uk finfluencers face prison time for false or misleading financial product promotions there, generative ai’s actual use isn’t meeting its perceived marketing potential—yet, retailers criticize mastercard and visa’s swipe fee settlement—here’s our take, teads and lg ads extend ctv advertising partnership across europe and apac, 2024 us ad market to hit $369 billion, buoyed by politics, says magna, linear, streaming, avod, and beyond: what do common tv terms mean, social media is a core part of young people’s lives, walmart connect’s enhances network, leverages store footprint, emerging brands, about emarketer, the digital healthcare consumer 2023, what providers and marketers need to know about the digital patient journey.

• Executive Summary

Digital healthcare usage was fast-tracked by the pandemic. But now, with so many tools in the market, providers and marketers must deliver differentiated experiences to stay competitive. They’ll need to know how and why patients use these tools—and how to resolve the pain points.

Key Question: Which digital health products and services are US consumers using, and how does usage differ across populations?

KEY STAT: About 46% of US consumers—an estimated 119 million patients—engage with their healthcare providers using a combination of patient portals, telehealth appointments, apps, and traditional in-person visits, per PYMNTS.

Here’s what’s in the full report

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Table of Contents

• Consumer adoption of digital health tools is still growing.
• Who is the healthcare tech user?
• Patients demand an omnichannel experience.
• The patient healthcare journey often starts online.
• Patients are using social media to find health information.
• Patients believe digital health tools lead to better health.
• Consumers want doctors to embrace digital health tools.
• Healthcare is falling short on delivering a quality digital experience.
• Providers are at risk of losing patients if they don’t go digital.
• How can providers and marketers keep pace with the digital healthcare consumer?
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